Originally Rus was a medieval country and state that comprised mostly Early East Slavs. The territories of that old Rus are today distributed among the Russian Federation, Belarus and Ukraine. That early "Rus" state had no proper name; by its inhabitants it was called which might be translated as "Rus Land" or "Land of the Rus". According to the Normanist theory, which has the broader traditional acceptance in the West, the word "Rus'" was adopted by the Slavs from the Norse root , in compounds (roths-), either directly or via the Finnish Ruotsi. This root is the same as the English row and may have referred to the fact that the Varangians mainly rowed down the East European waterways; cf. the Swedish region, Roslagen, which means "naval districts."
In Old East Slavic literature, the East Slavs refer to themselves as (muzhi) ruskie ("the Rus men") or rarely, rusichi. It is thought the Slavs adopted that name from the Varangian elite, which was first mentioned in the 830s in the annals of Saint Bertan. These annals relate that Emperor Louis II's court at Ingelheim, in 839 (the same yeare as the first appearance of Varangians in Constantinople), was visited by a delegation from the Byzantine emperor. In this delegation there were two men who called themselves Rhos (Rhos vocari dicebant). Louis enquired about their origins and learnt that they were Swedes. Fearing that they were spies for their brothers, the Danes, he incarcerated them. They were also mentioned in the 860s by the patriarch Photius under the name of Rhos.
Rusiyyah was used by Ibn Fadlan for Varangians near Astrakhan, and by the Persian traveler Ibn Rustah who visited Novgorod and described how the Rus' exploited the Slavs. The name Rök Stone is something of a tautology: the stone from the 800s is named after the village, "Rök", but the village is probably named after the stone, "Rauk" or "Rök" meaning "stone" in the Old Norse language. The stone is unique in that it contains a fragment of what is believed to be a lost piece of Norse mythology. It also makes a historical reference to Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. The part about Theodoric (who died in 526 A.D.) probably concerns the statue of him in Ravenna, which was moved to Aachen by Charlemagne. The runes in Old East Norse (Swedish and Danish) dialect of Old Norse:
Medieval Polish chroniclers would derive Rus' from the Latin rus, ruris ("country"). The early Rus may well have seemed to visitors from Byzantium to be "rustic" and "rural" both, terms derived from the Latin rus. And the name of the semilegendary founder of the early Rus state, Rurik, does suspiciously resemble the genitive case of rus ruris.
The Iranian tribe of the Roxolani, who inhabited southern Ukraine, Moldova and Romania (from the Old- Persian rokhs meaning light, white) One of two rivers in Ukraine, the Ros and Rusna (near Kiev and Pereyaslav), whose names are derived from a postulated Slavic term for water, akin to rosa (dew), rusalka (water sprite), ruslo (stream bed) Rusiy (reddish-haired), a Slavic cognate of ryzhiy (red-haired) and the English red A postulated proto-Slavic word for bear, cognate with arctos and ursus.