Old English: The Viking invasions and their consequences

1. Characterize the nature of Viking raids and Viking settlement in England.

Viking raids (787+)

• Reasons for the Vikings leaving their home:

- over-population

- too few natural resources

- primogeniture system

• Nature of the raids = similar like the Anglo-Saxons'

- pillaging and burning of the coast + returning home with gold, silver, slaves etc.

- Monasteries sacked and manuscripts destroyed in Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona (793-795)

Viking settlement (850+)

• Less raids, more settling - Danish Vikings in large parts of North and East England, Norwegian Vikings in Western Scotland + parts of Ireland => farms established => territorial conflict between inhabitants + newcomers, BUT no forced removal of Celts as the Anglo-Saxons have done

• West Saxon kings undertook defense against the Danes, ex. Æthelwulf (recorded as a descendant of Seth, the son of biblical Adam) in 854

• Æthelwulf’s son Alfred the Great of Wessex (initiator of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) stopped the advance of Danish Vikings at battle of Edington in 878

• Peace under Treaty of Wedmore:

1) Stable boundary set between kingdom of Wessex and Danelaw (Northumbria, East Mercia & East Anglia)

2) The defeated Danish king of East Anglia Guthrum became Christian (= step towards assimilation of Viking conquerors)

• Æthelstan (Alfred’s grandson) helped the West Saxons reconquer territories in Danelaw and then in whole England

• Settlements of Danes and Anglo-Saxons = relative proximity, similar ways of life, bilingualism

• Eventual renewed attacks by the Danes => establishment of Danish king over all England: Sweyn Forkbeard

- Æthelstan put into exile

- His son Cnut (= king of Denmark and Norway) ended Danish raids, though not Danish claims to the throne

- Official language at court: English, x Danish

Compare OE borrowings from Latin and ON.

• Latin borrowings = mainly religious (bishop, Saturday etc)

• Borrowings/loan words from ON

- War + maritime: ransaka “ransack”, dreng “warrior”

- Legal + administration: laga “law”, hūsting “tribunal”

- Common verbs: get, want, call

- Bodily features: leg, freckles, skin

- Farm & animal terms: bull, egg, axletree

- Life: birth, slaughter, die

- Relations: sister, husband

• BUT ex. ON taka “take” replaced OE niman, but “nim” = “nimble” (= stealing in PDE)

• Most loan words adopted in OE do not appear in writing until ME

- Reason: lack of a literary tradition in Danelaw

4. Summarize the main syntactic changes during this period.

• Mainly relative pronouns/particles
  • Ϸe (that/who) used in OE for all antecedents regardless of case and number
  • ON contributed to the use of relative particle as that came from Norse som
    • As in the man as came yesterday (more common in northern English dialects)
  • Zero relative appears
    • As in the man I [zero] saw yesterday
    • Was probably used even before the Viking invasions, but even though it is a rare construction it appears both in English and Danish, which is interesting
      • The languages also share “preposition stranding”
        • A construction where the preposition can be moved away from the relative
        • E.g. a construction in which the relative is fronted X a construction which the relative is fronted in
• Verb phrase
  • In OE complex verb forms (such as the perfect, the progressive, the will-future, auxiliary do) were not common, but they are in ME
    • It is debatable how much was their appearance in ME influenced by ON
    • It might also be caused the disappearance of the West Saxon written standard under the Normans
    • In either case it is also possible that it was influenced by the vernacular during the absence of a unified language form (whether in Danelaw or Norman England)

References