Norse-Derived Vocabulary in Late Old English Texts: Wulfstan's Works, A Case Study (review)

In Norse-Derived Vocabulary in Late Old English Texts: Wulfstan's Works, A Case Study, Sara Pons-Sanz offers readers a clearly organized and thorough examination of the Anglo-Saxon archbishop's use of Norse terms throughout his works. This timely book responds to a widely expressed need for Old English vocabulary studies that simultaneously address aspects of social and stylistic stratification, word-formation, and semantics. In addition, Pons-Sanz's work complements a number of recent studies such as Matthew Townend's Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English and Richard Dance's Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the South-West Midland Texts. As such, the book is a welcome contribution to our evolving understanding of linguistic contact between English and Norse speakers during this period.

The book begins with a consideration of the Wulfstanian corpus and outlines the distinctive features of the homilist's style. The following chapter explains the terminology and the method of the study in clear and explicitly defended terms. The discussion therein differs from those works that simply present lists of loan-words, such as Sergeantson's A History of Foreign Words in English, which has served as a standard reference for generations. Pons-Sanz, noting the proximity between Old English and Old Norse, "as well as the scarcity of extant Old English texts and the late date of the Scandinavian sources which can be consulted to determine the existence of a word in Old Norse" (p. 38), offers detailed rationales for considering a word Norse-derived and highlights that the study "is an attempt to clarify what Wulfstan's use of the terms generally accepted to be Norse-derived can suggest about his language and that of his contemporaries" (p. 67), judiciously underscoring aspects of probability and possibility with respect to the foreign origin of a word.

The study of Wulfstan's vocabulary itself begins with an exploration of the lagu and grið word-fields in chapters 3 and 4. The subsequent chapters treat remaining Norse-derived terms in Wulfstan's legal vocabulary (chap. 5) and technical terms in his works (chap. 6). Consequently, the bulk of the book's space and the weight of its analysis focus on the word-fields related to lagu and grið, so that the legal texts of the archbishop receive the most attention. This seemingly restricted scope is justifiable based on the nature of the evidence and on the principle that multiple in-depth studies-Pons-Sanz suggests more is to come-rigorously performed according to accepted contemporary methods will better serve future scholarship than a more sweeping but necessarily more superficial survey of a broader range of material.

The analysis of the middle chapters yields to broader issues in the following chapters which focus on the possible motivations for Wulfstan's use of Norse-derived vocabulary (chap. 7) and Wulfstan's impact on legal language (chap. 8). The most common explanations for Wulfstan's use of Norse-derived terms posit his contacts with his archbishopric in York, his addressing a Scandinavian audience, and his possible East Anglian origin. In parsing the evidence and the sometimes uncritical comments used to account for the phenomenon, Pons-Sanz demonstrates the implausibility of the first two explanations and the insufficiency of the evidence to substantiate the third. Pons-Sanz instead endeavors to understand why specific terms appealed to the archbishop and asserts that "it is, generally speaking, too simplistic to give one single reason for the selection of a Norse-derived term instead of a native synonym" (p. 229). In this straightforward sentence, the author subtly recognizes that Wulfstan's use of a Norse-derived word is not necessarily or exclusively a reflex of upbringing or an adaptation to address a specific...