Re: The Norse in England

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "akoddsson" <konrad_oddsson@...>
wrote:

>
>
> I had heard about this before, but was unaware what, if any,
> scholarship had gone into this queston. But it doesn't surprise me
> in the slightest. We know almost nothing about our past, and anyone
> who says otherwise is a liar ;-)

Quite so!

> I imagine that the English and
> Norse mingled for generations out there in Byzantium, fighting and
> drinking and dying side by side. Not that we would know much about
> that.

Or about their Gothic comrades...

> One thing we do know is that Haraldr harðráði was one

of them,

> and one wonders to what extent internal troubles, political or
> other, in England might have lead some of the English guardsmen to
> suggest he try his odds on the English throne, even before 1066,
> when he did? I'll bet that Haraldr spoke English, even if brokenly.
> Then whole Norse settlement of England seems to show that learning
> English was a given for Norse settlers, most of whom seem to have
> been of the merchant, farming or fishing classes. Whatever may have
> been the case, Haraldr was a warrior and lived by a warrior's code.
> Popular or unpopular, I think it highly unlikely that the English
> tongue would have changed much, if at all, had he been taken as
> king. For the first, the Norse were a minority, most of whom already
> spoke English as it was. For the second, the Norse were of the same
> stock, and that avoided ethnic tensions. For the third, Norse and
> English were very similar at that time, as opposed to the French of
> William, which became the administrative and legal language at the
> cost of English. For the fourth, Haraldr loved poetry, and even was
> a poet himself, which probably means that would have had open ears
> for traditional verse, including English of course, and that could
> mean that a lot of king ¯lfred's noble work in promoting English as
> a literary language, most of which is lost to the damnation of all
> Germanic scholarship and Anglophiles, like myself, might have
> survived to the present day, with English, in a more conservative
> form, as the only administrative, legal, ecclesiastical, literary
> and common tongue of the land down to modern times. Now, alternative
> histry is not my bag, but I can't help speculating on something so
> big as a failed Norman conquest ;-)

He wouldn't have been the first Norse king of England to cultivate
poetry (see Matthew Townend (2001): "Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur:
skaldic praise-poetry at the court of Cnut", Anglo-Saxon England 30:
145-179). As it was, English history has (in retrospect) these two
great breaks, the Norman conquest and the reformation where cultural
changes and liguistic changes more or less coincided to seal off what
came before, and sadly made it fashionable for many to neglect or
scorn the older tradition.

I wonder how long Norse (in the broad sense including Old Danish) was
spoken in England. I'm sure there must have been some scholarly
attempt to answer that question from the scant evidence... There was
certainly a wealth of Norse words in Early Middle English in dialects
spoken in the old Danelaw areas, even more than have made it into
standard Modern English. We even had our own amateur phonetician,
with the good Norse name of Orm, who devised his own (nearly) phonetic
spelling system not so long after the First Grammarian was writing his
treatise in Iceland.

LN