Dear historians, my girlfriend and I are a part of a medieval reenactment group called the Society for Creative Anachronism. In this society, you create a persona in and around a certain time period, with a name you can prove was most likely used in whatever geographical period you choose. I want to be part of the Varangian Guard and she wants to be a soldier in the army of Vladimir, Grand Prince of the Kievan Rus, just before his death in the early 11th century. I was wondering if you might know of any information of Swedes picking up Rus girls and then heading down to Constantinople? What would the likelyhood of a Rus girl adopting a Norse name? Would I have changed my name to integrate into Byzantine society better? Are there resources out there for armour and clothing used by either group in and around the early 11th century, before everything went to hell with the Mongols?
Thank you for your time. If you have you have information about scholars I could contact, that would be cool too.
No idea about Rus-Scandinavian interaction, but as far as names go: you would both likely be renamed (to something Greek) if you converted to Christianity, as you may well do even for simply practical purposes if you serve long enough in Constantinople (where the Varangians had their own church). Foreign empresses from a bit later than the early eleventh century (wives of the early Komnenoi) were often renamed Eirene/Irene ("Peace"), though I imagine if you're both soldiers you could find more suitably bellicose saints (Michael, Demetrios, Theodore/Theodora, George/Gorgo, etc.) rather easily. If you don't mind poking around through a bunch of data, the online Prosopography of the Byzantine World is a pretty good place to start looking for names - it includes names in Latin, Greek, and even other languages, and you can narrow those down by source, geographical location, and so on.
Ordinarily I would link you to the Academy of St. Gabriel's Medieval Names Archive, since it's specifically for SCA folks (and generally very thoroughly researched), but Chrome has flagged their site for me as a security risk since early summer or so. :( The site still works, though, so if you're feeling brave or just confident in your antivirus software, I would definitely recommend giving it a go! It might also be available through archive.org's Wayback Machine, though I don't know how easy it would be to navigate from there.