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About this time the overking of Denmark ruled
also Vestfold, the west coast of the Vík, now the
fjord of Christiania in Norway ; there was hardly anything
in the nature of a political distinction between
the people on the opposite coasts of the Skagerrack ;
the language was much the same, and the ethnological
differences noticed later as distinguishing Black-pirates,
or Danes, from White-pirates, or Norse, in Ireland
cannot have been important in the case of sea-farers
united rather than divided by the narrow seas. The
mountains of Norway, cutting up the country into
deep valleys, were a more effectual bar to intercourse,
and the true Norse were those of the Bergen and
Trondhjem fjords and Gudbrandsdal. From the beginning
the English regarded the invaders as Danes ;
the word "Northmen" was the French name. To
the Franks all the invaders came from the North,
and the name did not mean people of Norway, which
indeed Prof. Noreen derives—as Munch (Norske Folks
Historie, I. i. 67) hinted—not from "north," but from
nór, a sea-loch. The Northmen of Normandy were
mostly of Danish origin—that is to say, from the
country later known as Denmark. Irish annals called
the invaders the Gaill (foreigners) or Gentiles, or
heathen, until 836, when the Four Masters chronicle
the arrival of sixty ships of Northmen, and, in 841,
three fleets Normannorum—a Latin word in the
Gaelic text. In 846 the same annals mention Tomhrair
erla tanaisi righ Lochlainne, jarl Thórir, tanist
(heir) of the King of Lochlann. Then, in 847, "a
fleet of seven score ships of the people of the king
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