Suspect etymologies
I've developed a suspicion, and it is now nothing grander than a suspicion, that contemporary English etymologies for reasons I might guess at are prejudiced in claiming wherever they can get away with it that English derives from Old Norse, making out that a very considerable part of English is imported from those Scandinavian raiders and invaders of the Viking Age, which in England amounts to the century-and-a-half from the first Viking raid in 793 to the more-or-less final English victory in 954.
"Wassail" makes a case-in-point: the convention is that the Modern English "wassail" from the Old English "waes hael" derives ultimately from the Old Norse "ves heill". I esteem the American Heritage Dictionary and I consult it daily, despite that its etymology for "wassail" accepts the convention that the English abandoned their native salutations in preference to aping some boozy invocation of the monstrous Vikings who terrorized them. But that same etymology stipulates a native English pedigree for "wassail" in three iterations, recorded in even Beowulf and the West Saxon Gospels. American Heritage cites the native English salutation "wes thu hal", which in its most direct rendering recognizable to us would read "be thou healthy", and that combines the "wes" and "hal", and in the same order as "waes hael", with the marginal variation of inserting between them the pronoun "thou" for "you".
So to suppose that the merry English "wassail" derives not from the terrorizers of the English but from a native English pedigree would not contradict the documentary record, and that documentary record of English before 800 can be uneven, so that we may assume where there's smoke, there's fire: that if "wes thu hal" appears in written English, then "wes hal" absent the "thu" may've been spoken but not recorded in those manuscripts which survive to us.
But more than that, these etymologies ought to apply common sense: the English were terrorized, impoverished, brutalized, enslaved, raped, and slaughtered by the Vikings, until they drove the monsters out and kept them out by force, so this etymology that the English abandoned their native salutations for the Old Norse of the Viking monsters is about as sensible to me as imagining "hail" as in "hail a cab" is an English aping of the German "heil" heard by the British in the Nazis' "heil Hitler".
Then there's the case of the suffix "by" or "bee", which appears on a good many English placenames and surnames, as in "Appleby" or "Applebee": we're taught that "-by" or "-bee" is not native English but an import to English from Old Norse. And the "by" suffix does appear on Scandinavian placenames to this day, as in "Rinkeby" in Sweden. But see for example Naseby in the English Midlands, immortalized by the momentous battle in that place and of that name in the English Civil War. Naseby was founded in the 6th Century by a Saxon called Hnaef, as Hnaefes-Burgh, then per the Domesday Book in 1086 the name had developed to Navesberie, and it's not for some time that the name develops to Navesby and Nathesby and ultimately Naseby. So the "by" suffix in "Naseby" appears well after even the Norman Conquest, centuries after England had dispatched the Vikings, a contraction or simplification arguably of those earlier "b-" suffixes "Burgh" and "berie".
Inarguably English did take on words from Old Norse, and in those parts of the north and east of England which were subject to the Danelaw are found placenames which are altogether Norse, as for instance "Ormskirk" in Lancashire, with its "Orm" from "ormr" meaning "serpent, dragon", and its "kirk" for "church". But that etymology comports with the record, that the English word was "church" and never "kirk", and it comports as neatly with the history, that Lancashire was subject to the Danelaw.
Old Norse and Old English are after all cousin-tongues, the Germanic dialects and languages of Germanic tribes and nations in Northern Europe in the first half of the Middle Ages, and it's my suspicion that etymologies too often find parallels and imagine antecedents, that too many of those words they identify as imports to English from Old Norse are native English stock, English words with cousin-words in our cousin-languages including Norse.
And there's the practical difficulty in supposing that a very considerable part of English derives from Old Norse, which is that the window for it is narrow, in time and in space. The Vikings in England in the first 72 years of the Viking Age were raiders and not invaders; when from 865 to '78 the greatest warriors of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden did invade and overrun England with their Great Heathen Army, they were soon enough driven back to the north and east of England, to the Danelaw which by 918 the English had reduced to Northumbria; and 36 years thereafter even Northumbria was reclaimed by the English.
Plus which these Viking Age Northmen were the sorts to rob monks and rape nuns and murder both, when they didn't sell them into brutal slavery. The English had resisted the language of even the native Britons they had displaced, and they had that much more cause for resisting the influence of these heathen Northmen whose evil was not again seen in Europe until the Nazis. English imported "blitz" from German in the Second World War, but there wasn't much call in Britain for German imports about the time of the Blitz, and it defies reason to suppose that England in the Viking Age was mad for things Scandinavian, save for some naval technology and a military tactic or two.
Not to mention, it was the Northmen who converted to Christianity, not the English who converted or rather relapsed into pre-Christian Germanic paganism. It was the English who had a large literate class of churchmen, and the Northmen who were illiterate. And it was the Northmen who were the few, fleeting occupiers in a Saxon sea which had seen centuries before the Vikings and has seen a millennium and more since. I cannot accept that English is in any considerable part hand-me-down Viking-talk, and not out of my violent nationalism so much as my residual rustic common sense.
The historical liberties of History's Vikings
Michael Hirst's Vikings is very fine television, and Michael Hirst with his Elizabeth movies and The Tudors is a historical-drama force-of-nature. Vikings surely has driven a general education in Viking Age Europe. And I appreciate that Vikings is a TV show and not a textbook, plus which there is such a thing as artistic license. But at the same time Vikings is a co-production of the History channel, and it must be said that the history in the show is compressed by times and by times it's madness. So I offer herewith several paragraphs on the historical liberties of Vikings.
Vikings has King Egbert (the show prefers "Ecbert", and the show may have it right) of Wessex handing off to his son Prince Aethelwulf with the Great Heathen Army on the doorstep, then executing a charter conceding the Danelaw before slitting his wrists in his Roman bath, but Egbert was dead a quarter-century before the coming of the Great Heathen Army, and even Aethelwulf was seven years in his grave before that time. Wessex between Egbert and the Great Heathen Army had four kings: Aethelwulf, Aethelbald, Aethelbert, and Aethelred.
Also Aethelwulf was married to a Judith, but she was no daughter of King Aella of Northumbria; Judith was a Continental princess. And so much worse than that, Alfred the Great was not the bastard of Judith and a naughty monk, but Aethelwulf's legitimate son by his first wife Osburh.
As to King Aella of Northumbria, the show accepts the sagas' account of his death by "blood eagle" at the hands of Ragnar's sons, but the English histories report Aella died in battle in 867, and had he been tortured to death by Vikings then the English sources might've had an interest in playing that up. Also the show has Aella as king of Northumbria by the time of the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, through the coming of the Great Heathen Army in 865, but the history is that Aella was king for a year or at most five.
The invasion of the Great Heathen Army which concludes Season Four was not some blitzkrieg sweep across England, but fully a decade between landing in East Anglia and overrunning Wessex. And the invasion evidently was a reaction to the fortification of Francia which raised the cost to the Vikings of raiding there, more than revenge for the death of Ragnar. ("Revenge" there in the Viking sense, because only monsters on the order of the the Vikings would fault the English for executing the monster who had led the unprovoked slaughter and rape and plunder of English innocents.)
And Vikings has it that Ragnar Lodbrok (the show prefers "Lothbrok", and again the show may have it right) led the raid on Lindisfarne which came in 793 and which inaugurates the Viking Age, that his death was followed soon enough by the invasion of the Great Heathen Army which came in 865, and that Ragnar had a farm and family before turning to the slaughter, rape, and plunder of innocents, so that Ragnar Lodbrok would've been a man of a certain age by the time King Aella dropped him into that snake pit. Ragnar in the sagas may be a composite of more Vikings than one, and an embellishment of them, a mythological invention representing a historical reality, and Vikings evidently takes those Norse sagas very largely for its historical record.
I've developed a suspicion, and it is now nothing grander than a suspicion, that contemporary English etymologies for reasons I might guess at are prejudiced in claiming wherever they can get away with it that English derives from Old Norse, making out that a very considerable part of English is imported from those Scandinavian raiders and invaders of the Viking Age, which in England amounts to the century-and-a-half from the first Viking raid in 793 to the more-or-less final English victory in 954.
"Wassail" makes a case-in-point: the convention is that the Modern English "wassail" from the Old English "waes hael" derives ultimately from the Old Norse "ves heill". I esteem the American Heritage Dictionary and I consult it daily, despite that its etymology for "wassail" accepts the convention that the English abandoned their native salutations in preference to aping some boozy invocation of the monstrous Vikings who terrorized them. But that same etymology stipulates a native English pedigree for "wassail" in three iterations, recorded in even Beowulf and the West Saxon Gospels. American Heritage cites the native English salutation "wes thu hal", which in its most direct rendering recognizable to us would read "be thou healthy", and that combines the "wes" and "hal", and in the same order as "waes hael", with the marginal variation of inserting between them the pronoun "thou" for "you".
So to suppose that the merry English "wassail" derives not from the terrorizers of the English but from a native English pedigree would not contradict the documentary record, and that documentary record of English before 800 can be uneven, so that we may assume where there's smoke, there's fire: that if "wes thu hal" appears in written English, then "wes hal" absent the "thu" may've been spoken but not recorded in those manuscripts which survive to us.
But more than that, these etymologies ought to apply common sense: the English were terrorized, impoverished, brutalized, enslaved, raped, and slaughtered by the Vikings, until they drove the monsters out and kept them out by force, so this etymology that the English abandoned their native salutations for the Old Norse of the Viking monsters is about as sensible to me as imagining "hail" as in "hail a cab" is an English aping of the German "heil" heard by the British in the Nazis' "heil Hitler".
Then there's the case of the suffix "by" or "bee", which appears on a good many English placenames and surnames, as in "Appleby" or "Applebee": we're taught that "-by" or "-bee" is not native English but an import to English from Old Norse. And the "by" suffix does appear on Scandinavian placenames to this day, as in "Rinkeby" in Sweden. But see for example Naseby in the English Midlands, immortalized by the momentous battle in that place and of that name in the English Civil War. Naseby was founded in the 6th Century by a Saxon called Hnaef, as Hnaefes-Burgh, then per the Domesday Book in 1086 the name had developed to Navesberie, and it's not for some time that the name develops to Navesby and Nathesby and ultimately Naseby. So the "by" suffix in "Naseby" appears well after even the Norman Conquest, centuries after England had dispatched the Vikings, a contraction or simplification arguably of those earlier "b-" suffixes "Burgh" and "berie".
Inarguably English did take on words from Old Norse, and in those parts of the north and east of England which were subject to the Danelaw are found placenames which are altogether Norse, as for instance "Ormskirk" in Lancashire, with its "Orm" from "ormr" meaning "serpent, dragon", and its "kirk" for "church". But that etymology comports with the record, that the English word was "church" and never "kirk", and it comports as neatly with the history, that Lancashire was subject to the Danelaw.
Old Norse and Old English are after all cousin-tongues, the Germanic dialects and languages of Germanic tribes and nations in Northern Europe in the first half of the Middle Ages, and it's my suspicion that etymologies too often find parallels and imagine antecedents, that too many of those words they identify as imports to English from Old Norse are native English stock, English words with cousin-words in our cousin-languages including Norse.
And there's the practical difficulty in supposing that a very considerable part of English derives from Old Norse, which is that the window for it is narrow, in time and in space. The Vikings in England in the first 72 years of the Viking Age were raiders and not invaders; when from 865 to '78 the greatest warriors of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden did invade and overrun England with their Great Heathen Army, they were soon enough driven back to the north and east of England, to the Danelaw which by 918 the English had reduced to Northumbria; and 36 years thereafter even Northumbria was reclaimed by the English.
Plus which these Viking Age Northmen were the sorts to rob monks and rape nuns and murder both, when they didn't sell them into brutal slavery. The English had resisted the language of even the native Britons they had displaced, and they had that much more cause for resisting the influence of these heathen Northmen whose evil was not again seen in Europe until the Nazis. English imported "blitz" from German in the Second World War, but there wasn't much call in Britain for German imports about the time of the Blitz, and it defies reason to suppose that England in the Viking Age was mad for things Scandinavian, save for some naval technology and a military tactic or two.
Not to mention, it was the Northmen who converted to Christianity, not the English who converted or rather relapsed into pre-Christian Germanic paganism. It was the English who had a large literate class of churchmen, and the Northmen who were illiterate. And it was the Northmen who were the few, fleeting occupiers in a Saxon sea which had seen centuries before the Vikings and has seen a millennium and more since. I cannot accept that English is in any considerable part hand-me-down Viking-talk, and not out of my violent nationalism so much as my residual rustic common sense.
The historical liberties of History's Vikings
Michael Hirst's Vikings is very fine television, and Michael Hirst with his Elizabeth movies and The Tudors is a historical-drama force-of-nature. Vikings surely has driven a general education in Viking Age Europe. And I appreciate that Vikings is a TV show and not a textbook, plus which there is such a thing as artistic license. But at the same time Vikings is a co-production of the History channel, and it must be said that the history in the show is compressed by times and by times it's madness. So I offer herewith several paragraphs on the historical liberties of Vikings.
Vikings has King Egbert (the show prefers "Ecbert", and the show may have it right) of Wessex handing off to his son Prince Aethelwulf with the Great Heathen Army on the doorstep, then executing a charter conceding the Danelaw before slitting his wrists in his Roman bath, but Egbert was dead a quarter-century before the coming of the Great Heathen Army, and even Aethelwulf was seven years in his grave before that time. Wessex between Egbert and the Great Heathen Army had four kings: Aethelwulf, Aethelbald, Aethelbert, and Aethelred.
Also Aethelwulf was married to a Judith, but she was no daughter of King Aella of Northumbria; Judith was a Continental princess. And so much worse than that, Alfred the Great was not the bastard of Judith and a naughty monk, but Aethelwulf's legitimate son by his first wife Osburh.
As to King Aella of Northumbria, the show accepts the sagas' account of his death by "blood eagle" at the hands of Ragnar's sons, but the English histories report Aella died in battle in 867, and had he been tortured to death by Vikings then the English sources might've had an interest in playing that up. Also the show has Aella as king of Northumbria by the time of the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, through the coming of the Great Heathen Army in 865, but the history is that Aella was king for a year or at most five.
