Description

The Vikings had a major and lasting impact on the English language. This volume is a unique companion to the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact, providing expert discussions of its contexts, backgrounds, and the considerable afterlife of its effects through the Middle Ages and down to the present day. It contains thirteen new articles by leading specialists in the fields of early medieval languages, literature, and history, specially commissioned in order to explore as wide a range as possible of the historical and cultural contexts for Anglo-Scandinavian encounters in the Viking Age and the evidence for them. These essays analyse in detail the Old Norse influence on English, offering studies of words and their meanings in their textual and literary contexts, and including lexicography, dialectology, and syntactic research; they explore findings from archaeology, inscriptions, and place-names; and they situate Anglo-Scandinavian contacts in the larger multilingual, multicultural contexts of the North Sea and Irish Sea worlds.