Do you speak Viking?

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.