It is, unfortunately, too seldom that a book arrives on one's desk that is highly enjoyable to read while retaining high standards of scholarship. From the Viking Word-Hoard is such a book. Diarmaid Ó Muirithe is a former Senior Lecturer in Irish Language at University College Dublin and has published widely on linguistic matters, with particular emphasis on the influences of now-defunct languages on the vocabulary and idiom of modern English.
The Vikings--the collective term generally applied to early- medieval Scandinavian raiders and merchants--first descended on Britain and Ireland in the late eighth century. They also travelled, raided, traded and, in some instances, made new homes further afield, reaching Greenland, Iceland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Russia, and Constantinople. The language spoken by these migrants is known as Old Norse. From the Viking Word- Hoard is concerned with the impact of this language on the indigenous languages of Britain and Ireland.
The first phase of Viking activity comprised plundering raids on the coasts of Britain and Ireland and on isolated monasteries situated on off-shore islands. In general, Norwegian Vikings focused their attention on Scotland, Ireland, and the western seaboard of England. The Danes directed their energies, in the main, towards England. By the middle decades of the ninth century, Viking attacks had increased in intensity and some groups had begun to form settlements. The first Norse settlement at Dublin was established in 841. Shortly thereafter, further Irish settlements were established, which were to grow into the Norse cities of Limerick, Waterford, and Cork, together with a number of smaller towns. By the later years of the ninth century, the Danes had gained control of large areas of the north, centre and east of England where they imposed their laws and customs. This area was called in Old Norse the Dena-lagu and is known to us today as the Danelaw.
The core of Ó Muirithe’s book is a dictionary of some two thousand words derived from Old Norse and belonging to the languages of Britain and Ireland. As the author acknowledges, his dictionary is "but a sampling from the Norse word-hoard" and he indicates that he would have wished to address, in greater detail, place-names and personal names, but was precluded from so doing by publishing constraints. For each word, many of which would be unfamiliar to readers, we are told in which language(s) or dialect(s) it is found; where possible we are given literary evidence, or the recorded local substantiation, for its use; where, as is often the case, a particular word of Norse origin appears in more than one language or dialect of Britain and Ireland, appropriate cross- referencing is furnished. There is a valuable Introduction to the book which sketches the history of the Viking migrations and settlements along with the process of linguistic borrowing, and includes specific sections on England, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland.
Ó Muirithe’s Introduction outlines the two broad periods of word- borrowing from Old Norse into English. The first phase commenced around the end of the late eighth century and lasted for about two hundred years. During this period, words such as "hustings," "law," "wrong," "husband," and "outlaw" entered the English language. The second period of borrowing commenced when the Danish king, Cnut, assumed the throne of England in 1016, and lasted until about 1150. The borrowings from this period include such words as "knife," "skin," "leg," "same," "awkward," "birth," "ransack," "rotten," and "muck." The majority of the loans were not adopted until the early twelfth century. English personal pronouns were changed forever under Norse influence: "they," "them," and "their" replaced the English forms. In total, some one thousand words were assimilated into English from Old Norse; many of these words have long-since fallen into disuse. The influence of Old Norse on the English language extended beyond vocabulary to the area of grammar- -for example, the loss of inflexional endings in English. The spread of the third person singular "-s" ending in the present tense of verbs is another aspect of the development of English which can be traced to the influence of Old Norse.
In order to test the long-term impact of the Danes in England, Ó Muirithe took the unusual step of consulting the telephone directories for the area of England that once formed the Danelaw, and discovered sixteen surnames, in addition to variant spellings of these names, which can be traced back to Danish personal-names; these include: "Allgood," "Brothers," "Fathers," "Mothers," "Knott," and "Tooke." We are reminded, too, of the major impact that the Vikings had on English place-names, with over six hundred found in the Danelaw bearing the Old Norse suffix "-by" (farm, village), e.g. Derby, Grimsby, Rugby; many other place-names bear the suffixes "-thorp" (village), "-thwaite" (clearing), and "-toft" (homestead).
Not surprisingly, given the proximity of Scotland to Scandinavia, there is considerable evidence of Norse influence on the languages spoken in Scotland and Ó Muirithe deals with this subject in reasonable detail in his Introduction. The impact on areas where the Scots-Gaelic language (brought to Scotland by Irish settlers around 500 AD) was dominant was considerable and is evidenced by the fact that around 80 per cent of the place-names of the Isle of Lewis are of Norse origin. This linguistic dominance may have been secured at the expense of the temporary removal of the Gaelic- speaking inhabitants from Lewis. Most Scots-Gaelic shipping terms are of Norse origin. Scots-Gaelic personal names such as "MacKittrick," "MacIver," "MacCure," and "MacBurney" also bear witness to the impact of Old Norse. The influence of the Vikings persisted longest in Orkney and Shetland. As late as 1795, a fifty-year old Orkney man recalled that, when he was young, old men spoke mostly Norse. The dialect spoken by these Orkneymen and their counterparts in Shetland was called Norn. The intensive penetration of the Vikings into Scotland and its islands is reflected in Ó Muirithe's lexicon where many of the loanwords are noted as being preserved in Orcadian, Shetlandic, Scots, and Scots-Gaelic.
We have evidence for considerable inter-marriage between Norse and native Irish and even the adoption of Irish patronymics by a number of Norse leaders. Yet, the impact of the Norse language on the Irish (Gaelic) language is quite modest. Ó Muirithe supports the notion, advanced by Magne Oftedal, that this limited influence is due to the fact that the Norse settlers in Ireland founded coastal towns and were oriented mainly towards overseas commerce. The Scandanavian settlers in the Hebrides, the Scottish mainland and, indeed, many parts of England, especially the Danelaw, were farmers who shared the same occupation as their underlings, giving rise to a greater degree of social interaction and linguistic transfer. A further influencing factor noted by Ó Muirithe is the broad linguistic similarity between the languages of the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes which meant that there was a reasonable degree of mutual comprehension. No such linguistic affinity existed between Gaelic- speaking Irish and the Norsemen.
Of the comparatively small number of Norse words that found their way into the Irish language, the earliest is erell, iarla from jarl. Irish adopted a number of words relating to shipping from the Norsemen which still survive in the language including: ancaire (anchor), bád(boat), scód (sail), stiúir (rudder) and tochta (boat- seat). In addition, Irish borrowed a number of words associated with commerce from Old Norse, such as margadh (market), pingin (penny) and scilling (shilling). This is scarcely surprising given that, prior to the establishment of Norse colonies, the Irish economy was based on barter and the only quasi- urban settlements known to the Irish were the great monasteries with their large, lay populations.
Seemingly, the limited linguistic transfer between the Norse and Irish was not all one-way and Ó Muirithe records a number of Irish words which were assimilated into the Norse language; these include: bachall (staff, crozier) > bagall, capall (horse) > kapall, lám (hand) > lámr, tarb (bull) > tarfr and teine (fire) > dini. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, one Norse word for a ship lung is taken from the Irish long. Just as the number of Norse words assimilated into the Irish language is quite limited so, too, is the number of Irish place- names displaying Norse roots and for the same reasons as outlined above in respect of linguistic assimilation generally. A small number of Irish place-names of indisputably Norse origin survive and are all found along the coast: Wexford, Saltee Islands (off the Wexford coast), Waterford, Lambay Island (off the Dublin coast), Strangford (county Down), and Smerwick (Dingle Peninsula in county Kerry) are the most notable. Dublin, the most famous Viking settlement in Ireland, derives its name from Norse Dyflin, but that formation is, in turn, a borrowing from Old Irish Dub linn ("Black pool," referring to the tidal pool at the centre of the old Norse city, where Dublin Castle now stands).
From the Viking Word-Hoard ought to be on the shelves of anyone interested in the development of language and/or the history of the Viking migrations and the impact that they had on the languages of Britain and Ireland. This reviewer would have no hesitation in recommending this volume for inclusion on the reading list of any undergraduate course dealing with the cultural impact of the Vikings on Britain and Ireland.