Supposedly 5 per cent of words in English are borrowed from Old Norse. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but much of our key vocabulary was brought over in longboats: ‘get’, ‘take’, ‘give’ and ‘egg’ are all derived from the language of the Vikings.
Indeed, it took the Saxons centuries to thwart the gangs of sly lads who came across the gusty seas full of anger, hoping to ransack the weak Saxon oafs and angrily hit their skulls together.
Our Saxon fellows repeatedly fell victim to these dregs of the North Sea. They blundered in paying the Danegeld and only slowly learnt the awkward lesson that this gift would not get rid of these Danish outlaws. By the time these gangs staggered back to Scandinavia, their words stayed with us, along with their settlers and settlements: any readers living in a town ending in –by or –thorpe are living somewhere founded by these marauding Norsemen.
Old Norse words didn’t just replace pre-existing Anglo-Saxon ones. They supplemented the language with new words with slightly different connotations.
My favourite example of this is difference between ‘slay’ and ‘slaughter’, which despite sharing the same Proto-Indo-European roots have very different connotations. We slay the dragon, but the women and children were slaughtered. The difference is that ‘slaughter’ was brought over by the Vikings and adopted by the resident Anglo-Saxons to denote a touch of brutality in proceedings; presumably as the rugged Nordic invaders, speaking their odd language, scared the natives.
It’s often forgotten that the Vikings won in the end. The Normans may have spoken French but they were descended from northmen. As a fan of Germanic languages, I wish they had kept speaking Old Norse: I much prefer the Germanic brotherliness or Brüderlichkeit to fraternité, or our freedom and Freiheit to the Latinate liberté.
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