This book, the outcome of a Gersum Project conference in Cambridge in 2018, is a densely researched, elegantly written and excellently organised contribution to the study of Medieval Scandinavians in the British Isles. The range of disciplines includes history, runology, comparative Germanic grammar, Skaldic poetry, placename studies, the vocabulary of Middle English alliterative poems, and the history and practice of lexicography with words from Old to Modern English, Norse and Irish. Structured on the basis of chronology into two parts, the history of encounters (A: “Meeting, Talking, Writing”) and the semantic traces of these (B: “Finding Viking Words”), the book equips its chapters with individualised bibliographies, 11 figures and 8 maps, and a plain but extensive index. In all chapters the scholarship is carried out at the highest level.
Lesley Abrams begins Part A with “Two Baptisms: Some Funerals, and Other Contexts of Interaction: Vikings and the Church in England in the Late Ninth Century,” in which she considers two cases of assimilation: one in which King Alfred had the Danish Guthrum baptised in Wessex in around 878, and the other in which Abbot Eadred of Carlisle is said to have ritually enthroned (the likely already Christian) Guthfrith as king of Northumbria. Abrams’s choice of these moments is highly effective. Although it may be an ecumenical stretch to argue that Alfred got his Scyldwa genealogy from the Danes, Abrams discusses burials of heathen Scandinavian warriors as an ecclesiastical process, not only across England but also, for comparison, in Normandy, with a conclusion which emphasises many local differences within the name of “conversion,” as well as changes: surprisingly, in around 895 and a century before their damnatio memoriae by Abbo and Ælfric, the Danes ruling East Anglia legitimised themselves with coins commemorating St Edmund, the king they had murdered twenty-five years before. Following up with Anglo-Norse epigraphy, in “Scandinavian Runes in England: Dating, Distribution, and Contexts,” Judith Jesch gives an update on The Scandinavian Runic Inscriptions of Britain by Michael Barnes and R. I. Page (2006), adding five inscriptions to their catalogue of fifteen and establishing eleventh- and twelfth-century dates for most of them, dating only two to the tenth century (E 15 Penrith, E 19 Sockburn Hall). Although the discussion is both meticulous and subtle, it is a pity, especially in the case of E 18 Saltfleetby, which records “Óðinn and Heimdallr and Þjálfa” helping a certain “Úlfljót,” that the appendix gives inscriptions in normalised text plus translation without the diplomatic transliterations from younger futhark that would make the contemporary authenticity visible. “Þorfastr made a good comb,” the self-advert in E 4 Lincoln I, has a more faithful transcription in the chapter that follows, George Walkden’s “Scandinavians and Verb-second in Northumbrian Old English.” In this chapter, concluding that V2 was a feature of all Germanic dialects from the earliest times, Walkden refutes the case that the Old Scandinavian “strict verb-second” (as in kamb: koþan: kiari: þorfastr, 115) may have been responsible for V2 in what remains of Old Northumbrian (sketchy as that evidence is) and for the relatively higher numbers of V2 in later medieval texts from the East Midlands and Northern England, relative to more southerly dialects in which the pronoun-verb sequence does not invert after a non-subject constituent (“information-structural verb-second/-third,” as in MnE After his prayer he lifted the child up). What the discussions of Jesch and Walkden both reveal is a great complexity in English-Norse linguistic relations in eastern and northern England, in which the “each in his own language” style of tenth-century communication gave way to the political prestige of Danish in the reigns of Cnut and his sons in 1016-42; thereafter to a “shift” in which resident speakers of Old Norse, knowing their language to be on the way out, deliberately acquired English, refitting this variously to their native syntax and vocabulary. For those Norse speakers who borrowed English words in their homelands in Norway and Iceland, the most datable evidence survives in the cryptic idiolect of Skalds, or eulogists. Nikolas Gunn, in “Ransacking the Wordhord: The Stylistic Use of Old English Lexical Borrowings in Viking Age Skaldic Poetry,” contributes to the latest branch of Skaldic studies in which the subject is non-native influences on Skalds, in this case four Norse terms apparently borrowed from English: firstly, the nouns for “leader” harri and hertogi (OE hearra, heretoga), albeit Low German cannot be far behind; secondly;sál(a) (“soul,” OE sāwol) and guðfaðir (“godfather,” OE godfæder). In common with Russell G. Poole in another collection, [1] Gunn not only takes his cue from Dietrich Hofmann’s Nordische-Englische Lehnbeziehungen der Wikingerzeit (1955), but considers the skalds’ stylistic effects in the context of their marking a change in a newly Christian society. With the Anglo-Saxon church once more in the foreground, Elizabeth Ashman Rowe reviews what is known of the history of northern missionary encounters. In “Anglo-Scandinavian Context from a Scandinavian Perspective: Ecclesiastical and Political Contacts in Norway and Iceland c. 1000-1050,” Rowe reveals Norse calques of Old English Christian phrases on the Kuli and Eik runestones in Norway, probably a witness to English missionaries in the reign of Óláfr Haraldsson (1015-28). She is most effective in drawing attention to the fact, revealed by Abrams earlier, that the otherwise proven missions to Scandinavia go unmentioned in English sources and nearly so in Icelandic ones, which appear to gloss over the activity of English and other bishops in Iceland in the first half of the eleventh century. Rowe’s conclusion, however, that these northern missions were politically rather than episcopally driven, and that there was “no ecclesiastic centre, no programme of training, no identifiable source of books, and no historiography” (178), might be qualified by Johan Gerritsen’s argument that Archbishop Wulfstan (d. 1023) had his “Handbook,” in Kongelige Bibliotek, Gamle kongelige Samlingen, MS 1595 (s. xiin), completed in Worcester in time to accompany Bishop Gerbrand to his new see in Roskilde in 1022. [2] As regards the placenames of northern Cumbria in the period 1040–70, to which “Gospatric’s writ” is dated in the final chapter of this half of the book, David N. Parsons draws some fascinating linguistic conclusions. In a penetrating analysis of this document, which attests to the rights of one Thorfynn mac Thore of Cardew, Parsons defines the near coastal region near Carlisle as a Norse-speaking area with Brythonic elements, in which Northumbrian English had long disappeared, and which saw further immigration from the Scandinavian Gall-Goidíl (“foreign Gaels”) of Ireland along with the reimposition of English, all before the post-Conquest dominance of Anglo-Norman.
Part B handles the later medieval legacies of Norse contacts in the British Isles. Moving us to the Ostman towns in “The Scandinavian Influence on Irish Vocabulary: Evidence from the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL),” Máire Ní Mhaonaigh explores the Royal Irish Academy dictionary database for as many as 460 Gaelic words of possible Norse origin, with results which mirror those of the Gersum Project in Middle English: although the picture is usually more complex the closer one looks, with the admixture of Latin or English in the case of Norse words in Gaelic, words such asfuindeóc (< ON vindauga, “window”) and útluighe (< ON útlagi, “outlaw”) attest in similar ways to Norse settlement and law. Jayne Carroll brings us back to English placenames with a balance between those of Norwegian and Danish origin, once again in the North-West, in Cumberland and Westmorland, and also in northern Lincolnshire. Pushing the boundaries of this subject in “Old Norse Watery Terms in English Place-Names: A Survey of Medieval Evidence from Two Regions of England,” Carroll finds evidence to suggest that Scandinavians made new names for watery features in the North-West, whereas in Lincolnshire, where Danish settlement had started significantly earlier, the given names reflect a Danish adaptation of English names, at least from the twelfth century onwards. Carroll’s broader finding is that forms of Norse predominated in Cumbria into the twelfth century, whereas in northern Lincolnshire Danish and English were neighbours (spoken by interacting speakers whose descendants developed the hybrid language of Ormulum, likewise from the twelfth century). Somewhat linguistically related to the latter are the four Cheshire poems of the Gawain poet, as well as St Erkenwald and The Wars of Alexander, all from the North-West Midlands in the fourteenth century. Discussing the language of these, Brittany Schorn, in “Gersum: Lexis of Old Norse Origin in the Poetry of the Middle English Alliterative Revival,” demonstrates the value of the Gersum Project database in which more than 950 words of variously secure Norse origin can be found. She leads us through the A-D summary categories of definitive loan, which will become standard; and moves us away from quantifying into qualifying Norse-derived words by their literary contexts. While reaffirming St Erkenwald’s Scandinavian-tinted affinity with Sir Gawain and the other three poems of BL, MS Cotton Nero A.X, Schorn shows that the Norse elements in The Wars of Alexander, though less densely distributed, and despite the text’s assimilation into the dialects of the scribes in both extant manuscripts, represent “the full range of grammatical categories in broadly similar proportions” (326). How and why Norse-derived words are used is the subject of “The Lexico-Semantic Distribution of Norse-Derived Terms in Late Middle English Alliterative Poems: Analysing the Gersum Database,” in which Sara M. Pons-Sanz defines Gersum’s 424 words of secure Norse origin through the Middle English Dictionary to determine their use relative to native and French words within the categories of the Historical Thesaurus of English. She then bases a case study on Mental Capacity (02.01) on St Erkenwald and the four Gawain-manuscript poems, an unlikely category from which, although native and borrowed terms for “cognition” predominate in MnE at 52.8% and 47.2% respectively, with Norse at no more than 1.9%, such ME words of Norse origin as skil, sleight, spak and weiknen “were also able to carve out spaces for themselves” (358) both in well-populated and developing spheres of meaning. A literary illustration of Norse-derived usage follows which takes us back to Carroll’s and Parsons’s study of placenames in the North-West. In “Topographical Vocabulary in The Wars of Alexander,” Thorlac Turville-Petre reveals the variety and descriptive power (in contrast to the prosaic Latin source) of the requisite Lancastrian Norse landscape features, of which three (clynt “cliff,”grofe “cave,” nabb “rock”) occur in no other poem, noting also that the 90 given topographical terms include 18 of likely Norse origin as opposed to 21 French, the rest being English (or Celtic). Philip Durkin, in “Norse Borrowings in the OED: A Fresh Examination,” goes further forwards in time. Demonstrating the complexity of answering such a simple question as “How many English words are from Norse?”, Durkin takes note of the ambiguities and then builds a picture of dated attestations in English and Scots which climbs to its peak in the fourteenth century and thereafter tumbles, but which also includes Norse-derived words mysteriously first recorded in the seventeenth century or even later: one of these, MnEsprint, cognate with Old Icelandic spretta, turns up late for the race in the 1840s. Finally, we turn to the foundations of the Anglo-Scandinavian disciplines that have led to this book. Matthew Townend, in “The Vikings and Victorians and Dialect,” reveals the pioneering work of amateur dialectologists in the northern English counties from Lincolnshire west through Yorkshire to Lancashire, Lakeland, and Cumbria: the Danish archaeologist Jens J. A. Worsaae, whose 1851 work An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland, translated into English in 1852, stimulated such research into still spoken Scandinavian words as led to Rev. J. C. Atkinson’s Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect (1868), Rev. George Sidney Streatfeild’s Lincolnshire and the Danes (1884) and Rev. Thomas Ellwood’s Lakeland and Iceland (1895). “It this philology,” says Townend, “which led the way, and in turn cast light on archaeology, not the other way round” (418). Paying homage to Andrew Wawn’s The Vikings and the Victorians (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), Townend’s chapter makes elegantly clear what debt was owed to this early dialectology by the university-based discipline that replaced it, with studies, particularly Erik Björkman’s Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English (1900–1902), that have resulted in the Gersum Project of today. In all, the editors and contributors have created a long-lasting contribution to the subject with a scholarship of which they may be proud.
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Notes:
1. “An Icelander in Cnut’s Court: The Case of Sigvatr Þórðarson,” in Anglo-Danish Empire, ed. Richard North, Erin Goeres, and Alison Finlay (Berlin and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter, 2022), 257-78.
2. Johan Gerritsen, “The Copenhagen Wulfstan Manuscript: A Codicological Study,” English Studies 79.6 (1998), 501-11, at 501-2.