Hey!

Well, I think "liar" is a little harsh. That would mean that someone is
deliberately and knowingly trying to mislead you. More often, it seems to a
case being mistaken rather than lying.

I never lie, but I occasionally suffer from excremental overload, as do many of
these neo-pseudo amateur historians to whom you may be referring.

;=)>

Larry M.

llama_nom wrote:

> --- 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
>
>
>
> A Norse funny farm, overrun by smart people.
>
> Homepage: http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/
>
> To escape from this funny farm try rattling off an e-mail to:
>
> norse_course-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>