TheNorsemen (orNorthmen) were a Germanic cultural group in theEarly Middle Ages, originating among speakers ofOld Norse inScandinavia.[1][2] During the late eighth century, Scandinavians embarked on alarge-scale expansion in all directions, giving rise to theViking Age. In English-language scholarship since the 19th century, Norse seafaring traders, settlers and warriors have commonly been referred to asVikings.
Historians of Anglo-Saxon England often use the term "Norse" in a different sense, distinguishing between Norse Vikings (Norsemen) from Norway, who mainly invaded and occupied the islands north and north-west of Britain as well as Ireland and western Britain, and Danish Vikings, who principally invaded and occupied eastern Britain.[a]
The wordNorseman first appears in English during the early 19th century: the earliest attestation given in the third edition of theOxford English Dictionary is fromWalter Scott's 1817Harold the Dauntless. The word was coined using the adjectivenorse, which was borrowed into English from Dutch during the 16th century with the sense 'Norwegian', and which by Scott's time had acquired the sense "of or relating to Scandinavia or its language, esp[ecially] in ancient or medieval times".[3] As with modern use of the wordviking, therefore, the wordnorseman has no particular basis in medieval usage.[4]
The termNorseman does echo terms meaning 'Northman', applied to Norse-speakers by the peoples they encountered during the Middle Ages.[5] TheOld Frankish wordNortmann ("Northman") wasLatinised asNormannus and was widely used in Latin texts. The Latin wordNormannus then enteredOld French asNormands. From this word came the name of theNormans and ofNormandy, which was settled by Norsemen in the tenth century.[6][7]
The same word entered Hispanic languages and local varieties of Latin with forms beginning not only inn-, but inl-, such aslordomanni (apparently reflecting nasaldissimilation in local Romance languages).[8] This form may in turn have been borrowed into Arabic: the prominent early Arabic sourceal-Mas‘ūdī identified the 844 raiders on Seville not only asRūs but alsoal-lawdh’āna.[9]
TheAnglo-Saxon Chronicle, written inOld English, distinguishes between the pagan Norwegian Norsemen (Norðmenn) ofDublin and the Christian Danes (Dene) of theDanelaw. In 942, it records the victory of KingEdmund I over the Norse kings of York: "The Danes were previously subjected by force under the Norsemen, for a long time in bonds of captivity to the heathens".[10][11][12]
In modern scholarship,Vikings is a common term for attacking Norsemen, especially in connection with raids andmonastic plundering by Norsemen in theBritish Isles, but it was not used in this sense at the time. In Old Norse and Old English, the word simply meant 'pirate'.[13][14][15]
The Norse were also known asAscomanni,ashmen, by the Germans,Lochlanach (Norse) by the Gaels andDene (Danes) by the Anglo-Saxons.[16]
The Gaelic termsFinn-Gall (Norwegian Viking or Norwegian),Dubh-Gall (Danish Viking or Danish) andGall Goidel (foreign Gaelic) were used for the people of Norse descent in Ireland and Scotland, who assimilated into theGaelic culture.[17] Dubliners called them Ostmen, or East-people, and the nameOxmanstown (an area in central Dublin; the name is still current) comes from one of their settlements; they were also known asLochlannaigh, or Lake-people.[citation needed]
TheSlavs, theArabs and theByzantines knew them as theRus' orRhōs (Ῥῶς), probably derived from various uses ofrōþs-, i.e. "related to rowing", or from the area ofRoslagen in east-central Sweden, where most of the Northmen who visited the Eastern Slavic lands originated.[18]
Archaeologists and historians of today believe that these Scandinavian settlements in theEast Slavic lands formed the names of the countries of Russia andBelarus.[19]
The Slavs and the Byzantines also called themVarangians (Old Norse:Væringjar, meaning "sworn men"), and the Scandinavian bodyguards of theByzantine emperors were known as theVarangian Guard.[20]
Modern descendants of Norsemen are described as Scandinavians.[21]
The British conception of the Vikings' origins was inaccurate.[citation needed] Those who plundered Britain lived in what is today Denmark,Scania, the western coast of Sweden and Norway (up to almost the70th parallel) and along the Swedish Baltic coast up to around the60th latitude and LakeMälaren. They also came from the island ofGotland, Sweden. The border between the Norsemen and more southerly Germanic tribes, theDanevirke, today is located about 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of the Danish–German border. The southernmost living Vikings lived no further north thanNewcastle upon Tyne, and travelled to Britain more from the east than from the north.[citation needed]
The Norse Scandinavians established polities and settlements in what are now Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales), Ireland, Iceland, Russia, Belarus, France,Sicily, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Poland,Greenland, Canada,[22] and theFaroe Islands.[23]
^For example: "Most of the earliest Viking settlers in Ireland were Norsemen, but c.850 a large Danish Host arrived" (Peter Hunter Blair,An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., 2003, pp. 66–67); "In 875 Danes and Norsemen were competing" for control of Scotland (Peter Sawyer,The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, 1997, p. 90);Frank Stenton distinguishes between the "Danish kingdom of York" and the "Norse kingdom of York", and refers in the mid-tenth century to "the antagonism between Danes and Norsemen, which is often ignored by modern writers, but underlies the whole history in this period" (Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd ed., 1971, pp. 359, 765);Barbara Yorke comments that theChronicle tends to use the term "Danish" for all Scandinavian forces, but the attackers on Portland in the late eighth century seem to have been "predominantly Norse adventurers, but some way from their normal raiding grounds in Britain" (Wessex in the Early Middle Ages, 1995. p. 108); in 793: "The hit-and-run raid on Lindisfarne was probably the work of Norse rather than Danish warriors, straying from their accustomed haunts in the Faroes and Orkney down the North Sea coast of Britain in search of easy loot" (N. J. Higham,The Kingdom of Northumberland AD 350–1100, 1993, p. 173).
^Michael Lerche Nielsen, Review of Rune Palm,Vikingarnas språk, 750–1100,Historisk Tidskrift 126.3 (2006) 584–86 (pdf pp. 10–11Archived 24 April 2018 at theWayback Machine)(in Swedish)
^Louis John Paetow,A Guide to the Study of Medieval History for Students, Teachers, and Libraries, Berkeley: University of California, 1917,OCLC185267056,p. 150, citing Léopold Delisle,Littérature latine et histoire du moyen âge, Paris: Leroux, 1890,OCLC490034651, p. 17.
^Ann Christys,Vikings in the South (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 15–17.
^Ann Christys,Vikings in the South (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 23–24.
^Cleasby, Richard; Vigfusson, Gudbrand (1957). "víkingr".An Icelandic–English Dictionary (2nd edition by William A. Craigie ed.). Oxford University Press.
^Bosworth, Joseph; Northcote Toller, T. (1898). "wícing".An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford University Press.
