By Jackson Crawford, University Of Colorado, Boulder
Old Norse and the English language are strikingly related at a deep level, a fact evident in much of our everyday vocabulary inherited from a common ancestor language, less than two thousand years ago. For example, the Old Norse words for kinship relations are almost identical to our own—the Old Norse words fathir, mothir, brothir, systir, and dottir require little explanation. And yet, the relationship between the languages became more complicated during the Viking Age. How?
Borrowings from Old Norse
When the Viking settlers in eastern England settled down and slowly became integrated into the English population over the next several centuries, it influenced their relationship with their language. The result was that since the two languages were close enough, the Norse settlers were readily able to bring much of their own Old Norse vocabulary into the English language and wound up learning it.
It is an astonishing fact that, of the one thousand words we use most often each day in English, about one-tenth are borrowings from Old Norse.
This is in addition to the inherited words that Old English and Old Norse already had in common from the more distant past, like the kinship terms. Words borrowed from the Viking Age Old Norse include such incredibly common words as ‘they’ and ‘them’ and basic verbs like ‘get’, ‘give’, and ‘take’.
The Interchange of Fundamental Vocabulary
Crucially, it is worth noting that it is not normal for a language to borrow words for such simple concepts from another language. The English later did borrow thousands of words from the French, but these were mostly formal or specialized words from high registers of vocabulary.
Thus, the intimate interchange of fundamental vocabulary between Old English and Old Norse reflects how easily a speaker of one could learn the other, or make himself understood in his own language with only some minor accommodations for speakers of the other.
However, as trade and contact between England and Scandinavia diminished in the intervening centuries, the English language and the Scandinavian languages have changed considerably, in their own distinctive ways. Still, Scandinavian language speakers find English an easy language to learn, and English speakers will find the same is true of the Scandinavian languages if they spend a little effort on Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish.
The same, nonetheless, is not quite true for an English speaker approaching the more archaic Icelandic language, or Old Norse itself.
This article comes directly from content in the video series Norse Mythology. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
A Close Linguistic Relationship
On the one hand, on the surface, there are still close linguistic relationships between Old Norse and English that are easy to perceive. This includes not only in vocabulary, where counting to ten is a reasonably familiar process: einn, tveir, thrir, fjorir, fimm, sex, sjau, atta, niu and tiu; but it also includes grammar. Much of the more complicated grammar of older stages of English has worn away with time, but is still readily perceptible in Old Norse or even Modern Icelandic.
Consider early modern English ‘I am’, ‘thou art’, ‘that is’, which in the early Old Norse of a poem like Hávamál are, ek em, thu ert, and that es. These close correspondences are more than just coincidence. They are the vestiges of deeply linked roots.
Not Readily Translatable into Contemporary English
Over time, the learner of Old Norse can learn many ‘tricks’ and correspondences that make new vocabulary in Old Norse easy to recognize. For example, inherited English words with the [oh] sound always correspond to words with the [ei] sound in Old Norse—bone and bein, stone and stein, home and heim.
But, in spite of readily visible similarities, Old Norse is not really readily translatable into our contemporary English without a severe change of grammar and style. Old Norse has a grammar and style so archaic from our perspective that translating it into a convincing English idiom is a goal that has eluded translators for centuries.
For some reason, when something is old, translators have felt compelled to make it sound old in English. Popular translations of the Eddas are laden with ‘thous’ and ‘thees’ and other such archaic words that make Thor and Odin sound like characters in a Shakespeare play.
Not Relatable
There, clearly, is no reason to translate the original poems into a stiff kind of English that creates an unnecessary barrier—and that can push readers into seeking more accessible, but less reliable, secondary works.
Keeping them simple will encourage the readers to engage with these texts and continue to find things worth remembering in the eerie tales, and timeless wisdom, of the Norse gods and heroes.
As Odin says in Hávamál, stanza 57:
A torch is lit by another
and burns till it’s burned out;
a fire is kindled by another fire.
A man becomes wise
by speaking with other men,
but foolish by keeping to himself.
Common Questions about How English and the Old Norse Language Are Linked
It is an astonishing fact that, of the one thousand words we use most often each day in English, about one-tenth are borrowings from Old Norse.
The intimate interchange of fundamental vocabulary between Old English and Old Norse reflects how easily a speaker of one could learn the other, or make himself understood in his own language with only some minor accommodations for speakers of the other.
In spite of readily visible similarities, Old Norse is not really readily translatable into our contemporary English without a severe change of grammar and style.
