Norsemen

• 1. Introduction

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  Norsemen left their mark on the languages, borders, and royal lines of much of the known world. In 844, raiders struck Seville. A century later, King Edmund I of England celebrated his victory over the Norse kings of York. By the eleventh century, Norsemen had settled in places as far apart as Greenland and Sicily, Ireland and what is now Russia. How did a Germanic cultural group from Scandinavia spread across so much of the globe, and what did the peoples they met actually call them? The answers lie not just in longships and raids, but in place names, runic stones, royal genealogies, and the slow absorption of one culture into many others.

• 2. A Name's Long Journey

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  Walter Scott introduced the word "Norseman" to English in his 1817 poem Harold the Dauntless, but the adjective "norse" had entered English from Dutch during the sixteenth century, originally meaning simply "Norwegian." By Scott's era it had broadened to cover all of Scandinavia in ancient and medieval times. The word, then, is a modern coinage with no particular basis in medieval usage, despite the ancient feel it carries.

  The underlying idea of "Northman" is older and travels much further. The Old Frankish word Nortmann was Latinised as Normannus and spread across Latin texts throughout Europe. It then entered Old French as Normands, giving the world both the name of the Normans and the name of Normandy itself, the French region settled by Norsemen during the tenth century.

  The word's journey did not stop at France. In Hispanic languages and local varieties of Latin, forms beginning with "l" appeared, such as lordomanni, a shift that linguists attribute to nasal dissimilation in local Romance speech. The early Arabic geographer al-Mas'udi identified the 844 raiders on Seville not only as Rus but also by a term that may trace back to that same "l" form, al-lawdh'ana. A single Germanic concept of "Northman" thus rippled outward through Latin, Old French, Spanish, and Arabic.

• 3. Many Names, Many Worlds

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  Germans called the Norse Ascomanni, or ashmen. The Gaels of Ireland and Scotland used Lochlanach. Anglo-Saxons used Dene, meaning Danes, as a catch-all term. Each name reflects the angle from which a particular people encountered the Scandinavians, and each tells a slightly different story.

  The Gaelic naming system grew especially fine-grained. Finn-Gall meant Norwegian Viking; Dubh-Gall meant Danish Viking; and Gall Goidel described people of Norse descent who had fully absorbed into Gaelic culture. Dubliners called the Norse settlers Ostmen, or East-people. An area of central Dublin still carries the name Oxmanstown, which descends from one of their settlements. They were also called Lochlannaigh, or Lake-people.

  The Slavs, Arabs, and Byzantines developed their own labels. They called the Norsemen the Rus or Rhos, a word probably connected to the Old Norse root roth meaning rowing, or to the Swedish coastal district of Roslagen, from which many Norsemen who traveled into Eastern Slavic lands originally came. Archaeologists and historians now believe those Scandinavian settlements gave rise to the names Russia and Belarus. The Byzantines and Slavs also called them Varangians, from a Norse word meaning "sworn men," and the elite Scandinavian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperors carried that name as well, known to history as the Varangian Guard.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle drew its own internal distinction in the year 942, recording King Edmund I's victory over the Norse kings of York by quoting a verse: "The Danes were previously subjected by force under the Norsemen, for a long time in bonds of captivity to the heathens."

• 4. Where They Actually Came From

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  Popular imagination placed the Vikings far to the north, as if they emerged from a frozen and distant fringe. The geographic reality was different. Those who raided Britain came from what is now Denmark, Scania, the western coast of Sweden, Norway up to nearly the 70th parallel, the Swedish Baltic coast up to roughly the 60th latitude, and the island of Gotland. The southernmost Norse communities lived no further north than Newcastle upon Tyne, and they typically crossed to Britain from the east rather than the north.

  The border dividing the Norsemen from more southerly Germanic tribes, a fortification called the Danevirke, sits today about 50 kilometers south of the modern Danish-German border. That line marked not just territory but cultural identity, separating the Norse world from the rest of Germanic Europe.

  As settlers and traders rather than raiders alone, Norsemen established polities and communities across an extraordinary range of territory: England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Iceland, Russia, Belarus, France, Sicily, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Greenland, Canada, and the Faroe Islands. Each destination involved a different kind of encounter, from the Norse kingdoms of Dublin to the first known European contact with continental North America.

• 5. Remarkable Individuals

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  Leif Erikson, born around 970 and living to around 1020, is widely credited as the first European to set foot on continental North America. He was Icelandic, not Norwegian, and his journey is considered part of a broader pattern of Norse exploration westward through the Atlantic island chains.

  Freydis Eiriksdottir, born around 970, was an explorer who participated in the colonization of Vinland, the Norse name for North America. Her contemporary Erik the Red, who lived from around 950 to 1003, was Norwegian and founded the first Norse settlement in Greenland. Aud the Deep-Minded, active in the ninth century, was a ship captain and early settler of Iceland, and she was married to Olaf the White, a Viking sea-king who served as King of Dublin.

  Harald Bluetooth, who died around 985-986, was king of both Denmark and Norway. His name carries an unusual afterlife: the modern Bluetooth wireless technology takes its name from him. Harald Hardrada, also known as Harald III of Norway, was born around 1015 and reigned from 1046 until his death on the 25th of September 1066, a date that marks one of the last major Norse interventions in English history.

  Snorri Sturluson, who lived from 1179 to 1241, was an Icelandic historian, poet, politician, and lawspeaker of the Althing whose writings form a major source for Norse mythology. Among the poets were figures like Steinunn Refsdottir, a tenth-century Icelandic skald known for verses mocking the Christian missionary Thangbrandr, and Egill Skallagrimsson, born around 904 and dying around 995, who combined roles as war poet, sorcerer, berserker, farmer, and the central figure of Egil's Saga. Gunnlaugr Ormstunga, living from around 983 to 1008, traveled widely as a skald, serving in Iceland, Norway, Ireland, Orkney, and Sweden during his short life.

• 6. Words That Outlasted Empires

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  The Old Norse language did not survive as a spoken tongue outside of small communities, but its traces run through English, French, Russian, and the Gaelic languages in ways that speakers rarely notice. Place names are among the most durable remnants. Normandy in France carries the Norse word for Northman. Oxmanstown in central Dublin preserves the memory of the Ostmen. Roslagen on Sweden's Baltic coast may have lent its name, through the Rus, to Russia itself.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's distinction between the Normen of Dublin (who were pagan and Norwegian) and the Christian Danes of the Danelaw in 942 illustrates how contemporaries perceived these groups as distinct, despite sharing a common linguistic and cultural origin. Historians of Anglo-Saxon England still preserve this distinction today, using "Norse" specifically for the Norwegian branch of the Scandinavian expansion.

  For all the diversity of names they acquired, modern descendants of the Norsemen are called by a single collective term: Scandinavians. The runemaster Gunnborga, active in the eleventh century and responsible for the Halsingland Rune Inscription 21, left one of many carved stones that scholars continue to read as windows into who these people were in their own words rather than those their neighbors invented for them.