Discrete subgroups of normed spaces are free

Abstract Ancel, Dobrowolski and Grabowski ( Studia Math . 109 (1994): 277–290) proved that every countable discrete subgroup of the additive group of a normed space is free Abelian, hence isomorphic to the direct sum of a certain number of copies of the additive group of the integers. In the present paper, we take a set‐theoretic approach based on the theory of elementary submodels and the Singular Compactness Theorem to remove the cardinality constraint from their result and prove that indeed every discrete subgroup of the additive group of a normed space is free Abelian.