• General Notes

  TITLE:  Duke of NORMANDY
  NOTE:
  HROLFR the GANGER (walker), GANGE-ROLV, ROLF, ROLLO OF NORMANDY; and later in life, ROBERT; also HRO'LFR
  "The central fact of Norman history ... is ... the grant of Normandy and his northern followers in the year 911. ... For the actual occurences of that year, we have only the account of a romancing historian of a hundred years
  later, reenforced here and there by the exceedingly scanty records of the time. The main fact is clear, namely that the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, granted Rollo as a fief a considerable part, the eastern part, of
  later Normandy. Apparently Rollo did homage for his fied in feudal fashion by placing his hands between the hands of the king, something, we are told, which "neither his father, nor his grandfather, nor his great-grandfather before him had ever done for any man." Legend goes on to relate, however, that Rollo refused to kneel and kiss the king's foot, crying out in his own speech, "No, by God!" and that the companion to whom he delegated the unwelcome obligation performed it so clumsily that he overturned the king, to the great merriment of the assembled Northmen. ... As to Rollo's personality, we have only the evidence of later Norman historians of doubtful authority and the Norse saga of HArold Fairhair. If, as seems
  likely, their accounts relate to the same person, he was known in the north as Hrolf the Ganger, because he was so huge that no horse could carry him and he must needs gang afoot. A pirate at home, he was driven into exile by the anger of King Harold, whereupon he followed his trade in the Western Isles and in Gaul, and rose to be a great Jarl among his people. The saga makes him a Norwegian, but Danish scholars have sought to prove him a Dane, and more recently the cudgels have been taken up for his Swedish origin.
  To me the Norwegian theory seems on the whole the most probable, being based on a trustworthy saga and corroborated by other incidental evidence. ... The important fact is that Norway, Denmark, and even more distant Sweden, all contributed to the colonists who settled in Normandy under Rollo and his successors, and the achievements of the Normans thus become the common heritage of the Scandinavian race. (P) The colonization of Normandy was, of course, only a small part of the work of this heroic age of Scandinavian
  expansion. The great emigration from the North in the ninth and tenth centuries has been explained in part by the growth of centralized government.

Details of (Duc) Rollo's family with Poppa De VALOIS