Gange-Hrólfr 'Rollo' of Normandy - Gange-Hrólfr 'Rollo' of Normandy and number of children

A quick search finds this:
http://www.medievalhistories.com/viking-chieftain-in-normandy-rollo...

Could be what I'm remembering.

Thanks - that one makes sense, and is more detail than I remember reading when it was last brought up.
Unfortunately the link to the actual paper is a 404, but it should be possible to find it.

>The traditional view was that in the Viking times, Norwegian and Danish (and Swedish and Icelandic) were not differentiated, everyone just spoke "old Norse".

I wonder if people will be arguing in a thousand years time about whether American and Australian were different languages from English or Canadian.

>earlier native sources would seem to have a higher priority than later foreign sources
By which I assume Dudo is the "native" and Landnama etc are foreign? I had been thinking along these lines about motives of the different writers.

Dudo is writing within a lifetime of Rollo's death, probably no one Dudo spoke to knew Rollo but there were probably a lot of people alive that had parents who knew Rollo. By modern standards that fact would be worthless but in a society based on oral history it has a lot more weight, i imagine that saga's were stilling being told by the fire-side during the reign of William Longsword and Richards I & II. Someone surely would have noticed if their All-Conquering Norwegian Hero (Göngu-Hrólfr Rognvaldsson) had suddenly been posthumously transformed into a Dane (Rollo Forgotten-his-name-son)?

Baldwin posits why would Dudo invent Gurim, a complete irrelevance who if imagined could only weaken his credibility? I can think of only one reason, a contemporary of Dudo's make have had a brother killed by a despot and Dudo may have been trying to piggy-back his hero off of the positive feelings within the audience towards this contemporary. It's pretty far fetched and the much more obvious answer is that Rollo had a brother named Gorm who didn't do much except die.

So then what to the character of Göngu-Hrólfr in the later Scandinavian sources and the authors motives?

Alex Moes are you really quoting Dudo of St Quentin? The first thing I learned at the University is that he was as unreliable as the wind and not to be relied on. He wasn't accurate at all as you can find all over the Internet. Here is a stub on him on Wikipdia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudo_of_Saint-Quentin

If you haven't, I urge you to read about him and here is just a little bit of what researchers have dismissed in his narratives: "..... Dudo claims that Richard I of Normandy was sent by his father William I Longsword to learn the "Dacian" language with Bothon.[3] It is generally accepted that Dudo erred and meant Danish – that is, in the same passage he states that the inhabitants of Bayeux more often spoke "Dacian" than "Roman" (i.e. Old French).... ".

Anna, I don't think i was quoting Dudo, I was contemplating his motives and the environment in which he was writing.

The text you quote from Wikipedia revolves around Dudo using the name "Dacia" for "Denmark" but that misses the whole point of Dudo's recounting of the anecdote. Dudo isn't writing a history to record what language the family of William Longsword spoke the point he is illustrating is that Richard was raised in isolation from his own family due to the French king's control over him.

Also if Harald is correct in his comment that 1000 years ago Danish, Norwegian and Swedish were all much the same language then what does it matter if Dudo called it Dacian or Danish or Zulu? If all the Scandinavian languages were basically Old Norse then it is not indicative of Rollo's ancestry and becomes irrelevant because we know Rollo is Norse no one questions that, the riddle is where in the North.

Too close to midnight, I must to bed.

Anna, one of the first things I learned at University is that opinions about Dudo's reliability are tainted by nationalistic bias. That is, it is a subjective not objective conclusion.

The text in Wikipedia is a good example of why Wikipedia can be unreliable. Dudo didn't "err" Dudo used the word Dacia to mean Denmark, as did other writers of his time and place. They were wrong about the connection between Denmark and Dacia but that doesn't give us any reason to doubt they they meant Denmark.

Also notice the sources for the criticisms of Dudo's reliability in the Wikipedia article. The article is citing Ernst Dümmler, Georg Waitz, and the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. This scholarship is 100 years old and hopelessly out of date. (Always look at Wikipedia citations. That will help you judge how reliable it is.)

The real questions about Dudo are where he got his information, and to what extent whether his gossipy style and purpose in writing tell us anything about his reliability. He apparently got his information from the family itself. (He composed it at the request of Richard I and he calls Richard I's brother Raoul of Ivry the "relator", although it's not entirely clear what he means by that.) It's common nowadays to see the text as a propaganda piece, although there is general quibbling about what it was meant to accomplish.

Here are two links to show examples of modern discourse about Dudo:

http://www.medievalhistories.com/dudo-st-quentin/

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1870

@Justin Swanström! I advice you to read for example the article on Dudo's reliabilty and arguments on his failure as a historian published in "Haskins Society Journal Studies in Medieval History, Volume 3".

The mistake many people do is that they assume that if someone has made errors, then all that that person has done must be wrong, it's the same with liars, we can't assume that they actually lies all the times. Some information are wrong, others is right. One of Dudo's critics was the Norwegian Historian Gustav Storm, according to Anna, this historians own statements were not worth a crap regarding the connections he draw between Jón "ríki" Loftsson and the Drotning family of Tjörn.

"En datter viss navn som vi ikke kjenner, men som ble gift med Asbjørn Jonsson, en høvding som slåss i krigen mot kong Sverre Sigurdsson av Norge og døde i 1184 i et sjøslag i Sognefjorden".

Private User, this is the article by Victoria B. Jordan, The Role of Kingship in Tenth-Century Normandy: Hagiography of Dudo of Saint-Quentin. Yes, I've read it. A long time ago, and now I've re-read as much of it as I can find on Google books.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ku7UAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontco...

This is not an article about Dudo's reliability. According to modern notions of history, an article about Dudo's reliability would compare his statements with facts that should have been known to him where we can show he was wrong.

This is the common mistake of older historians. They think it's enough to say Dudo is a jumble of anecdote and hagiography so he must be wrong. They think they don't have to prove it with examples. It's enough to say it.

This article is quite different. It draws on the methodology of prominent modern historians like R. W. Southern and Eleanor Searle. You might know Searle. She's one of the founders of prosopography, which goes back to basics by documenting facts rather than making up stories. If you know R. W. Southern it's for his work on the development of medieval institutions.

This article does not judge Dudo's reliability. it is part of that Southern & Searle approach that says attempts to judge Dudo's reliability miss the point.

Instead, what the article does is look at the ways Dudo develops a theme about the Norman dukes that is basically hagiographic. That is, Dudo treats the early dukes as though they were saints, so his work shows the Will of God unfolding in the establishment of Normandy.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the writings of medieval historians. They always praise and flatter their patrons. Great men always have glorious ancestors (because it's in their blood). And, of course, the most important people always have Trojan ancestry (because that shows they are equal to the Romans).

Dudo is odd because (a) he includes stories that seem more intimate than was usual, and (b) he is way "over the top" in his praise of the early dukes. Older historians think that makes him unreliable. Dudo might be unreliable but that's not the way to judge it.

What modern historians say instead is that there must be a strong element of oral tradition in those stories because they are not the kind of things that would be preserved in official documents.

No, certainly not. They are the kinds of things any of us might hear from a grandmother who might be right and might be wrong but everyone in the family believes her anyway. There's a good chance Grandma might be right, but there's always a chance she got some things wrong, and it's probably better to check her facts if you can.

That's Dudo -- family stories tied together with a story line that shows the family had a divine mission. How fascinating is that?

Justin Durand Have it "your way".... But why don't you take these arguments of yours to a more knowledgeable audience than is here on Geni. Academic societies for example...

Private User, unfortunately there is nothing here that is particularly new or interesting for the academic world.

I know about this area because Rollo was one of the case studies I was working on for my master's thesis about invented genealogies in the middle ages.

It's not news to anyone that Rollo's genealogy is uncertain. In academic circles Rollo's ancestry is considered to be not proved either wau. There is no "majority opinion". There is just debate by two opposing camps that everyone else thinks go beyond the evidence. In the meantime various experts make interesting arguments, looking for the magic break-through.

Here on Geni we will have to someday decide whether we prefer intellectual honesty or whether we like old stories.

Justin Durand - after my experience of the "intellectual honesty" here on Geni, I prefer the "old stories" and academic integrity.

Anna, academic integrity involves an honest acknowledgement that there is no answer when eminent scholars cannot agree.

The nice thing about the world is that you can still come to your own, different conclusion and believe it as fervently as you want. It's like the Loch Ness Monster. Believe or don't believe. The only thing you can't do is force everyone else to believe.

That is what in Trump world is called an alternate truth or Used when No real evidense is present.
That can All be Nice and fine as long as you present it as a theory and not as fact..
But you should still be aware that it is a theory and not facts