The Viking World (Routledge Worlds)

Dynna

×kunuur×kirþi×bru×þririkstutir×iftira ̨sriþi×tutur×sina×suuasmarhanarst×a ̨haþalanti

Gunnvo ̨r gerði brú, Þrýðriks dóttir, eptir Ásríði, dóttur sína. Sú vas mær ho ̨nnurst á

Haðalandi.

Gunnvo ̨r, Þrýðrikr’s daughter, made a bridge after Ásríðr, her daughter. She was the

handiest maid in Haðaland.

How far the carver of this inscription used mutated o ̨ in his/her speech is uncertain. The
third u in kunuur clearly indicates a vowel other than /a/, but there the rounding of the
vowel is assisted by the immediately preceding [w]. In hannarst, on the other hand
(normalised as ho ̨nnurst in keeping with standardised Old Norse orthography), a pro-
nunciation /han:arst/ seems most likely. This fits with what we know of later eastern
Norwegian, where u-mutation is much less consistent than in the West. Mær is from
older ma ̄, with replacement of the palatal fricative (see Kälvesten above) by /r/, and
front mutation /a/ > /æ/ presumed to have been caused by the palatal before its
replacement.

SCANDINAVIAN IN THE COLONIES

As a result of Viking expansion and settlement Scandinavian-speaking communities
were established in areas as diverse as Normandy, the British Isles, the Faroes, Iceland,
Greenland, coastal Finland and Russia. If we assume that dialectal variation of one kind
or another existed during the period of settlement, it follows that differing forms of
Scandinavian will have been in use in the colonies. It is, however, impossible to know
what first-generation immigrant speech in, say, England, Iceland, Ireland or Russia, was
like. In those areas where Scandinavian subsequently died out, the most we can hope for
are occasional glimpses of the language, mostly from well after the original period of
settlement. It is no surprise to discover that a recent book on linguistic relations
between speakers of Old Norse and Old English stresses how hard it is to identify
dialectal features in the Scandinavian of England (Townend 2002 : 28 ). The varieties of
colonial Scandinavian that survived – Icelandic, Faroese and Finland-Swedish – by the
time they are first attested, represent the products of several hundreds of years (at least) of
linguistic levelling (Finland-Swedish, indeed, must be in part, if not wholly, the legacy
of Swedish incursions into Finland in the twelfth century and later).
Certain things can nevertheless reasonably be concluded about the linguistic legacy
of the Viking expansion. In Normandy and Russia the kind of Scandinavian spoken is
likely to have reflected that in use in ninth- and tenth-century Denmark and Sweden
respectively, since it is from those regions that the bulk of the settlers appear to have
come. In both places Scandinavian is likely to have died out after two or three gener-
ations, and in neither did it leave more than a faint impression on the indigenous
language(s).
In most parts of the British Isles Scandinavian will have lasted a while longer: in
England because of new waves of immigration in the tenth and early eleventh centuries;
in Ireland as a result of its concentration in urban centres; in the Isle of Man and the

–– Michael P. Barnes––