Nobody in the Viking Age called themselves Norsemen; Walter Scott popularised it
The English word Norseman first turns up in Walter Scott's 1817 poem Harold the Dauntless, and viking in Old Norse and Old English simply meant pirate. The peoples who met these Scandinavian raiders and traders had their own names for them, and one of those names may survive in Russia and Belarus.
The Norsemen were Old Norse speakers from Scandinavia who, from the late eighth century, spread outward in every direction, opening what is now called the Viking Age. Historians of Anglo-Saxon England sometimes use Norse more narrowly, for raiders from Norway who took the islands north and west of Britain, Ireland and western Britain, as opposed to Danes who seized the east. The adjective norse itself came into English from Dutch in the 16th century, meaning Norwegian.
Contemporaries used a different vocabulary. The Franks said Nortmann, northman, which became Latin Normannus and gave its name to Normandy, settled by Scandinavians in the tenth century. Germans called them ashmen, the Gaels Lochlannach, and Dubliners Ostmen, or east people, a name surviving in the Dublin district of Oxmanstown. In Spain the word mutated into forms beginning with l, and the Arab writer al-Mas'udi used a related term for the raiders who struck Seville in 844.
To the east, Slavs, Arabs and Byzantines knew them as Rus, probably from a root linked to rowing or from Roslagen, a coastal region of east-central Sweden. Many scholars think those settlements shaped the names of Russia and Belarus. Byzantines also called them Varangians, sworn men, and the emperors' Scandinavian bodyguards became the Varangian Guard. The British picture of their origins was muddled too: the raiders came from Denmark, Scania, Norway, the Swedish coasts and Gotland, and many reached Britain from the east rather than the north.
Their footprint stretched from Sicily and Ukraine to Iceland, Greenland and Canada. Famous names include Erik the Red, who founded Greenland's first settlement, and his son Leif Erikson, probably the first European on mainland North America. Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark and Norway, lent his name to wireless technology, while Cnut ruled a North Sea empire spanning England, Denmark, Norway and part of Sweden. Women appear too, such as Aud the Deep-Minded, a ship captain who helped settle Iceland.
Source: Norsemen
