Were Old Norse and Old English a single language?
I say hām, you say heimr, let's call the whole thing off.
Ancient and medieval texts are full of surprises.
For example, one group of people living near the Baltic apparently had access to refrigeration technology in the late 800s (according to the Old English Orosius).
Or here’s another one: there was apparently a kind of magnetic wood in India that could attract not only metals but also any sparrows which happened to fly too close. If the log was big enough, it could also pull in sheep and goats!
But weirder still is what we read in the 13th-century Icelandic saga Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu, which tells us that Old Norse and Old English were, in fact, one language:
Ein var þá tunga á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmǫrku.
‘Then (c. AD 1000) the language in England was the same as in Norway and in Denmark.’
Naturally, these kinds of claims invite a healthy suspicion. Jackson Crawford and Simon Roper have a great video where they test it out, and reenact a hypothetical conversation between a speaker of Old Norse and Old English as a kind of “experimental linguistic archaeology.”
They set their conversation in the East Midlands of England around AD 1000. Jackson Crawford played a speaker of the Danish variety of Old Norse, and Simon Roper played a speaker of late Mercian Old English. These dialects will be relevant later.
Their conversation is well worth watching in its entirety (it only lasts a couple of minutes), if for no other reason than to hear what these languages sounded like pronounced in a conversational manner.
But for us the important thing is what they concluded from this experiment, namely that two people trying to make themselves understood to each other across this linguistic divide would indeed have succeeded.
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If these heroes of Germanic linguistics Youtube are correct, the two languages were therefore — to some degree, at least — mutually intelligible. And, according to the mutual intelligibility criterion, that means they are best thought of as two dialects of a single language.
And yet… it certainly doesn’t feel that way. At least in my experience, it’s not particularly easy, even for a skilled reader of Old English, to start reading Old Norse texts without some training.
I forget exactly when I started reading Old Norse, but it was after I’d been studying Old English for at least four years. By that point my ability to read, write, and speak Old English had advanced to what I’ll call, for modesty’s sake, a very functional level.
Therefore, when I picked up my first Old Norse text — Hrólfs saga kraka (the Saga of Hrólf Kraki) — I expected to find it pretty easy, buoyed as I was by the reputation of the two languages as mutually intelligible.
What I found, however, was that I could understand only about 80% of the words I encountered at first glance. This might seem like a lot. But, well, it isn’t. There’s no way you can follow a story with only 80% comprehension. Even though my Old English was surely helping me, it wasn’t helping me enough to read the text with ease.
So I set myself to studying Old Norse, which has been a delightful experience.
But I was troubled: why was Old Norse so hard for me, a proficient speaker of Old English, to understand? Was I the problem? Or were the two languages really as mutually intelligible as advertised?
To figure out the answer, I did what I usually do: read a stack of books. And what I found in those books is that Simon and Jackson were right. It’s likely that Old English and Old Norse were indeed mutually intelligible, but probably only in certain contexts.
To understand why this was the case — and why my Old English ability didn’t translate into Old Norse — we need to become familiar with the history of Old Norse and Old English, the circumstances which brought Old Norse to England, and the linguistic and psychological processes by which we understand other accents in our native language.
This quest will take us through the domains of literature, linguistics, and the study of place names (of all things). Let’s begin.
