The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English by Sara M. Pons-Sanz (review)

John Donne’s dictum ‘doubt wisely’ (Satire 3, line 77) comes to mind when reading this book, which now takes its place as the standard and authoritative reference-work on the lexical effects of Scandinavian settlement in England from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Sara Pons-Sanz builds on her series of earlier publications, including two monographs, Analysis of the Scandinavian Loanwords in the Aldredian Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels (Universitat de València, 2000) and Norse-Derived Vocabulary in Late Old English Texts: Wulfstan’s Works, a Case Study (John Benjamins, 2007), in a work of fresh and insightful analysis, and rigorous critique of received views on the canon of Norse-derived loans.

Following the introductory and methodological discussion of Chapter 1, the book is divided into three parts. The first (Chapter 2) discusses the etymology and phonological/morphological form of each lexeme, and has as its companion Appendix III, listing words which formerly have been advanced as loan words, but which are rejected and re-categorised as ‘native’. Even those words that are counted as loans are often admitted only with qualification, and on a basis of probability following nuanced and complex argument. The evidence for Norse origin is frequently weighed against hypotheses that the form of a word may be explained alternatively as of native Old English origin on the basis of related words in the language, or cognates in the other West Germanic dialects. The evidence of dialectal and chronological distribution is also put into the equation. Even with some of the most commonly adduced and widely accepted loans, Pons-Sanz applies her ‘particularly sceptical view’ (p. 28) and plays Devil’s advocate. OE lagu ‘law’, for example, is ultimately accepted as Norse-derived, but only after the author has laid out the evidence of related nouns in OE such as feorlegu and orlæg, and cognates like Old High German urlag and Old Saxon orlag that leave at least a small possibility that we are dealing with a semantic loan rather than a loan-word, or with a fully native term. Stronger doubts are expressed about an item like OE cnif ‘knife’, although it is ultimately allowed into the corpus of 179 words and seven phrases. Some 145 items in Appendix III fail to make the cut.

Building on this rigorously selected corpus of words, Chapter 3 examines them from a lexico-semantic perspective, first examining their dialectal and chronological distribution, set out with splendid clarity in a series of tables based on chronological banding, and the location of texts within or outside Scandinavianised areas. Words are then sorted into their semantic fields, using a system of classification based on the Thesaurus of Old English, and examined in relation to their native OE synonyms. Thus, Pons-Sanz is able to provide ‘snapshots of the different stages of the terms’ integration into Old English’ (p. 242). One of the most interesting and complex cases is that of lagu, which moves from being a culturally marked ‘peripheral’ term in the field, to becoming the ‘core’ member, with the concomitant decline of native terms such as OE riht and, in the religious field, æ and bebod.

Chapter 4 examines Norse-derived terms in a set of selected texts, offered as case studies, and providing a model for further work of this kind. New insights into the relationship of the D- and E-recensions of the Chronicle entries from 1064 to 1080 are provided, for example. Pons-Sanz examines the apparent retention from the exemplar of Norse-derived words in the Worcester version, where they are replaced by native items in the Peterborough version. The case studies also cover Ælfric, Aldred’s and Owun’s glosses to the Lindisfarne and Rushworth Gospels, The Battle of Maldon, and the Lives of St Nicholas and St Giles. Finally, the author explores lexical...