Laudator Temporis Acti

Tom Shippey, Beowulf and the North before the Vikings (Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2022), pp. 10-11:

There is a strong tendency for unfamiliar peoples to be lumped together under the name of the ones who first became familiar. Thus the Romans called all seaborne raiders Saxones, and the Celts of Britain followed suit—as they do to this day, the Welsh calling the English Saeson and the Scots Sassenach. (Harassed provincials were unlikely to hang around questioning whether the thugs who had just landed were indeed Saxons, or Angles, or Jutes, or anyone else: “Saxons” would do for all of them.)

In just the same way, “Danes” became a catch-all term. The first report of a Viking Age disturbance in England makes the point. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 789 recording an event at Portland in Dorset, reads:

three ships of Northmen first came from Hordaland. The king’s reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king’s town because he did not know what they were, and they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English¹⁸.

The Chronicler knew quite well that the malefactors were “Northmen,” i.e., Norwegians, and even that they came from Horthaland, the area round Bergen, far to the north of even the northern tip of Denmark. Still, as far as he was concerned, all seaborne nuisances were the same: they were all “Danes,” and all as bad as each other.

18 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. Michael Swanton (London: Phoenix, 2000), 54: MS A 787 (for 789).