The History of English: Suddenly, Vikings!

Thank you for reading the third instalment of my 'History of English' series. If you haven't read my first two entries yet, it would be a good idea to read them first to avoid complete and utter bewilderment.

As you will recall, the Anglo-Saxons had much of England and parts of Scotland under control by the eighth century AD. Everything changed in 787 though, when the Vikings began their raids on Britain.

The Vikings (also called Norsemen or Danes) were a seafaring people who raided, traded, explored and settled in parts of Europe, also extending into Asia and the North Atlantic islands. They even established colonies in America for a short time. The Vikings were akin to the Anglo-Saxons; if you recall, they spoke a North Germanic language which was fairly close to Old English.

Contrary to their popular image as uncultured, wild brutes, they were highly skilled seafarers and craftsmen. They didn't wear horned helmets, and they didn't use skulls as drinking vessels.

The Vikings originated from Scandinavia, encompassing what is now Denmark and parts of Sweden and Norway. The Anglo-Saxons called the Vikings Dena, or 'Danes.' The Viking raids on England were intense and prolonged, lasting for some 200 years. Within a few years of their first raids, the Danes controlled most of eastern England. But by the Treaty of Wedmore in 886, the Danes agreed to only settle in the north-east third of the country. The area became subject to Danish law, and became known as the Danelaw (Crystal, 2003.)

 

'No, those weren't horns on our helmets. They were croissants'

If you think the Anglo-Saxons got off relatively lightly, you'd be wrong. In 991, a further wave of Viking invasions brought a series of victories for the Danish army, and resulted in the English king, Æthelred, being forced into exile. England stayed under Danish rule intermittently until 1042.

By this time, there was a large and generally peaceful Scandinavian population living in England. They assimilated into the culture of the Anglo-Saxons, and there was almost certainly a great deal of intermarrying between the Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons.

Due to the intense and prolonged contact between the Anglo-Saxons and their Norse cousins, the Vikings left a considerable imprint on the English language. It is important to remember that the Vikings spoke a language known as Old Norse, which was fairly similar to Old English. In fact, it is very likely that the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings would have been able to communicate, at least to some extent, by speaking their own languages to each other.

The effect of Old Norse on Old English

Scandinavian place names abound in England, and even in some parts of Wales and Scotland. There are over 1,500 place names in England, especially in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, that are of Norse origin. Over 600 of these end in -by, the Scandinavian word for 'farm' or 'town' - Grimsby, Derby, Naseby and Tenby for example. Many others end in -thorp(e) (village), as in Scunthorpe and Althorp; -thwaite (clearing), as in Braithwaite and -toft (homestead), as in Lowestoft (Crystal, 2003.)

 

'So this is Lowestoft? I want to go back to Denmark.'

As well as the influence on place names, Old Norse had an enormous effect on the English language itself. Nearly 1,000 Norse words became part of the English language, many of which are still in use today. These include very basic words such as: take, anger, awkward, birth, both, bull, cake, die, dirt, egg, flat, get, happy, ill, law, knife, root, seem, skill, skirt, sky, skin, tight, want, weak and window.

Some of these words completely replaced the corresponding Anglo-Saxon word. For example, the Norse verb tacan, which becomes take in Modern English, ousted the native Old English equivalent word niman (compare German nehmen, with the same meaning.)

In some cases, the Anglo-Saxon and the Norse word coexisted alongside each other, with one of them taking on a slightly different meaning. 

The native Old English word scyrte has become shirt in Modern English; remember that <sc> in Old English was pronounced as <sh>. A related Norse word, skyrta, was borrowed from Old Norse. As you might guess, it has developed into skirt. But both of these words come from the same Germanic root. The original meaning was probably 'a short piece of clothing.'

Some of the borrowed words from Old Norse were originally only used north of the Danelaw. As you'd expect, they were confined to the North of England, and weren't fully adopted in the South until several centuries later. Egg was a Norse word that co-existed alongside Middle English ey (a native Anglo-Saxon word from Old English æg) until the 1500s.

In the 15^th century, Caxton writes of a Northern merchant in a public house on the Thames who asked for eggs:

And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe [French]. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not.

She did, however, recognize another customer's request for eyren, which was the native English word for eggs (British Library, 2013.)

Remarkably, Old Norse even influenced the verb to be, and our pronoun system. These are very basic elements of a language which are rarely borrowed. The third person plural are was reinforced by a similar verb form in Old Norse, replacing Old English sindon. 

The third person plural pronouns they, them and their are all Norse in origin. They gradually ousted the native English pronouns hīe, him and hiera. There was a long period of time when both the Norse and the Anglo-Saxon pronouns coexisted (Geoffrey Chaucer used both forms interchangeably) but the Norse pronouns had completely won out by the 16^th century.

Also, the third person singular -s verb ending was originally a Northern form, and could be of Norse origin. It replaced the older -th ending which came directly from Old English; Think of some archaic verb endings like doth and hath, which have been ousted by does and has.

The fact that a simple sentence such as they are both ill is composed entirely of Norse-derived words shows how much Old Norse influenced English.¹

Loss of inflections

The influence of Old Norse might have been partly responsible for the loss of inflections in English, too. 

In Old English, verbs took different endings depending on who is doing the action (i.e. the person), how many people are doing it (number), and the timeframe in which it happened (tense and aspect). 

Nouns also took different endings depending on whether they were the subject or object of the clause, or if they were the possessor or the recipient of an action. These noun endings are known as cases; Old English had four cases and the remnants of a fifth. 

The cases in Old English were called the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative with the remnants of an instrumental case. Anyone who's studied German or Latin will have heard of the first four of these cases. As in German and Latin, adjectives and articles had to agree with their noun in case and number (singular or plural).

Trust me, it only gets worse from here.

To illustrate how the noun cases were used in Old English, here are five sentences containing the phrase sē cyning (the king) in various case and number combinations:

sē cyning seah mē - the king saw me 

[Subject of the verb - nominative singular]

ic seah þone cyning - I saw the king 
[Object of the verb - accusative singular]

þā cyningas sāwon mē - the kings saw me 

[Subject of the verb - nominative plural]

þæs cyninges hūs - the king's house 

[Possessive - genitive singular]

ic geaf mearh þǣm cyninge - I gave a horse to the king  

[Recipient - dative singular]

As you can see, Old English had a complicated system of inflections that seems totally alien to us now. All we have left on present-day English nouns is the -'s possessive suffix and the -s plural marker.

Because some Old English nouns and adjectives had different inflections for the subject and the object of a sentence, then the word order was much freer. It was common for a verb to be placed at the beginning of a sentence, or right at the end.

Because Old Norse and Old English inflections didn't always match, it is probable that the mixing of the two languages paved the way for the loss of inflections in English. If inflections posed a significant barrier between communication, then it makes sense that the inflections would gradually erode.

But we can't entirely blame Old Norse on the loss of inflections in English. Like most Germanic languages, words in Old English tended to be stressed on the first syllable. This is bad news for Old English inflections, which affected the last syllable. Over time, unstressed vowels either disappeared or merged with each other, so many distinct endings were lost (Baugh, 1991.)

By about 1200, English was beginning to look a bit less like the richly-inflected Old English and a bit more like Modern English. It was developing into Middle English.

Before I talk about Middle English, another important event happened in 1066. If you can guess what's going to happen next, très bien. Until then, you will have to wait until my next invasion...I mean, instalment.

Footnotes:

1 -  The influence of Norse on Old English is substantial, but it should not be overestimated. It is possible to write a sentence comprised only of native Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. One example would be: I am a man with ten wives, and I drink strong beer every day.

Note that the above sentence is not in any way true.

References:

Baugh, A. & T. Cable (1991) A History of the English Language, Routledge: London

British Library (2013) Caxton's 'egges' story. http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126611.html [Accessed 16/10/13]

Crystal, D. (2003) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.