Vikings and their Influence on English

Vikings and their Influence on English

The first Viking attacks on England started around 800 AD and were at first merely plundering raids, but some fifty years later these attacks had become more serious and groups had even started settling in Britain. The resistance from the English was badly organized and often ineffective. The lack of unity in England made it a great deal easier for the Vikings to roam and raid the countryside. The Vikings, usually referred to as ‘Danes’, successfully took control of large parts of England, and towards the end of the ninth century their eyes turned to Wessex, the strongest of the Saxon kingdoms not yet under Danish control. Here, their conquering of England came to an end when King Alfred and his followers put up resistance, eventually forcing the Viking troops to surrender in 878. Alfred and the Viking leader Guthrum reached an agreement, called the Treaty of Wedmore, where the Vikings promised to leave Wessex alone and to accept Christianity. The northern and eastern counties already belonged to the Danes, and now a southern boundary was drawn. This area was what would be called the Danelaw.

Naturally, the massive migration and settlement that the Scandinavians undertook led to extensive use of the Norse (Scandinavian) tongue in the area of the Danelaw, and we can see evidence of it even today through its influences on the English language. The Anglo Saxons and the Vikings were culturally quite similar. They spoke similar languages and had similar traditions and it appears that the Vikings soon started integrating with the Anglo Saxons. Scandinavian vocabulary penetrated nearly every area of the English language, but most words of Scandinavian origin in English are concrete everyday words. A few examples follow here:

o Nouns bank, birth, booth, egg, husband, law, leg, root, score, sister, skin, trust, wing

and window

o Adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, low, odd, sly, ugly, weak, and wrong

o Verbs to cast, clip, crawl, cut, die, drown, gasp, give, lift, nag, scare, sprint, take, and

want. And of course the present plural of ‘to be’, are.

o Pronouns both, same, they, them and their

The fact that even the Norse pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’ were accepted into English is remarkable; it is very unusual that grammatical items are borrowed. This suggests that there was extensive contact between the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings and a gradual integration of the two groups.

It can be difficult to recognise the Scandinavian words since the languages are so closely related; many words that look Scandinavian are actually native English words. Here are some hints on how to decide whether a word is a Scandinavian loan or not:

1. Germanic /sk/ became / ʃ / (sh) in all positions. This change occurred later in Scandinavia, and therefore words like shall, shoulder and shirt are native English words whereas skin, sky and skirt are Scandinavian words.

2. In early Old English the Germanic /g/ before front vowels became /j/, and /k/ became /ʃ /. In Old Norse /g/ and /k/ remained. Thus, child, choose and yield are all native words, while give, gift, kid and kindle are Scandinavian.

3. Date of first appearance. For instance, the Old English word for ‘take’ was niman, but in late Old English tacan is found. The Old Norse word was taka, which shows that it must have been borrowed from the Scandinavians. In the same way, the word for ‘law’ was originally æ but a later recording is lagu, which comes from Old Norse.

In fact, judging by the large number of Scandinavian words in the legal area, The Vikings had a considerable impact upon the law and order of the Anglo-Saxons. Some examples are fellow (‘partner’), law, and outlaw. Even more Scandinavian words related to the legal area existed in Old English but were later replaced. Not only did the Scandinavian peoples bring their laws and customs to the Danelaw, but their view on law and legal custom was to a great extent acknowledged by all of England.

Scholars infer that the Indo-European migration throughout Europe occurred as a process of branching and splitting. The Indo-European family could be broken into two large groups, the “Satem” languages and the “Centum” languages. This terminology is based on the words for “one hundred” in the various languages and indicates a very early consonant shift. These two large groups probably indicate an original divide of the Indo-Europeans in two large groups. The Satem group includes the Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, and Balto-Slavic families. The Centum group includes the Tocharian, Anatolian, Hellenic (Greek), Italic (Latin), Celtic, and Germanic languages families. The exact relationships between the language families is somewhat disputed, but because we are examining English in this course, we can quickly move to the Germanic branch of the Centum family, the branch and family to which English belongs.

Germanic

The Germanic family tree itself is divided into three branches, based on the location in Europe in which the speakers of those languages had settled and lived for long periods of time (so that their languages had time to split from their common Germanic ancestor into separate languages). Thus we have the East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic branches. Only one language survives from the East Germanic family, and that only in a very few texts. Gothic was the language spoken by the Goths, and it is preserved in a few translations made by the missionary Ulfilas in the fourth century (we have a few place names and proper names from Burgundian and Vandalic, but not enough material to reconstruct the languages).

Other Germanic speakers settled in the very north of Europe, in Denmark and Scandinavia. Their language was Old Norse, but this language also began to change and diversify, splitting into East Norse and West Norse. East Norse eventually evolved into Swedish and Danish, and West Norse became Norwegian and Icelandic. Old Icelandic is particularly important because so many of our most important medieval texts are preserved in this language. Old Norse is also significant because it would later influence the development of English. But English itself belongs to the West Germanic group, which is divided into two branches, High and Low. High German was spoken in the mountains and uplands of Germany and, after Martin Luther translated the Bible into this language, became the standard literary language of Germany. The Low German languages include Old Saxon (which has evolved into modern Low German or Plattdeutsch), Old Low Franconian (which became Dutch and Flemish), Old Frisian (which became Frisian, still spoken in a few places in the Netherlands), and Old English.