Norsemen

The Norsemen, or Northmen, were the Old Norse-speaking peoples of early medieval Scandinavia, in what are now Denmark, Norway and Sweden. From the late eighth century their seafaring traders, raiders and settlers spread across Europe and the North Atlantic in the period known as the Viking Age. Their descendants are the modern Scandinavians, and Norse settlers helped form the Icelanders, the Faroese, the Normans and the Norse-Gaels.

"Norseman" is a modern English word, first recorded in a poem by Walter Scott in 1817, but it echoes medieval names. The Franks called these people Nortmann, Latinised as Normannus, the origin of the names Normans and Normandy. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle distinguished Norwegian Norsemen from Danes. Gaelic writers spoke of Lochlannaigh and of "fair" and "dark" foreigners, Finn-Gall and Dubh-Gall. In the east, Slavs, Byzantines and Arabs called them Rus' and Varangians. "Viking" originally meant a pirate and was not used for a whole people at the time; few Scandinavians of the period were ever pirates.

Scandinavia was divided among many chiefs and petty kings. By about 800 Norway alone had some 30 small kingdoms, separated by mountains and fjords, and the sea was the easiest highway between them. In Jutland a strong central authority had emerged by 801. Their language, Old Norse, is the ancestor of today's Scandinavian languages, and they carved inscriptions in runes. Their religion was the pre-Christian Norse faith, with its gods, priests and seeresses, which Christianity gradually replaced.

The attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne in north-east England on 8 June 793 is traditionally taken as the start of the Viking Age, though earlier contacts and raids are likely. The scholar Alcuin of York wrote: "Never before in Britain has such a terror appeared". Historians debate the causes: wealth in overseas towns and monasteries, political centralisation at home that drove out chiefs, population growth, and above all advances in shipbuilding that made long voyages possible. Raids grew into conquest. The Great Heathen Army arrived in England in 865 and took York, and Norse kings ruled Dublin from 853. In 911 the Frankish king granted Normandy to the leader Rollo.

Swedish Norsemen travelled along the rivers of eastern Europe to the Black Sea and Constantinople, trading and serving as soldiers; Scandinavian bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors formed the Varangian Guard. According to tradition Rurik became ruler of Novgorod in 859, and his successors founded Kievan Rus'. In the North Atlantic, Norse settlers reached the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, where Erik the Red founded the first settlement. Leif Erikson is believed to be the first European who reached mainland North America, and a Norse presence in Newfoundland has been dated to 1021.

In the homelands, kingdoms grew larger and royal power stronger. Harald Fairhair is remembered as the first king of a united Norway. The Danish king Cnut ruled England, Denmark, Norway and part of Sweden in the early eleventh century. Iceland adopted Christianity in 1000, a date sometimes used to mark the conversion of all Scandinavia. The defeat and death of Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066 is often treated as the end of the Viking Age, though Norway held Orkney and Shetland until 1469.

Norse settlement left lasting marks: the Irish towns of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Cork and Limerick, the Rus' states of the east, the Norman aristocracy that conquered England in 1066, and the Icelandic sagas, written down later, which remain major sources for Norse history and myth.

Our 800 map draws the Norse homelands in Scandinavia under the label "Northmen", spanning today's Sweden and Norway. On the 900 map the Kingdom of Norway appears in the west of this area.