Normen

All the low German tribes were early distinguished for maritime enterprize, but the Danes and Scandinavians, who all passed by the name of Northmen, or Normen, were by far the most remarkable for bold adventure in the middle ages. […] Westwards the Feroe, Orkney, Shetland, and Western Islands were often visited, and partly peopled by the Normen; […] If we were to relate all the bold deeds which in pilgrimages, in the service of Constantinople, and in expeditions in almost every land and sea, even to Greenland and America, were achieved by the Normen, the relation would seem a romance. […] The Normen were true to one another, and virtuous men in their own eyes; […] The plundering Normen held murder, in the acquisition of their booty, no crime; […] We doubt if Christianity made the Normen more scrupulous, with regard to the property of others, than it did our Scotch and English borderers, who received absolution one day, and stole cattle the next. The Normen settled the matter with their conscience, on the terms of the following low German adage: […] which means that robbing and devastating were no shame, as they were practised by the best in the land.

Musulman. The plural of this word, in respectable writers, is often written musulmen, as if the English word man entered into its composition. The true root, however, is salam, an Arabic word. […] It is remarkable that for the words German, Norman, which are really made up of our word man, the plurals Germen, Normen, are never thought of.

The Danes and Normen were making descents upon France and Germany, and inflicted upon those countries losses not much less grievous than England had suffered.

The King said: “Better would it be that the Swedes should sit at home and lick their bowls of sacrifice than try to mount Ormen Långa with their arms. But who are those who steer the ships to the left?” The people said: “That is Jarl Erik and his men.” Then said the King: “He has a lawful cause of fight against us, and there will be a hard battle for they are Normen like ourselves.” […] Then Jarl Ragwald stood up, and set forth Olof Haraldson’s proposal of peace and courtship of the Princess Ingegerd; he also spoke of how all West Gothland longed for peace, partly because the Normen robbed them of the provisions they were expecting by sea, and partly because they lived in continual fear and uncertainty by the invasions and marauding excursions which ruined their frontier.

When “the Normen were put to flight,” says the Saxon Chronicle, “the English from behind hotly smote them, until they came, some to their ships, some were drowned, and some also burned; and thus in divers ways they perished, so that there were few left, and the English had possession of the place of carnage.”

When full of hope to clasp thy Alfbright form, / Oft am I driven by the envious storm / On Valland’s coast where Normen are enticed, / With snow-white garments to acknowledge Christ. […] I perceive that I have called the ancient Norwegians indifferently Normen, Northmen, and Norsemen. In writing of times subsequent to Rollo’s settlement in France, a distinction should be observed, but Normans (plural of Norman) appears to be a barbarism in our language.

As I lay in the sublime calm of that midsummer night stretched on the grass beside my last salmon, I thought what cleverer fishers the Normen were of old—fishers of men. But the will and the might have gone from them. Have they forgotten the glory and the guilt?

The Norwegians–the Normen were such inveterate mariners that they called the summit of the mt chain which separates Norway from Sweeden–the Keel ridge of the Country as if it were a vessel turned up.

The deacon proposed we should visit the tombs, or rather the coffins, of the “Normen,” as he called them, who, by records still existing, are proved to have been here interred. […] The vault was so crowded up with Skeels—pronounced Scales, like Shakespeare’s Lord Scales—and Beens, great people in their time, if you may judge by their quarterings—that the massive oak coffins of the Normen were scarcely visible. The chapel under which the Normen lie is styled the Høg Chapel, and here may be seen one of the finest monuments of the Renaissance period existing in Denmark or elsewhere, erected to the memory of Sir Erik Høg, one of Christian IV.’s crack men, of Biørnholm, and Dame Sophia Lange, his wife, date 1647.

TRAVELING through the wilds of Norland, her tender limbs exposed to the snows of winter and the rains of summer, often without a shelter in the severest storms, it was expected that the frail Fredeema, if not captured by her enemies, would at length sink under the hardships she had to endure. […] [A]s long as he did not meddle with the Normen and Norwomen, it was deemed highly impolitic to stir up his wrath by interfering in behalf of the wretched and helpless creatures who had the misfortune to fall under his power.