While researching the viking age in england, I saw that the English refered to pretty much anyone from Scandinavia as a "Dane". So was the Dane Law in England really just controlled and colonized by the Danes, or did norwegian vikings and settlers also control parts of England during the viking age?
In short, the 'Dane' appeared in the British (as well as continental) primary texts at least in the late 9th century should not be interpreted as an ethnic label as its modern usage usually does, rather than much broader and vague 'raiders as well as settlers of Scandinavian cultural origin', and it is often difficult to identify what the word exactly means in individual contexts.
In the classical histriographical narrative (roughly until ca. 1980), it is also said that medieval Irish authors could distinguish difficult ethnic identities within the Vikings, namely in difficult words like Finngaill ('old foreigners' - traditionally identified with the Norwegians) and Dubgaill ('new foreigners'- with the Danes), but now Downham proposes the new hypothesis that they might rather reflect different degrees of interaction of these groups in question with the indigenous Irish people than the actual ethnic difference between these Gaill ('foreigners').
The following are some examples that illustrate the difficulty in identifying these Scandinavians, especially represented by the Old English words like the Dene and the Norðmennn closely.
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The scribe of the Annals of Ulster recorded the death of Ívarr (Ivar the Boneless), a famous leader of the (Dane) 'Great Army' as well as an alleged son of Ragnarr Loðbrók, with the following title:
'Ímar, king of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain (rex Nordmannorum totius Hiberniae et Brittanie), ended his life' (Translation is taken from CELT version).
Just as the 'Danes', neither was the word 'Norsemen' probably primarily ethnic one here.
Another example of the difficult interpretation of the source is found in the entry of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the year 942 CE, the poem commemorating the capture of five borougha in Danelaw region
The traditional translation of the poem follows:
'Here King Edmund, lord of the English......conquered Mercia......five boroughs; Leicester and Lincoln, and Nottingham, likewise Stamford also and Derby. Earlier the Danes were under Northmen (Dæne waeran æror under Norðmannum), subjected by force in heathen's captive fetters, for a long time until they were ransomed again, to the honour of Edward's son, protector of warriors, King Edmund' (Swanton 2000: 110, ASC (A) a. 942a).
So, did the Northmen (Norðmennn) mean the Norwegian here, and they, more stubborn believer of their traditional heathenism, became the overlord of the Danes in Danelaw by then?
The new translation proposed by Downham, however, changed some interpretations:
'[The five boroughs]- they were previously Dene –, oppressed in need under Northmen, in the fetter-chains of heathens, for a long time......' (Downham 2009: 148)
This new translation interprets Dene not as the Danes of the five boroughs, but as the 'Dane/ Danish' five boroughs themselves under the rule of 'Northmen'. In other words, this interpretations suppose that the Danes and the Northmen (probably not the Norwegian) are used interchangeably here.
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While these examples does not explicitly show that the now Norwegians did indeed included in the 'Danes' active in the late 9th century, but they are enough to raise doubt against the assumption of the overtly simple identification of the Danes Viking Age England solely with the modern Danish people.
The usage/ meaning of Old English 'Northmen (Norðmennn)' also might have been little different from Old Norse counterpart that usually means the Norwegians rather than the Scandinavians in general, as I mentioned before in: Did the Vikings refer to themselves as “Northmen” within Scandinavia?
References:
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