Deck 3: Old English: the Viking Invasions and Their Consequences 700-10661100

Question 1

How did the Christianization of the Vikings contribute to the stability of England after King Alfred's victory over the forces under Guthrum at Edington?

Answer 1

Christianization was an important step in the process of assimilation of the Danes to Anglo-Saxon culture. This is understandably the case in societies in which religion plays a central unifying role and contributes to
accommodation­ and the development of a cultural identity. Furthermore, the relationship between the Church and the Wessex monarchy was very close, each supporting the other.

Question 2

How do the two poems quoted in the excerpts ("Brunanburh" and "Maldon") reflect "national" self-awareness among the Saxons?

Answer 2

"Brunanburh" celebrated the Saxon victory over the Vikings and Scots, invoking their Saxon ancestors and homeland and apostrophizing the Scots and Vikings as enemies, fated to fall.
"Maldon" also invoked the homeland against the heathens and mentions the shame that the taking of booty from the Saxons without the Saxons offering resistance would mean.
Furthermore, coming after the Norman Conquest, this poem has a patriotic appeal to a Saxon identity.

Question 3

The written literature we have from the OE period may not give a balanced view of the language. Ex-plain why this is the case.

Answer 3

See the answer given to Social-cultural background 2.5, repeated here:
Because of the limited number of registers available we have no real examples of everyday language. Much of what was written may have been outdated, if not directly archaic at the time of composition.

Question 4

What speaks for and what against seeing the weakening of inflections as the result of ON-OE contact?

Question 5

Quite a number of ON-OE lexical doublets exist that may be credited to borrowings from ON that go back to the same roots as the corresponding OE words. Where they continue to exist there is a semantic differentiation between the two. Explain how the following pairs differ:

Question 6

How are the effects of ON on the language evident in ModE? Give examples from the areas of inflection, syntax, and regional dialect vocabulary.

Question 7

Just how present were the Vikings in England. Look at estimates of the numerical relations and of blood-type representation as well as of DNA-evidence. Some literature (see the general bibliography) which you might start with include the following: Sykes 2006, 2007 and Thomas, Stumpf, and Härke 2006.

Question 8

Look at further OE-ON doublets and see how they are differentiated from one another semantically. Examples of such ModE doublets are till-to; die-starve; skin-hide; take-nim; sky-heaven; ill-evil; scathe-harm; raise-rear.

Question 9

In this chapter we have assumed in Table 3.2 that ON was the superstrate and OE, the substrate in the Danelaw area. However, an earlier comment in §3.3 suggests something different: "ON may initially have been the superstrate, but later, even in Danelaw times, the substrate." Assuming a situation of creolization between ON and OE which language would be the superstrate and which the substrate language? Justify your conclusion.