9. Norse influence

The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries. In addition to a great many place names, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland).

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English in that both derived from the same ancestral Proto-Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English.

Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the north and latest in the southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory, the influence of Old Norse on the lexicon of the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky, leg, the pronoun they, the verb form are, and hundreds of other words.

10. ALFRED (the Great) (848-899), king of the West Saxons from 871 to his death, important in the history of literature for the revival of letters that he effected in his southern kingdom and as the beginner of a tradition of English prose translation (though there were some Northumbrian translations of Latin before him). He translated (before 896) the Cura Pastoralis of Gregory with a view to the spiritual education of the clergy, and a copy of this was sent to each bishop. The preface to this translation refers to the decay of learning in England and indicates Alfred’s resolve to restore it. He then translated (or had translated) the Historia Adversus Paganos of Orosius, inserting the latest geographical information at his disposal, notably accounts of the celebrated voyages of the Norwegian Ohthere to the White sea and of the Wulfstan in the Baltic, both of which are full of interesting detail. He had a translation made of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History with some omissions, but giving a West Saxon version of the Hymn of Caedmon, and translated the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius, with some additions drawn from exegetes such as Remigius of Auxerre. The loose West-Saxon version of Augustine’s Sololiquia is also probably the work of Alfred. He composed a code of laws, drawing on the Mosaic and early English codes. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the systematic compilation of which began about 890, may represent in part his work of inspiration. The characteristic virtue of Alfred’s style lies in his principle of idiomatic translation, sometimes sense for sense, which gives vividness to his English versions. The absence of his distinctive quality from the translation of Bede has led to the questioning of its authenticity as an Alfredian text.

See Asser’s Life of Alfred, in Alfred the Great, ed. S.Keynes and M.Lapidge (1983); E.S.Duckett, Alfred the Great and his England (1961).

11. Old English written records

Our knowledge of the OE language comes mainly from manuscripts written in Latin characters. The first English words to be written down with the help of Latin characters were personal names and place names inserted in Latin texts; then came glosses and longer textual insertions.

Among the earliest insertions in Latin texts are pieces of OE poetry. Bede’s HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM (written in Latin in the 8th c.) contains and English fragment of five lines known as “Bede’s Death Song” and a religious poem of nine lines, “Cadmon’s Hymn”. It was translated into Kentish dialect.

The greatest poem of that time was BEOWULF, an epic of the 7th or 8th c. It was originally composed in the Mercian or Northumbrian dialect, but has come down to us in a 10th c. West Saxon copy. It is valued both as a source of linguistic material and as a work of art; it is the oldest poem in Germanic literature. BEOWULF is built up of several songs arranged in three chapters. It is based on old legends about the tribal life of the ancient Teutons. The author is unknown.

Religious poems paraphrase, more or less closely, the books of the Bible – GENESIS, EXODUS (written by Cadmon, probably in Northumbrian dialect). CHRIST, FATE OF THE APOSTLES tell the life-stories of apostles and saints or deal with various subjects associated with the Gospels. OE poetry is characterized by a specific system of versification and some peculiar stylistic devices. Practically all of it is written in the OG alliterative verse: the lines are not rhymed and the number of stressed syllables being fixed. The style of OE poetry is marked by the wide use of metaphorical phrases or compounds describing the qualities or functions of the thing. OE prose is a most valuable source of information for the history of the language.

The earliest samples of continuous prose are the first pages of the ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLES. It was written in West Saxon dialect. By the 10th c. the West Saxon dialect had firmly established itself as the written form of English.