Reassessing Purported English Loanwords in Old Norse

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose E-theses Online Contact and Christianisation: Reassessing Purported English Loanwords in Old Norse Nikolas Gunn PhD University of York English July 2017 2 Abstract This thesis reassesses a corpus of Old Norse words which previous scholars claimed to have been loaned from English. It has been over sixty years since the last concerted study of these purported borrowings, and research has not moved much beyond the foundations laid by Absalon Taranger in 1890. This thesis seeks to establish a more plausible corpus of English loanwords in Old Norse, focusing particularly on lexical material relating to the spheres of Christianity and literacy. Chapter 1 offers a detailed survey of the literary material relating to language contact between English- and Norse-speakers, with a special focus on the English missionary effort. I suggest that we should see the Anglo-Saxon church as a distinctly international, multilingual institution during the Viking Age. A case study focusing on the twelfth-century First Grammatical Treatise contributes to the debate over Anglo-Norse mutual intelligibility and explores Norse- speakers’ integration within a wider European cultural sphere. In Chapter 2, I assess 113 supposed English loanwords in Old Norse in order to ascertain which ones we can confidently ascribe as English borrowings. I suggest that the number of loanwords that are unambiguously English in origin are fewer than previous scholars have suggested and that some conceptual fields demonstrate more English influence than others. I also indicate that a large number of purported English loans are more likely to be polygenetic in origin. Chapter 3 categorises and interprets the reanalysed lexical items. I devise a number of new categories into which our corpus of loanwords can be grouped. I use these new groupings to reflect on Anglo-Norse language contact more generally, and place my work within the context of recent research on institutional religion as an engine for language change and the emergence of Anglo-Scandinavian identity in England. 3 Contents Abstract 3 Contents 4 Acknowledgements 7 Declaration 8 Note on translations 9 Introduction 10 Chapter 1: Contact and Mission in early medieval England and Scandinavia 28 1.1 - Prelude: Pre-Viking Age missionary contact 30 1.2 - Contact and mission in the Viking Age 33 1.3 - Bishops and missionaries at the turn of the eleventh century 45 1.4 - The dawn of literacy: the eleventh to thirteenth centuries 60 1.5 - ‘Now after their examples’: English and the Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise 68 Chapter 2: Reanalysing purported English loanwords in Old Norse 80 2.1 - The scope of the present study 80 2.1.1 - Problems with the corpus 81 2.1.2 - Definitions: English and Old Norse 83 2.1.3 - Definitions: Loanwords 85 2.2 - The data 88 2.3 - Loanword Studies 91 2.3.1 - Clergy 91 2.3.2 - Church architecture 116 2.3.3 - Church material culture 130 4 2.3.4 - Feasts 140 2.3.5 - Canonical hours 150 2.3.6 - Church service 153 2.3.7 - Texts 160 2.3.8 - Writing (practice) 170 2.3.9 - Writing (material culture) 177 2.3.10 - Learning 179 2.3.11 - Initiation 183 2.3.12 - Spiritual relations 189 2.3.13 - Qualities 194 2.3.14 - Spiritual figures 200 2.3.15 - Miscellaneous 206 Chapter 3 - English loanwords in Old Norse 215 3.1 - Classifying the loanwords 215 3.1.1 - Other source language 219 3.1.2 - Polygenetic loanwords 220 3.1.3 - English source 225 3.1.4 - Probable English source 229 3.1.5 - Unclear OE-ON connection 233 3.2 - Implications for OE-ON language contact 239 3.2.1 - Mutual intelligibility 240 3.2.2 - Language and identity in the conversion era 241 3.3 - Coda: ‘As we are all of one tongue’ 249 5 Conclusion 251 Appendix 257 Abbreviations 265 Bibliography 267 6 Acknowledgements The opportunities that higher education has opened up to me have been astonishing, and I would not have made it so far without the support of a number of important people. I’d like to thank Matthew Townend for his keen guidance throughout, and for planting the idea for this thesis in the back of my mind during my MA. Thanks are also due to Alaric Hall for teaching me Old English and Old Norse with such enthusiasm during my undergraduate degree at the University of Leeds, and to Clive Upton, whose uplifting words convinced me to grasp the opportunity to do this PhD in the first place: ‘Get as much education as you can. Nobody can take that away from you.’ I would like to extend my gratitude to the Wolfson Foundation for providing me with a full scholarship in order to pursue my research at the University of York. The institution has been a fantastic support to me, and I’ve been lucky enough to feel part of an extended academic family that stretches across the Department of English and Related Literature, the Centre for Medieval Studies, and the Humanities Research Centre. I’m grateful for the stimulating conversations and restorative pints I’ve shared with everyone over the past four years. I’d particularly like to thank: Jennie England, Heidi Stoner, Jack Quin, Doug Battersby, Sarah Cawthorne, Anna Reynolds, Fiona Mozley, James Harland, Alex Alonso, Megan Girdwood, Dale Kedwards, and many more besides. Special thanks to Harri Thorne for her constant support and belief in me. This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Roger and Dragica Gunn. One instilled a love of history, the other encouraged me to read and write. 7 Declaration I declare that this thesis presents original work and I am its sole author. This work has not previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, university. All sources are acknowledged as references, both in the main text and bibliography. 8 Note on translations All translations are my own unless stated otherwise. I have maintained the orthography of the editions from which I quote. 9 Introduction The study of Old Norse loanwords in English has long been one of the cornerstones of scholarly research into Anglo-Scandinavian contact in the Middle Ages. In the past twenty-five years philologists have subjected the long-established corpus of Norse borrowings to the rigours of modern lexico-semantic and sociolinguistic study, underpinned by thorough literary-historical scholarship. Despite the great advances made in this field, there has been no parallel growth of interest in loanword material being transferred in the ‘other’ direction — that is from Old and Middle English to Old Norse. This is not without good reason. The period in which Anglo- Norse contact would have been most intense also falls before the beginnings of recorded literacy in Scandinavia, making concentrated synchronic studies — say of dialect or textual groups — much less feasible. There is also the simple fact that materially fewer English words were borrowed into Norse than the other way around. Yet despite this smaller corpus, it remains striking that the last major studies of English borrowings remain Absalon Taranger’s influential 1890 work, Den Angelsaksiske Kirkes Indflydelse paa den Norsk, and Frank Fischer’s 1909 Die Lehnwörter des Altwestnordischen, plus J.E. Buse’s unpublished 1955 PhD thesis which reuses much of those two scholars’ material. Together, Taranger and Fischer provided a ‘core’ group of borrowings which has subsequently informed all lists of English loanwords in ON.1 Although philologists have added or discarded lexical items from Taranger and Fischer’s groundwork as they see fit, it is rare that 1 For the main sections on the loans, see: Absalon Taranger, Den Angelsaksiske Kirkes Indflydelse paa den Norske (Kristiana: Grøndahl & Søns Bogtrykkeri, 1890), 215-366. Frank Fischer, Die Lehnwörter des Altwestnordischen (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1909), 20-25 and 46-55. 10 any of the loans are accompanied by detailed explicatory information, and we are mostly reliant on entries in etymological dictionaries. This is problematic, as lists of loans may well be treated uncritically by scholars; as Philip Durkin cautions: Lists of loanwords given in handbooks and histories of English can give the appearance of being simple statements of fact. It is important to realise that they are not: they are hypotheses, sometimes supported by evidence so secure that they are not in any real doubt, but very often based on much less secure foundations.2 This thesis inspects these foundations, bringing modern knowledge to bear on a subject area which has largely been ignored for the past sixty years. Through a re-examination of 113 purported borrowings from English to Old Norse, I argue for a reduced but richer corpus of English loans. My thesis consciously takes the same ecclesiastical focus as Taranger, but places language contact front and centre in the story of the Christianisation of Norse-speaking peoples by English churchmen. The loanword analysis which forms the centrepiece of this thesis is therefore bookended by two chapters: the first is a historicist review of literary-historical and scholarly material which provides ‘contextual’ evidence for Anglo-Scandinavian interaction, focusing on a conversion process which had, in the words of Lesley Abrams, ‘a significantly English cast and an English script.’3 The third chapter considers the theoretical implications for language contact in the Viking Age in light of my newly reformed corpus of English (and non- English) loanwords. 2 Philip Durkin, Borrowed Words. A History of Loanwords in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13. 3 Lesley Abrams, “The Anglo-Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia.” Anglo-Saxon England 24 (1995): 213- 14.

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