Nordic

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

Nordic means "northerly" or "northern" and usually refers to a region of Northern Europe called the Nordic countries. Nordic also refers to people of early European tribes that were of Scandinavian descent and co-existed in parts of Northern Europe during the age of the Roman Empire.

Nordic People

Nordic people or Norsemen is used to refer to the group of people as a whole who speak one of the North Germanic languages as their native language. (Norse, in particular, refers to the Old Norse language belonging to the North Germanic branch of Indo-European languages, especially Danish, Icelandic, Swedish and Norwegian in their earlier forms.)

The meaning of Norseman was 'people from the North' and was applied primarily to people from southern and central Scandinavia. They established states and settlements in areas which today are part of the Faroe Islands, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Iceland, Finland, Russia, Italy, Canada, Greenland, France, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Germany.

Norse, Norseman, and Normans are all applied to the Scandinavian population of the period from the late 8th century to the 11th century.

It was a common term for the Vikings, famously used in the prayer A furore normannorum libera nos domine ("From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord!"), doubtfully attributed to monks of the English monasteries plundered by Viking raids in the 8th and 9thcenturies.

The Northmen were also known as Ascomannii by the Germans (perhaps due to their mythological ancestor Ask), Lochlanach by the Irish and Dene (Danes) by the Anglo-Saxons.

The Slavs, the Arabs and the Byzantines knew them as the Rus' or Rhos, probably derived from various uses of roþs-, i.e. "related to rowing", or derived from the area of Roslagen in east-central Sweden, where most of the Norsemen who visited the Slavic lands came from. It is by archaeologists and historians of today believed that these Scandinavian settlements in the slavic lands formed the names of the countries Russia and Belarus).

The Slavs and the Byzantines also called them Varangians (Væringjar, meaning "sworn men"), and the Scandinavian bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors were known as the Varangian Guard.

Northmen (Norwegian:nordmenn/Danish:nordmænd/Swedish:norrmän) is a Scandinavian word for Norwegians.

Nordic Languages

The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages, along with the West Germanic languages and the East Germanic languages. Derived from Proto-Norse and Old Norse, they are spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and (to some extent) Greenland, as well as by a significant Swedish minority in Finland and by immigrant groups mainly in North America and Australia. The language group is often called either Scandinavian or Nordic languages. The latter term is the most commonly used by both scholars and laymen in the Nordic countries and is often favored by these when writing in English.

Often however the term Scandinavian (skandinavisk[a]) is used to designate merely the continental North Germanic languages, ie Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, thus excluding Faeroese and Icelandic. For example, in inter-Nordic contexts, texts may be labelled as either Finnish, Icelandic, or Scandinavian, where the latter will be written in either one of the three mutually comprehensible continental languages.Read More[1]