Scandinavian Element

In the Scandinavian attacks upon England we can distinguish 3 stages:

1. The period of early raids, beginning according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 787 and continuing with some intermissions until about 850. The raids of this period were simply plundering attacks.

2. The second stage is the work of large armies and is marked by wide-spread plundering in all parts of the country and by extensive settlements.

3. The third stage of the Scandinavian incursions covers the period of political adjustment and assimilation from 878 to 1042.

The Danish settlements were, in the early years of the occupation, little more than armed camps. But, gradually as conditions stabilized the Northmen began to transplant their families. The differences between the invaders and the resident population were not deep: for they had much in common in their Germanic heritage, social customs and languages. The Old Norse was spoken by the Danes. During the two centuries that elapsed between the advent of the Viking Great Army in 865 and the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066, the Danes intermarried with the English and sank quietly into the society around them.

The impact of the Viking onslaught on literature and learning was disastrous. As a consequence of three centuries of Viking aggressions a great part of England absorbed lasting traces of Scandinavian culture.

The Viking left their imprint on the island in many ways – in government, legal procedures, language and even arithmetic. They transmitted to the English with whom they dwelt, among other things their duodecimal system. They did their counting in twelves instead of tens, thus establishing to this day the marketing unit of a dozen, the measuring formula of 12 inches to a foot, the monetary equation of 12 pence to a shilling, and the legal entity of a jury of 12 good men and true.

The heritage of the Scandinavian conquest survives to­day in many words of the English language and most special­ly in place names. More than 1.400 villages and towns in England bear names of Scandinavian origin. In Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Cumberland, Northumberland, Westmorland, and parts of Norfolk up to 75 per cent of the place names are Danish or Norwegian.

The Scandinavians who had been in Britain for at least a couple of hundred years before the Normans were the speak­ers of a language that resembled that of the Angles and Saxons in so many ways that there was no question of the slightest violation of the structure or the sound system of English.

What was the Scandinavian influence on the syntactical structure of English? Though, as O. Jespersen puts it, there was no direct influence on English syntax, the Scandinavian presence may have accelerated the rapid disintegration of the elaborate inflectional apparatus of Old English. Although a large proportion of the basic lexicon was common to English and Scandinavian, the grammatical processes of the two lang­uages were in many respect divergent. In those areas where the population was bilingual words lost their affixes and other morphological formants and were used in their root forms.

In addition to that the Northmen also reduced ambiguities. In Old English a good deal of confusion prevailed with respect to the third-person pronoun. It was difficult phone­tically, to distinguish between he (he) and hi (they); between hire (her) and hira (their); and between him (him) and heom (them). To clear up matters, the Scandinavians clung to their own plural pronouns, þa (they), þara (their), and þoem (them), and those plurals were adopted by the English.

It is impossible to pinpoint with any precision the moment when Scandinavian words first began to be adopted by the English. Few, if any, can have been borrowed during the pre-settlement phases of the Danish invasion. It was probab­ly not until the latter part of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth centuries that the invaders and the natives were on terms permanent and intimate enough to allow the recipro­cal exchange of lexical items to take place.

The adoption of large quantities of Scandinavian terms by English - as reflected in eastern and northern Middle Eng­lish texts from the XII th century onwards - is an unambiguous indication of the extremely close relationship. Of the handful of Norse terms recorded in English texts prior to 1016 only the following have survived to our own time: husband, fellow, thrall, hustings, wrong, call, egg.

During the late eleventh and the first half of the XII th century about 30 Scandinavian words appear for the first time in the manuscripts, and of these, about half the total have survived to our own times: knife, root, rag, score, snare, skin, haven, die, hit, take, crooked, they, them, their.

In due course some of these borrowings elbowed their native equivalents out of the English vocabulary; die rep­lacing swelt, skin replacing fell, root replacing wyrt and take replacing nim.

From the middle of the XII century onwards, most of the texts contain substantial numbers of Scandinavian words: anger, awe, aye, bait, band, bloom, bull, fro, gain, guest, hail, ill, kid, loft, low, meek, raise, root, scare, skill, sleuth, thrive, till, wing, etc.

From the XIII th century onwards, dozens of fresh Scan­dinavian words begin to sprinkle the English texts often at the expense of their native counterparts. Thus the Scandinavian cast triumphed over the English werp, neck over halse, window over eyethirl, sister over swester, anger over ire and cut over snith. Sometimes, the native and Scandinavian forms have survived side by side in such doublets as craft/skill, sick/ill, rear/raise, whilst, at an earlier period, it was possible to witness two synonymous terms with one or the other passing out of use. This happened to the English ba, which, after a protracted struggle, was finally jostled out of the vocabulary by its Scandinavian equivalent both.

Occasionally, a native term, while retained intact, acquired a new meaning through the influence of its Scandinavian counterpart. Such words as bread, bloom, dream, dwell, gift, plough no longer mean the same as they did before. In Old English, they signified a fragment, a mass of metal, joy, to make a mistake, dowry and a measure of land respectively.

The transition from the English to the form of a word common to the two languages must often have caused confusion. The Scandinavian noun egg was used side by side with the native ey – some speakers favouring one form, some the other.

In the XVI th century batten, scrag, wad, slag, skit, snag, scuffle, simper, snug were admitted to literary English, where they were joined in the XVII century by oaf, keg, squall, skewer, smut, in the XVIII th by cosy and muggy and in the XIX th by vole, nag, ski. bawl, clip, slouch, bungle, gawk, sud, niggle, mawkish, dowdy, gawmless, wizen, scawny; they are all comparative newcomers to the standard vocabulary – although they have been used for generations in the North. Scandinavian, words fit so snugly and unobtrusively into our everyday language that it is difficult to think of them as borrowings. As Otto Jespersen remarks, “An Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinavian words, they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare”.

Some 400 words whose origins are Scandinavian are still in daily use in standard literary English making up a mere fraction of the 20000 – 30000 that comprise the vocabulary of the educated English speaker. It must be realised that most of these Scandinavian terms are part of the very bedrock of our lexicon among the most frequently occurring words in colloquial English. If we add to these the hundreds of others that continue to flourish in the rural dialects, we quickly arrive at a total far in excess of 2000 items, sufficient to allow us, if we so desired, to carry on an elementary conversation using almost entirely Scandinavian forms. Among the most recent of the Scandinavian loans in English are those terms that refer to specifically northern concepts, such as Norse antiquity and mythology (saga, troll, skald, berserk, valkyrie, valhalla), natural and topographical features (fiord, fjell, skerry, iceberg, maelstrom, geyser); and fauna (lemming, narwhal, elk). Norwegian skiing terms, such as slalom, telemark, Christiania have also found a place in the English vocabulary.

A minority of the Scandinavian loanwords in English were introduced into Britain through Norman French: flounder (the fish), faggot, frown, equip, blemish, target, tryst, scotch, jolly, elope, brawl, waive are a few that survive from the large number brought across by the followers of William the Conqueror.

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