There are plenty of sources out there “explaining” The Norman Theory.
A Good Place to start is —
I’ve covered bits of 1066 and all that here.
Let’s see what NC has to say about The Norman Theory :
It should be abandoned the idea that the chronicle records that have reached us, tendentiously edited in the XVII-XVIII centuries, allow an unambiguous understanding today. We are assured that the old names in the Middle Ages meant basically the same thing as today. It turns out that this is often not the case.
Here, for example, is the quintessence of the “Norman theory”, which interprets in the following way the information of the editions of old Russian chronicles that have come down to us. Having coarsened, we single out only the essence of “theory”. “The Norman prince, the Varangian Rurik came from Scandinavia to Russia, called up by the Russian people, and began to rule in Russia.”
The “Norman theory” of later interpreters was precisely as if in the Middle Ages:
# Scandinavia has always been called only modern Scandinavia.
# Normans and Varangians have always called people who left the territory of modern Scandinavia.
# Russia was called only a relatively small area in the territory of modern Russia.
However, our research shows a very different picture.
# Scandinavia = Skit (f) Nova in the Middle Ages originally called part of Russia-Horde. Only then, during the “Mongol” conquest of the 14th century, did this name move from Russia to modern Scandinavia.
# Normans were called Russians in the Middle Ages, see “Empire,” ch. 9:19, as well as the Fasmer Dictionary [866].
# Russia in the Middle Ages was called not only Russia in its modern sense, but also many of the lands it conquered, including large territories of Southern, Northern and Western Europe, as well as Asia.
# The Russian princes-khans, uniting Russia in the XIII-XIV centuries and beginning the great conquest in the XIV century, were called in some chronicles the Russian word “enemies”, that is, the Vikings.
As a result, we get a completely different interpretation of the editions of Russian chronicles that have reached us. In particular, modern Scandinavia = Scythia Nova preserves, apparently, in its name the memory of the past Russian conquest and colonization.
Hidden History Research 