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  • Frisians and Their North Sea Neighbors: From the Fifth Century to the Viking Age ed. by John Hines and Nelleke IJssennagger
  • Joseph Salmons
Frisians and Their North Sea Neighbors: From the Fifth Century to the Viking Age. Edited by John Hines and Nelleke IJssennagger. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017. Pp. xx + 279; 29 color, 46 b/w illustrations. $120.

Interdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity and all the related buzzwords have long since, for me at least, grown tiresome. People far too often claim to be doing such work and far too seldom actually engage in it with vigor or rigor. Happily, the present volume makes not much more than passing mention of working across and between disciplines, but then goes on to practice the art with contributions from archeologists, (pre-)historians, philologists, linguists, legal historians, and others. What I know about medieval Frisia and Frisian comes almost exclusively from linguistics and philology, and I learned a tremendous amount from this pleasant read about issues from archeaology to physical geography, in ways that connect naturally—and are explicitly connected across twelve chapters—with language. Medieval studies is today in some ways a hip area to be working in, in part surely because of this kind of deft integration of insights from a range of fields that have been making great strides and offer more when synthesized with the right empirical focus.

In this review, I will briefly summarize the individual chapters, with particular attention to linguistic issues, since these are what I know best, then close with a few more general and more evaluative observations. First, though, it is worth noting that the book is an attractive physical object, printed on high quality paper and with almost ninety illustrations, color maps, photographs, and drawings, plus [End Page 303] tables. The book includes abstracts of the chapters before a brief introduction, twelve meaty chapters, and a modest index. (And just to get it out of the way: the book is generally cleanly written and produced—the occasional typographical errors or stylistic rough spots hardly merit mention.)

The Introduction, "The Frisians—Who, When, Where, Why?" by John Hines and Nelleke IJessennagger (pp. 1–4), sets the stage succinctly and clearly, laying out the difficulties of exactly who the Frisians were and what was going on with them from the end of Roman imperial rule until into the Viking period, a notoriously dark but crucial period in the history of West Germanic. Perhaps most importantly for the volume, the editors stress that the organization—chronological and geographical rather than by academic discipline—is central to the book's purpose as synthesis and integration of what we know, as already alluded to above.

In "Paleogeography and People: Historical Frisians in an Archaeological Light," Egge Knol and Nelleke IJssennagger (pp. 5–24) lay out the broad evidence on the complex and ever-changing physical landscape at hand and correlate that with key waves of settlement and resettlement as they are currently understood. To the former point, the landscape was dramatically altered in the process by human activity, notably with the creation of terps, raised areas that allowed more secure settlement. To the latter, the sea made possible Viking raids after 810 but also allowed robust trading with many partners, including especially English and Scandinavians communities, which probably involved "great numbers of Frisians" (p. 19).

John Hines's "The Anglo-Frisian Question" (pp. 25–42) treats, in an easily accessible way that means the chapter could be assigned to early-career students, the thorny and longstanding question of whether shared features between English and Frisian reflect a genetic subbranch of West Germanic on the one hand or language contact and even convergent development over time on the other. Situating the discussion in linguistic and extralinguistic contexts, Hines lays stress on the ongoing and often intense contacts into late in the relevant time period, a situation suggestive of a role for convergent development.

"Frisian between the Roman and the Early Medieval Period: Language Contact, Celts and Romans," by Peter Schrijver (pp. 43–52) reviews the author's long-held position, one that some find controversial, that Frisian was...

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