The Settlement of the Danes in England. The events here rapidly summarized had as an important consequence the settle-ment of large numbers of Scandinavians in England. However temporary may have been the stay of many of the attacking parties, especially those which in the beginning came simply to plunder, many individuals remained behind when their ships returned home. Often they became permanent settlers in the island. Some indication of their number may be had from the fact that more than 1400 places in England bear Scandinavian names. Most of these are naturally in the north and east of England, the district of the Danelaw, for it was here that the majority of the invaders settled. Most of the new inhabitants were Danes, al-though there were considerable Norwegian settlements in the northwest, especially in what is now Cumberland and Westmore-land, and in a few of the northern counties. The presence of a large Scandinavian element in the population is indicated not merely by place-names but by peculiarities of manorial organ-ization, local government, legal procedure, and the like. Thus we have to do not merely with large bands of marauders, marching and countermarching across England, carrying hardship and devastation into all parts of the country for upward of two centuries, but with an extensive peaceable settlement by farmers who intermarried with the English, adopted many of their customs, and entered into the everyday life of the community. In the districts where such settlements took place conditions were favorable for an extensive Scandinavian influence on the English language.

CHAPTER III

The Amalgamation of the Two Races.

The amalgamation of the two races was greatly facilitated by the close kinship that existed between them. The problem of the English was not the assimilation of an alien race representing an alien culture and speaking a wholly foreign tongue. The policy of the English kings in the period when they were re-establishing their control over the Danelaw was to accept as an established fact the mixed population of the district and to devise a modus vivendi for its component elements. In this effort they were aided by the natural adaptability of the Scandinavian. Generations of contact with foreign communities, into which their many enterprises had brought them, had made the Scandinavians a cosmopolitan people. The impression derived from a study of early English institutions is that in spite of certain native customs which the Danes continued to observe they adapted themselves largely to the ways of English life. That many of them early accepted Christianity is attested by the large number of Scandinavian names found not only among monks and abbots, priests and bishops, but also among those who gave land to monasteries and endowed churches. It would be a great mistake to think of the relation between Anglo-Saxon and Dane, especially in the tenth century, as uniformly hostile. One must distinguish, as we have said, between the predatory bands that continued to traverse the country and the large numbers that were settled peacefully on the land. Alongside the ruins of English towns--Symeon of Durham reports that the city of Carlisle remained uninhabited for two hundred years after its destruction by the Danes--there existed important communities established by the newcomers. They seem to have grouped themselves at first in concentrated centers, parceling out large tracts of land from which the owners had fled, and preferring this form of settlement to too scattered a distribution in a strange land. Among such centers the Five Boroughs--Lincoln, Stamford, Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham --became important foci of Scandinavian influence. It was but a question of time until these large centers and the multitude of smaller communities where the Northmen gradually settled were absorbed into the general mass of the English population.

The Relation of the Two Languages. The relation between the two languages in the district settled by the Danes is a matter of inference rather than exact knowledge. Doubtless the situation was similar to that observable in numerous parts of the world today where people speaking different languages arc found living side by side in the same region. While in some places the Scandi-navians gave up their language early1 there were certainly com-munities in which Danish or Norse remained for some time the usual language. Up until the time of the Norman Conquest the Scandinavian language in England was constantly being renewed by the steady stream of trade and conquest. In some parts of Scotland Norse was still spoken as late as the seventeen century. In other districts in which the prevailing speech was English there were doubtless many of the newcomers who continued to speak their own language at least as late as 1100 and a considerable number who were to a greater or lesser degree bilingual. The last-named circumstance is rendered more likely by the frequent intermarriage between the two races and by the similarity between the two tongues. The Anglican dialect resembled the language of the Northman in a number of par-ticulars in which West Saxon showed divergence. The two may even have been mutually intelligible to a limited extent. Con temporary statements on the subject are conflicting, and it is difficult to arrive at a conviction. But wherever the truth lies in this debatable question, there can be no doubt that the basis existed for an extensive interaction of the two languages upon each other, and this conclusion is amply borne out by the large number of Scandinavian elements subsequently found in English.

The Tests of Borrowed Words. The similarity between Old English and the language of the Scandinavian invaders makes it at times very difficult to decide whether a given word in Modern English is a native or a borrowed word. Many of the commoner words of the two languages were identical, and if we had no Old English literature from the period before the Danish invasions, we should be unable to say that many words were not of Scandinavian origin. In certain cases, however, we have very reliable criteria by which we can recognize a borrowed word. These tests are not such as the layman can generally apply, although occasionally they are sufficiently simple. The most reliable depend upon differences in the development of certain sounds in the North Teutonic and West Teutonic areas. One of the simplest to recognize is the development of the sound sk. In Old English this was early palatalized tojh (written sc), except possibly in the combination scr, whereas in the Scandinavian countries it retained its hard sk sound. Consequently, while native words like ship, shall, fish have sh in Modern English, words borrowed from the Scandinavians are generally still pro-nounced with sk: sky, skin, skill, scrape, scrub, bask, whisk. The O.E. ycyrlc has become shirt, while the corresponding O.N. form skyrla gives us skirt. In the same way the retention of the hard pronunciation of k and g in such words as kid, dike1 (cf. ditch) get, give, gild, egg, is an indication of Scandinavian origin. Oc-casionally, though not very often, the vowel of a word gives clear proof of borrowing. For example, the Teutonic diphthong ai became в in Old English (and has become ц in modern English), but became ei or e in Old Scandinavian. Thus aye, nay (beside no from the native word), hale (cf. the English form (w)lwle), reindeer, swain are borrowed words, and many more examples can be found in Middle English and in the modern dialects. Thus there existed in Middle English the forms geit, gait, which are from Scandinavian, beside gat, gцt from the O.E. word. The native word has survived in Modern English goat. In the same way the Scandinavian word for loathsome existed in Middle Eng-lish as leip, laif) beside Id}), loft. Such tests as these, based on sound-developments in the two languages are the most reliable means of distinguishing Scandinavian from native words. But occasionally meaning gives a fairly reliable test. Thus our word bloom (flower) could come equally well from O.E. blorna or Scandinavian blцm. But the O.E. word meant an "ingot of iron', whereas the Scandinavian word meant 'flower, bloom'. It happens that the Old English word has survived as a term in metallurgy, but it is the Old Norse word that has come clown in ordinary use. Again, if the initial g in gift did not betray the Scandinavian origin of this word, we should be justified in suspecting it from the fact that the cognate O.E. word gift meant the 'price of a wife', and hence in the plural 'marriage,' while the O.N. word had the more general sense of 'gift, present'. The word plow in Old English meant a measure of land, in Scandinavian the agri-cultural implement, which in Old English was called a sulh. When neither the form of a word nor its meaning proves its Scandinavian origin we can never be sure that we have to do with a borrowed word. The fact that an original has not been preserved in Old English is no proof that such an original did not exist. Nevertheless when a word appears in Middle English which cannot be traced to an Old English source but for which an entirely satisfactory original exists in Old Norse, and when that word occurs chiefly in texts written in districts where Danish influence was strong, or when it has survived in dialectal use in these districts today, the probability that we have here a borrowed word is fairly strong. In every case final judgment must rest upon a careful consideration of all the factors involved.

CHAPTER IV

Scandinavian Place-names.

Among the most notable evi-dences of the extensive Scandinavian settlement in England is the large number of places that bear Scandinavian names. When we find more than six hundred places like Grimsby, Whitby, Derby, Rugby, and Thorcsby, with names ending in -by, nearly all of them in the district occupied by the Danes, we have a strik-ing evidence of the number of Danes who settled in England. For those names all contain the Danish word by, meaning 'farm' or 'town', a word which is also seen in our word by-law (town law). Some three hundred names like Althorp, Bishopsthorpe, Gaw-thorj)C, Linthorpe contain the Scandinavian word thorp (village). An almost equal number contain the word thwaite (an isolated piece of land)--Applcthwaite, Braithwaite, Cowpcrthwaite, Langthwaite, Satlerthwalte. About a hundred places bear names ending in toft (a piece of ground, a messuage)--Brimtoft, Eas-toft, Langtoft, Loivestoft, Nortoft. Numerous other Scandinavian elements enter into English place-names, which need not be particularized here. It is apparent that these elements entered intimately in the speech of the people of the Danelaw. It has been remarked above that more than 1400 Scandinavian place-names have been counted in England, and the number will undoubtedly be increased when a more careful survey of the material has been made. These names are not uniformly distributed over the Danelaw. The largest number are found in Yorkshire and Lin-colnshire. In some districts in these counties as many as 75 per cent of the place-names are of Scandinavian origin. Cumberland and Westmoreland contribute a large number, reflecting the extensive Norse settlements in the northwest, while Norfolk, with a fairly large representation, shows that the Danes were numerous in at least this part of East Anglia. It may be remarked that a similar high percentage of Scandinavian personal names has been found in the medieval records of these districts. Names ending in son, like Stevenson or Johnson, conform to a characteristic Scan dinavian custom, the equivalent Old English patronymic being -ng, as in Browning.

Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5