In this article, I take up the case of runic writing to reflect upon James Scott’s view of the nexus between writing and various forms of domination in early states, especially the use of literacy for taxation in cereal-growing societies. Scott’s theses provide interesting matter “to think with,” even when his grasp of historical detail has been found wanting. It is not controversial to grant Scott that cuneiform writing was a remarkable tool for statecraft, and exploitation, in the first states of Mesopotamia, around 3500 BC. The same is true of writing in other early states. But in the first states of Scandinavia, particularly Denmark ca. AD 500–800, writing had a more troubled relationship with the state. No evidence survives that runic writing was used to administer taxation or much else, as it was in other agrarian civilisations. It is true that the runic script was used to commemorate kings, most famously by Haraldr Blátǫnn (r. ca. 958–ca. 986.). But, statistically speaking, it was more often used to aggrandize the sort of local big men who usually resisted centralized power. In this article, I survey the relationship between runic writing and administration. I consider what the Danish situation suggests about the relationship between states and writing and offer a tentative hypothesis of a short-lived attempt at runic bureaucracy around 800, which created—and quickly lost control of—a shortened variety of the runic script (the Younger Futhark).

This paper reconsiders the passage in Maxims I in which Woden is said to have constructed wēos, a word that can be understood to mean “idols” or “pagan shrines.” It compares the passage to various euhemeristic narratives concerning Woden (or Óðinn) preserved by authors such as Ælfric, Æthelweard, Saxo Grammaticus, and Snorri Sturluson, and it argues that the Maxims I passage has more in common with ideas expressed in the later Scandinavian sources than in the earlier homiletic or insular historiographical sources. This exercise in comparative euhemerism suggests that the Woden passage in Maxims I is indebted to a narrative that resembled either the story of Óðinn's misadventure with an idol (preserved in Gesta Danorum) or the story of Óðinn as the builder of temples and founder of pagan religion (preserved in Ynglinga saga). In either case, it appears that a euhemeristic narrative of the sort preserved by Snorri and Saxo circulated centuries earlier in England. Toponymic evidence lends support to this conclusion, as place-names such as Wōdnes dīc and Grīmes dīc bear witness to the early circulation of otherwise unrecorded ideas about Woden as a supernatural builder. Finally, the presence of the Woden passage in Maxims I is viewed as a manifestation of the poem's indebtedness to the tradition of the wisdom contest, a genre associated with Óðinn in Old Norse sapiential literature.

The Gersum Project has significantly developed our understanding of Norse-derived terms in English by providing a highly systematic typology for their identification. However, this article shows that, in order to fully comprehend the lexical impact that Anglo-Scandinavian contact had on medieval English, we need to go beyond the identification of the Norse-derived terms and explore their process of integration into English. To exemplify the benefits of this approach, the article analyses the make-up of the lexico-semantic field of emotion, particularly fear, in the texts attributed to the Gawain-poet, and examines the interaction between native, Norse- and French-derived terms. This analysis moves away from the traditional study of the texts’ vocabulary in relation to their sociohistorical context, considering the terms instead from semasiological, onomasiological and stylistic perspectives. By taking this novel approach, this article addresses key linguistic and literary topics: the formal and semantic factors that facilitated the integration of Norse-derived terms into this lexico-semantic field and, more broadly, the impact that multilingualism had on the expression of emotions in medieval England; diachronic and diatopic variation in the field; and the Gawain-poet's artistry and interest in fear as a key emotion closely linked to other affective and cognitive processes.

This article undertakes the first systematic examination of Frank’s (1979, 1981, 1987, 1990, 2007b, 2008) claim that Old Norse influence is discernible in the language of Beowulf. It tests this hypothesis first by scrutinizing each of the alleged Nordicisms in Beowulf, then by discussing various theoretical considerations bearing on its plausibility. We demonstrate that the syntactic, morphological, lexical, and semantic peculiarities that Frank would explain as manifestations of Old Norse influence are more economically and holistically explained as consequences of archaic composition. We then demonstrate that advances in the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact provide strong reasons to doubt that Old Norse could have influenced Beowulf in the manner that Frank has proposed. We conclude that Beowulf is entirely devoid of Old Norse influence and that it was probably composed ca. 700, long before the onset of the Viking Age.

This research studies language contact as a possible cause of differences between languages in their degree of transparency. As transparency is assumed to facilitate intelligibility and learnability, especially for adult L2 learners, it is hypothesized that in particular contact settings with many such learners, languages tend to show increasing transparency. The study tests this hypothesis by investigating transparency in Norwegian, which has been exposed to extensive contact with Low German and Danish, and the relatively isolated Icelandic language. Based on a set of opacity features formulated in Functional Discourse Grammar, the degree of transparency of the two languages is compared. The results show that, as predicted, Norwegian is more transparent than Icelandic, which seems due to an increase in transparency in Norwegian and general opacity maintenance in Icelandic compared to their ancestor Old Norse. The study thus supports the hypothesized relation between language contact and transparency.

This paper argues that there is no reason to believe that full NP Object Shift (NPOS) was not found in Old Norse (Old Icelandic) nor that it is more common in Modern Icelandic than in earlier stages of the language. In addition, it is claimed that NPOS is also an option in Modern Faroese, contrary to common belief, although it is much more restricted in Faroese than in Icelandic. These results demonstrate the usefulness of systematic corpus studies while at the same time reminding us of their limits. In addition, they shed a new light on the status of Faroese among the Scandinavian languages and on the nature of intra-speaker variation and grammar competition.