Viking dynasties

john6,863

Hello everyone, I'm new to the group. I have 2 sets of Viking ancestry. One is Hrolf, the Ganger, Rollo, Duc de Normandy, whose descendant, William, was illegitimate & became William I of England, the Conqueror. Is there any knowledge of Rolf/Rollo's lineage down to William, & back to the beginning of his line? the other line begins w/Rurik, who founded the line that were the Grand Princes of Novgorod & Kiev/Kyiv leading down to Yaroslav, the Wise, Father w/some Scandinavian Princess of Anna/Anne of Kiev/Kyiv who married Henri I of France & created w/ the birth of her son, Philippe one of the Royal lines of France! I'm sure there areothe Scandinavian lines that I'm related to!? Be well, Jack MacDonald-Hilton, now from Worcester, MA, grew up in Danvers, MA, proud descendant of Capt. Amos Hilton originally from Manchester, MA, Settler/Founder of Yarmouth, NS, Canada.

Niels Just Rasmussen

It's important to know that the Rollo's lineage is close to being legendary and is all based of Dudo of Saint-Quentin's "Historia Normannorum" in around 1015. It might be true and it might be totally made up; we can't be sure.

Dudo described him as Danish.

The association of "Rollo" with the Ganger-Hrolf is first from the 1200's sagas [where you have a Norwegian Kingdom in direct competition with Denmark]. You have two people with the same common name, which people think almost 300 years later is the same person.....

The whole discussion of today whether Rollo was Danish or Norwegian:

Back when Ottar visited King Alfred the Great "Northway" was the area where the northmen living along the Atlantic coast [and that was not a united Kingdom or one people] whereas the area facing towards Skagerak and Kattegat was Danish!

So Rollo could easily have been Danish from an area that later became Norwegian. So what was his self-identification or is it modern borders who deicide what you are/were?!

Furthermore people of prominent families was so "internationally married" (then as now) so that leaders can't really be ascribed to any ethnic group -> though they ruled over certain ethnic groups.

Canute the Great might in fact have been more slavic than danish %-wise..

So just take any genealogical information, that wasn't written down close to that event and preserved to modern time, with a huge grain of salt.

The information on Rurik and his lineages are from "The Primary Chronicle" written in the early 1100's again long after the events taking place. It might be true, partially true or it might have been entirely made up.

Even much later in Scandinavian history we see many nobleman "glorifying their family trees" with wishful thinking, so it was hardly different in viking age times......

The Swede Olof Rudbeck even that Atlantis was Sweden and all languages descend from Sweden (and taking an idea earlier from Johannes Magnus) that Swedish Kings descended from Japhet's son Magog -> why was this important? To "prove" that Norway should belong to Sweden and not Denmark. It's all power politics and genealogy has been power politics for millennia.

I know it looks cool and impressive on a family tree, but I would think one should distinguish between mythical genealogy and where you start to have actual textual contemporaneous proof. [one could put a star * in front of all lines, where such contemporaneous proof doesn't exist].