How Vikings Influenced the Modern English Language

Knowledgable linguist Rob Watts of RobWords explained how the Old Norse language of the Vikings had a profound effect upon the modern English language with many very important words.

The Vikings raided, pillaged… and changed our language. Their Old Norse words invaded English and many remain to this day

This effect includes gender pronouns (she, he, them), key verbs (to be, to take, to crawl, to guess, to trust), words of violence (slaughter, ransack, club, knife, berserk), clothing words (skirt, shirt, shorts), words with “SK” origins (shabby, scabby, scatter, shatter, ship, skipper), doubled-up words (bathe, bask, ditch, dike, shriek, screech), English place names (Derby, Grimsby, Braithwaite, Langthwaite), Scottish place names (Jura, Lerwick), and surnames (Anderson, Carson, Harrison, MacAskill, MacArthur, MacIvor), and Norse gods (Thor, Tuesday, Wednesday).

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Vikings: Raiders, Traders and Settlers (Online Course)

The University of Oxford online course will run from Wednesday, 28 Sep 2022 to Friday 09 Dec 2022 

You can find further details here...

Reykjavík 871±2

IN 2001, ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS ON Aðalstræti unearthed the remains of a tenth-century longhouse with a wall dating back to 871±2, the oldest evidence of human habitation in Reykjavík.

The year is based on the layer of tephra deposited from a volcanic eruption in the Torfajökull area, which has been found all over Iceland and placed around 871 by carbon dating, with a range of possible inaccuracy of two years either way. The eruption coincides with the early years of Iceland’s settlement age, when the Norsemen started to migrate across the sea, as told by later medieval texts dealing with Icelandic history.

Managed by the City Museum, the Settlement Exhibition of Reykjavík 871±2 gives visitors a rare glimpse into the Viking Age, with the entirety of the excavated ruins displayed in the basement alongside a various collection of artifacts, from pieces of relics to everyday tools. Utilizing interactive multimedia, the exhibit gives an immersive experience and takes visitors back to the days of yore.

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Viking Textiles Show Women Had Tremendous Power

Cloth from Viking and medieval archaeological sites shows that women literally made the money in the North Atlantic

Archaeology has a representation problem. For most of the time that scholars have been probing the human past, they have focused mainly on the activities of men to the exclusion of women. There are a couple reasons for this bias. One is that the kinds of artifacts that tend to preserve well are made of inorganic materials such as stone or metal, and many are associated with behaviors stereotypically linked to men, such as hunting. Another reason is that early archaeologists were mostly men and more interested in men's work than in women's. As a result, our understanding of past cultures is woefully incomplete.

In recent years archaeologists have sought to fill that gap in our knowledge, in part by taking a closer look at traditionally ignored remains such as textiles, which had long been dismissed as trivial. Cloth rarely survives the centuries because it decomposes easily except under ideal preservation conditions. But even in a fragmentary state, it contains a wealth of information about the people who made and used it.

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