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ARCHAEOLOGY

The Anglo-Saxons were more menacing than the Vikings, and the English language can prove it

The Vikings invaded England in the 9th and 10th centuries. They plundered, raped and burned towns to the ground. Or at least, this is the story we know from school and popular culture.

The Anglo-Saxons were more menacing than the Vikings, and the English language can prove it
A replica of an Anglo-Saxon battle helmet. Photo: RPBMedia/Depositphotos

But the reported plundering and ethnic cleansing are probably overrated. The Vikings simply had worse ‘press coverage’ by frustrated English monks, who bemoaned their attacks.

In recent decades, ground breaking research in DNA, archaeology, history, and linguistics provide nuance to these written records. And together they provide a much clearer picture, ScienceNordic reports.

Research indicates that the Vikings were not the worst invaders to land on English shores at that time. That title goes to the Anglo-Saxons, 400 years earlier.

The Anglo-Saxons came from Jutland in Denmark, Northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Friesland, and subjugated the Romanized Britons.

This means that if the Viking Age is defined by numerous migrations and piracy (according to most scholars, Viking means ‘pirate’), the Viking Age should start earlier than 793 CE. It should really start as early as around 400 CE.

Here, I outline the various sources that indicate a much more systematic colonization, which started with the Anglo-Saxons, and how recent research, when viewed in its entirety, gives us a much clearer understanding of the impact that the Anglo-Saxons had before the Vikings arrived.

READ MORE from ScienceNordic: The Viking Age should be called the Steel Age

The Anglo-Saxons eradicated Celtic languages in England

One support for this contention is the impact or rather the lack of impact that the Viking Old Norse language had on the contemporary Old English language of the Anglo Saxons in the 9th and 10th centuries. This should be compared to the absence of Celtic language in England in the 5th and 6th centuries, after the Anglo-Saxons had arrived.

In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Old English wiped out the earlier Celtic language in a similar way to that in which modern English eradicated the language of the Native Americans in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This is clear in the almost non-existent impact that Native American words have on the English spoken today in the U.S. Modern American English has retained around 40 Native American words. Similarly, only a dozen Celtic words made it into the Old English of the Anglo Saxons.

So, did the Anglo Saxons have the same sort of impact on the Britons that 19th century Europeans had on Native Americans? And are we looking at ethnic cleansing in the 5th – 8th centuries?

READ MORE from ScienceNordic: Vikings versus Iron Age: Who made the best swords?

An Anglo-Saxon sells a horse to a Viking

If the Anglo-Saxons eradicated the Celtic language, the Vikings’ impact was significantly less.

Linguists do see some influence from the Old Norse of the Vikings in the Old English language, but it doesn’t come close to the eradication of Celtic by the Anglo-Saxons.

Old Norse did not eradicate the Old English language; Old English was simplified or pidginised because the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings were able to coexist for a time.

An example could be somewhere in Eastern England in the 9th century where an Anglo-Saxon met a Norseman.

The Anglo-Saxon wants to sell the Norseman a horse to pull a wagon. In modern English, he’d have said the equivalent of “I’ll sell you that horse that drags my wagon.”

In Old English it would have sounded like this: “Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn.”

The Norseman on the other hand would say “Ek mun selja ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine.”

One says “waegn”, where other says “vagn,” meaning wagon.

One says “hors” for horse, and “draegeth” for drag, while the other says “hros” and ”dregr.”

The point is that there are differences but they would have understood each other. What is lost in translation are the grammatical elements. Therefore, according to some linguists, English was simplified because of the meeting between two closely related languages. 

The language simplified, so one could ‘do business’ and communicate when people and languages met. They did not want to be cheated in the horse trade, so to speak. 

READ MORE from ScienceNordic: Why Danish Vikings moved to England

Anglo-Saxons caused more change than the Vikings

Numerous archaeological finds of settlements and graves in England suggest that many Scandinavians settled in the Eastern part of England, in the area known as Danelaw, and in parts of Scotland.

On the other hand, the Old English of the 9th century was not assimilated into Old Norse, unlike the earlier irradiation of Celtic by the first Anglo Saxon conquests.

Put simply, the impact of Viking immigration was not as massive as the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century. And this is now backed up by a large-scale DNA analyses of the modern British. 

The Vikings did not irradiate Old English — a sign of their limited impact compared to the earlier Anglo Saxon invasion. But remnants of their influence are still visible in modern English.

For example, north and east of the line that demarcates the Danelaw, you are likely to hear 'bairn' instead of 'child,' which is more closely related to the Danish 'barn'. 

Other similarities include ’armhole’ (Danish: armhul) for armpit and ‘hagworm’ (Danish: hugorm) meaning adder.


Map: ScienceNordic, based on an original in 'Word Maps: A Dialect Atlas of England'.

Some scholars have suggested that the Anglo-Saxons practiced a sort of apartheid against the local Celtic-speaking people between the 5th and 9th centuries, where they probably lived apart, or only had limited interaction.

Ethnic cleansing by the Anglo-Saxons is a likely alternative scenario, as suggested by the fact that Celtic culture and language did not survive outside of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Additionally, the Romano-British were less well organised and lived in a vacuum after the Romans left Britain in the 5th century, whereas the later Anglo Saxon kingdoms of the 9th century were better organised.

Thus, Anglo-Saxon England was harder to conquer in a similar way. The Vikings most likely married into Anglo-Saxon families over time, and maybe the children of the Scandinavians were raised by Anglo-Saxon servants.

Additionally, by intermarrying there was no way to maintain the Old Norse language in England.

However, some linguists suggest that if Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons had not met up and in that process modified each other’s languages, people in England today would speak something more similar to Frisian or Danish, depending on whether the Anglo-Saxons or Vikings had won the language clash.

READ MORE from ScienceNordic: What can linguistics tell us about the Vikings in England?

Place names indicate the presence of Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons

Place names confirm the presence of Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon settlements in England.

Anglo-Saxon place names end in -ham, like Clapham; -stowe like Felixstowe; and -ton like Brighton. The place names of the Scandinavians end in -by; like Grimsby and Derby.

The word ’by’ is, in Swedish, still a small hamlet as opposed to a ‘stad’, which is a city.

King Alfred stopped the advance of the Vikings

But all of this is not to underestimate the immediate threat that the Vikings posed to life in 9th century England.

In CE 878, the Viking invasions became so dire that the Anglo-Saxons were close to being overrun by the Scandinavians, just as their Anglo-Saxon ancestors had besieged the Britons 400 years earlier.

King Alfred of Wessex was forced into hiding in a bog in Somerset with a small group of men, and many omens suggested that the future England was going to be inhabited by Old Norse-speaking peoples.

However, Alfred succeeded in gathering an army from Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire. He made a surprise attack on the Danes at the battle of Ethandune, a battle that to this day is commemorated by a large white horse carved into the hill.


Ethandune. Photo: Ian Redding/Depositphotos

After the battle, Alfred settled the dispute by the so-called Treaty of Wedmore. He forced the Danes to withdraw their army from Wessex. In addition, their leader, Guthrom, was christened.

His victory saved Wessex and perhaps even the English language.

Alfred drew a line across the country, behind which he settled to the South, and the Danes settled towards the Northeast. Everything behind the frontier was the Danelaw.

This frontier ran northwest along the old Roman road from London to Chester, west of Rugby, a Nordic place name, and south of present-day Liverpool. Dialects still spoken throughout England today point to the dominance of a Danish-speaking population east of this line.

READ MORE from ScienceNordic: English mass grave contains remains of Viking Great Army

The Vikings had a bad (English) press

Even though the Christian chroniclers complained about the Viking invasions and written and archaeological sources confirm that the Vikings came in large numbers, with modern eyes and evidence, it seems that the Viking invasion was not as massive as the Anglo-Saxon invasion, 400 years earlier.

First, they did not take over the entire country of England: neither linguistically, materially, nor genetically.

Second, all analyses show that the present population of the East of England has more in common with the peoples on the North Sea coast (northern Germany and Netherlands), one of the places of origin of the Anglo-Saxons, than they do with the present-day population of Scandinavia. This is supported by all sources, including DNA.

Finally, the same study suggests that the flow of Anglo-Saxon immigration must have been so massive that they came to consist of up to 40 per cent of the population in England at the time. The Vikings did not come close to that. And where the earlier Anglo-Saxons apparently did not mix with the native Britons, the Vikings did exactly that with the now Anglo-Saxon English.

By these measures, the Vikings were not as bad as their reputation and the written sources suggest.

If the Viking Age is to be defined as the period when piracy, migration, and ethnic cleansing was predominant, the period should start much earlier.

Of course, there is more to the Viking Age than piracy and pillaging. But this is another story for another day.

This article was originally published on ScienceNordic

READ ALSO: Danish Vikings 'may have made their own wine'

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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Le Havre rules: How to talk about French towns beginning with Le, La or Les

If you're into car racing, French politics or visits to seaside resorts you are likely at some point to need to talk about French towns with a 'Le' in the title. But how you talk about these places involves a slightly unexpected French grammar rule. Here's how it works.

An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre.
An old WW2 photo taken in the French port town of Le Havre. It can be difficult to know what prepositions to use for places like this - so we have explained it for you. (Photo by AFP)

If you’re listening to French chat about any of those topics, at some point you’re likely to hear the names of Mans, Havre and Touquet bandied about.

And this is because French towns that have a ‘Le’ ‘La’ or ‘Les’ in the title lose them when you begin constructing sentences. 

As a general rule, French town, commune and city names do not carry a gender. 

So if you wanted to describe Paris as beautiful, you could write: Paris est belle or Paris est beau. It doesn’t matter what adjectival agreement you use. 

For most towns and cities, you would use à to evoke movement to the place or explain that you are already there, and de to explain that you come from/are coming from that location:

Je vais à Marseille – I am going to Marseille

Je suis à Marseille – I am in Marseille 

Je viens de Marseille – I come from Marseille 

But a select few settlements in France do carry a ‘Le’, a ‘La’ or a ‘Les’ as part of their name. 

In this case the preposition disappears when you begin formulating most sentences, and you structure the sentence as you would any other phrase with a ‘le’, ‘la’ or ‘les’ in it.

Masculine

Le is the most common preposition for two names (probably something to do with the patriarchy) with Le Havre, La Mans, Le Touquet and the town of Le Tampon on the French overseas territory of La Réunion (more on that later)

A good example of this is Le Havre, a city in northern France where former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, who is tipped to one day run for the French presidency, serves as mayor. 

Edouard Philippe’s twitter profile describes him as the ‘Maire du Havre’, using a masculine preposition

Here we can see that his location is Le Havre, and his Twitter handle is Philippe_LH (for Le Havre) but when he comes to describe his job the Le disappears.

Because Le Havre is masculine, he describes himself as the Maire du Havre rather than the Maire de Havre (Anne Hidalgo, for example would describe herself as the Maire de Paris). 

For place names with ‘Le’ in front of them, you should use prepositions like this:

Ja vais au Touquet – I am going to Le Touquet

Je suis au Touquet – I am in Le Touquet 

Je viens du Touquet – I am from Le Touquet 

Je parle du Touquet – I am talking about Le Touquet

Le Traité du Touquet – the Le Touquet Treaty

Feminine

Some towns carry ‘La’ as part of their name. La Rochelle, the scenic town on the west coast of France known for its great seafood and rugby team, is one such example.

In French ‘à la‘ or ‘de la‘ is allowed, while ‘à le‘ becomes au and ‘de le’ becomes du. So for ‘feminine’ towns such as this, you should use the following prepositions:

Je vais à La Rochelle – I am going to La Rochelle

Je viens de La Rochelle – I am coming from La Rochelle 

Plural

And some places have ‘Les’ in front of their name, like Les Lilas, a commune in the suburbs of Paris. The name of this commune literally translates as ‘The Lilacs’ and was made famous by Serge Gainsbourg’s song Le Poinçonneur des Lilas, about a ticket puncher at the Metro station there. 

When talking about a place with ‘Les’ as part of the name, you must use a plural preposition like so:

Je suis le poinçonneur des Lilas – I am the ticket puncher of Lilas 

Je vais aux Lilas – I am going to Les Lilas

Il est né aux Lilas – He was born in Les Lilas  

Islands 

Islands follow more complicated rules. 

If you are talking about going to one island in particular, you would use à or en. This has nothing to do with gender and is entirely randomised. For example:

Je vais à La Réunion – I am going to La Réunion 

Je vais en Corse – I am going to Corsica 

Generally speaking, when talking about one of the en islands, you would use the following structure to suggest movement from the place: 

Je viens de Corse – I am coming from Corsica 

For the à Islands, you would say:

Je viens de La Réunion – I am coming from La Réunion 

When talking about territories composed of multiple islands, you should use aux.

Je vais aux Maldives – I am going to the Maldives. 

No preposition needed 

There are some phrases in French which don’t require any a preposition at all. This doesn’t change when dealing with ‘Le’ places, such as Le Mans – which is famous for its car-racing track and Motorcycle Grand Prix. Phrases that don’t need a preposition include: 

Je visite Le Mans – I am visiting Le Mans

J’aime Le Mans – I like Le Mans

But for a preposition phrase, the town becomes simply Mans, as in Je vais au Mans.

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