The history of the Viking Age contains plenty of gruesome reading. Icelandic sagas tell of a large Viking called Rolv Ganger (Rolv Walker), aka Rollo or Rollon. He was too big for horses to carry him, a saga tells. Viking horses may have been quite small. Their Icelandic descendants are pony sized, at any rate.
Rolv killed many people and became an ancestor of the British monarchy, and he had relatives . . .
After once being outlawed in Viking Norway for raiding where he was not supposed to, Rollo lived by the sword further away from home. After much bloodshed he had Normandy handed over to him in three strides by the French king Charles the Simple. King Charles granted Rollo land between the Epte and the sea as well as parts of Brittany.
Whether Rollo was a "duke" (dux) or like a "count" under Charles is debatable. At any rate, brute violence and bloodshed brought a high title and lots of land. Wise persons have other values.
Two spouses are reported for Rollo:
(1) Poppa, said by chronicler Dudo of Saint-Quentin to have been a daughter of Count Berenger, captured during a raid at Bayeux. She was his concubine or wife. They had children: (a) William Longsword, born "overseas" (b) Gerloc, wife of William III, Duke of Aquitaine; Dudo fails to identify her mother, but later chronicler William of Jumieges makes this explicit. (c) (perhaps) Kadlin, said by Ari the Historian to have been daughter of Ganger Hrolf, traditionally identified with Rollo. She married a Scottish King called Bjolan, and had at least a daughter called Midbjorg. She was taken captive by and married Helgi Ottarson.
(2) (traditionally) Gisela of France (d. 919), the daughter of Charles III of France - according to the Norman chronicler Dudo of St. Quentin. However, this marriage and Gisela herself are unknown to Frankish sources. Some details can be hard to verify.
Rollo converted to Christianity to get the Viking-downtrodden and looted Normandy. There he and his family could rule. Soon Normandie become the best part of Franceand remained that way for centuries. Normans also took over England and Wales after a descendant of Rollo, known as William the Conqueror, took over England in 1066. Normans also conquered the rich, southern half of Italy, including Sicily, and several other tracts bordering on the Mediterranean Sea. [◦WK, s.v. Rollo]
This is looks like a basic "recipe" of success in later Scandianavian folktales, where the hero gets tough and ends up reigning. In other words, the life of Rollo conforms well to several well-known plots often expressed in Scandinavian folktales, such as in Strong John. The success tale of Rollo contains a fair amount of fairy tale motifs, but unlike Scandinavian folktales - collected in the 1800s and into the early 1900s for most part - the Rollo story is largely historical, according to the Icelander Snorre Sturlason in Heimskringla, Book 3, section 24; Book 7, section 19, and other Icelandic sagas from medieval times, as the Orkneyingers' Saga, section 4.
Was Rollon Other than Norwegian? A Snapshot
An announced project in search of the origin of Rollon by gene technology
"History has many cunning passages". - T. S. Eliot
There are stories about the arsonist father and brothers of Rolf Ganger. Their tales start somewhere during the reign of King Harald Fairhair (Chaps. 27, 30-32)
The Orkneyingars' Saga tells a lot of the family and their deeds too. Sources
(1) The war-ships of the Vikings were called dragons, from being decorated with the head of a dragon, serpent, or other wild animal; and the word "draco" was adopted in the Latin of the Middle Ages to denote a ship of war of the larger class. The snekke was the cutter or smaller war-ship.
(2) Shields were hung over the side-rails of the ships.
(3) The wolf-skin pelts were nearly as good as armour against the sword.
"NORMANDY was created by the three consecutive grants of 911, 924 and 933". [Tnn 20] Especially in Lower Normandy the Scandinavian influences and custom remained rather strong. [Cf. Tnn 21 and 41n] Normandy was in part colonised. Rollo and his successors, as rulers of Normandy, obtained the title of count and valuable rights from before, along with widespread domains. [Cf. Tnn 22]
Their buildings seem to document remarkable strength or solidity. The churches were much like bastions. But the duke of Rouen controlled the whole church and his bishops owed him military service for their lands - [Cf. Tnn 32]
"From (their) Scandinavian inheritance the Normans derived their sea-faring, much of their trade and commercial prosperity which they shared with the Nordic world, their love of adventure, their wanderlust which led to the great period of Norman emigration in the eleventh century, their dynamic energy, and above all perhaps, their powers of assimila
(In AD 911) Charles the Simple, king of the west Franks, granted to a band of Vikings, operating in the Seine valley under Rollo their leader, territory corresponding to Upper or Easter Normandy. [Tnn 20] To this was subsequently added by two further grants, first the district of Bayeux, and the districts of Exmes and Seez in 924, and second the districts of Coutances and Avranches in 933 in the time of William Longsword, son and successor of Rollo. [Tnn 20] (2)
And from the French Histoire de la Normandie (1862) we find, in the fourth chapter, how Rollo, son of the Norwegian Rognevald, was made an outlaw by the Norwegian tyrant king Harald Harfager. He arrived at Rouen with his companions. The inhabitants spontaneously submitted to the giant. King Charles at first wanted to fight the Viking, but dropped it. Instead they bargained - Rollo won, he got land and permanent welcome. [Hnam 80 pp]
The historian R. Allen Brown puts the matter into relief: "Normans were pagans when they came (and they continued to come long after 911)." [Tnn 30] But their leader, the Viking Rollo, said yes to getting ◦baptised, and many others followed. More surprisingly, "Rollo . . . is (also - later) said to have wanted to become a monk (at Jumieges). That could have been due to a genuine flame deep inside. [Cf. Tnn 26]
In short time the Normans got the back-up of their astute castles and strongholds, helped themselves to most of it - often they were served by ditches and stockades too. [Cf. Tnn 44-5]
Their treaty at St. Claire-sur-Epte became a fact, and Rollo got baptised and married Gisele.
[It is thought that Rollo showed exceptional skills in navigation, warfare, leadership, and administration. He abdicated to his son Guillame (William) and died in a monastery in 933. Among his people he was for hundreds of years the personification of justice and good government under law. Others, who thought differently, found him cruel and arrogant.]
His son Guillame Longue-Epee (William Longsword) succeeded him. The third duke was Richard sans Peur (the Fearless), and there were many intrigues and hard fights. This Richard died and was succeeded by Richard 2 who massacred Saxons in England at war. The French king Robert became the ally of Richard 2. After his death, Richard 3 succeeded him and died prematurely. Robert le Diable succeeded him and, before he died in Terre-Sainte, became the father of Guillame le Conquerant: William the Conqueror. [Hnam 80 pp]
WE FIND the family tree of William the Conqueror in the book of the historian R. Allen Brown. It looks like this:
Rollo's great-granddaughter, Emma married two kings of England, Æhelred the Unready and Knut who was also king of Norway and Denmark. Her son, Edward the Confessor, from the first marriage, was King of England from 1042 to 1066.
A few more dukes of Normandy may be added for the sake of survey of that dynasty line that ruled over Normandy and its English (British) domain:
"It was a direct result of the Viking onslaught upon Western Europe . . . tidy and precise." [Tnn 20]
"The Norman monasteries were, by and large, distinguished . . . new . . . vibrant with . . . careless rapture of spiritual endeavour". The (Normans) became great spirituals - intensely aristocratic. [Tnn 28, 30]
Master builders in a very short time, (Normans) restored and built on monasticism in outstanding degrees. [Tnn 25-6]
Normans from the next century left grand architectural monuments, and some are still there, more or less intact. The Tower of London is a very Norman building, for example. King William had much of it built. [Cf. Tnn 25 pp]
"The tower at Rouen was built by Richard 1 (943-96) and is glimpsed from time to time in the reign of his successor and thereafter . . .. It may have been the prototype for the great Norman towers at Colchester and London. [Tnn 44n] (4)
Normans went on and built very monastic churches at such places as Jumieges [one still stands there] and lots of other places. "They added their cathedrals at Rouen, Bayeux [etc.] Many of these major works of Norman Romanesque architecture survive in whole or part". [Tnn 31-2]
Formerly hostile Scandinavians . . . became converted [in that way]. [Tnn 13]
"SOME (including Norman clergy) were patrons of the arts and scholarship . . . and almost all of them were mighty builders." [Tnn 31]
Source: [Nbl 350-53]Rollo was the son of Earl Ragnvald of More, say Norse sagas. Two of his brothers were Ivar and Tore. Three more were Hallad, Einar and Rollaug. Hallad and Einar in due time became earls of the Orkneys, each in his turn. [eg, Harald Fairhair's Saga]
After being made an outcast by the tyrant king Harald Harfager, Rolf voyaged to the western isles. Obviously he could count on support from relatives. The earl of the Orkneys was his paternal uncle, succeeded by that uncle's son, that is, his cousin, and later again by his own brothers Hallad and Einar.
The old sources hold that Rolv took his residence in certain tracts of what today is the domain of Scotland. The Landnamaboka mentions Rolv got a daughter, Kathleen:
Helgi . . . harried Scotland, and took thence captives, Midbjorg, the daughter of Bjolan the King, and Kadlin, the daughter of Gaungu Hrolf or Rolf the Ganger; he married her. (Part 2, ch. 11).
Before Helgi had harried and married, Rolv of the Sagas had travelled from Scotland and the isles near it, to Valland, near the English Channel. The Vikings' Valland consisted of the southern Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Normandy, roughly said. He took over Normandy in three steps. The Sagas identify him with the Rollo that the Frank king Charles the Simple bestowed it on.
Spread over the plentiful space from the Danube to the neighborhood of the Scythian Black Sea, do there inhabit fierce and barbarous nations, which are said to have burst forth in manifold variety like a swarm of bees from a honeycomb or a sword from a sheath, as is the barbarian custom, from the island of Scania, surrounded in different directions by the ocean. For indeed there is there a tract for the very many people of Alania, and the extremely well-supplied region of Dacia, and the very extensive passage of Greece. Dacia is the middle-most of these. Protected by very high alps in the manner of a crown and after the fashion of a city. - [From chapter 2, second paragraph in Gesta Normannorum by the chronicler Dudo ca. 1015]
Three things stand out from Dudo's obscure and glorifying marvel. They are:
To add to Dudo's "back-up of Denmark":
The Dacians are called by their own people Greeks or Danes, and they boast that they are descended from Antenor. He entered with his followers the Illyrian borders, having slipped away from the midst of the Achaeans who pillaged Troy. [Gesta Normannorum, Chapter 2, paragraph 5]
Dudo's work has the nature of a romance, and has been regarded as untrustworthy on this ground by such competent critics as Ernst Dümmler and Georg Waitz. The Danish Johannes Steenstrup, on the other hand, while admitting the legendary element in the work, regards the book as of considerable value for the history of the Normans. Further, Leah Shopkow has more recently argued that Carolingian writing, particularly two saints' lives, the ninth-century Vita S. Germani by Heiric of Auxerre and the early tenth-century Vita S. Lamberti by Stephen of Liége, provided models for Dudo's work. [Wikipedia, s.v., "Dudo of Saint-Quentin"]
There are differences of opinion. The Danish scholar Johannes Steenstrup wrote in favour of Dudo's version back in 1876. But it is not very clear what that version is or implies. For judged from Dudo, Dacia is not Denmark [Norsd 30, 31] - the descriptions of the terrain and the geographic position do not fit.
Most historians have settled on the presentation of the Icelandic sagas. That position is held by many Icelandic, French, British and Norwegian historians. They have supported the Sagas of Icelandic origin.
Some Danes love to think that Rollo was Danish, without much valuable evidence that it was so. There is not a single mention of Rollo in the classical Danish sources, and it is often pointed out that a huge, vastly successful marauder from Scandinavia at that time would not go unmentioned in the country he came from - such a "prominent man". The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus from about 1200, has no mention of any Danish Rollo in ◦The Danish History. But there is mention of Gange-Rolf in several Icelandic sagas, and the Orkneyingar Saga, and in the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway.
Vikings launched many attacks in France and elsewhere in Europe in times long gone. For example, a vast Viking army attacked Paris in 885. It was a huge army equipped for bombarding and breaking down huge walls - the king came to the aid and bought Paris back. [Noko 40] (6)
Sagas tell that Rollo the Walker took part in similar activities, and that this Hrolf (Rolv, Rollo) was the son of the Viking Ragnvald from Trondelag, a marauder that was granted the title Earl of More for helping Harald Fairhair. Sagas tell that Ragnvald's son Rolv was tall and heavy, and that the region he left when he sailed away as a Norse outlaw, was More.
Many Danes will disagree with many Icelandic sagas on the basis of a Norman chronicler's obscure tales about a tract he calls "Dacia," with key descriptions that do not fit the Danish geography at all, and despite the fact that the medieval Danish History of Saxo has no mention of the notable Rollo. [Noko 39]
Norwegian and other historians on the other hand have not swerved from the view that the Viking Rollo was Rolv, the son of Earl Ragnvald of More in Norway. And as it also shows up, Danes have changed their views. In short:
This pinpointing more than suggests that political interests may interfere with and/or colour versions and views.
Be that as it may, after Rollo and his companions settled in Normandy, they most likely kept the ties with their kin, according to Norse customs at the time. Rolv Ganger converted and wed according to Frank fashion and settled in Rouen. Next he granted many of his Viking companions ample landed property. It is likely that kin from up north came to join them in such a fine country as well. It was feasible to go north and fetch one's women and children and kin to the new land, for the soil was fit, there was much fish, and as members of the ruling class they were much safer or freer than those who submitted to the tyranny of Harald Harfager and his family in Norway and its colonies in several western islands. [Cf. Noko 43]
Normans built fortresses on strategic places, and many rustic castles were to come along with them in a short time. All able men had to serve in the Norman military forces. And the formerly ruined, marauded region was turned into one of the foremost in France, and Rouen became the second largest city in France, and Rolv became the originator of the Norman duchy. [Noko 39, 45-46]
In 1911, during the Norman Millennium celebrations, the city of Rouen in Normandy decided to create two copies of its Rollo statue. One replica was sent as a gift to Rollo's putative birthplace somewhere around Ålesund, Norway. The earls of Moere were headquartered somewhere nearby Ålesund, it is estimated.
The other replica went to Fargo in North Dakota. The two bronze statues were copied from an original stone statue sculpted in 1863 by Arsene Letellier, erected in Rouen in 1865.
In Fargo, the dedication ceremony in 1912 included a speaker from the French embassy in Washington. A proclamation by the mayor of Rouen, bound in leather with gold seal of the city, gold leaf and other ornamentation, read in part,
"Since these ancient times, these fierce warriors have populated and have become a hard-working people whose importance is shown by the powerful association of the Sons of Norway which has preserved the cult of memory, and which participated last year in the celebrations in the ancient Duchy of Normandy."
The celebrations were concluded with a parade down Broadway. The Rollo statue was relocated in the 1980s and now stands in a little park.
And the other copy of the now war-damaged statue in Rouen is in a small park in Aalesund, Norway. [Noko 39, 48, 40]
EB: Encyclopaedia Britannica, online or yearly DVD suite. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2008.
Hnam: Barthelemy, Ch. Histoire de la Normandie ancienne et moderne. Tours: Mame, 1862.
Bnsi: Marongiu, Antonio. Byzantine, Norman, Swabian and later Institutions in Southern Italy. Collected Studies. London: Variolum Reprints, 1972.
Hee: Woodward, E. A History of England. London: University Paperback/Methuen, 1965.
Lb: Ellwood, T., tr. The Book of the Settlement of Iceland (The Landnama-Book) . Kendal: T. Wilson, 1898. On-line.
Norsd: Steenstrup, Johannes. Normannerne, bd 1. Copenhagen: Klein, 1876.
Noko: Simonnæs, Per. Normannerne kommer. Oslo: Grøndahl Dreyer, 1994.
Nok: Hødnebø, Finn, and Hallvard Magerøy, eds. Norges kongesagaer. Vols 1-4. Oslo: Gyldendal, 1979.
Tnn: Brown, Reginald Allen. The Normans and the Norman Conquest. London: Constable, 1969.
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