Anglo-Saxon Britain.The Vikings and Alfred the Great. Scandinavian borrowings.

The history of Anglo-Saxon England covers the history of England from the end of Roman Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the fifth century until the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. Anglo-Saxon is a general term that refers to tribes of German origin who came to Britain, including Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes.

The Benedictine monk, Bede, identified them as the descendants of three Germanic tribes:[2]

* The Angles, who may have come from Angeln (in modern Germany), and Bede wrote that their whole nation came to Britain,[3] leaving their former land empty. The name 'England' (Anglo-Saxon 'Engla land' or '?ngla land') originates from this tribe.[4]

* The Saxons, from Lower Saxony (in modern Germany; German: Niedersachsen)

* The Jutes, from the Jutland peninsula (in modern Denmark)

Migration of Germanic peoples to Britain from what is now northern Germany and southern Scandinavia is attested from the 5th century (e.g. Undley bracteate). Christianization of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms began in 597 and was at least nominally completed in 686.

Old English literary works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research.

The most famous works from this period include the poem Beowulf, which has achieved national epic status in Britain. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of important early English history. C?dmon's Hymn from the 7th century is the earliest attested literary text in English.

Anglo-Saxon art is mainly known today through illuminated manuscripts, including the Benedictional of St. ?thelwold (British Library) and Leofric Missal (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl, 579), masterpieces of the late "Winchester style", which drew on Hiberno-Saxon art, Carolingian art and Byzantine art for style and iconography, and combined both northern ornamental traditions with Mediterranean figural traditions. The Harley Psalter was a copy of the Carolingian Utrecht Psalter — which was a particular influence in creating an Anglo-Saxon style of very lively pen drawings.

The architectural character of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical buildings ranges from Celtic influenced architecture in the early period; basilica influenced Romanesque architecture; to in the later Anglo-Saxon period, an architecture characterised by pilaster-strips, blank arcading, baluster shafts and triangular headed openings.

Viking challenge and the rise of Wessex (9th century)

Between the eighth and eleventh century raiders, conquerors and colonists from Scandinavia, mainly Danish and Norwegian, plundered western Europe including the British Isles.[77] These raiders came to be known as the Vikings; the name was believed to have been derived from Scandinavia where the Vikings originated.[78][79] The first raids in the British Isles were in the late eighth century and mainly on churches and monasteries. In the 860s, instead of raids, the Danes mounted a full scale invasion, and 865 marked the arrival of an enlarged army that the Anglo-Saxons described as the Great Heathen Army.

By 870 the Danes had overthrown the kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia, and were preparing to do the same to Wessex. Standing in their way was a young king of Wessex, Alfred by name. At first the fight went badly for Alfred; some of his allies found it more expedient to cooperate with the Danes, and in 877 he was pushed back to a small corner of the marshes around Athelney, in Somerset.A new wave of Danish invasions commenced in the year 891.[93] This was the beginning of a war that lasted over three years. However, Alfred's new system of defence worked and ultimately it wore the Danes down, with them giving up and dispersing in the summer of 896.

Alfred's Towns. Alfred was an innovator and a thinker, as well as a successful warrior. He began a policy encouraging the formation of fortified towns, or burhs, throughout his lands, such that no place in Wessex was more than 20 miles from a town. In exchange for free plots of land within the towns, settlers provided a defense force. The burhs were also encouraged to become centres of commerce and local government. (See our article on Saxon towns)

The Danelaw. Alfred built a new and improved navy to better meet the sea-faring Danes on their own terms. He wrested London from Danish control and reached the agreement by which England was divided into two zones; the south and west, where Saxon law would apply, and the north and east, where Danish law ruled. This second territory became known as the Danelaw.

Alfred's Legacy. Alfred also did his bit on the cultural front. He established schools and encouraged the dissemination of knowledge. He is said to have personally translated several books from Latin into the Anglo-Saxon tongue. An untraceable myth has it that he established the first university at Oxford. From the depths of despair in 877, Alfred brought Anglo-Saxon England into a golden age of social stability and artistic accomplishment. He was one of the first kings who seems to have looked beyond his own personal glory to a vision of the future well-being of the nation he ruled. He has every right to be remembered as Alfred "The Great".

Scandinavian Borrowings in English

They are ordinary, everyday words, and quite often monosyllabic and include grammatical words (like the verb are (to be), or the pronouns their, them and they and some of the commonest words in English today like bag, dirt, fog, knife, flat, low, odd, ugly, want, trust, get, give, take, raise, smile and though. A good number of sc- or sk- words today are of Scandinavian origin (scathe, scorch, score, scowl, scrape, scrub, skill, skin, skirt, sky). Scandinavian loan-words are therefore more usefully considered as core items.

(a) the English word sometimes displaced the cognate Scandinavian word: fish instead of fisk; goat instead of gayte;

(b) the Scandinavian word sometimes displaces the cognate English word: egg instead of ey, sister instead of sweoster;

(c) both might remain, but with somewhat different meanings: dike-ditch, hale-whole, raise-rise, sick-ill, skill-craft, skirt-shirt;

(d) the English word might remain, but takes on the Scandinavian meaning dream (originally ‘joy’, ‘mirth’, ‘music’, ‘revelry’); and

(e) the English words that were becoming obsolete might be given a new lease of life, eg dale and barn.