Vikings Are A Thing! The Scandinavian Influence on English (Out of Time Episode 1)

This is the first of what I'm calling the "Out of Time" episodes, an embedded series of Subcast shows that fill in gaps I may have missed along the way.  Today, we fly our Out-of-Time-Machine all the way back to the 8th-century to see how the Danish invasions left an indelible mark upon English language and literature.  Pack your battle-axe!

Transcript

Sael! Gotham dagun aen taka vith!  That was my terrible pronunciation of an Old Norse greeting from the late first millennium.  It means, I hope I’ve got this right, Hello!  Good day and welcome!  

Wait! you say.  Have I tuned into the wrong podcast?  Why is he talking about Old Norse?  No, you’re right where you ought to be, friend listener – here in the cozy embrace of the Classic English Literature Subcast, and I’ve slaughtered some Old Norse here because this is the first in what will no doubt be a chronic if intermittent series of what I shall call the Out of Time episodes.  You may remember that I recently did a bonus episode on the differences between the three texts of Hamlet, even though the Hamlet episode was ages ago now, and I did that to fulfill a listener’s request.  But that gave me an idea.  You see, it’s inevitable that, while doing a historical survey of English literature, you’re bound to miss out things you should’ve included.  But by the time you realize that you forgot to talk about – oh, let’s just pick something completely at random: let’s say, for instance, the variations in the published Hamlets or that I failed to discuss the Scandinavian influence on Old English during our early medieval episodes.  But I realized my glaring oversight only too late as our historical timeframe marches relentlessly on.  What to do?  Just ignore it and leave a gap in my listener’s knowledge as gaping and wide as an ax wound?  No, certainly not.  Why not just admit to the mistake, correct it, then move on?  That seems the prudent course.  So, Out of Time episodes will pop up from time to time, as it were, when I notice that I’ve missed out something important or interesting from an earlier literary period.  I’ve already thought of a couple other ideas for Out of Time episodes that will make their way to your feeds in the fullness of . . . time.  Today, surely the penny’s dropped, I want to fill in some missing pieces of the development of English in the 9th and 10th centuries, especially as regards the Danish invasions and Norse raiders.   So, let’s jump into the wayback machine, leave Stuart England behind for the nonce, and set our dials for the year 793.  The place: Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumbria…

Umm…you know what?  Let’s not stop at Lindisfarne right now.  It seems an inconvenient time. (battle noises throughout; Tardis effect again)

What we have narrowly escaped, friend listener, is the inauguration of the Viking Age in England.  On June 8, 793, a group of Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery on Lindisfarne, raping, looting, and pillaging, killing monks and descrecrating relics.  The sudden brutality of the attack shocked Christian Europe and an architecture of fortification marked the continent for centuries.  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the event: 

Here terrible portents came about over the land of Northumbria, and miserably frightened the people: these were immense flashes of lightening, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine immediately followed these signs; and a little after that in the same year on 8 June the raiding of heathen men miserably devastated God's church in Lindisfarne island by looting and slaughter.

While this is the first recorded offensive by what would come to be called Vikings against England, the chronicle does note the Danes first significant appearance in 789: 

And in his days there came for the first time 3 ships; and then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king's town, because he did not know what they were; and they killed him. Those were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race.

Over the next two centuries, raids by men from modern day Denmark, Sweden, and Norway would radically alter English culture and language.  By the early 9th century, isolated smash-and-grab raids like that at Lindisfarne gave way to more organized military incursions, culminating in the 865 invasion of the so-called Great Heathen Army, a confederation of Viking forces which sought to conquer East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and Wessex.  By the year 878, only Wessex under King Alfred the Great held out against the invaders.  In May of that year, Alfred finally defeated the Great Viking Army at Ethanbrun, now Edington, which resulted in the Treaty of Wedmore.  In that agreement, Alfred and the Viking king Guthrum established territorial boundaries along the Thames and Lea rivers.  These boundaries would eventually become a formal Danelaw – that is, areas in which English kings allowed Danes to exercise their own power and keep their own laws.  However, Alfred’s descendents began to push against this treaty and by the 10th century were launching incursions seeking to retake territory from the Danelaw.  Alfred’s grandson Athelstan overcame a coalition of Viking and Scottish warriors at Brunanburh in 937, redeeming his claim to be the Rex Anglorum, the King of all the English.  Yes, the first English king.  His victory is commemorated in a poem found in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle which begins

In this year, King Æthelstan, lord of earls,

ring-giver of warriors, and his brother as well,

Eadmund ætheling achieved everlasting glory

in battle, with the edges of swords

near Brunanburh. They cleaved the massed shields,

hewed the battle-wood, the relics of hammers,

of the heir of Eadweard, as it suited

their heritage, so that they often in battle

defended their lands, treasures, and homesteads

against every one of the hateful 

This is kind of the beginning of the end for Viking power in England.  Eric Bloodaxe, king of Norway and sometime king of Northumbria, not to mention featuring rather prominently in the semi-legendary sagas, dies in 954. The last  Viking victory in England worth mentioning occurs in 991, when Olaf Tryggvason defeats Aethelred the Unready’s English at the Battle of Maldon, commemorated in a poem of the same name.  The poem focuses on the heroism of the ill-fated English leader Byrhtnoth, but

the slaughter-wolves waded—caring not for the water—

the Viking army, westward across the Pante,

across the bright waters, carrying their board-shields,

sailing-men to the shore, bearing yellow linden.

There they stood ready against the ferocious one,

Byrhtnoth and his warriors. He ordered them

to form a shield-wall with their shields and for the army

to hold fast against their foes. Then was the fighting near,

glory in battle. The time was coming

that fated men must fall there. 

In the years following Maldon, however, the Vikings were reduced to mere harrying raids.  The last real gasp comes in 1066 when Harald Hardrada falls to the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson.  The Viking Age in England had ended.

Well, sort of.  Of course, we know that Godwinson himself was soon to be overthrown by William the Conqueror at Hastings.  William was, of course, the Duke of Normandy, a Danelaw in the north of France that had been established by the Viking ruler Rollo.  Billy the Bastard and his followers were all descended from good hardy Viking stock.

These two-plus centuries of battle, appeasement, settlement, and battle exerted a profound effect upon the language of England.  While the rise of Alfred’s Wessex had begun to make that kingdom’s dialect a de facto “standard English,” the introduction of Scandinavian culture complicated that process.

Old Norse seems to be the primary language of these Viking peoples.  And perhaps I should clarify here that the name “Viking,” while common and useful for us today, is really rather inaccurate and anachronistic, historically speaking.  Despite my casual usage of the phrase a moment ago, there is no such thing as “the Viking people.”  That term developed from the Old Norse word vikingr, which referred to a person who engaged in viking, a term that originally meant a "pirate raid." The verb form, víking, meant "to go on an expedition or raid, usually by sea."  However, the exact origin of the word of the original term vikingr is debated. Some scholars suggest it may be linked to the Old Norse word vík, meaning "bay" or "inlet," so that Vikings were "people of the bay," right?  Seafarers.  Others think the OE word “wic” meaning “camp,” as in a military or raiding encampment, might have played a role as Old English derived the term wicing to similarly describe raiders or pirates, particularly those from the Scandinavian regions.

So, viking was originally an activity, not a people.  But we now regularly refer to early medieval Scandinavian raiders as Vikings, and I will continue to do so here as well.

Oh, and they didn’t wear big, horny helmets, either.  What a stupid idea that would be: excellent way of getting your enemy’s sharp, pointy weapon tangled up very near your head region.

But whatever we call these people, they have left their footprints all over the English language.  The earliest borrowings into English obviously had to do with seafaring and battle.  Words like knife, slaughter, and berserk.  The original for the English word boatswain (a ship’s officer)is the Norse batswegen.  

As settlement progressed in the Danelaw, we can note Norse influences on English place-names.  Most common are those cities and towns whose names end in -by, a Norse suffix meaning “farm” or town.  So, we’ve Grimsby and Danby, and so on.  Also, the suffix -thorpe, meaning village to the Vikings, can be found in places named Mablethorpe or Scunthorpe.  Or the -thwaite ending, which means meadow, in places like Slaithwaite in Huddersfield.

We can also thank the Vikings for one of the most common name endings in English: the -son ending, which is our most common patronymic, that is, name from the father.  So the Norse gave us Johnsons and Stevensons and Robertsons.  

Perhaps the most profound impact of Old Norse on Old English is the former’s contribution of third-person plural pronouns.  Our modern they, their, and them come from Scandinavia and were rather easily incorporated into English because they solved a problem in that language.  Old English third-person plural was “hie”, which unfortunately sounded rather close to the third person singular feminine “heo”.  The Norse pronouns evaporated that potential confusion.  Although highly disputed, there may be a Norse influence in the development of that “heo” (which itself doesn’t sound too different from the masculine “he”) into the more distinctive “she.”  But highly disputed.

Additionally, the Norse gave English one of its most common verbs: the second and third person versions of the verb “to be”: that is, “are.”  We are, you are.  In other verb news, the suffix -s at the end of third-person singular present indicative verbs is a Viking innovation, so a brief sentence like “she runs” may ultimately be Norse in origin.  

And yeah, of course, how can we forget our Norse day of the week: Thursday, or Thor’s Day, the day of the god of thunder?

The Oxford English Dictionary, I think, officially lists like 30 words that begin with either sk- or sc- as English words borrowed in the Viking Age: think skirt or sky or scathe.  But if we expand our horizons to include dialectical words, now we’re pushing maybe 1200 contributions to the English vocabulary.  Incidentally, the Norse skirt and the English shirt originally referred to the same garment, Norse sk-words often being cognate with English sh-words (which is why so many brief theatrical episodes are terrible, because skits are shit.  That’s not true).  Later on, we decided that shirts are for tops, and skirts are for bottoms, but at the start, those words meant the same thing. 

And that’s my favorite Norse to English crossover: the word “thing”!  A “thing” in medieval Scandinavia meant a public assembly, like a council of elders or something, and came from proto-Germanic roots meaning “affair” or “matter” or even “lawsuit.”  Some scholars maintain that thing finds its ultimate origin in a word meaning “the appointed time.”  Anyway, it’s something about meetings to discuss weighty matters.  It starts to take on its modern meaning of a nonspecific inanimate object probably around the Middle English period, maybe the start of the 14th century, meaning, at first, “personal possessions”: you know, my things.  Why that transformation happened is a mystery as deep and profound as why clocks go clockwise.

So, there you have it, a brief episode on how the Viking age permanently altered the English language and, thereby, English literature.  From personal names to place names, to vast vocabulary contributions, to influential changes to grammar, Modern English would be an impossibility without those rapacious Northmen.  I hope the monks at Lindisfarne take some comfort from that.

OK, let’s climb back into our Out of Time machine (Tardis effect) and whisk ourselves back to Jacobean England. Thanks very much for listening to the Classic English Literature Subcast.  I hope you enjoyed it.  If you did, please consider posting a 5 star review of your listening platform.  If you liked it so much you’re thinking to yourself, “I’d like to buy that guy a beer,” well, you can!  Just click the support the show button to make a financial contribution and I shall toast your generosity to the  very echo.  Take it easy, folks.  Talk to you soon.