Norsemen in the context of "Old Norse"

French people (French: Les Français, lit. 'The French') are a nation primarily located in Western Europe that share a common French culture, history, and language, identified with the country of France.

The French people, especially the native speakers of langues d'oïl from northern and central France, are primarily descended from Romans (or Gallo-Romans, western European Celtic and Italic peoples), Gauls (including the Belgae), as well as Germanic peoples such as the Franks, the Visigoths, the Suebi and the Burgundians who settled in Gaul from east of the Rhine after the fall of the Roman Empire, as well as various later waves of lower-level irregular migration that have continued to the present day. The Norsemen also settled in Normandy in the 10th century and contributed significantly to the ancestry of the Normans. Furthermore, regional ethnic minorities also exist within France that have distinct lineages, languages and cultures such as Bretons in Brittany, Occitans in Occitania, Basques in the French Basque Country, Catalans in northern Catalonia, Germans in Alsace, Corsicans in Corsica and Flemings in French Flanders.

The Normans (Norman: Normaunds; French: Normands; Latin: Nortmanni/Normanni) were a population arising in the medieval Duchy of Normandy from the intermingling between Norse Viking settlers and locals of West Francia. The Norse settlements in West Francia followed a series of raids on the French northern coast mainly from what is now Denmark, although some also sailed from Norway and Sweden. These settlements were finally legitimized when Rollo, a Scandinavian Viking leader, agreed to swear fealty to King Charles III of West Francia following the siege of Chartres in 911, leading to the formation of the County of Rouen. This new fief, through kinship in the decades to come, would expand into what came to be known as the Duchy of Normandy. The Norse settlers, whom the region as well as its inhabitants were named after, adopted the language, religion, social customs and martial doctrine of the West Franks but their offspring nonetheless retained many of their traits, notably their mercenary tendencies and their fervour for adventures. The intermixing between Norse folk and native West Franks in Normandy produced an ethnic and cultural "Norman" identity in the first half of the 10th century, an identity which continued to evolve over the centuries.

The Norman dynasty had a major political, cultural and military impact on medieval Europe and the Near East. The Normans were historically famed for their martial spirit, and eventually for their Catholic piety as adherents of the Catholic orthodoxy of the Romance community. The original Norse settlers adopted the Gallo-Romance language of the Frankish land they settled, with their Old Norman dialect becoming known as Norman, Normaund or Norman French, an important literary language which is still spoken today in parts of mainland Normandy (Cotentinais and Cauchois dialects) and the nearby Channel Islands (Jèrriais and Guernésiais). The Duchy of Normandy, which arose from the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, was a great fief of medieval France. The Norman dukes exercised independent control of their holdings in Normandy, while at the same time being vassals owing fealty to the King of France, and under Richard I of Normandy (byname Richard sans Peur, meaning "Richard the Fearless"), the duchy was forged into a cohesive and formidable principality in feudal tenure.

Volga Bulgaria or Volga–Kama Bulgaria (sometimes referred to as the Volga Bulgar Emirate) was a historical Bulgar state that existed between the 9th and 13th centuries around the confluence of the Volga and Kama River, in what is now European Russia. Volga Bulgaria was a multi-ethnic state with large numbers of Bulgars, Finno-Ugrians, Varangians, and East Slavs. Its strategic position allowed it to create a local trade monopoly with Norse, Cumans, and Pannonian Avars.

Kievan Rus', also known as Kyivan Rus', was the first East Slavic state and later an amalgam of principalities in Eastern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century. Encompassing a variety of polities and peoples, including East Slavic, Norse, and Finnic, it was ruled by the Rurik dynasty, founded by the Varangian prince Rurik. The name was coined by Russian historians in the 19th century to describe the period when Kiev was preeminent. At its greatest extent in the mid-11th century, Kievan Rus' stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and from the headwaters of the Vistula in the west to the Taman Peninsula in the east, uniting the East Slavic tribes.

According to the Primary Chronicle, the first ruler to unite East Slavic lands into what would become Kievan Rus' was Varangian prince Oleg the Wise (r. 879–912). He extended his control from Novgorod south along the Dnieper river valley to protect trade from Khazar incursions from the east, and took control of the city of Kiev, laying the foundation of the state and becoming prince of Kiev. Sviatoslav I (r. 943–972) achieved the first major territorial expansion of the state, fighting a war of conquest against the Khazars. Vladimir the Great (r. 980–1015) spread Christianity with his own baptism and, by decree, extended it to all inhabitants of Kiev and beyond. Kievan Rus' reached its greatest extent under Yaroslav the Wise (r. 1019–1054); his sons assembled and issued its first written legal code, the Russkaya Pravda, shortly after his death.

The history of navigation, or the history of seafaring, is the art of directing vessels upon the open sea through the establishment of its position and course by means of traditional practice, geometry, astronomy, or special instruments. Many peoples have excelled as seafarers, prominent among them the Austronesians (Islander Southeast Asians, Malagasy, Islander Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians), the Harappans, the Phoenicians, the Iranians, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the ancient Indians, the Norse, the Chinese, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Hanseatic Germans, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Danes.

The exploration of North America by Norsemen began in the late 10th century. Voyages from Iceland reached Greenland and founded colonies along its western coast. Norse settlements on Greenland lasted almost 500 years, and the population peaked at around 2,000–3,000 people. The colonies consisted mostly of farms along Greenland's scattered coastal fjords. Colonists relied heavily on hunting, especially of walruses and the harp seal. For lumber, they harvested driftwood, imported wood from Europe, and sailed to modern-day Canada.

Archaeological evidence indicates that the Greenland colonists used lumber and possibly iron ore imported from North America. Archaeologists found remains of one short-term settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows near the northern tip of Newfoundland. The remains of buildings excavated there in the 1960s dated to approximately 1,000 years ago. It was not a permanent settlement and lacked graves and livestock areas. The site was abandoned, seemingly deliberately, by 1145 AD with no valuables or tools left behind. Some wood fragments and nuts in the Norse remains were from plants not found in Newfoundland, but native to the continental mainland across the Gulf of St. Lawrence. No other settlements in Canada and no settlements on the North American mainland have been conclusively identified as Norse.

Scottish people or Scots (Scots: Scots fowk; Scottish Gaelic: Albannaich) are an ethnic group and nation native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged in the early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland (or Alba) in the 9th century. In the following two centuries, Celtic-speaking Cumbrians of Strathclyde and Germanic-speaking Angles of Northumbria became part of Scotland. In the High Middle Ages, during the 12th-century Davidian Revolution, small numbers of Norman nobles migrated to the Lowlands. In the 13th century, the Norse-Gaels of the Western Isles became part of Scotland, followed by the Norse of the Northern Isles in the 15th century.

In modern usage, "Scottish people" or "Scots" refers to anyone whose linguistic, cultural, family ancestral or genetic origins are from Scotland. The Latin word Scoti originally referred to the Gaels, but came to describe all inhabitants of Scotland. Considered pejorative by some, the term Scotch has also been used for Scottish people, now primarily outwith Scotland.

Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At 450,295 square kilometres (173,860 sq mi), Sweden is the largest Nordic country by both area and population, and is the fifth-largest country in Europe. Its capital and largest city is Stockholm. Sweden has a population of 10.6 million, and a low population density of 25.5 inhabitants per square kilometre (66/sq mi); 88% of Swedes reside in urban areas. They are mostly in the central and southern half of the country. Sweden's urban areas together cover 1.5% of its land area. Sweden has a diverse climate owing to the length of the country, which ranges from 55°N to 69°N.

Sweden has been inhabited since prehistoric times around 12,000 BC. The inhabitants emerged as the Geats (Swedish: Götar) and Swedes (Svear), who formed part of the sea-faring peoples known as the Norsemen. A unified Swedish state was established during the late 10th century. In 1397, Sweden joined Norway and Denmark to form the Scandinavian Kalmar Union, which Sweden left in 1523. When Sweden became involved in the Thirty Years' War on the Protestant side, an expansion of its territories began, forming the Swedish Empire, which remained one of the great powers of Europe until the early 18th century. During this era Sweden controlled much of the Baltic Sea. Most of the conquered territories outside the Scandinavian Peninsula were lost during the 18th and 19th centuries. The eastern half of Sweden, present-day Finland, was lost to Imperial Russia in 1809. The last war in which Sweden was directly involved was in 1814, when Sweden by military means forced Norway into a personal union, a union which lasted until 1905.

The British colonization of the Americas is the history of establishment of control, settlement, and colonization of the continents of the Americas by England, Scotland, and, after 1707, Great Britain. Colonization efforts began in the late 16th century with failed attempts by England to establish permanent colonies in the North. The first permanent English colony in the Americas was established in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Colonies were established in North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Though most British colonies in the Americas eventually gained independence, some colonies have remained under Britain's jurisdiction as British Overseas Territories.

The first documented settlement of Europeans in the Americas was established by Norse people around 1000 AD in what is now Newfoundland, called Vinland by the Norse. Later European exploration of North America resumed with Christopher Columbus's 1492 expedition sponsored by Spain. English settlement began almost a century later. Sir Walter Raleigh established the short-lived Roanoke Colony in 1585. The 1607 settlement of the Jamestown colony grew into the Colony of Virginia. Virgineola—settled unintentionally by the shipwreck of the Virginia Company's Sea Venture in 1609, and renamed The Somers Isles—is still known by its older Spanish name, Bermuda. In 1620, a group of mostly Pilgrim religious separatists established a second permanent colony on the mainland, on the coast of Massachusetts. Several other English colonies were established in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. With the authorization of a royal charter, the Hudson's Bay Company established the territory of Rupert's Land in the Hudson Bay drainage basin. The English also established or conquered several colonies in the Caribbean, including Barbados and Jamaica.

Landnámabók (Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈlantˌnauːmaˌpouːk], "Book of Settlements"), often shortened to Landnáma, is a medieval Icelandic written work which describes in considerable detail the settlement (landnám) of Iceland by the Norse in the 9th and 10th centuries CE.

The settlement of Iceland (Icelandic: landnámsöld [ˈlantˌnaumsˌœlt]) is generally believed to have begun in the second half of the ninth century, when Norse settlers migrated across the North Atlantic. The reasons for the migration are uncertain: later in the Middle Ages Icelanders themselves tended to cite civil strife brought about by the ambitions of the Norwegian king Harald I of Norway, but modern historians focus on deeper factors, such as a shortage of arable land in Scandinavia. Unlike Great Britain and Ireland, Iceland was unsettled land and could be claimed without conflict with existing inhabitants.

On the basis of Íslendingabók by Ari Þorgilsson, and Landnámabók, histories dating from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and providing a wealth of detail about the settlement, the years 870 and 874 have traditionally been considered the first years of settlement. However, these sources are largely unreliable in the details they provide about the settlement, and recent research focuses more heavily on archaeological and genetic evidence.

Norwegians (Norwegian: Nordmenn) are an ethnic group and nation native to Norway, where they form the vast majority of the population. They share a common culture and speak the Norwegian language. Norwegians are descended from the Norse of the Early Middle Ages who formed a unified Kingdom of Norway in the 9th century. During the Viking Age, Norwegians and other Norse peoples conquered, settled and ruled parts of the British Isles, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland. Norwegians are closely related to other descendants of the Norsemen such as Danes, Swedes, Icelanders and the Faroe Islanders, as well as groups such as the Scots whose nation they significantly settled and left a lasting impact in, particularly the Northern Isles (Orkney and Shetland).

The Norwegian language, with its two official standard forms, more specifically Bokmål and Nynorsk, is part of the larger Scandinavian dialect continuum of generally mutually intelligible languages in Scandinavia. Norwegian people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Norwegians are traditionally Lutheran since the Reformation in Denmark–Norway and Holstein which made Lutheranism the only legal religion in the country, however large portions of the population are now either non-practicing, atheist or agnostic.

Ingolfr Arnarson, in some sources named Bjǫrnolfsson, (c. 849 – c. 910)is commonly recognized as the first permanent Norse settler of Iceland, together with his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir and foster brother Hjǫrleifr Hróðmarsson. According to tradition, they settled in Reykjavík in 874.

The territory today known as England became inhabited more than 800,000 years ago, as the discovery of stone tools and footprints at Happisburgh in Norfolk have indicated. The earliest evidence for early modern humans in Northwestern Europe, a jawbone discovered in Devon at Kents Cavern in 1927, was re-dated in 2011 to between 41,000 and 44,000 years old. Continuous human habitation in England dates to around 13,000 years ago (see Creswellian), at the end of the Last Glacial Period. The region has numerous remains from the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, such as Stonehenge and Avebury. In the Iron Age, all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth was inhabited by the Celtic people known as the Britons, including some Belgic tribes (e.g. the Atrebates, the Catuvellauni, the Trinovantes, etc.) in the south east. In AD 43 the Roman conquest of Britain began; the Romans maintained control of their province of Britannia until the early 5th century.

The end of Roman rule in Britain facilitated the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, which historians often regard as the origin of England and of the English people. The Anglo-Saxons, a collection of various Germanic peoples, established several kingdoms that became the primary powers in present-day England and parts of southern Scotland. They introduced the Old English language, which largely displaced the previous Brittonic language. The Anglo-Saxons warred with British successor states in western Britain and the Hen Ogledd (Old North; the Brittonic-speaking parts of northern Britain), as well as with each other. Raids by Vikings became frequent after about AD 800, and the Norsemen settled in large parts of what is now England. During this period, several rulers attempted to unite the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, an effort that led to the emergence of the Kingdom of England by the 10th century.

Rollo (Norman: Rou, Rolloun; Old Norse: Hrólfr; French: Rollon; c. 835/870 – 933), also known with his epithet, Rollo "the Walker", was a Viking who, as Count of Rouen, became the first ruler of Normandy, a region in today's northern France. He was prominent among the Vikings who besieged Paris in 885–886, and he emerged as a war leader among the Norsemen who had secured a permanent foothold on Frankish soil in the valley of the lower Seine after the Siege of Chartres in 911. Charles the Simple, king of West Francia, agreed to the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, which granted Rollo lands between the river Epte and the sea in exchange for Rollo agreeing to end his brigandage, swear allegiance to Charles, convert to Christianity, and pledge to defend the Seine estuary from other Viking raiders.

Rollo's life was recorded by Dudo of St. Quentin. Historians such as W. Vogel, Alexander Bugge, and Henri Prentout have debated whether Dudo's account is historically accurate, and Rollo's origin and life are heavily disputed.

The Viking Age (about 793–1066 CE) was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonising, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. The Viking Age applies not only to their homeland of Scandinavia but also to any place significantly settled by Scandinavians during the period. Although few of the Scandinavians of the Viking Age were Vikings in the sense of being engaged in piracy, they are often referred to as Vikings as well as Norsemen.

Voyaging by sea from their homelands in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the Norse people settled in the British Isles, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast and along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes in eastern Europe, where they were also known as Varangians. They also briefly settled in Newfoundland, becoming the first Europeans to reach North America. The Norse-Gaels, Normans, Rus' people, Faroese, and Icelanders emerged from these Norse colonies. The Vikings founded several kingdoms and earldoms in Europe: the Kingdom of the Isles (Suðreyjar), Orkney (Norðreyjar), York (Jórvík) and the Danelaw (Danalǫg), Dublin (Dyflin), Normandy, and Kievan Rus' (Garðaríki). The Norse homelands were also unified into larger kingdoms during the Viking Age, and the short-lived North Sea Empire included large swathes of Scandinavia and Britain. In 1021, the Vikings achieved the feat of reaching North America—the date of which was not determined until a millennium later.

Vinland, Vineland, or Winland (Old Norse: Vínland hit góða, lit. 'Vinland the Good') was an area of coastal North America explored by Vikings. Leif Erikson landed there around 1000 AD, nearly five centuries before the voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. The name appears in the Vinland Sagas and describes a land beyond Greenland, Helluland, and Markland. Much of the geographical content of the sagas corresponds to present-day knowledge of transatlantic travel and North America.

In 1960, archaeological evidence of the only known Norse site in North America, L'Anse aux Meadows, was found on the northern tip of the island of Newfoundland. Before the discovery of archaeological evidence, Vinland was known only from the sagas and medieval historiography. The 1960 discovery further proved the pre-Columbian Norse exploration of mainland North America. Archaeologists found butternuts at L'Anse aux Meadows, which indicates voyages into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence as far as northeastern New Brunswick. L'Anse aux Meadows has been hypothesized to be the camp Straumfjörð mentioned in the Saga of Erik the Red.

Longships (Old Norse: langskip) were long clinker-built warships (Old Norse: herskip, Old Swedish: hærskip) propelled by oars, and later also by sail, used by the Norse and surrounding Germanic tribes from at least the 4th century AD and throughout the Viking Age, being part of the Nordic ship building tradition. As the name suggests, they were long slender ships, intended for speed, with the ability to carry a large crew of warriors. They are sometimes called "dragonships" (Old Norse: drekaskip) due to a tradition of the fore and aft ends being decorated with a raised dragonhead (Old Norse: drekahofud) and tail respectively, with the sail making up the "wing" of the dragon. The largest types were thus called "dragons" (dreki), while smaller types had names such as karve (karfi), snekke (snekkja), and skeid (skeið).

Archaeological finds have been made of longships from the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries in Denmark, Norway and Germany, with motifs on Gotlandic picture stones dating to the 8th century or earlier. It is thought that the Norse specifically invented the design for Viking usage, which included raiding and warfare, exploration and commerce. The longship is a rather distinctly Norse (Scandinavian) construction, with bronze age petroglyphs in Sweden indicating a long tradition of building long animal-headed naval ships in Scandinavia. Equivalent clinker-built naval ships by the Wends (a South Baltic Slavic people) were much smaller and shorter in comparison.