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

2.Characterize the Scandinavian element of English lexicon on phonological level.

Although the words in OE and ON were identical in many cases, the sound changes have led to distinctions:

a. Proto-Germanic /sk/ remained /sk/ in Norse, but became /ʃ/ in OE. Numerous words in ModE with the consonant cluster /sk/ come ultimately from ON: skirt (vs. native shirt), shrub (vs. scrub), scatter (vs. shatter), but also skin, sky, skill;

b. /g/ for /j/ as in give (OE giefan with in initial /j/) or egg (OE ey);

c. /k/ for OE /tʃ/ as in kid (OE cild) or kirk (OE cirice);

d. Proto-Germanic /ai/ became /ei/ in Norse, but /o:/ in OE in the ModE pairs nay-no, hale-whole, raid-road);

e. Proto-Germanic /au/ remained ON /au/ but became OE /e:a/ as in lauss (> ModE loose) vs. lēas (> ModE –less, e.g. hopeless).

Less frequent pronunciation differences: loss of initial w- (cf. Ulf vs. Wulf) or the so called metathesis (ON brenna vs. OE biernan “burn”).

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