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Introduction and background

When I was 17 I went to Iceland with my dad, it was the first trip I ever made to a northern European country. I have not been back to Iceland since, but, since that time, public awareness of the Nordic countries has increased in a way. This is perhaps a collective, unconscious movement, although it can partially be connected to better photography equipment, and more people photographing the northern lights; and can also be somewhat connected to the increase in TV series, films and books that focus on the Vikings. 

Being from England myself, the Vikings and the Nordic languages do have a very real connection to England, where I live. And so, it is understandable that more people in the UK and in the USA for example have an interest in connecting to these roots. But the way in which television and books present this ancestry to us, often does not coincide with the archaeological and linguistic evidence. The way in which the "Vikings" have been portrayed, has also sometimes, wrongly idealised their lifestyle and overstated their levels of personal freedom and good nature. Of course, some Vikings were good, and when we talk of the Nordic cultures as a whole, they were communities of people. "Viking" refers specifically to the lifestyle that often involved pillaging, and it seems that in our modern day "Nordic" and "Viking" have wrongly become interchangeable terms. 

There are also several more specific problems in how the Vikings and Norse are presented through the English language. We have to keep in mind that there is a great level of idealisation. "Vikings" for over a century have represented something of a natural, wild masculinity. In modern feminism "Vikings" are also sometimes wrongly idealised, yes indeed, some women had more power in Viking society than in other societies, but this does not outweigh the immense injustices of this power committed towards women and others as attested through British history. It was only relatively recently when the "Vikings" became a popular and idealised people. 

There is an arguably unhealthy need in our society, at a collective level to "prove" Viking ancestry. I have heard individuals from Northumbria and from Aberdeenshire tell me that they probably have Viking ancestry, but in reality these areas were never particularly "Norse", they were more Anglic in linguistic terms, and formally Pictish in the case of Aberdeenshire. There are also notions for example that blonde hair is evidence of Viking ancestry, or that red hair is evidence of Viking ancestry, neither of which are true. 

In terms of the linguistics, there are immense problems in our assumptions about how Nordic languages interfaced with language in ancient Britain. As I have tried to demonstrate and have written and published about in numerous places: the links between Britain and Scandinavia go back thousands of years before the Vikings, at least as far back as the Maglemosian culture in the Upper Paleolithic period. There would therefore have been linguistic contact during this period, and it is entirely possible I think that some of our so-called "Vikings words" in English, actually belonged to far more ancient languages. It is likely that the languages in this period were not what we would call "Indo-European" languages, which is what the Nordic languages, and English, are. But I think it possible that even when these connections became linguistically "Germanic", they did so long before the Vikings. In the Neolithic and Bronze Ages there is already evidence for significant archaeological, cultural and genetic connections between Britain and Scandinavia. "Long houses" in England seem to be attested in the Bronze Age, and earlier; and many examples of the so-called "Old Norse" language in Britain, reflect a pronunciation more akin to that of Anglic or even Proto-Norse or Proto-Germanic. This can be observed simply by studying the "Norse" place-names in parts of Scotland and Northern England, but, like many things, this has not been picked up on by linguists or historians, and thus this much more complex linguistic and social history has been crammed into the definitions of "Viking invasion" and "Old Norse" language; when in reality I suspect that the "Vikings" and "Old Norse" are simply the most recent manifestations of cultural bonds that are thousands of years old. 

Our understanding of the Old Norse language, and of Old Norse religion, is also incredibly biased. The primary sources that are used or quoted by perhaps the vast majority of researchers are the Old Icelandic sagas and the kind of language used within them, generally referred to as "Old Norse" but I think the term "Old literary Icelandic" is more accurate. These sources were written down after Iceland was Christianised, and after Latin-based writing conventions were put into place. So essentially our popular ideas about Norse mythology, whilst absolutely holding historical merit and truth, are nevertheless biased to the Christian interpretations written in medieval Iceland. This is of course not representative of the Nordic world as a whole, or even of Iceland as a whole, and therefore when we try to implement these ideas to the word, and place them onto say, Britain, or Norway, or Denmark or Sweden, whilst ignoring the local Nordic folklore and languages, we are essentially misrepresenting our old history.