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The Viking Invasions

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The Viking Invasions oby'ect in either an eaily vernacular or a more elaborate Latinate style is one of its mo$ remarkable characteristics, and one which enables it to have a unique subtlety and flexibility of meaning. By the end of the eighth century, the impact of Christianity on Anglo-Saxon England had produced a culture unrivalled in Europe. The illuminated manuscripts of the famous monastery at Lindisfarne) on Holy Island off the Northumbrian coast, show how words and pictures had both achieved a kind of perfection. But in the eighth and ninth centuries this culture faced another threat from what was to become the second qreat influence on the making of English - the sea-warriors from the North. THE VIKING INVASIONS The mass movement of the Scandinavian peoples between the years AD 75o and ro5o, one of the great migrations of European history, began as plunder-raids and ended as conquest and settlement. People from what is now known as Sweden established a kingdom in part of European Russia. Adventurers from Norway colonized parts of the British Isles, the Faroes and lceland, pushed on to Greenland and eventually the coast of Labrador. And the Danes - also called Norsemen - conquered *rorthern France (which became Normandy) and finally E,ngland. Collectively, these peoples are referred to as the Vikings, a name which is thoughtto come either from the Norse aik (.a bay, indicating "one who frequents inlets of the sea") or from the Old English wic, a camp, the formation of temporary encampments being a prominent feature of Viking raids. In the past, the Vikings have been described as daring pirates but, while there is obviously much truth to the stereotype, recent scholarship likes to emphasize the long-term peaceful benefits of the Norse landings. It has been suggested, too, that the native Anglo-Saxons took advantage of the Viking raids to settle old scores with each other. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon race war against the Celts which preserved virtually no trace of the Celtic languages in English, the Danish settlers had a profound influence on the development of Old English. The Viking raids against England began in earnest in the year AD 793 when the monasteries of Jarrow and Lindisfarne were sacked in successive seasons and plundered of gold and silver. By the middle of the ninth century almost half the country was in Viking hands. The Norsemen, referred to by the Anglo-Saxons as "Danes", turned their forces against the jewel in the crown: the kingdom of Wessex. The king of \Tessex was a young man na'med Alfred who had inherited the throne in 87r after his brother was killed beating off the first of the Danish attacks from the North. It is perhaps a measure both of Alfred's qualities and of the desperate situation in \Tessex that Alfred was chosen in preference to his brother's sons. For a time, the Vikings seemed unstoppable. By 878 Alfred was reduced to taking refuge with a small band of followers in the marshes of Somerset on the island of Athelney. The story of Alfred burning the cakes while brooding on the plight of his kingdom symbolizes the gravity of his situation. This was the moment at which it became suddenly possible that English might be wiped out altogether. 68/THF STORY OF FNGL]S- \X/ith no English-speaking kingdoms left, the country would gradually speak Norse. The turning point came that same year. Alfred raised a fresh army of men from Somerset, \X/iltshire and Hampshire, and, surprising the Danes, overwhelmed them at the battle of Ethandune, a victory commemorated by a white horse carved on the hillside. The subsequent Treaty of $Tedmore saved Wessex. The Danes withdrew to the North. Alfred and the English-speaking Saxons ruled in the South and the country was partitioned roughly along the line of Watling Street, the old Roman road that ran from London to Chester. Having rvon the war, Alfred set out to make sure he won the peace. His problem was that his power-base was too small to guarantee that the peace with the Danes *orl.i hold, or that Englishmen living outside \(essex in, for example, Mercia ($Torcestershire and Warwickshire) would not be graduall1, drawn into the Danish empire. As king of \Tessex Alfred had sovereignty only over people who lived in the counties of the south-west centred on Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset and Hampshire, based around the capital cit-v, Winchester. He had no power over, for example, people who lived in Oxfordshire or Shropshire. Yet his continued survival against the Vikings depended on men and money from the counties outside \Wessex. Somehow he had to retain political control of territorl, that was not his. He did this'by appealing to a sharecl sense of Englishness) conveyed by the language. Alfred quite consciously used the English language as a means of creating a sense of national identity. S7ithout Alfred the Great the history of the English language might have been quite lifferent. He set about restoring his kingdom to its former greatness. He began rebuilding the monasteries and the schools. It was his inspiration to use English, not Latin, as the basis for tl-re education of his people. At the age of nearly forty, amidst what he called the "various and manifold cares of this kingdom", he learnt Latin so that he could translate (or arrange for the translation of) various key texts, notably Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ilistory of the English Church and PeopLe). Alfred describes his English-language campaign in a famous preface: Therefore it seems better to me . that we should also translate certain books which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language that we can all understand, and also arrange it . so that all the youth of free men now among the English people . are able to read English writing as well. There is one story (recorded by his biographer, Bishop Asser) that perhaps demonstrates more than any other Alfred's understanding of books and language. \il/hen he was young) Asser writes, Alfred was sitting, with some other children, at his mother's feet. She had on her lap a book written in English, and the boy was struck by the beauty of the decorated initial on the first page. As the story goes, his mother said that she would give the book to whoever couid learn the book and repeat it to her. So Alfred went away, learnt the book, returned to his mother, repeated the text, and won the prize. Not only does the story convey - as it was IHE I"lOTHERIONGUE/69 - designed to do - the future king's drive and tenacity, it also reveals his belief in the importance of culture. Alfred understood that his people needed history to remind them of their loyalties. So he instituted a chronicle, a record of current events) unique in Europe. The saviour of the English language, he was also the founder of English prose. No other English monarch is remembered as "Great". After Alfred, the Danes and the Saxons lived alongside each other for generations, more 0r less at peace. Because both their languages had the same Germanic roots, the language fronrier broke down and a kind of natural pidginization took place that gradually simplified the srructure of Old English. Professor Tom Shippey, who has made a close study of the mingling of Saxon and Viking culture, vividly explains the process Consider what happens when somebody who speaks, shall we say, good Old English from the south of the country runs inro somebody from the north- east who speaks good old Norse. They can no doubt communicate with each other, but the complications in both languages are going to get lost. So if the Anglo-Saxon from the South wants to say (in good Old English) "I'll sell you the horse that pulls my cart," he says: "Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn." Now the old Norsemah - if he had to say this - would say: "Ek rdun selja ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine'" So, roughly speaking, they understand each other. One says "waegn" and the other says "vagn". One says "hors" and "draegeth"; the other says "hros" and "dregr", but broadly they are communicating. They under- stand the main words. \rhat they don't understand are the grammatical parts of the sentence. For instance, the man speaking good Old English says for one horse "that hors" but for two horses he says "tha hors". Now the Old Norse speaker understands the word Zorse all right, but he's not sure if lt means one or two because in Old English you say "one horse", "two horse". There is no difference between the two words for horse' The difference is conveyed in the word for "the" and the old Norseman might not understand this because his word for "the" doesn't behave like that. So: are you trying to sell me one horse or are you trying to sell me two horses ? If you get enough situations like that there is a strong drive towards simplifying the language. Before the arrival of the Danes, Old English, like most European languages at that time, was a strongiy inflected language. Common words like "king" or "stone" relied on word- endings to convey a meaning for which we now use prepositions like "to", "with" and "from". In Old English, "the king" ts se cyning, "to the king" is thaem cyninge. In Old English, they said orre stan (stone), two stanas (stones). The simplification of English by the Danes gradually helped to eliminate these word-endings, as Tom Shippey explains: Nowadays we say the same thing for all the plurals.
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