it so clumsily that he overturned the king, to the great merriment of the assembled Northmen. Rollo did not receive the whole of the later duchy, but only the region on either side of the Seine which came to be known as Upper Normandy, and it was not till 924 that the North- men acquired also middle Normandy, or the Bessin, while the west, the Cotentin and the Avranchin, fell to them only in 933.
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. Yet, however significant of Rollo's importance it may be that three great countries should each claim him as its own, like the seven cities that strove for the honor of Homer's birthplace, the question of his nationality is historically of subordinate
