Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
As I watched the Norway soccer team win more games than they were expected to win in the World Cup, and saw the team and its fans join in synchronized air-rowing and chanting of “Roo!” or “Hoo!” at each stroke, I got to thinking about the Vikings, the team’s nickname, and this thing about rowing. Of course the longboats of the old Vikings had sails, but when they entered inlets or rivers they took up oars. That, believe it or not, may be why Russia is called Russia. The old name Rus’ (the apostrophe indicates a Slavic way of altering the final s) referred at first to settlements of Norsemen near the Volkhov River in northern Russia; the name seems to come from a word much like Old Norse roa (“row”) or rothr (“a rowing”), which is how they got there. Those two Old Norse words are clearly akin to English row and rudder, and go back all the way to Proto-Indo-European, as we can see in Latin remus and Old Irish ramae, both meaning “oar.” So the Russians are named after rowers!
As for Viking itself, it is borrowed from Old Norse (or Icelandic) vikingr, which scholars have thought comes from vik (“inlet, creek”), which was where they were seen by the unfortunate folk who lived near one. But it seems the similar Old English word for these invaders (wicing) already existed before the Old Norse name was picked up, and that word seems to be based on wic, which could refer to the encampments the Vikings set up when they disembarked. Wic could mean any settlement, town, or farm; in today’s English it survives in placenames such as Chiswick, Ipswich, Sandwich, and Warwick, as well Wickham, and in the word bailiwick. Its origin seems to be Latin vicus (the v sounded like a w), which meant “village” and is where we get vicinity. It goes way back too: it is akin to Greek oikos (“house, household”), earlier woikos. The Vikings had much to do with inlets and encampments, not to mention more frightening activities, and their name seems to be based on one or the other, or both.
But the Vikings didn’t just make raids and row off with booty and slaves. Eventually they came to stay. In 865 the “Great Heathen Army” of Vikings, called “Danes,” invaded East Anglia and within fourteen years conquered about half the Anglo-Saxon part of Britain. They made York (then called Eoforwick) their center, but got as far south as London before their momentum subsided. Wars with the Anglo-Saxon states continued and large chunks of land often traded hands. As late as 1035 Cnut the Great (or King Canute) ruled nearly all of England as well as Denmark, Norway, and part of Sweden. Not all was peaceful in the homeland, however, and in September 1066 Harald Hardrada, having failed to claim the Danish throne, invaded England and defeated some local forces. A larger English army then annihilated his forces and killed Harald.
This detail is worth noting because in the very next month the English, having fended off these new Vikings, were defeated by William of Normandy at Hastings. William “The Conqueror” conquered most of England, including the Danish regions, in short order. And who were the Normans? They were originally “North-men,” Norsemen, Vikings, but they had settled in France for several generations and spoke French. They apparently retained their penchant for invasions.
So from 865 to 1066 large swathes of England were controlled and settled by people who spoke Old Norse, the term for the oldest form of Scandinavian that we know of, the same as Old Icelandic. Old Norse was a Germanic language, like Old English, but in the northern branch, distinctly different from the more southerly “western” branch (Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, etc), but close enough that some sort of awkward communication was possible, so English speakers, especially in northern areas, absorbed lots of Norse words.
Take this simple pair of clauses: They are wrong: seek them both until they die. Every word here is from Old Norse, not Old English, though there is some dispute about are. You would think that words with such basic meanings, including pronouns, would not be replaced by foreign words. Words of Norman French origin are everywhere in Modern English, but they did not displace many words as basic as these. Old Norse words did. The two languages were close enough that words could hop from one to another without many complications. Egg, for instance, replaced Old English aeg, once itself with a “hard” g but probably then pronounced aye, like German Ei. Old Norse sveinn (“boy, servant, attendant”) replaced Old English swon or swan with similar meanings; it became swain, visible today in boatswain and coxswain. By itself it evolved from “servant” to “countryman” or “shepherd,” and then, mainly in pastoral poetry, to a “young rustic in love with a maiden,” as in: “Who is Silvia? What is she, that all our swains commend her?” in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the Scandinavian languages today Sven is a common given name, best known in English now as the lovable reindeer in Disney’s Frozen.
Here is a short list of some of the most common English words that we owe to the Vikings: the verbs take, get, like, call, seem, guess, want, run, cut, and hit; and the nouns leg, birth, dream, window, fellow, score, anger, cap, and bag. If asked, we might have said that these are all Old English words, so well do they blend in with the other old words. Well, they were absorbed into English when it was Old, but they are not part of the original Old English stock, brought over in the fifth or sixth century from the Continent.
A number of words beginning sk- go back to Old Norse, such as skill, skin, skip, skirt, skulk, and sky. Sky, for example, originally meant “cloud,” and that meaning can be found as late as Chaucer. Belonging to this set is the noun scold, which means a person, often a woman, “known for using coarse or abusive language” (OED); it seems to come from skald, which meant “poet” or “bard”! Rather odd, that. It seems that these Nordic bards often lampooned and libeled people, and were not much liked.
One of my favorite Old Norse words is uggligr (“fearful”), from which we get ugly. It comes from a verb ugga (“fear”), which also entered English as ug, usually meaning “disgust.” As late as 1894 in Northumberland this sentence was recorded: “He was ugged wi’ eatin the stuff.” I think we should bring it back. There is a man in Washington who seriously ugs me.
I’ll conclude with a word that only entered English in 1818 in a book about Iceland: berserk. It was a noun, not the adjective it is today. It is good Old Norse or Old Icelandic: berserkr, made up of two parts: ber (“bear”) and serkr (“shirt”). It refers to a man who wore a bear-skin, as opposed to proper armor, when he fought his enemies. According to the poet Snorri Sturluson, there were men devoted to the god Odin who rushed into battle without armor, the berserksgangr. Odin (Old Norse Othinn, Old English Woden) was the god of war-fury or frenzy. Old Icelandic othr meant “mad”; the German noun Wut means “fury” or “rage”; the English word wood means “mad,” and is still in use in Scotland. It seems these warriors worked themselves up into a kind of ecstasy in which they feared nothing and charged into battle naked, or dressed as rabid bears or wolves. This practice too may go back to the Indo-Europeans, for there is an Assyrian inscription of 1228 BCE that describes such warriors: they may have been Hittites. They must have been terrifying.
The more civilized Norwegian soccer team, however, kept their uniforms on, and Erling Haaland’s “foul” that disallowed a goal was no more than a push. But their fans went berserk.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.