The Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North 9780226493923

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The L anguage s of s candinavia

Fig. 1. (frontispiece) Map of the North and environs, including Mainland Scandinavia and the North Atlantic Islands. Illustration by Lara Thurston.

The Languages of Scandinavia s even sisTer s of Th e norT h

Ruth H. Sanders

The University of Chicago Press

c h ic ag o and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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isBn-13: 978-0-226-49389-3 (cloth) isBn-13: 978-0-226-49392-3 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226493923.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sanders, Ruth H., author. Title: The languages of Scandinavia : seven sisters of the North / Ruth H. Sanders. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Lccn 2017006141| isBn 9780226493893 (cloth : alk. paper) | isBn 9780226493923 (e-book) Subjects: Lcsh: Scandinavian languages—History. Classification: Lcc Pd1545 .s26 2017 | ddc 439/.5— dc23 Lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006141 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

List of Illustrations vii List of Tables ix Introduction • Dead Man Talking 1 1 • Prologue to History 11 2 • Gemini, the Twins: Faroese and Icelandic 31 3 • East Is East: Heralding the Birth of Danish and Swedish 65 4 • The Ties That Bind: Finnish Is Visited by Swedish 93 5 • The Black Death Comes for Norwegian: Danish Makes a House Call 113 6 • Faroese Emerges 133 7 • Sámi, Language of the Far North: Encounters with Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish 150 Epilogue • The Seven Sisters Now and in the Future 170 Acknowledgments 183 References 185 Index 201

Illustrations

Fig. 1 • Map of the North and environs: frontispiece ii Fig. 2 • Germanic language family tree 7 Fig. 3 • Finno-Ugric language family tree 8 Fig. 4 • Norse/Viking settlement 39 Fig. 5 • Odin’s eight-legged steed 48 Fig. 6 • The Norns 52 Fig. 7 • Lewis chess figures 61 Fig. 8 • The runic alphabet of twenty-four symbols 67 Fig. 9 • The British Isles 72 Fig. 10 • Cities of the Hanseatic League 78

Tables

1 • The Lord’s Prayer in Germanic Scandinavian languages 8 2 • The Lord’s Prayer in Finno-Ugric Scandinavian languages 9 3 • Timetable, 20,000 Bc–ad 400 14 4 • The Lord’s Prayer in Shetland Norn 35 5 • Timetable, ad 500–1199 37 6 • Genesis 8:15–17 in Bokmål and Nynorsk 130 7 • The Lord’s Prayer in Icelandic, Faroese, and English 143

Introduction: Dead Man Talking Þat kann ek it tólpta ef ek sé á tré uppi váfa virgilná svá ek ríst ok í runum fák ok sá gengr gumí ok mælir við mik (For the twelfth I know, if on a tree I see a corpse swinging from a halter, I can so grave and in runes depict, that the man shall walk, and with me converse.) Hávamál, 156, from The Poetic Edda

In very early times, the largely illiterate people of the North believed the ability to read the runes was a kind of magic. The people of Odin, All-Father of the pagan Norse, even considered Hávamál (Words of the High One) a gift from on high, its runic song-spells reginkunnr ‘of divine origin’ (Krause and Slocum 2013). It must have seemed wondrous that those initiated in reading the runes could call up the words of gods and of people long dead. Equally wondrous, those who inscribed the runes on stone could leave messages to the people of the future. Indeed, the runic treasure trove of information about the people of the North long ago can perhaps, as Hávamál described, make the dead—if not walk—at least converse with us as we read them. From the second century ad, the runes were the writing system both for North Germanic, the predecessor to Proto-Norse and then Old Norse (which emerged by about the eighth century ad), and for the other Germanic languages. As that world was Christianized, the runes were gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet. In their day, runes

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were used not only to prophesy the future and cast spells, but also for everyday purposes: to record, in stone and later on vellum, memories of loved ones, great deeds, historical events, and the laws and customs of the people of the European North. The Old Norse Hávamál, source of the song-spell cited above, is a long gnomic poem; that is, it consists of short proverbs or words of wisdom attributed to Odin. Some parts of it are traceable to the ninth or tenth century, when runes were still in use in the North. The Poetic Edda, of which it is a part, was, however, not written down until the thirteenth century, long after the North had been Christianized; and it was recorded not in runes, but in the Roman alphabet. In modern Scandinavia, if All-Father Odin is remembered by the descendants of his people, it is as a mysterious, though still eerily attractive, chimera from the mists of the past. The language of Odin has become the ancestor of five modern languages—Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Faroese, and Icelandic. Through millennia these languages have mutated, merged, split, and then merged again to separate still another time. Stones and documents in runes, carved and written until the fourteenth century ad, long after the Roman alphabet became dominant, have survived to our time in an incomplete but surprisingly information-rich collection of inscriptions. Their messages range from the brief and quotidian (for example, ek Hlewagastiz Holtijaz horna tawidō ‘I Hlewagastiz Holtijaz made the horn’, on the fifth-century Horn of Gallehus) to the lengthy and complex two-hundred-page Danish Codex Runicus of 1300, written in the by-then-archaic runes even though the Latin alphabet was already standard in Scandinavia by that time. This book narrates, primarily for the nonspecialist reader, highlights of the shared history from earliest times, insofar as it can be reconstructed, to modern times, of these five Norse daughter languages, plus two more: Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese, Finnish, and Sámi. These—the “Seven Sisters of the North”—are not, in traditional linguistic terms, all sister languages, since not all are descended from the same ancestor language; but they have been close neighbors in Fenno-Scandia for millennia, and their long-term intimate relationship is emphasized in this account. The chapters focus not so much on the languages alone as on their transforming relationships with each other. The stories of these languages are woven into the stories of all seven of the sisters. The histories of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese—members of the Germanic language family, itself

Dead Man Talking

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a member of the larger Indo-European family—are entwined with those of Finnish and Sámi, members of the Finno-Ugric family. In linguistic science, languages are conceived of as feminine: we speak of “mother tongues,” and “genetics” of “language families” that have “mother languages” and “daughter languages.” Thus, I have called these seven languages, from two language families, “sisters.” More accurately, they are stepsisters, members of a “blended” family— they grew up in the same household, have histories of squabbles and even of blood feuds, and in the end have influenced each other, not as strongly as their genetic forebears, but overall far more than any other languages have influenced them. Traditionally, studies of the linguistic history have separated the Indo-European, Germanic Scandinavian languages from the FinnoUgric Scandinavian languages because of their differing genetic origins. However, a crisscrossing of names, territories, and even to some extent language genetics in the North over millennia has created a body of shared culture, experience, and linguistic influence that invites us to consider these seven languages together. Uriel Weinreich, author of Languages in Contact (first edition 1953, reprinted many times; see Weinreich 2011) was probably the first scholar to investigate languages from the point of view of contact between them. This line of inquiry was applied in particular to the Scandinavian languages in the 1984 volume Scandinavian Language Contacts, whose editors, P. Sture Ureland and Iain Clarkson, write that “none of the Scandinavian languages have existed in a state of isolation, not even the most remote mountain dialects in the Norwegian fjord landscape, in the vast Swedish forest area, in the stormy Faroe Islands, or on the volcanic West Islands west of Iceland” (2009, 3). Further, as Dutch linguist Peter Schrijver writes, “a consequence of reintroducing language contact into language change is that it stresses the role of speakers . . . a reminder that the structure of a language is to a large extent determined by the vagaries of human history, rather than by the innate tendencies of the language beast that inhabits our brains” (2014, 200). Historian Byron J. Nordstrom reminds us that “during the early modern period, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, Norway (which nominally retained its status as a kingdom), and Finland were integral parts of the central kingdoms of Denmark or Sweden” (2000, 138). In fact, contact and concomitant language mingling and codevelopment have been part of the story of the Germanic languages and

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the Finno-Ugric languages of Scandinavia since the languages’ beginnings. This contact has amounted throughout history not only to language change, but to language life, language decline, and language renewal.

nomencL aT ur e Scatinavia and Scandia are first recorded as names for the North in Pliny the Elder’s ad 77 work Naturalis historia (Natural history). Pliny, like the Roman geographers who followed him, used these names to refer to northern islands in the present- day Danish Kattegat, a strait between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. In modern times, referring to Scandinavia and its languages requires some delicacy of nomenclature: “Scandinavian,” as used by linguists to refer to languages, peoples, and cultures, includes Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese, and Icelandic (all daughter languages of Old Norse, itself a Germanic language). In the American idiom, more casual use of “Scandinavian” often includes Finnish, and less often Sámi, people, languages, and cultures; for example, North American universities’ programs in Scandinavian studies commonly include both the Germanic and the Finno-Ugric languages of the region. For geographers, the Scandinavian Peninsula, or simply Scandinavia, is made up of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, including Lapland (or Sápmi). This geographic sense excludes three Scandinavian-languagespeaking nations: Denmark, not on the Scandinavian Peninsula but rather on the European mainland and several nearby islands; and the North Atlantic Faroe Islands and Iceland. Fennoscandia is a geographic term used for Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russian Karelia, and the Russian Kola Peninsula. Lapp and Lappish, old names, not used by the Sámi themselves, are now considered pejorative but once were used by other Scandinavians for the Sámi (sometimes spelled “Saami”) people or the Sámi language. In Swedish, though, Lappland is still the name of a northern Swedish province; and, in both Finnish and Northern Sámi, Lappi is the name of the northern region of Finland, Lappilainen the descriptor of a (non-Sámi) Finn who lives in that region. The Sámi people and many linguists regard Sámi as not one but several languages, among other reasons because its regional variants are so strongly differentiated; some are barely mutually understandable

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(more about this in chapter 7). But for ease of reference, in this volume the Sámi language group is considered as a unit. A descriptor that covers them all, languages, geography, and peoples of the seven sisters, is Nordic (though it is not as commonly used in the United States as in Scandinavia) or, as often heard in all these nations, the North (Swedish/Norwegian/Danish Norden; Finnish Pohjola; Sámi Davvi). The metaphor of seven sisters will suggest to many readers the Pleiades, the seven-star cluster especially prominent in the skies of the North and mythologized by the Ancient Greeks as the Seven Sisters. But I also intended it a literary reference to the seven brothers of Finland’s first novel, and still the one most widely known, Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän Veljestä (Seven brothers), of 1870. Like the seven brothers, the seven languages grew together for a while and then went their own ways. Faroese and Icelandic, for example, developed separately in their island realms from the Old West Norse brought first to the Faroe Islands and then to Iceland in the ninth century by Norwegian Viking settlers. Hence Modern Norwegian (including both variants, Nynorsk and Bokmål) is a daughter of Old West Norse, while Danish and Swedish are daughter languages of Old East Norse, developed during centuries of national struggle for territorial control in Denmark and Sweden. Faroese and Norwegian were each suppressed for a time by the government of Denmark, and Finnish by the government of Sweden, but afterward rose again to become the predominant languages of their nations, although in each case not without experiencing considerable linguistic change from the period of suppression. Nine of the ten extant variants of Sámi are in serious decline, at least partly because of past language policies of the politically and economically dominant Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish governments. But, as with the mischievous brothers of Kivi’s novel, such family feuds can be set aside: these languages, and their speakers, remain close.

fa miLy re semBL a nc e s The three Scandinavian languages with the largest numbers of speakers, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, are sometimes referred to by linguists as a “dialect continuum.” They are to a great extent mutually understandable in reading, writing, and speaking. If it were not for the fact that they are national languages of three sovereign nations that do

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not wish to unify their languages, they might be regarded as dialects, or variants. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, often referred to together as “Mainland Scandinavian,” are not subdivisions of a single modern language but are all daughters of long- extinct Old Norse. Icelandic and Faroese, the “Insular Scandinavian” languages of the North Atlantic islands, are also daughters of Old Norse. They are similar to each other in their written forms (although strongly differentiated in pronunciation), and they might also be considered a dialect continuum. Partly because of their geographic isolation from the Scandinavian Peninsula, both Icelandic and Faroese have kept many ancient characteristics of Old Norse and resemble it far more than they resemble Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Both Insular and Mainland Scandinavian developed from the Germanic language that was spoken in Northern Europe from the sixth century Bc or even earlier (evidence does not admit of a certain date). The breakup of ancient Germanic into dialects, some of which became separate languages (see family tree in fig. 2), accompanied massive emigration of Germanic speakers into virtually all of Europe and even North Africa. Finnish, living as it did in a nation dominated by Sweden for six centuries, has definitely been influenced by Swedish. In spite of that influence, though, Finnish and Swedish are not genetically related and are not mutually intelligible. Nor are Finnish and Sámi mutually intelligible in speaking or in writing. Nonetheless, they are daughters of a single extinct ancestor language, and they share fundamental linguistic similarities. Their ancestors Proto-Finno-Ugric and Proto-Uralic (a related, broader, category that includes the Samoyedic languages of what is today Siberia) present a history as complex as that of ProtoIndo-European. As we will see in later chapters, though it is not at all evident on the surface, closer observation reveals cross-linguistic influence, possibly even codevelopment, between the Finno-Ugric and the Germanic languages of the North. In historical times, this influence has more often been from the Germanic group on the Finno-Ugric group; there are many Germanic loanwords in Finno-Ugric. There is some evidence that influence flowed in the opposite direction in prehistoric times, when both flourished in the same territories in what is today northwestern Russia. Indeed, Schrijver argues that several thousand years ago, native

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Fig. 2. Germanic language family tree. Illustration by Lara Thurston.

speakers of Proto-Finno-Ugric played a seminal role in the development of Proto-Germanic, first by altering the accent pattern of ProtoIndo-European as it was spoken in the Baltic. This happened over many generations as the bilingual Proto-Finnic speakers spoke the Baltic language with their native first-syllable word stress, altering it for good. In time, this Baltic Proto-Indo-European became Proto-Germanic, and its first-syllable word stress became universal in the Germaniclanguage world. Schrijver argues further that in the first centuries ad, speakers of Sámi or a Sámic language introduced other sound changes that caused the breakup of Germanic into West Germanic and North Germanic, thereby starting a wave of development that culminated in the Germanic Scandinavian languages (2014, 179– 97). Family trees are not the only way to represent genetic, or historical, relationships among languages, but they do give a quick visual representation of complex information. See figures 2 and 3, language trees depicting the Germanic branch of Indo-European and the Finno-Ugric branch of Uralic.

The L a nguage s: Pa ra LL e L T e x T s Tables 1 and 2 each present the same text from the Bible, that is, a portion of the Lord’s Prayer. It is often used to make comparisons among languages, not for religious reasons but because parallel translations

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Table 1. The Lord’s Prayer in Germanic Scandinavian languages norwegian (BokmåL; 2011)

danish (1933)

iceLandic (2007)

faroese (1974)

9. Vår Far i himlen,låt ditt namn bli helgat.

9. Vår Far i himmelen! La navnet ditt helliges.

9. Vor Fader, du, som er i Himlene! Helliget vorde dit Navn;

9. Faðir vor, þú sem ert á himnum. Helgist þitt nafn,

9. Faðir okkara, Tú, sum ert í Himli! Heilagt verði navn Títt!

10. Låt ditt rike komma. Låt din vilja ske, på jorden som i himlen.

10. La riket ditt komme. La viljen din skje på jorden slik som i himmelen.

10. komme dit Rige; ske din Villie, som i Himmelen således også på Jorden;

10. til komi þitt ríki, verði þinn vilji, svo á jörðu sem á himni.

10. Komi ríki Títt! Verði vilji Tín, sum í Himli, so á jørðini við!

11. Ge oss i dag vårt dagliga bröd.

11. Gi oss i dag vårt daglige brød.

11. giv os i dag vort daglige Brød.

11. Gef oss í dag vort daglegt brauð.

11. Gev okkum í dag dagliga breyð okkara!

swedish (1917)

in many languages of the same biblical text are easily found. Matthew 6:9–13, in the King James Version, reads, “9. Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. 10. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. 11. Give us this day our daily bread.” Although the Scandinavian texts in the tables are not all the most current available translations, they are all completely understandable by contemporary speakers of the languages; some phraseology may seem archaic (as the King James translation does to twenty-first- century Americans), but the various versions illustrate the commonalities of the languages. To compare the texts in table 1, watch for nearly identical words in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish: Vår Far/Vor Fader; himlen/himmelen

Fig. 3. Finno-Ugric language family tree. This tree has been considerably simplified to include only the languages mentioned in this volume, partly because the exact historical relationship of the numerous Finno-Ugric languages has not yet been firmly established. In addition, a more nearly complete account would result in a complex, even unmanageable tree (see Salminen 2002). Illustration by Lara Thurston.

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Table 2. The Lord’s Prayer in Finno-Ugric Scandinavian languages finnish (1938)

norTh sámi (1998)

9. Isä meidän, joka olet taivaissa! Pyhitetty olkoon sinun nimesi;

9. Áhččámet, don guhte leat almmis! Basuhuvvos du namma.

10. tulkoon sinun valtakuntasi; tapahtukoon sinun tahtosi myös maan päällä niinkuin taivaassa;

10. Bohtos du riika. Šaddos du dáhttu, mo almmis nu maiddái eatnama alde.

11. anna meille tänä päivänä meidän jokapäiväinen leipämme.

11. Atte midjiide odne min beaivválaš láibbi.

‘heaven’. Similarly, in Icelandic and Faroese: Faðir vor/Faðir okkara ‘Our father’. Also note strong resemblances among all five: bröd/ brauð/breyð ‘bread’. As you compare the texts in table 2, note that rarely, a word may be identical in Finnish and Sámi (example: ja ‘and’, itself an ancient loanword from Germanic into both languages; see chapter 4). More commonly, only the initial sounds are the same: nimesi, namma ‘name’; anna, atte ‘give’; leipämme, láibbi ‘bread’; äläkä, ala ‘don’t’; and, where there is a p in Finnish, there is a b in Sámi: Finnish päivänä ‘daily’ vs. Sámi beaivválaš.

The focu s of This B o ok The focus is on the crucial intersections, sometimes amounting rather to collisions, among the seven languages and their speakers. I tell the story of their shared past, their continuing contact with each other, and how the languages have influenced each other’s development. Information and analysis of some other traditional aspects of language history is not the book’s focus. For example, there is no comprehensive, or even chronological, account of the history, phonology, structure, or typology of each language. Also not found here is the history of the literature in the languages. Further, I offer only brief sketches of the relevant historical events involving the northern nations. Informative, up-to- date, and expert discussion of all of these further aspects of language may, however, be found in many other specialized books, some of which are cited in this volume. Not counted among the seven languages is another language of the

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North Atlantic, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), from still another language family. It did not undergo codevelopment with them; Norse settlement of Greenland was relatively brief, and mutual language contact in premodern times was almost nonexistent. For this reason, Greenlandic is discussed only briefly, in chapter 2. This book sets the story of the seven languages in the context of their neighboring languages and the histories and societies of the speakers. The narrative is informed not only by linguistics but also by social history, archaeology, anthropology, and human genetics. Like all other languages, the “Seven Sisters” were, and continue to be, affected by historical events and by military and political events within their home territories. Here is a brief description of the chapters: Chapter 1 outlines the prehistoric geologic situation of the North and the prehistoric proto-languages that became the grandmothers and the mothers of the modern languages of the North. Chapter 2 describes the Norse settlement of the North Atlantic and how Old West Norse gave birth to modern Faroese and Icelandic. Chapter 3 describes the birth of Danish and Swedish, the daughters of Old East Norse, against a background of national and international strife. Chapter 4 tells how the Swedish and Finnish languages have alternately dominated Finnish territory. Chapter 5 describes the effect of the Black Death plague on the Norwegian people and language, as Denmark took over the failed Norwegian monarchy and brought with it the Danish language, which became the vehicle of government, church, and public discourse in Norway. Chapter 6 narrates how Faroese established itself as a national language after centuries of being considered a dialect of Icelandic. Chapter 7 relates how the Sámi, the people and the language, coped through early and modern times in the nations of the North and were very nearly absorbed by the Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish peoples and languages, while seeming to go unnoticed in the wider world. Both the Sámi people and the Sámi language were nearly invisible in many ways even to their neighbors until the twentieth century. The epilogue recaps immigration from the nations of the North to North America and the effect upon the immigrants’ languages, summarizes current conditions in the North, and speculates about the future of its languages.

1 • Prologue to History Habet quoque id ipsum immensum pelagus in parte arctoa, id est septentrionali, amplam insulam nomine Scandiam, unde Nobis sermo, si Dominus jubaverit, est assumendus. (The same mighty sea has also in its arctic region, that is in the north, a great island named Scandza, from whence my tale [by God’s grace] shall take its beginning.) Jordanes, De origine actibusque Getarum, ad 551.

Th e ice meLT s; The seT TLer s ar r ive The last gasp of the Ice Age, or the Last Glacial Maximum, as it is called by geologists, ended around 20,000 Bc. Its vast glaciers covered the North and most of the British Isles, along with the greater part of northern continental Europe. They took in what are now the northern parts of France, Germany, Poland, and Russia, including Siberia. This iceover was the latest of several that had waxed and waned in parts of the Northern Hemisphere over millions of years. By around 10,000 Bc, only some polar regions remained under ice. The people arrived in the North soon afterward, when plant and animal colonization in Fennoscandia was sufficient to support human population. Studies of archaeological and human remains in both Sweden and Finland suggest that these early settlers are the ancestors of today’s Scandinavians (Karlsson et al. 2006, 963). Whether they were replacing even earlier, preglacial populations of the North who had been killed off or driven away by the inhospitable cold and barrenness of the rumbling glaciers, we cannot know. Presumably any earlier populations would have been not Homo sapiens (biologically modern humans) but Neanderthals. The massive moving mountains of ice scraped away all evidence that would tell us with certainty. Clans of hunter-fisher-gatherers began to enter Scandinavia as the last Ice Age ended, around fifteen thousand years ago. “The land was already infiltrated by vegetation, then entered by animals, and eventually occupied by people sometime after 13,000 Bc,” writes

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archaeologist T. Douglas Price (2015, 1). Signs of settlement, preserved in layers of Scandinavian bog and unearthed in modern times, include fishing hooks, axes, and heaps of hazelnut shells. Hunting of elk and reindeer has been dated by archaeologists to around 9000 Bc in what is now Scania (local name Skåne, in southern Sweden), while reindeer hunting in Finland can be reliably dated at the earliest to around 6000 Bc (Siiriäinen 2003, 45–47).

era s of This cha P T e r The Stone Age, named for the stone that was the principal material the people used to make tools, occurred later in the North than on the European mainland, in tandem with the later settlement process in the North. The Stone Age is usually considered to have three parts everywhere: • The Paleolithic, including, in Scandinavia, the periods before as well as after the earliest human habitation sometimes referred to as Early Stone Age • The Mesolithic, in Scandinavia beginning around 6000 Bc • The Neolithic, also called Late Stone Age, in Scandinavia beginning around 4000 Bc The three eras are defined by the increasing sophistication of design and the skill of manufacture visible at their borders. The Neolithic saw the beginnings of agriculture and domestication of farm animals such as cattle, accomplishments that fundamentally changed human life wherever they occurred. Though the people of the North had long imported copper and bronze from other regions, it was not until about 1800 Bc that they learned to smelt copper and manufacture bronze (copper alloyed with tin or arsenic), thus beginning the Nordic Bronze Age. Now they were able to forge more effective weapons and utensils than the old tools chipped out of stone. In the Celtic Iron Age, which lasted roughly from 600 Bc to ad 1, the knowledge of smelting and casting iron was brought to the North by Celts, or perhaps by northerners who had traveled to Celtic regions of the European continent. In the Roman Iron Age, ad 1–400, trade

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with the Roman Empire flourished over land and water routes from continental Europe, and Roman influence is seen in Scandinavian methods and types of ironworking. The peoples of the North during the ages depicted in this chapter did not yet have any form of writing; they recorded the events of their lives in pictorial rock carvings, leaving only archaeological scraps for modern scientists to discover. Written documentation of large or small events cannot be dated anywhere in the world before about 4000 Bc in the Middle East and southern Europe, and these writings did not include descriptions of the North until Roman times, thousands of years later. Table 3 lists some of the major events that occurred between the time when the North was settled and the time when evidence of its peoples emerged in recorded history.

The seT TLer s of The norT h Evidence of the earliest human settlement of the very far north of Fennoscandia, which later became Sámi territory, was found at the River Utsjoki, in northern Finnish Lapland, on the border with Norway. Settlers arrived there as early as 8100 Bc from Lake Ladoga, in what is today northwestern Russia (Aikio 2004, 5); transient hunters may have been in the area even earlier. Archaeological evidence provides no clue as to their language (more on this in chapter 7). The earliest known settlers in southern Finland, their language likewise still unidentified, left evidence of their settlement around 7200 Bc (Jutikkala and Pirinen 1988, 10). Of varying tribes and genetic backgrounds, the settlers seem to have come from many areas, including the Pontic steppes (today western Ukraine and Kazakhstan), though their ancestral tribal homelands may well have been in Europe or even the Middle East. On the Danish and Norwegian-Swedish peninsulas and their associated North Sea islands, the earliest post–Ice Age settlers were probably migrants from the northwestern coasts of the European continent. It is not known what language they spoke or from what location they had previously migrated. These migrations of peoples, from the east and from the west, settled what is today Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. But when did the ancestors of the languages we know today come to the North? To

Table 3. Timetable, 20,000 BC–AD 400 aPProximaTe year

in The norTh

eLsewhere

20,000 Bc

Last Glacial Maximum (the ice had reached its peak)

Neanderthals extinct in Europe; Paleolithic art

10,000 Bc

Scandinavian Paleolithic Era (early Stone Age); earliest known settlement of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) in Danish and Scandinavian peninsulas

Dawn of agriculture in the Middle East, world population estimated at a few million (8000 Bc; Gilbert 2005, 9)

6000 Bc

Scandinavian Mesolithic Era; earliest known reindeer hunting in Finland

Beekeeping depicted in cave paintings in Spain

4500–4000 Bc

Emergence of Proto-Finno-Ugric, ancestor of Finnish, Sámi, and Estonian; Scandinavian Neolithic Era (New Stone Age) begins; first agriculture and domestication of animals

Earliest Sumerian writing, done on clay tablets; first year of Jewish calendar (3760 Bc); great pyramid of Gizeh erected (2900 Bc)

2500–1001 Bc

Emergence of Proto-Indo-European, ancestor of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages; rock carving at Rødøy, Norway, depicting skiing; Dolmen (single- chamber stone tomb) period in Scandinavia

Earliest Egyptian mummies; Stonehenge (England); Israelites, according to biblical tradition, leave Egypt, led by Moses; rule of Hammurabi (1800 Bc)

1000–701 Bc

Nordic Bronze Age—beginning of smelting of copper and bronze

Iliad and Odyssey composed around end of 8th century (traditionally ascribed to Homer); Rome founded (753 Bc)

699–1 Bc

Emergence of Proto-Germanic, ancestor of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, German, and English; Celtic Iron Age, knowledge of iron smelting and casting arrives in Scandinavia under Celtic influence

Aramaic language begins to replace Hebrew; Babylonian captivity of the Jews; height of classical Greek culture (Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes)

ad 1–400

Roman Iron Age in Scandinavia brings Roman-influenced iron manufacture; trade with Rome and points south via Roman trade routes

Birth of Jesus of Nazareth (ca. ad 6); Constantinople founded (ad 324); Roman legions begin to leave Britain (ad 383)

Source: Adapted from Grun 2005.

Prologue to History

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answer this question, we must look to deep history in the areas both west and east of the Ural Mountains, where the two ancestor languages of the North got their start.

The Language Families of the North Historical linguistics often categorizes languages into families; the oldest ancestor language that linguists have been able to identify is characterized as the “mother” of the “daughter” languages that developed from it. Proto-languages are theoretical reconstructions of languages that have not survived to the present, based on linguistic evidence (for example, from similar words in related languages) as well as cultural and archaeological evidence. It cannot be known with certainty whether a given proto-language actually existed in its reconstructed form, and for this reason words or parts of words hypothesized for proto-languages generally appear with an asterisk in front of them. Two proto-languages are the oldest known ancestors of the languages of the North: Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European. Both were once spoken over large areas of the Eurasian continent, along with an unknown number of other languages that have left no trace in modern times. Proto-Uralic (PU) is the older of the two. Spoken from probably around 5000 Bc in the areas to the east of the Ural Mountains (hence “Uralic”), it is the ancestor of thirty or so languages spoken both east and west of the Urals, including in the Arctic territories of what is today Russia. Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU) is a western subgroup of Proto-Uralic believed to date from around 4500 Bc (dating is from Janhunen 2009, 68) and is the one more relevant in this volume, since PFU is the more immediate ancestor of Finnish and Sámi (for a discussion of the PU/ PFU language family, see Campbell and Poser 2008, 88). However, there is evidence of a non-PU/PFU language or languages, now extinct, spoken in Sámi territory in very early times and called by linguists Paleo-Laplandic. Paleo-Laplandic is believed to be a substrate language underlying Sámi; it left its footprints in words not traceable to Proto-Finno-Ugric or to any other known language. Finnish linguist Ante Aikio sees evidence of a process of linguistic replacement rather than of population replacement. “The earlier speakers of ‘Paleo-Laplandic’ languages belong to the cultural and genetic ancestors of the Saami even if they were not their linguistic ancestors,”

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Aikio concludes (2012, 106). According to this hypothesis, the speakers of Paleo-Laplandic living in the northern reaches of Scandinavia for some (unknown) reason abandoned that language. In taking up a new language, they retained some useful words from their old language. Examples of such words include names of birds native to the northern Sámi territory, not known in territories further south where PFU originated: állat ‘snow bunting’ and giron ‘rock ptarmigan’. Other examples are place names ending -ir, such as Gealbir, Hoalgir, Jeahkir, suggesting a “substrate lexeme meaning mountain,” as Aikio writes. He has dated these substrate words to the same era as the Proto-Scandinavian borrowings into Sámi, that is, ad 200–700, the time of “the spread of Saami languages to Lapland and the disappearance of the unknown Paleo-Laplandic languages” (2012, 87). Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mother of almost all European languages, had its origins either in what is today Turkey or in the Eurasian steppes, according to scholars (see page 18). However, still another large shift had to occur before the PIE languages of the North became differentiated into Germanic and then Scandinavian. British anthropologist David W. Anthony estimates that northwestern dialects of PIE gave birth to a pre-Germanic proto-language beginning around 3300 Bc in what is today coastal Denmark (2007, 82) and then, about 500 Bc, to Proto-Germanic (for a full discussion, see Ringe 2006), which developed eventually into the Germanic languages as we know them today. In Scandinavia, stages following Proto-Germanic include Proto-Scandinavian, Common Scandinavian, Proto-Norse, and finally Old Norse, mother to the Germanic Scandinavian languages.

Languages, Peoples, and Ethnicity A people’s settlement patterns may result in language change, and even a people that lives in a contiguous territory and speaks the same language for thousands of years may at some point change languages. For these reasons it is a mistake to identify any language with a particular ethnic group. For example, it may seem surprising that the Sámi could have lived for thousands of years in the North and then changed their language, without changing their locality, but this seems to have happened, as we saw in the Paleo-Laplandic hypothesis. While the reasons for the Sámi language change are not known,

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such a change has been documented many times in human history. One cause is migration into a settled population by a group of newcomers with a new language, even if the newcomers are relatively few in number. A voluntary shift of the settled population to the new language may occur if the migrants and their language are perceived by the original inhabitants as more powerful than they and their previous language. This would happen if the migrants had a superior technology— for example, knowledge of agriculture or animal husbandry, or more effective manufacture of tools or weapons. Or the language shift could have come about because the newcomers were invaders who were able to take control of the population and force the new language on them. Without material evidence, we cannot know what forces were at work among the Sámi, only that before they began to speak a Proto-Uralic language, out of which modern Sámi developed, they spoke some other language (see chapter 7). Genetically, the peoples of modern Fennoscandia have been mixed, dating to early times and continuing until today; and the modern populations cannot in all cases be firmly linked to the two major ancestor peoples. The genetic profile of the modern populations may be plotted on an east-west gradient, with the Sámi people, though still predominantly western, the most inclined toward an eastern profile. Likewise, trade, exploration, and shared territories between the peoples of eastern and western Scandinavia are traceable to Stone Age times, and these connections remain strong to this day. Nearly as striking as their commonalities, however, are the differences between the two prongs of settlement. The western Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese) are strongly differentiated from the eastern Scandinavian languages (Finnish and Sámi); and their speakers, for all their shared genetics and history, retain notable differences in culture and tradition. Even within Finland, as we will see in later chapters, there are differences in dialect and custom between the western and the eastern parts of the nation, although both are Finnish-speaking. The Sámi, for their part, are one people who live in three Scandinavian nations as well as in Russia (although this volume focuses only on the Sámi in Scandinavia). In Sweden, Norway, and Finland, the Sámi people have retained many of their folkways even as they partake fully in the modern cultural and political life of the majority populations.

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how L a nguage origins a re dis c ove r e d By LinguisTic s cie nc e It is impossible to say definitively what language was spoken by any prehistoric peoples, because they have left no written evidence; normally linguists or other scientists develop a hypothesis through a chain of reasoning in which a people’s customs, such as funerary habits (for example, burial or burning), styles of pottery, and design of housing are associated with a language known or believed to have been spoken by contemporaneous peoples with a similar culture. Several competing hypotheses exist concerning the origins of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic, prehistoric language families of the North.

The Origin of Proto-Indo-European: Two Views According to British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, Proto-IndoEuropean originated in Anatolia in south- central Turkey and was spoken by the world’s first farmers, who gradually migrated to Greece beginning around 6500 Bc, then continued northward, arriving in northern Europe around 3500 Bc. The farmers brought the peoples already living in these areas not only the art of agriculture, but also their language. This is Renfrew’s Anatolian Hypothesis (Renfrew 2000). PIE also took hold in those prehistoric times on the western coasts and islands of what is now Finland, areas that have been in historical times, and remain, Swedish-speaking (see chapter 7), even as Finnish was, and remains, dominant on the central and eastern Finnish peninsula. Possibly because weather and soil conditions were less favorable to farming in prehistoric Proto-Finno-Ugric-speaking territory, agriculture became the major source of subsistence there much later than it did in what is now Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Vuorisalo et al. 2012, 168). David W. Anthony proposes a different origin for Proto-IndoEuropean. Basing his view on analysis of wheeled-vehicle vocabulary in PIE’s daughter languages, he places the origin of PIE in the Eurasian steppes, around 3000–4000 Bc (2007, 75– 81). Similarly, LithuanianAmerican archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1991, 89), writing in both her native Lithuanian and in English, developed the Kurgan Hypothesis, according to which PIE originated in the area of the Black Sea and

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the Caucasus, its speakers builders of kurgans, burial mounds dating from the third to fifth millennia Bc. According to both of these hypotheses, PIE originated among horsemen with wheeled vehicles. These horsemen migrated westward into the Baltic coastal homelands of the peoples who later became the first Germanic speakers, bringing their superior transportation technology (horses and wheels) and their language, both of which were incorporated into the ways of the indigenous population.

The Origin of Proto-Uralic Perhaps not coincidentally, the Eurasian steppes have also been identified as the homeland of Proto-Uralic. Finnish linguist Jorma Koivulehto writes that “the oldest homeland inferable from lexical contacts between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic should be located not very far (south)east of the ancient regions of Finnic and Sami, and the hypotheses of an Asian homeland should be rejected. . . . The best alternative seems to be Central/Western Russia. From there the westward spread of western Uralic languages seems to have  . . . [moved westward] around 4000–3600 Bc” (2001, 257).

A Connection between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic? Current scholarly consensus holds PIE and PU to be genetically, or in terms of their origins, unrelated. However, the fact that they appear to share an unusually high number of characteristics has motivated scientific hypotheses of either common ancestry or very early language contact. Anthony enumerates three schools of linguistic thought on this question (2007, 94): 1. The Indo-Uralic Hypothesis: The shared characteristics are so deeply rooted that we must assume that PIE and PU stem from a common ancestor. 2. The Early Loan Hypothesis: The common lexicon, including the words for fundamental concepts such as water and name, are too similar to be from a long-ago common ancestor; they must be very early loans from one proto-language to the other.

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3. The Late Loan Hypothesis: The oldest loans of words and structures result from contacts in the Russian steppes between speakers of PU and those of Indo-Iranian (an Indo-European language that emerged following the breakup of PIE into daughter languages). Koivulehto has identified many very early lexical borrowings into Proto-Uralic from Proto-Indo-European, some by way of neighboring Indo-European languages including the Balto-Slavic-Germanic grouping. These include such basic words as Finnish lehti ‘blade, leaf ’ from PIE b hlh-to (cf. English “leaf ”), through Finnic reduction of an initial consonant cluster to just its final consonant; and vesi ‘water’ (from PU *wete, ultimately from PIE *wed- [cf. English “wet”]); these and other examples are found in Koivulehto (2001, 235–37). However, Koivulehto cautions against assuming that borrowed vocabulary, even of words for basic actions and objects, is proof of genetic relationship of the two proto-languages: “The phonetic resemblance of the ProtoIndo-European words to their Proto-Finno-Uralic counterparts is far too strong to be explained by a common origin. . . . On the contrary, we would then observe divergent developments and we should be able to detect sound laws (Lautgesetze), which, in turn, could account for these divergencies. . . . Anything can be borrowed, provided the contacts are intense enough” (2001, 258– 59). In addition to numerous lexical items, there are pronoun and inflection forms (morphology) that seem to have come into PU from PIE. These present an argument for the first hypothesis, that PIE and PU shared an ancient ancestor; for example, Koivulehto allows that “grammatical morphemes and similarities in pronouns” can suggest ultimate relatedness of language families, though this is still not definitive (2001, 258). A sampling of the evidence from pronoun similarity appears in box 1, with the caveat that even though pronouns were once considered safe indicators of a genetic relationship if shared between languages, it has been shown that they can be and in fact have been borrowed (Thomason and Everett 2010). To sum up, scholars are not agreed on whether PIE and PU have a common ancestor; however, many do agree that there is evidence for some kind of early connection between the two proto-languages. This research area is currently attracting attention from language historians.

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Prologue to History Box 1. Family Resemblance, or Borrowing from the Neighbors? Similarities between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European ProTo - uraLic

ProTo - indo - euroPean

engLish meaning

*te-nä *me-nä *ta/to *ke-, ku*-m

*ti *mi *te/to *kʷe/o *-om

thou I/me this/that who/what (-m object case ending; cf. Modern English him, them, whom)

*Asterisks indicate evidence is taken from reconstructed proto-languages rather than attested in writing or speaking of current or historical languages (examples from Anthony 2007, 96).

Li f e an d s ocieT y in neoLiThic fe n no s c an dia Life in the western part of Old Fennoscandia during the late Stone Age was probably not very different from that in the eastern part. Hunterfisher-gatherers lived in families or communities, celebrated religious or spiritual ceremonies, and buried or burned their dead in their habitation areas, in what is today Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or Finland. How do we know this? Linguists make such conclusions on the basis of reconstructions of prehistoric languages, as well as looking to archaeologists and anthropologists for evidence based on material remains of prehistoric settlements. Whalebone was used to make arrowheads, spearheads, fishing and hunting tools, and chisels; and a whalebone runner from the earliest known winter vehicle, a nine-thousand-year-old sledge, was excavated at Viikinäinen in Heinola, southern Finland (Luho 1976, 115). We do not know what this one was used for, but early rock carvings show such sledges, pulled by harnessed dogs or people, transporting the carcasses of the hunt. The people in early Fennoscandia, though they bred and domesticated dogs, probably did not breed reindeer even if they hunted them. Reindeer breeding is traceable only as far back as a thousand years ago, in central Sweden. It was not initiated by Sámi (though they are now the sole reindeer herders and breeders of Norway and Sweden), but by

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other peoples, since the Sámi had not yet settled here: “Recent excavations in middle Sweden indicate . . . that the Sámi population in this area is post-medieval. . . . The relationship between the early settlers and the Sámi people is not known” (Ingman and Gyllensten 2007, 116). This does not mean that the Sámi or their language did not yet exist, only that they had not yet migrated to this area of Sweden (see chapter 7). The mean life span in the Neolithic era was thirty-five years, but those who escaped death in infancy or early life might live to a relatively old age: researchers have found remains of individuals who died at age sixty-five. Violence from their fellow human beings was a fact of life for people in these early agricultural societies. Researchers concluded after their study of corpses of Neolithic Denmark and Sweden from 3900–1700 Bc that “endemic levels of interpersonal violence . . . affected both men and women” (Fibiger et al. 2013, 190). The Neolithic skulls showed both fatal (without postinjury healing) and nonfatal injuries; the male corpses had far more of the nonfatal head injuries, while males and females suffered fatal injuries at about the same rate, possibly indicating a male habit of fighting each other without intending to kill and that women were more often victims of murderous intent. Agriculture was practiced beginning around 4000 Bc, but it did not become the most important means of subsistence in the North until about a thousand years later, according to archaeological evidence (Siiriäinen 2003, 49). Farming subsequently became the principal economic support of southern Scandinavia and coastal districts as far north as southern Troms in Norway and the head of the Gulf of Bothnia in Finland. Pastoral farming (which includes the domestication of animals for food and for work) eventually spread even farther north, to Sámi territory, but hunting and fishing were predominant there and “remained so as the climate gradually turned cooler and damper and attained its present sub-Atlantic character in the pre-Roman Iron Age” (Helle 2003, 7). In a study of ancient DNA, researchers in Scandinavia (Skoglund 2012, 466), analyzing the remains of hunter-fisher-gatherers and farmers excavated in what is today Sweden, have established that it was the hunter-fisher-gatherers whose genetic material was passed on to residents of Fennoscandia today. The farmers, who had evidently migrated from the south, perhaps ultimately from the Mediterranean,

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brought the arts of farming that ended in replacing the hunter-fishergatherer way of life in the North (except in Sámi territory). The farmers themselves, however, were too few in number to dominate either the resident population or its genetic profile. The genetic picture of the ancient hunter-fisher-gatherers in Sweden matches closely with that of twenty-first- century Scandinavians (most closely Finns), while the genetic picture of the ancient farming population of Sweden has been found to be consistent with that of today’s Greeks and Cypriots. The farmer-settler minority, then, merged its DNA with that of the hunter-fisher-gatherer majority, but because of their small numbers, the farmer-settlers are responsible for only a small part of the genetic inheritance of the current Scandinavian population. In contrast to the hypotheses of earlier researchers, who posited large hordes of invading agriculturalists overwhelming the locals, this newer genetic evidence suggests that a small number of southern farming immigrants was enough to change both language and culture in the North.

Pro To - L a nguage s a nd The c uLT ur e of Their sPea ker s How can early languages that left no traces in writing be reconstructed? Linguists use the comparative method. Comparing closely related and attested (in writing or speaking) languages in light of what is known about lexical, morphological (word formation), grammatical, and sound changes allows linguists to come up with sometimes extensive lists of vocabulary and even detect the grammar of extinct languages. This process can be thought of as similar to the one that produces models of dinosaurs and other early, now extinct, creatures: a few bones, or impressions of bones on stone, are used as the basis of an image, or even a three-dimensional model, of how the original must have looked. In addition, the reconstruction of the proto-language may provide clues that allow scholars to hypothesize about the culture and artifacts of the speakers’ society at various times. It can be a tenuous chain of evidence, which is sometimes challenged at every step by other researchers; but even if the argument is not backed up by material evidence, the conclusions often gain general scholarly acceptance (Fortson 2010, 18–19). The history of a word can provide information about when a cultural habit described by the word was in use. This technique has been used

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to tell us that, at some point in Neolithic times, the peoples of the North organized their settlements by family (the earliest) and by clans (next earliest), but ultimately also by tribe (until even later, when realms and nations came into existence). For example, Proto-Finno-Ugric *kunta ‘tribe/nationality’ has survived in Modern Finnish as the final element in perhekunta ‘family community’ and maakunta ‘province’ (lit. ‘territory community’), indicating that tribal organization dates back to a time before Proto-Finno-Ugric broke up into daughter languages (Hajdú 1975, 57– 58). Scandinavian society in both eastern (PFU-speaking) and western (PIE-speaking) areas was probably patriarchal. The mythological Vanir, early Scandinavian gods and goddesses, are often viewed as representing matriarchy (Cahill 2012, 721); but the relationship between Norse mythology and history remains uncertain. Likewise, patriarchy rules among those modern Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples that still have some form of tribal organization; however, traces of matriarchy are also seen, for instance, in cultural practices such as honoring a mother figure as founder of the tribe, or spirits and deities in female form, writes Hajdú (1975, 58).

daughTer s of ProTo - finno - ugr ic an d ProTo - ura Lic: LinguisTic c ou sin s Besides Finnish, daughters of Proto-Finno-Ugric include the ten surviving Sámi variants, which are in some cases more linguistically distant from each other than from Finnish. They are Inari, Kildin, Lule, Northern Sámi, Pite, Skolt, South Sámi, Ter, Ume, and Akkala. All of these, plus Finnish, Estonian, and other smaller languages spoken to the east and south of the Gulf of Finland, belong to the PFU subgroup Finnic. Hungarian, part of the PFU subgroup Ugric, separated from Finno-Ugric toward the end of the third millennium Bc (Hajdú 1975, 67). Several other PFU daughter languages survive, some with very small numbers of speakers. These include the Finnic language Kven, spoken in northern Norway, and its near-double Meänkieli, spoken in northern Sweden (scholars are divided about whether Kven and Meänkieli were originally separate from Finnish or were developed by Finnish speakers migrating into Norway and Sweden). From northwestern regions of Russia are Ingrian, Karelian, Ludic, Livonian, Veps,

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and Votic; the Finno-Permic languages Komi, Permyak, and Udmurt are spoken to the west of the Ural Mountains of Russia. All together, Finno-Ugric languages and variants have 20 million speakers, dominated numerically by the three national languages Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Proto-Uralic daughter languages, genetically distant relatives of Finnish and Sámi, are spoken today primarily in the northern reaches of today’s Russia (Hajdú 1975, 106). A nineteenth- century theory that Uralic and Finno-Ugric are genetically related to Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and sometimes including Korean and Japanese) is no longer accepted.

ea rLy men Tions of finno - ugr ic More than a thousand years ago, Ohthere (Norwegian Ottar) of Hålogaland (now the coastal Norwegian counties of Nordland and Troms), a Norwegian traveler in northern Fennoscandia, entered history as possibly the earliest amateur linguist of Finno-Ugric. He reported to his patron Alfred the Great (King of England, ad 871– 99) a relationship between the languages of the Finnas (Sámi) and the Bjarmas (Permians, who were possibly other Finno-Ugric peoples including Komis and Udmurts; Hajdú 1975, 15). Here is his comment, as it was recorded in Old English more than eleven hundred years ago: “Ðā Finnas, him ðūhte, ond ðā Beormas sprǣcon nēah ān geðēode” (It seemed to him that the Finns and the Permians spoke nearly one language; Ohthere’s First Voyage 2003). Ohthere’s stories, as recorded by Alfred’s scribes, “contain far less fanciful narrative and much more apparent fact than is normally found in popular medieval travelers’ tales,” comments Jonathan Slocum (2011). The discovery that Hungarian was Finno-Ugric was made in 1671, when Swedish scholar and poet Georg Stiernhelm published findings to that effect. His hypothesis became generally accepted in the following century after it had been taken up by several other linguists, including the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and Hungarian linguists János Sajnovics and Sámuel Gyarmathi. Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian are the most commonly spoken Finno-Ugric languages in the twenty-first century (Hungarian has 10 million native speakers, Finnish 5 million, and Estonian 1 million).

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cha P T er 1 Box 2. Agglutination: An Example from Finnish maassasiko ‘in your country?’ maa country

ssa in

si your

ko [interrogative]

Note: The spoken language does not show rising intonation in a question; the interrogative particle ko or kö marks a question in speaking and writing; the question mark is used additionally at the end of a sentence-length written text.

Their grammars differ strikingly from those of Indo-European languages such as Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, German, and English (all Germanic) or French, Spanish, and Italian (all Romance). Finno-Ugric languages are characterized by the lack of grammatical or even natural gender: that is, there are no masculine, feminine, or neuter nouns, or even separate words for “he” and “she” in Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Sámi. In addition, these four are all agglutinative languages, which means they have infixes (particles in the middle of a word) or suffixes (at the end of the word) that express grammatical functions such as case or tense. Even speaker attitudes such as emphasis, questioning, or surprise are expressed through particles in the relevant word. Sometimes long chains of meaning are created within one word (see box 2). All four languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Sámi) are heavily inflected; Finnish has fifteen noun cases, Estonian has fourteen, Hungarian eighteen, and Inari Sámi nine (for comparison, Latin has five, German four). Untutored speakers of Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian cannot understand any of the Sámi variants; and Sámi speakers cannot, without study, understand Finnish, Estonian, or Hungarian. However, Sámi people routinely learn in school the majority language (Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, or Russian) of the nation in which they live, and often it is their home language as well. Speakers of Estonian and Finnish cannot understand Hungarian unless they take the trouble to learn the language, nor can Hungarian speakers understand Estonian or Finnish. However, with a little effort and goodwill, Estonians and Finns can understand one another in speaking and in writing. Curiosity about their languages encourages a lively tourism trade between Finland, Estonia, and Hungary. The intonation patterns among the three languages are so similar that visitors on one side of

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Prologue to History Box 3 “The living fish swims under water” Finnish:

Kala Fish

ui swims

elävänä while alive

veden water

alla. under

Estonian:

Elav Living

kala fish

ujub swims

vee water

all. under

Hungarian:

Hal Fish

úszkál swims

eleven alive

a viz water

alatt. under

a street might have the impression that the people on the other side are speaking “our” language. Crossing the street to listen more closely, however, makes it plain that this is not the case. Linguists have been able, with some ingenuity, to come up with comparison sentences in the three languages that show the family relationship of vocabulary in Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, as in the sentence “The living fish swims under water” (box 3). The sentences are artificial and unidiomatic (for example, Finnish fish swim not veden alla but vedessä); they are linguistic constructs designed to show a lexical relationship between languages that are not normally mutually comprehensible. The word-for-word translations beneath the examples are mine.

Pro T o - i ndo - euroPea n daughT e r L anguage s Around 2500 Bc Proto-Indo-European, or a northwestern dialect of it, gave birth to Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of all Germanic languages. The earliest written evidence of this emerging Germanic proto-language is an inscription, “harigastiteiva” (of uncertain meaning) from around the third century Bc, scratched on a bronze helmet found in what is now the Negau district of Austria. The differentiation of Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European occurred through the Germanic Sound Shift, also known as the First Sound Shift (in German, Die erste Lautverschiebung). This sound change was first identified in 1818 by Danish philologist Rasmus Rask; together with discoveries involving word stress, it was elaborated as a historicallinguistic law by German philologist Jacob Grimm (it is now sometimes

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referred to as Grimm’s Law). The massive First Sound Shift affected every word that was inherited from Proto-Indo-European into the new language, Proto-Germanic (for a more detailed discussion, see Wells 1987, 71–73). The impetus of the First Sound Shift remains unknown, but the results are still perceptible in modern spoken Germanic languages (the sound shift is shown primarily in pronunciation, not spelling, as Germanic languages were not written until much later). The sound shift changed every instance of p in PIE (represented in my examples by Latin, a non-Germanic PIE daughter) into f in Proto-Germanic (represented here by Modern Swedish). For example, Latin pater → Swedish fader ‘father’. A second universal change was the PIE k sound into the Germanic ch or h sound; for example, Latin canis (pronounced kahnis) → Swedish hund ‘dog’, English cognate “hound.” The First Sound Shift occurred in tandem with other consistent changes. The Indo-European word accent, which, depending on the word in question, might be on any syllable, became in Germanic a language-wide first-syllable accent (a pattern still dominant, though not without exceptions, in modern Germanic languages). As mentioned earlier in this chapter, some language historians attribute the shift of accent to the influence of Proto-Finnic speakers on PIE in the Baltic. Additionally, some verb forms and noun cases were eliminated. In the North, the resulting Proto-Germanic developed into a specifically Scandinavian form, as we will see. A further note for those interested in Germanic sound changes: the Second Sound Shift, which took place on the European continent around ad 500, involved some of the same consonants affected by the First Sound Shift and differentiated High German (today’s Standard German) from Low German (various Germanic dialects, as well as Modern Dutch and English; see Salmons 2012 for an exceptionally clear and detailed scholarly account of both sound shifts).

s c an dinavia in cL a ssica L roman wr iT ing s Peoples of the North, which was then called Thule (Greek Θούλη ‘Thoúlē’, origin otherwise unknown), were described in classical Greek and Roman historical and geographic writings, but for the most part this was narration by authors who lacked any personal experience of the region or the peoples.

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The Greek historian Pytheas wrote about Thule in his secondcentury-Bc memoir τὰ περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ (Ta peri tou Okeanou; On the ocean), now lost and known to us only because it was quoted in the Rerum Geographicarum (Geography) of about ad 23 by the Greek geographer Strabo. According to Strabo, who expresses many doubts as to the accuracy of “On the Ocean,” Pytheas’s Thule, inhabited by farmers, was located six days’ sail north of Britain, near the “frozen sea” (Strabo 1917–32, 1.4). Some later writers (cf. Burton 1875, 1, 25) believed that Thule was Iceland, but this could not be the case, since Iceland was uninhabited until the ninth century. Sixth- century historian Procopius used the term “Thule” seemingly to mean Norway or Sweden. Later, “Thule” or “Ultima Thule” (in the Greek historian Horace’s phrase) gained a metaphorical meaning as a place beyond the known world, an ideal or unattainable goal. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, references to Thule became a staple in European literature. Examples include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s collection of poems Ultima Thule (1880) and Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 poem about Thule, “DreamLand.” Tacitus, in his ad 98 work Germania, was the first to mention the tribe of Suiones (probably meaning Swedes), as well as the Aesti, who lived on the eastern Baltic coast (just across the water from today’s Finland) and who might (or might not) have been the ancestors of the Estonians (who called their country and their language Eesti). The Roman historian Jordanes, writing in ad 551, describes “a great island named Scandza,” usually interpreted as Sweden, as the home of the Goths, a Germanic tribe, in his De origine actibusque Getarum (The origin and deeds of the Goths, Jordanes 2011). Some scholars doubt the historical accuracy of his account (discussed in Sanders 2010, 67– 68). Tacitus also wrote in Germania about the Fenni, people of the North whose origins he believed to be either Germanic or Sarmatian (a reference to Iranian peoples who lived in the Ukrainian steppes), “exceptionally wild and repellently poor” (Tacitus 1864–77, par. 46), possessing neither horses, nor houses, nor iron, carving their arrows not from metal but from bone. All in all, Tacitus considered the Fenni wild, primitive, but noble savages; this was the characteristic Roman attitude toward all of the northern peoples, whom they called “barbarians.” He praises (somewhat backhandedly), their state of mind, “unconcerned about men or gods,” saying they had “reached the most difficult state of mind, namely to have not a single desire for anything

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more” (par. 46). Modern archaeology has provided some information concerning the accuracy of Tacitus’s assertions about the identity of the people of the Finnish peninsula. The Fenni were almost certainly neither Germanic nor Finns, but Sámi (Hajdú 1975, 177). They could not have been Sarmatians, because by Roman times these had not yet made their way to Fennoscandia. Tacitus’s comments about the use of bone for carved tools have, however, proved accurate. Bone arrowheads now ascribed to Sámi settlements were indeed found in modern times at Bronze and Iron Age burial sites in western Finland (Ikäheimo, Hietala, and Joona 2004, 4).

oLd nor se is Bor n By ad 400–800, the Germanic tribes in what is today Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were players on the Western world’s political and economic stage. During this period the Germanic dialects of the North began a series of sound changes that were the precursor to Old Norse, which in turn became the mother language of Faroese, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Old Norse first entered the written record in runes from the sixth century ad. Soon afterward more linguistic branching began to occur: from Old Norse came East Norse (which became Danish and Swedish) and West Norse. The latter would become the language of the twelfth- century historical texts Landnámabók and Íslendingabók as well as the Icelandic literary sagas based on oral tradition but recorded in writing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. West Norse also became, centuries later, one variety of Norwegian (for more about the mixed east-west heritage of Modern Norwegian, see chapter 5). The Merovingian Age, from the fifth to the eighth centuries ad, saw the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages on the European continent. Norsemen, primarily out of Norway, sailed out to explore and settle the North Atlantic, taking their language with them and planting it on several islands in the North Atlantic. That is our starting point for chapter 2.

2 • Gemini, the Twins faroe se an d ic eL andic Svo er sagt, að menn skyldu fara úr Noregi til Færeyja; nefna sumir til Naddodd víking; en þá rak vestur í haf og fundu þar land mikið. Þeir gengu upp í Austfjörðum á fjall eitt hátt og sáust um víða, ef þeir sæju reyki eða nokkur líkindi til þess, að landið væri byggt, og sáu þeir það ekki. Þeir fóru aftur um haustið til Færeyja; og er þeir sigldu af landinu, féll snær mikill á fjöll, og fyrir það kölluðu þeir landið Snæland. (It is said that men intended to sail from Norway to the Faroe Islands; some said Naddodd the Viking [was one of them]; and they drifted west into the sea and there found a large land. They went up into the Eastern Fjords to a high mountain, and looked far around to see smoke or any trace that the land was settled, and they saw nothing of that. In autumn, they went back to the Faroe Islands, and as they sailed from the land, much snow fell on the mountains, and for that reason they called the land Snæland [Snowland = Iceland].) Landnámabók (Book of settlements)

moTher nor se Faroese and Icelandic are twin linguistic apples, fallen halfway across the sea from the tree of Old Norse, their mother language. This chapter tells that story, beginning when Norsemen discovered and settled first the Faroes (eighteen major islands about 250 miles north of mainland Scotland) and then Iceland (the main island and a few small ones about 500 miles northwest of Scotland). Our story continues through the frontier years when the Norsemen replicated the farming and fishing culture of their homeland, Norway, and then moves to the creation of Insular Scandinavian culture, dominated by Iceland and chronicled in its sagas. Next come the expeditions to Greenland and North America by Icelanders and other Norsemen of the North Atlantic. The chapter closes at the time of the publication in the twelfth century of Iceland’s Fyrsta Málfræðiritgerðin (The first grammatical treatise). Icelandic had begun

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to consider itself a language independent of Old Norse and the language spoken in Norway, while Faroese was considered a dialect of Icelandic until centuries later. The story of Faroese is taken up again in chapter 6. Born only a few years apart in the ninth century, when Norse explorers, invaders, and finally settlers brought their language to the North Atlantic, the Faroese and Icelandic languages today are similar but not identical. A third North Atlantic sister language, Norn, developed after the Norse brought their language to the Orkney and Shetland Islands in the ninth century, but it is now extinct. Scots, not a sister language but perhaps a cousin, was strongly influenced by East Norse, the ancestor language of Danish.

oLd nor se The language the settlers from Norway brought with them to all of these settlements in the North Atlantic islands was a western variety of Old Norse. An eastern variety of Old Norse, only slightly different, was spoken in ninth-century Denmark and Sweden. A thousand years later, Faroese and Icelandic turn out to look and sound much more like Old Norse than do Modern Norwegian, Danish or Swedish, Old Norse’s other daughter languages in mainland Scandinavia. The Icelanders and the Faroese kept their traditional folktales alive for some time; by the twelfth century, the Icelanders put quill to vellum and created from folktales the historical writings and sagas that enabled them to punch above their weight culturally. The sagas not only became a powerhouse in European literature, but, along with their sister historical texts, they provide extensive information, giving us a view into the history, the life, and the language of the early North. The earliest surviving written Old Norse–Icelandic manuscript dates to about 1150. Two hundred years later, by 1350, new norms in writing were found in the Scandinavian languages, from then on no longer called by modern scholars “Old.” The era of Medieval Scandinavian had begun.

L a nguage deTa iL s: oLd nor se an d oLd iceL a ndic Old Norse and Old Icelandic are two different names, both correct, for the language of the sagas. However, by about 1150 the language of

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the sagas in Iceland and the Old Norse of Norway were beginning to differ. These differences have been analyzed by scholars from manuscripts of the time, but for the purposes of this chapter they are not very significant. However, current scholars have begun following the lead of Carol J. Clover and John Lindow in calling the Old Norse of Iceland “Old Norse–Icelandic” (1985), a useful convention that is honored in this book. The surviving manuscripts in this language are far greater in both quantity and literary quality than those in other varieties of Old Norse. The discussion that follows is concerned with Old Norse– Icelandic.

Notes on Old Norse–Icelandic Pronunciation The details of Old Norse–Icelandic pronunciation are somewhat hypothetical, for obvious reasons, but some general principles are agreed on among scholars (for a discussion, see Valfells and Cathey 1981, 5–12; for a detailed description, see Barnes 2008, 8–13). A few specifics: word accents are invariably on the first syllable; ð is pronounced like English th in “the,” while þ is pronounced like English th in “thorn”; and an accent mark (for example, in a vs. á) indicates duration of the vowel’s pronunciation. Short video/audio files of dramatic readings from Old Norse, Old Norse–Icelandic, and medieval (ca. 1400) texts, with subtitles in Modern Norwegian, are available online at http://folk.uio.no/arnet/. Both a slow and a faster reading of an excerpt from the Old Icelandic Hrolfssaga (The saga of Rolf Kraki, ca. 1400), with written text in both Old Icelandic and English, may be found in Cambridge University’s site, ASNC Spoken Word, at www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/spokenword/on_pron .php?d=tt.

Grammar Old Icelandic is an inflected language, as are German and Latin: noun phrases and pronouns show case (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive); verbs have different forms for person (I/you/she/he/we/they), number (singular/plural), tense (present/past), and mood (indicative/ subjunctive). What follows is a brief outline of the main grammatical characteristics of Old Icelandic. A detailed syntactic description may be found in Faarlund (2008).

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How the Cases Are Used • Nominative. The case of the subject, usually the agent of the verb, or a predicate complement: Þá gekk maðr fyrir konung ‘Then the man went up to the king’ (nominative underlined; Faarlund 2008, 17). • Accusative. A direct object of a verb or of a preposition: Vér munum hafa fé litit ‘We will have little money’ (17). • Dative. An indirect object or the noun following a locative (locational) preposition, here undir ‘under’: er bjó undir Skagafelli ‘who lived under Skagafell’ (18). • Genitive: Possession: dóttir Bergþors ‘Bergthor’s daughter’ (19). Genders: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter Nouns, even if they name inanimate objects, have grammatical gender, and the set of case endings (declension) they are subject to is determined not only by their gender, but also by their type (strong or weak) and their stem classification. Adjectives within a noun phrase vary according to the gender of the noun they modify and also have strong- or weak- declension endings, depending upon the absence or presence of the definite article (“the”) in the noun phrase. An example is Old Norse–Icelandic skarpt sverð ‘(a) sharp sword’ vs. it skarpa sverðið, lit. ‘the sharp sword-the’ (both examples neuter singular; note the change of ending on the noun in the second phrase). This strong/ weak adjective declension is also a characteristic of Modern Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German. The adjective declension existed in Old English, though without the definite-article ending on the noun: god cwen ‘good queen’ vs. seo gode cwen ‘the good queen’; obviously, this has disappeared in Modern English. Pronouns: Singular, Plural, Dual Pronouns show, as in English, three persons: in the singular, I, you, he/ she/it; in the plural, we/you/they. “You” also has a dual form, þit ‘you two’, and a plural form, þér ‘you all’, ‘all of you’. Similarly, “we” has a dual, vit ‘we two’, and a plural, vér ‘we, all of us’ (Valfells and Cathey 1981, 92).

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Verbs Verbs may be strong (i.e., their inflection into different tenses shows a change of vowel, as in English “sing/sang/has-have sung”); weak (their past tense is formed by adding a dental consonant, in English -t or -d; in Old Icelandic also ð, to the present stem), as in English “love/ loved/has-have loved”; or irregular, in which no consistent pattern is maintained, as in the English verb “to be”: “am-are-is/was-were/ has-have been.” The system of strong/weak/irregular verbs is characteristic of all Germanic languages, including English. Often, but not invariably, strong, weak, or irregular verbs in one Germanic language will fall into the same category in others.

oTh er L a nguage s of The norT h aT L an T ic Norn Norn (from Old Norse norrǿnn), spoken in the Shetland and Orkney Islands after being brought there by Norse settlers, declined after the islands were transferred politically to Scotland in 1468. But the language was replaced (by the Scots language; see the next section) only very slowly and was spoken by a few people as late as the eighteenth century. There are still place names in the Shetland and Orkney Islands that reflect influence from Norn (Haugen 1976, 332). For the first few lines of the Lord’s Prayer in Shetland Norn, see table 4. Its similarity to other varieties of Old Norse are apparent when it is compared with the Icelandic and Faroese versions in the introduction, table 1. Table 4. The Lord’s Prayer in Shetland Norn 9. Fy vor o er i chimeri: halaght vara nam dit. (Father our who is in heaven; hallowed be name thy) 10. La konungdum din cumma. La vill din vera guerde i vrildin sin da er i chimeri. (Let kingdom your come. Let will your be done on earth as it is in heaven) 11. Gav us dagh u daglocht brau. (Give us today our daily bread.) Source: Lockwood 1972. Note: The word-for-word translations are mine.

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Scots In today’s Scotland, two languages are used in addition to standard English: Scots and Scottish Gaelic. Gaelic was the language of Scotland a thousand years ago, but it was replaced by the Anglic-Germanic dialect spoken by migrants to the Scottish mainland from England about ad 600. This Anglic-Germanic developed separately from English and eventually became the Scots language, dominant in Scotland (including, after 1468, the Shetland and Orkney Islands) until the 1707 political union with England. Scots is currently spoken by perhaps one-third of the Scottish population. Since historically it was a national language, Scots is properly classified not as a dialect but a language, though many people confuse it with Scottish-accented English or consider it a regional dialect of English. Scots was heavily influenced by East (Danish) Norse, and it can appear to resemble Danish more closely than English. An example (from Andersen 1999) shows that Scots, Danish, and English are more similar to each other than to Gaelic: English: I don’t know him Scots: A dinna ken him Danish: Jeg kender ham ikke Gaelic: Chan eil iólas agam air Here is a text sample in Scots: Aince upon a day my mither said to me: Dinna cleip and dinna rype And dinna tell a lee. For gin ye cleip a craw will name ye, And gin ye rype a daw will shame ye; And a snail will heeze its hornies out And hike them round and round about Gin ye tell a lee.

aince = once cleip = tell tales; rype = steal lee = lie gin = if; craw = crow daw = jackdaw heeze = lift up

(From William Soutar, “Aince upon a Day,” 1932 [Soutar 1988, 69])

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wr i T Ten evidence of ea r Ly h isT ory The birth of Faroese and Icelandic as languages is entwined with the historical facts about the Norse discovery and settlement of the Faroes and Iceland. Archaeological discoveries on the islands have enabled scientists to date settlements and analyze their material remains, such as the Viking-age longhouse and the fishing gear found at Toftanes in the Faroe Islands. However, the language story is to be found in the Old Icelandic historical writings and sagas. The old runes, used primarily in pre-Christian times in Germanic areas of the European continent and in mainland Scandinavia, have left only a few relics in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. In any case they were used not for long narratives but for short inscriptions on stone and metal, at least until the final century of runic survival (see discussion in chapter 3). The historical writings and the literary sagas, however, written at least two centuries after the events they describe, survive as descriptions of and lore about settlement times in Iceland and the Faroes. These writings can serve as background to the history we will look at and as evidence of the mother language that gave birth to twin daughter languages on these North Atlantic islands. Table 5 provides an overview of written works and historical events. Table 5. Timetable, AD 500–1199 daTe (ad)

in The norTh

in The resT of The worLd*

500– 599

First runic inscriptions in early Scandinavian language (Common Scandinavian); in Sweden, Vendel Age, Old Uppsala its sacramental and political center (550–793)

Arthur, semilegendary King of Britain, killed in Battle of Camlan (536); beginnings of chess in India (550); Mohammed, founder of Islam, born (570)

600– 699

700–799

Book printing in China (600); founding of Fustat (Cairo; 641); Sussex, last heathen kingdom in England, converted to Christianity (686) Attack on Lindisfarne, Britain, begins Viking Age (793); sixteen- character fuþark (runic alphabet) appears; first mention of Viking raids on the Irish coast (795)

Battle of Tours, defeat of Islamic Caliphate in France (732); death of the Venerable Bede, called “Father of English History” for his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The ecclesiastical history of the English people; 735) (continued)

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Table 5. (continued) daTe (ad)

in The norTh

in The resT of The worLd*

800– 899

Danish King Godfred has earthwork (the Danevirke) built across Jutland peninsula for protection (800); in Norway, skalds ‘bards’ begin tradition of formal poetry (800); settlement of Faroes (825); Olaf, first Viking king of Dublin (853– 870); settlement of Iceland (871)

Death of Charlemagne (ca. 815); settlement of Jews in Germany, beginning of Yiddish language (850); Swedish Viking (Rus) chieftain Riurik begins rule of federation of the Slavs and establishes his capital at Novgorod; rule of Alfred the Great, King of England (871– 899)

900– 999

Viking leader Rollo gains control of the French town of Rouen and surrounding countryside in what was later known as Normandy ‘land of the Northmen’ (ca. 911); Harold Bluetooth, first Danish king to convert to Christianity (ca. 960); Icelanders settle in Greenland (986); Olaf Tryggvasson of Norway invades England and defeats the English at the Battle of Maldon; he is paid off byAethelred with a Danegeld of 10,000 pounds of silver (991)

Arabic Thousand and One Nights (900); Arithmetical notation brought into Europe by Arabs (975); Vladimir the Great, leader of the Rus, has pagan idols thrown into the River Dnieper and converts his subjects to Christianity after trying and rejecting Islam and Judaism (988)

1000–1099

Colonization of Vinland, North America, by Icelandic and Greenlandic settlers (1000); Battle of Stamford Bridge, England; Norman Conquest of England; and end of Viking Age (all 1066); Godfred Haraldson, last Viking king of Dublin, is deposed (1094)

St. Vitus Dance (Sydenham’s chorea, a neurological disorder), strikes Europe (1021); “Sys willekommen heirre kerst,” first German Christmas carol (1050); William of Normandy, great-great-great-grandson of Viking chieftain Rollo, invades England at the Battle of Hastings and is crowned King of England (1066); start of First Crusade (1096)

1100–1199

Oldest surviving manuscript in Old Norse–Icelandic (1150); first recognition of Icelandic as a language (1175); Erik of Sweden conquers Finland (1157)

Omar Khayyam, Persian poet and astronomer, dies (1123); First recorded mention of Moscow (1147); game of chess arrives in England (1151)

*Adapted from Grun 2005.

a d 8 2 5– 7 1: seT TLemen T Be g in s The Settlers By the early ninth century, in what was later known as the Viking Age, Norsemen from Norway had sailed to and settled parts of the Scottish and Irish coasts and the islands of the North Atlantic, by the

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Fig. 4. Norse/Viking settlement, including North Atlantic islands, Greenland, and Vinland (in what is now Newfoundland, Canada). Map by Lara Thurston.

tenth century going as far as Greenland. According to the eleventhcentury Icelandic historical Landnámabók (Book of settlements), a ninth- century Norwegian named Naddodd accidentally discovered a new island when he was blown off course on a journey to the Faroes (Landnámabók, 12th century). He called the island he found Snæland ‘Snowland’. Sometime later its first longtime settler, Norwegian sailor Flóki Vilgerðarson, gave it the name we know today, Ísland ‘Iceland’. See figure 4. The Norse with their knarrer (singular form knörr), sturdy and roomy ships designed for trade voyages, were skilled sailors for the times; but some of their discoveries were unintended, for the compass and the sextant were still unknown in Europe, as Icelandic physicist Þorsteinn Vilhjálmsson notes (1991, 69). “Late in the first millennium, the North Atlantic was clearly full of courageous, skilful, lost Scandinavians blundering around ‘discovering’ things,” writes British historian

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Peter Heather, referencing the uncertainties of sailing in this area of the world, beset by storms even in the summer. But even four hundred years later, Heather continues, navigation of the North Atlantic remained anything but easy. He paraphrases the navigational directions to Greenland of the fourteenth- century Icelandic manual Hauksbók: “Turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes” (Heather 2010, 452). First invading and then settling in Orkney and Shetland, the Norsemen acquired local—that is to say, Celtic—wives and slaves. They took them along when they sailed to settle in two previously discovered nearby island groups. According to the best available historical sources, Færeyinga Saga (Saga of the Faroes) and Landnámabók (Book of settlements), this took place as early as ad 825 in the Faroe Islands and in about ad 871 in Iceland. Archaeological evidence of permanent Norse settlement in the Faroes about ad 900 came with the modernday discovery of the remains of ancient barley planting (Magnús Stefánsson 2003, 203– 9). The mixed ancestry of the original settlers, Celtic and Norse, is still identifiable today in these island peoples. According to large DNA studies of the population of both the Faroes and Iceland, a majority of the females in both countries who are descended from the original settlers are of Celtic ancestry (i.e., from the British Isles). This is shown by mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only through the female line. A majority of the males (through their Y- chromosomes, carried only in the male line) are of Scandinavian ancestry, that is, from what are today Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (Als et al. 2006, 497; Agnar Helgason et al. 2000, 697). These conclusions are possible because the populations of the Faroes and Iceland today consist almost entirely of descendants of the original settlers. Given the scarcity of archaeological remains, the Icelandic sagas provide much of what we know about the settlement of the Faroes and Iceland, although they were written down, presumably from oral tradition, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Isolation from Europe and mainland Scandinavia is only one reason that twenty-firstcentury Faroese and Icelandic are so little changed from Old Norse as compared to Norwegian, Danish, or Swedish. The sagas themselves provided an additional influence.

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Settlement Stories Prior to Norse discovery and settlement, both Iceland and the Faroes had been occupied by Irish monks seeking solitude for their cloistered way of life. According to legend, the Irish monk St. Brendan discovered the Faroe Islands in the sixth century while on a North Atlantic voyage. An Irish monk-historian named Dicuil described the Faroes in his Liber de mensura orbis terrae (Book on the extent of the earth’s orb, ca. ad 825) as “a place full of innumerable sheep and . . . waterfowl” (quoted in Ferguson 2010, 156), a comment to which popular etymology attributes the islands’ name (in Modern Faroese): Føroyar ‘sheep islands’. Dicuil claimed that the Irish monks inhabiting the Faroe Islands had been driven away by the Norse. Several centuries later, the Icelandic sagas told the settlement stories too. For example, Flateyjarbók (Flat island book, 1387) contains a copied portion of the original, no longer extant, Færeyínga saga (Saga of the Faroe Islands), which was written in Old Icelandic in about 1200. This saga records that the first long-term settler of the Faroes was a Norseman named Grímr Kamban (first name Norse, last name Celtic), who had arrived sometime before ad 872, in the first year of the rule of Norwegian King Haraldr hárfagri ‘Harald Fairhair’. The Færeyínga saga, parts of which appear also in two Icelandic sagas, tells the story of the Faroe Islands during the period ad 970–1035, but the versions do not agree on the identity of the first settlers of the Faroes. Understandably, the saga’s “historical accuracy is in serious question,” as historian Tom Nauerby writes (1996, 183). As for Iceland, Íslendingabók (The book of the Icelanders) and Landnámabók (The book of settlements) record that the monks left Iceland when the Norsemen arrived, not because they were driven out, as Dicuil had claimed, but because they didn’t want to live among the heathen. Ferguson, however, suggests that the pagan Norse dispatched them by the sword, a murderous deed that was written out of history because it embarrassed their Christian descendants, the saga authors (Ferguson 2010, 158). Meanwhile, in the Faroe Islands, the written language was not a reflection of spoken Faroese, but of the Icelandic of the sagas. In the thinly populated, rural Faroese islands, pronunciations and speech habits changed as the centuries passed, and no standard spoken language developed. Not until the nineteenth century was written Faroese

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standardized, and not until the twentieth was Færeyínga saga translated into Modern Faroese, as Føroyinga søga.

T wo nor se seT TLe me n T s Greenland In the summer of ad 986, fourteen Icelandic ships carried settlers to Greenland, which had been discovered earlier by Norse explorer Erik the Red, son of Thorvald (Old Norse Eiríkr raudi Þōrvaldsson). The Icelanders (many or most of them Christians, though Iceland was not officially Christianized until ad 1000) settled in, built two colonies (the Eastern and the Western settlements), and prospered for several hundred years. “The colonists developed a little Europe of their own just a few hundred miles from North America, a full five hundred years before Columbus set foot on the continent. They established dairy and sheep farms throughout the unglaciated areas of the south and built churches, a monastery, a nunnery, and a cathedral boasting an imported bronze bell and greenish tinted glass windows,” writes Dale Mackenzie Brown (2000). “Although the duration of tenure of the Norse in Greenland equals the length of time that has passed since the European ‘rediscovery’ of America, their venture is almost without exception seen as having failed in some way,” writes historian Kirsten Seaver. “Despite their proven ability to survive in such a challenging environment for half a millennium, they have routinely been portrayed in posterity as victims of external circumstances” (2010, 8). First the Western Settlement, and then the Eastern, disappeared in not yet completely understood circumstances, and this fact has encouraged an air of tragic mystery surrounding the Norse settlement of Greenland. After the colonies were established, the weather gradually turned colder, beginning the Little Ice Age of Europe that lasted into the nineteenth century. The settlers came into contact with Inuit peoples (called by the Norse skrælingar), who around ad 1200 migrated over the ice from North America to Greenland, and eventually the settlers traded with them. The Norse Western Settlement exported to Europe specialty goods such as walrus skins (cut in strips, good for making tough mooring lines), blubber from sea mammals, tusks of walrus

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and narwhal, polar bear skins, and Greenland falcons (Seaver 2010, 102). There is also evidence of conflict; the Inuit legends tell of an Inuit hunter’s killing a Greenlander collecting shells, followed by retaliation from the Greenlander and then Inuit revenge (Clements 2008, 219). However, Ívar Bárðarson, in a Norwegian church document from around 1360, Grænlandslýsing (Greenland report), described a visit to the Western Settlement to rescue the Norse settlers from a threat of heathen natives. He reported finding only deserted farmsteads and abandoned animals, which he and his men slaughtered and took with them. It was believed by historians long afterward that the Western settlers had been killed by the Inuit (Fagan 2000, 66– 67). However, Seaver rejects this out of hand, believing that the real motive of the Norwegian search party was an inquiry about the Greenlanders’ longstanding debt of tithes and taxes to Church and Crown and that the settlers suspected this and were hiding to avoid payment. Ívar and his company would have been frightened by what they assumed was the “black magic” of the Inuit and may have left without a proper search. “The archaeological record to this day shows no sign of any such Doomsday violence against the Norse. Nothing remotely classifiable as a Norse genocide by Arctic natives took place in either the Western or Eastern settlement,” she writes (Seaver 2010, 70), adding that modern excavation of a multilayered site called the “Farm beneath the Sand” indicates that the Western Settlement was maintained until around 1400 and was intentionally abandoned by the settlers for as yet undiscovered reasons (105). Sometime later, Greenland’s Eastern Settlement lost contact with Europe and stopped sending ships to Norway. A Christian mission sent from Norway in the early seventeenth century “found not a single man or woman of Viking descent,” as Neil Oliver writes (2012, 218). Inuit folktales, not substantiated, tell of raiders who arrived by sea and kidnapped the Norse, while the intrepid Inuit watched from the hills. The few Norse human remains excavated subsequently in Greenland left no clues as to the fate of the colonists. The Greenland mystery has continued to interest scholars and writers (cf. Jane Smiley’s absorbing 1988 novel The Greenlanders). As for the legend of kidnapping by seamen, it is by no means out of the question. Kidnapping by accomplished sailors and fishermen turned pirates, from Africa and from the Basque country, became

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almost a commonplace in the North Atlantic islands, militarily undefended and distant from their mainland Scandinavian protectors. A seventeenth- century Icelandic Lutheran minister described the 1627 kidnap from their homes of himself, his pregnant wife, and four hundred other Icelanders by Moroccan corsairs. They were taken to North Africa, where many northern Europeans were held for ransom or sold into slavery. He, however, was allowed to return to Iceland a year later, where he successfully raised enough money to ransom his family. His seventeenth-century memoirs, in the Icelandic Reisubók Séra Ólafs Egilssonar were a classic of the Icelandic literature of his time. They were translated into English as The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson (Ólafur Egilsson 2011).

Vinland: Norse in North America Around ad 1000 an Icelander named Bjarni Herjólfsson discovered lands to the south and west of Greenland, in what we now call North America, but which the Norse called Vinland ‘Wineland’. Shortly thereafter, Leif Eriksson (son of Erik the Red) led a group of Icelandic and Greenlandic men and women on a voyage of settlement to the same territories. The earliest written description of these events appears in Adam of Bremen’s 1076 work Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum (Deeds of bishops of the Hamburg Church), in which Adam writes about Vinland, discovered by the Normanni ‘Norse’ (Adamus 2002, cap. 38). In the early 1200s, another description arrived via the “Vinland sagas,” that is, Grænlendinga saga (Saga of the Greenlanders) and Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red). Discoveries in L’Anse aux Meadows on the island of Newfoundland, Canada, in 1960 confirmed the existence of a Norse settlement in North America; the condition of building foundations and other remnants suggested that the Norse had stayed there for a period of about three years. The sagas report that they sent back home shiploads of grapes (or raisins) and lumber (much prized for building in nearly treeless Iceland) and that they experienced several attacks by the indigenous people, whom they called (as they had called the Inuit in Greenland) Skrælings. Believing that they lacked the resources to prevail over the Skrælings in the long run, the Norse abandoned Vinland and returned to Iceland and Greenland.

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A North American Indian Woman in Iceland? A mitochondrial (maternal-line) DNA lineage found in several Icelanders in a 2010 study appears to be identical with DNA known to be present in the original settlers of North America fourteen thousand years ago. No material evidence apart from the DNA has been found. The researchers are confident that the DNA appeared in the Icelandic population sometime before 1700. They concluded that the most likely explanation was that a North American Indian woman was brought to Iceland around the time of the tenth-century Norse exploration of the Americas and subsequently had one or more children whose descendants are part of the modern Icelandic population (Sigríður Sunna Ebenesardóttir, Ásgeir Sigurdsson, and Sánchez-Quinto 2010). There is some support for this hypothesis in Eiríks saga rauða, one of the Vinland sagas, which exists today in a fourteenth-century manuscript. Eiríks saga rauða reports that the Norsemen took two children (gender unspecified) of the native Skraelings with them back to Iceland. From a nineteenth-century translation: “Now, when they sailed from Vinland, they had a southern wind, and reached Markland, and found five Skrælingar; one was a bearded man, two were women, two children. Karlsefni’s people caught the children, but the others escaped and sunk down into the earth. And they took the children with them, and taught them their speech, and they were baptized” (Eirik the Red’s saga 1880, chapter 14). If one or both of the children were girls, it is indeed possible that the DNA found by Sigríður Sunna Ebenesardóttir and her colleagues in the Icelandic population originated in Vinland. In any case, this possible link between early Iceland and North America is intriguing.

The saga s of The iceL an de r s The Old Norse–Icelandic Íslendingasögur (Sagas of the Icelanders) include historical and genealogical accounts, many written anonymously. However, Ari Þorgilsson (1067–1148), known as Ari hinn fróði ‘Ari the Wise’, named himself in his Íslendingabók (Book of the Icelanders); and scholars have identified Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) as the author of both The Prose Edda and Heimskringla. The sagas tell of people and events of the ninth and tenth centuries in Iceland and are read not only for their content, but because they

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document the Old Norse language of Iceland. They are part fact, part legend, and part poetic license, “fusions of history and legend in a vernacular prose form,” as Carol J. Clover describes them (1985, 239). The saga stories’ portrayal of a frontier society gives far more importance to individuals, both men and women, of every social class, than do the writings of that time with which they might be compared. The earlythirteenth-century Latin poetry and prose work Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes), by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish church official, for example, deals with gods, kings, and heroes, not with ordinary people. There are forty Icelandic sagas, some detailing the names of the original settlers of Iceland and their households, others telling the adventures of particular Icelanders, men and women, in largely undeconstructable mixtures of history and narrative. Thus, the extent to which this portrayal reflects an at least relatively egalitarian reality cannot be known. Many of the sagas could be understood by literary specialists as novels, with individualized characters and a plot line; these characteristics are not found in the first European novels until several centuries afterward. Scholar and novelist Jane Smiley describes the sagas as “prose narrative that concerns itself with the doings and opinions and fates of what we would call ordinary citizens, that is, men and women who live in communities of people who are more or less their equals, whose personal qualities determine the outcome of their intentions and whose stories constitute models of social and psychological behaviour. . . . Medieval Iceland shared with the modern world a considerable degree of social mobility” (Smiley 1997, x).

Religion and Literacy The sagas and historical texts had not only authors, but readers, in their home islands. Christianity, which came to both Iceland and the Faroes around ad 1000, brought a new religion as well as a culture based upon writing and books, and many more Icelanders and Faroese than previously learned to read and write. By the eleventh century, wealthy families began to send their young sons to Europe (often Germany) for their education, hoping to give them opportunities that could turn into good careers with the Church. This tradition continued for centuries. With the founding in 1479 of the University of Copenhagen, Icelanders and Faroese began to go to Denmark to study; it was another five hundred years before they could do advanced studies in their own

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countries (the University of Iceland at Reykjavik was founded in 1911, the University of the Faroe Islands at Tórshavn in 1965). They learned to write in Latin, and some turned this education to writing in their native language as well. By the mid-twelfth century in Iceland, not only sagas but also domestic laws, genealogies, and sacred works, such as saints’ lives and sermons, appeared in Icelandic, using the Latin alphabet (Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir 2004, 20), though this was not systematically done and was found inadequate by later scholars of Icelandic. Fyrsta málfræðiritgerðin (First Grammatical Treatise), completed in the middle of the twelfth century, was the first document to provide a complete and linguistically accurate representation of Icelandic sounds using the Latin alphabet augmented with extra characters and diacritical marks (Gísli Sigurðsson and Vésteinn Ólason 2004, 18). It provided nineteenth century scholars with a foundation for “normalization” of Old Norse–Icelandic texts printed in modern times so as to achieve consistency for students and scholars of the sagas.

They Eat Horses, Don’t They? Horses were sacred in the pagan society of the North. The All-Father Odin himself rode a special horse, Sleipnir ‘Glider’, eight-legged for speed (fig. 5); and the earthly Norse loved horses too. This did not keep them from eating horse meat, not only as a food source but also ceremonially. A major Norse pagan ritual, the blót (Icelandic and Faroese ‘sacrifice’) included sacrificing a horse and then boiling and eating the meat. When Christianity came to the countries of the North, this practice was no longer acceptable, since both the sacramental and the culinary eating of horses had been forbidden by Pope Gregory in ad 732 during Christian missionary campaigns in Germanic Europe. Of the countries of the North whose people still celebrated the blót at the end of the first millennium, Iceland alone successfully resisted the edict. According to the compromise decision of the Icelandic Alþingi ‘Parliament’ in the year 1000, all Icelanders who were not already Christians were to be baptized. Popular sentiment in favor of two pagan customs could not be denied: exposing unwanted babies to the elements and the eating of horse meat. Both could continue, it was ruled, as long as they were practiced in secret. However, “after a few years this heathenism [infanticide and the eating of horse meat] was abolished like the rest” (Jochens 1995, 88). From that time forward,

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Fig. 5. Odin’s eight-legged steed, Sleipnir ‘Glider’. Illustration by Lara Thurston.

in all countries of the North, the eating of horse meat was forbidden. Gradually, after Christianity had firmly established itself, the eating of horse meat resumed. It is possible in all the Nordic countries today to purchase sausage or other meat items made from horse, though horse meat is not as popular as pork or beef. In England and in the United States, the eating of horse meat is strongly disdained, and it is in some localities outright illegal to sell it for human consumption. However, in the Latin countries, such as France and Italy, horse meat is popular. In those countries no Germanic pagan horse cult existed to be stamped out by the Roman Church on the way to Christianization.

iceL andic s criBe s a nd The s c r iP T or ium Because the saga era preceded the printing press, saga manuscripts were handwritten and then hand- copied, not only by monks but also by professional scribes. Illustrated or decorated copies of the sagas were high-status possessions in Europe as well as in Iceland and the Faroes, and there was plenty of paid work for people trained to copy

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manuscripts in a fine and legible hand. Icelandic ink, which was made with bearberry and black humus, boiled and soaked together with sticks of raw willow, produced deep black and shiny images on the vellum (cured calfskin) and the sheepskin used for the saga manuscripts. The colored manuscripts of Iceland are considered particularly fine; native and imported plant dyes, as well as minerals such as vermilion, red ochre, and azurite, provided the color (Soffia Guðny Guðmundsdóttir and Laufey Guðnadóttir 2004, 52– 53). The scribes worked in the scriptorium, a room dedicated to manuscripts, which was unheated and often virtually unlit to protect the vellum from overdrying or light damage. A scriptorium in Iceland must have been especially uncomfortable in the long, dark winter; one of the scribes of an Icelandic manuscript of rímur ‘ballads’ wrote in the margin: “It’s bad to write in a northwester.” The dark and the close work were hard on the eyes; wooden-framed spectacles used by scribes attest to this, as do the comments found on another manuscript: “The poor wretch is ill in his eyes. . . . Jesus son of Mary, behold the eyes of your slave.” Not only dark and cold, the scriptorium was lonely, forbidden to others when the scribes were doing their work, for fear of distracting them. “I feel I have been a long time alone in the scriptorium,” writes a scribe at the bottom of his manuscript of Margrétar saga (The life of St. Margaret). The scribes called out their employers for second-rate supplies, as in “Poor is the writing for poor is the ink,” and for inadequate food: “You do me wrong, Dóri, you never give me enough fish”; and we can all sympathize with the scribe, unlucky in love, who wrote, “All hope is lost that she will love me” (quotations from Soffia Guðny Guðmundsdóttir and Laufey Guðnadóttir 2004, 54– 57). Despite the rise in literacy that began in twelfth- century Iceland (Þorsteinn Vilhjálmsson 1991, 69), it seems likely that the scribes believed their employers were unable to read these heartfelt marginal comments and that, hence, the scribes’ complaints did not endanger their employment. Nor is it likely that the comments motivated any improvement in working conditions. The year 1540 brought Iceland its first printed book: Oddur Gottskalksson’s 1540 translation of the New Testament. With the rise of printing, the scribes were out of work. Paper, not vellum, was used for book pages, with leather only on the bindings. But by then the age of the sagas was past.

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The viking s, a d 7 93 – 1066 In this book I refer to the Scandinavians of early medieval times as Norse or, for the males, Norse men, and for the females, Norse women. Often, however, the people as a whole are referred to, inexactly, as Vikings (Old Norse vikingr, from vik ‘bay’, or from the area near Oslo Fjord called Vik, among other suggested etymologies; for a discussion, see Wolf 2004, 2–4). The only Norse men (only rarely were women included) who were understood in their own times as Vikings were the ones who invaded other lands to raid, pillage, and kidnap; those who stayed home and farmed or put out to sea to fish were not called Vikings. It is difficult to know from our vantage point a thousand years later which were which. Many Norsemen seem to have been parttimers, farming or fishing in season and fara í viking ‘going a-viking’ off-season. The Orkneyinga Saga, the Viking-age story of the Orkney Islands written down in the thirteenth century, probably with oral tradition as its major source, provides an example. It describes the activities of one young man, Swein Asleifsson: “In the spring he had more than enough to occupy him, with a great deal of seed to sow. . . . Then . . . he would go off plundering in the Hebrides and in Ireland on what he called his ‘spring trip,’ then come back home just after midsummer where he stayed till the corn fields had been reaped. . . . After that he would go off raiding again . . . his autumn trip” (quoted in Oliver 2012, 150). In the pagan worldview of the Norse, stealing and kidnapping were legitimate ways of enriching oneself. “A determined seeking after wealth is really what unites the diverse activities clustered together under the Viking label,” writes Heather (2010, 498).

Life a nd work in ea rLy me die vaL insuL a r s ca ndinavia Written materials from Iceland and the Faroes, including the sagas, have provided documentation not only of these nations’ languages, but also of their organization as societies. For example, the blood feuds between clans recorded in the sagas were the inevitable result of the lack of mechanisms for enforcement of the national law councils (the Faroes’ Alþing and Iceland’s Alþingi). For most people, life was lived within large farm estates; but fishing was also a common occupation. Archaeological remains in Iceland

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and the Faroes have provided some evidence of daily life. In Kvívík in the Faroes, a Norse hall and byre (cowshed) from early medieval times was excavated in 1941; evidence of cereal cultivation was also found there. In Iceland, burial remains included evidence of women’s clothing and jewelry clearly patterned after Irish women’s dress of the time (remember the Celtic wives and slaves who came along with the Norse settlers). The dead were buried, sometimes in boats, under mounds near large farms where they presumably had lived. Longhouses were built of sod, stone, and timber and were divided into rooms. Norse colonization in Iceland had led to an ecological disaster: as much as 60 percent of the local vegetation was destroyed by woodcutting to make pastures for grazing cows; overgrazing then led to soil erosion, which caused the populace to move to other areas to find good farmland. This in turn led to the breakup of the extended family, which had been the basis of a social safety net. Agricultural cooperatives were set up to replace in part the extended families. Thus was cultural change, writes archaeologist Julian Richards, eventually determined by environmental factors (2005, 98–105). The Norse men, in the North Atlantic and on the Scandinavian mainland, appear far more often in print than the Norse women, either in Old Icelandic sagas or in the reports of the put-upon neighbors of the Vikings. The two commonest female roles of the sagas are “on one hand, the proud, strong-willed woman who is frequently the catalyst for, if not the cause of, trouble; on the other hand the fierce guardian of her family’s standing and honor, the voice of conscience that reminds men of their duty,” writes Judith Jesch (1991, 189). But those characters may not be representative of reality: “The saga ‘worthies’ [worthy women] did not represent flesh-and-blood women from the pagan age . . . or from the Christian age of the saga writers themselves” (Jochens 1995, ix). Rather, they were constructs from the saga writer’s idea of the past, or portraits of divine figures from the Christian tradition (x). These sources tell us that women were active and valued members of society but suggest that in the final analysis, the Norse world was a man’s world. As an example of Norse women’s activity and value, take their role as spinners and weavers of cloth—an archetypically feminine activity in classical times and even earlier. In Norse mythology the Norns, goddesses of fate, were portrayed as “weaving the threads” of human destiny (fig. 6). In real life, Norse women, whether in the North Atlantic

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Fig. 6. The Norns, Norse mythological weavers of human destiny. Illustration by Lara Thurston.

islands or in mainland Scandinavia, spent a great deal of their time in producing cloth. By hand they harvested and spun flax to make linen, and tore the wool off the sheep’s backs, to make yarn. The cloth created from their spinning and weaving became the mainstay of what we might call the legitimate business of their homeland’s trading economy (i.e., distinct from the plundering and kidnapping carried out by the Norse men in their role as Vikings). Norse homespun cloth was a central item of export from both Norway and Iceland. Bolts or lengths of homespun even became a form of currency in the North, for trade as well as for taxpaying. Among approximately three hundred skalds, or early medieval Scandinavian poets, known to us, four Norse women have entered written history as authors of skaldic poetry—verse in a rigid form unique to Scandinavia, written from the ninth to the fourteenth century, mostly by Icelanders. Their poetry is quoted in fragments in the Icelandic sagas written by male authors. Since there are only these four women, it is worth mentioning their names: Gunnhildr (Icelandic, tenth century), Hildr Hrólfsdóttir (possibly Norwegian, ninth century, and, according to tradition, the mother of Rollo, founder of the Viking settlement at Normandy), Jórunn (Norwegian or Icelandic); and Steinunn (Icelandic, late tenth century). All four wrote on politics and public events, not stereotypically domestic women’s topics. “There is hardly enough

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evidence to generalise about women’s poetic activities in the Viking Age. It is remarkable that women composed poetry at that time at all,” writes Jesch (1991, 167). In Norse society, as in most societies in history, women were the primary food preparers. In the North Atlantic islands’ long, dark, and damp winters, a significant aspect of food preparation was preservation. The absence of canning and refrigeration encouraged the development of imaginative methods. The women dried cod; pickled horsemeat in whey; cured hrutspungar ‘rams’ testicles’ in lactic acid; and made sviþ ‘boiled sheep’s heads’, blóðmör ‘blood pudding’, hákarl ‘basking shark’ (Cetorhinus maximus), and other fermented and airdried foods (Oliver 2012, 208). Several of these food items are available even today at traditional festivals in Iceland and the Faroes. The Norse women, however, were not mistresses of their own lives. Pagan marriage rules were “designed primarily to ensure orderly passage of property from one generation to the next” (Oliver 2012, 21–22). Men were allowed to have as many wives and children as they could support. Polygamy is not mentioned in Norse Christian sources, but bigamy (tvíkvenni ‘two wives’) was prohibited, and the Church gradually induced Christian priests to accept celibacy. Incest was forbidden in both pagan and Christian times, but it seems likely that it was hard to root out. Jochens points out that “the Church is compelled to repeat, century after century” even the rules against men’s incest with mothers and daughters (Jochens 1995, 23). Also a crime of violence is the Norse habit of using force to take women, especially foreign women, as wives or concubines. Jonathan Clements gives some examples of what he calls the “remarkable heights of objectification” of women in the sagas. “It seems complimentary for a Viking poet to describe a woman as a display unit for jewellery,” he writes. “Females are described as ‘sleighs for necklaces’, as ‘guardians of gold’, or as ‘ring-wearers’.” Both women and men were referred to by their rightful names and also by bynames, or nicknames; but whereas those of the men often referred to their character (“Ari the Wise”), those of the women, such as “Hallgerd Long-legs” and “Thorkatla Bosom,” often referred to their erotic appeal (Clements 2008, 56). An outstanding counterexample is provided in an account of the ninth- century Unnur Ketilsdottir, known as Auðr djúpúðga Ketilsdóttir ‘Aud the deep-minded’. After her husband’s death, she commissioned a knorr (seagoing ship) at Caithness,

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Scotland, and served as its captain, commanding twenty sailors and many prisoners of Viking raids on its voyage to Iceland (she appears in several Icelandic chronicles and sagas, including Landnámábók and Brennu-Njáls saga) (Icelandic Saga Database 2016). Yet Norse women evidently impressed foreign visitors, not only for their beauty, but specifically for their freedom (relative to the repressive societies from which the foreigners came). Two relevant written commentaries come from the Arab world. One is by the tenthcentury poet Ibrāhīm b. Ya’qūb al-Turtushi, probably a Jew from Muslim Spain (Tortosa in Andalusia), who traveled extensively in Europe around ad 950. He had visited the Norse trading port Hedeby ‘heathsettlement’ (Norse Heiðabýr), formerly part of Denmark but today in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, on the southern Jutland Peninsula. Among the facts Ibrāhīm notes are these two: unwanted children are thrown into the sea; and women may get a divorce anytime just by voicing the wish (for discussions of his comments, see Wolf 2004, 40–41; Jesch 1991, 91). As for the appearance of the Norse, both male and female, Ibrāhīm noted they were “tall as date palms, blond and ruddy,” and also that the women concocted eye makeup (Wolf 2004, 99–100). A second Arab commentary comes from Al-Ghazāl, a ninth-century poet, philosopher, and diplomat of Andalusia, whose handsome face and figure earned him his name, which means “the gazelle.” As reported much later by a twelfth-century countryman, Ibn Dihya, recounting Al-Ghazāl’s travel to and stay at a Norwegian or Danish court (it is uncertain which), Al-Ghazāl became infatuated with a Norse queen called Nūd. A “notorious relationship” between them was noticed at the court. Like other high-born Danish women of the time, according to runic inscriptions, Queen Nūd may have had more extramarital freedom than did ordinary women (Jesch 1991, 92– 95). Widows, by law and custom in both pagan and Christian times, could take over the estates of their deceased husbands and manage them at their own discretion, not subject to the authority of their sons. In fact, some sagas described mothers who more or less squandered their estates and left the sons nothing.

inva sion a nd PLu n de r What we now call the Viking Age is usually reckoned by historians to have begun in ad 793, when marauding Norsemen came by sea to

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invade Lindisfarne, an isolated northern British coastal monastery, pillaging its buildings and whipping the monks out into the sea naked to drown. The attack on Lindisfarne outraged the British, because it was committed on largely defenseless monks in their refuge and because Lindisfarne was considered the most holy place in Britain. Historian Robert Ferguson describes the Norsemen’s actions as “psychopathic rage directed at the Christian ‘other’ . . . infantile orgies of transgressive behavior,” and he suggests that the drownings were a “travesty of baptism” (2010, 56). This view of the Vikings’ motives is not widely shared by historians, who are inclined to the view that the Vikings simply followed the money (or the gold); but, whatever the reason, for decades afterward Viking raids in the British Isles were confined to isolated (and therefore defenseless) monastic communities, such as those in ad 795 on the monasteries in Skye, Iona, and Rathlin (Oliver 2012, 168). Starting around ad 830, large-scale Viking attacks on cities and rich churches in the British Isles and on the European continent became common, but their tactics were hardly new. Charles Martel, ruler of the Franks from ad 718 to 741, pursuing invasion and forcible conversion to Christianity of the Germanic tribes, had turned to “behaviour and practices every bit as bloody and horrific as anything perpetrated later by the Vikings,” Oliver writes. The Christian Franks continued to believe that their own “divinely sanctioned cruelty was always more acceptable than that meted out by pagans” (2012, 75). For the next two hundred years, the Viking attacks continued sporadically. By the eleventh century, their European victims, for the most part unable to repel the often surprise attacks militarily, reacted by trying to buy off the Vikings, collecting a tax called Danegeld ‘Dane money’ to pay the marauders. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes the Vikings just kept the money and pillaged anyway.

The Vikings in Russian Territory The Rus, Swedish Vikings who traveled from the Baltic to the Black and Caspian seas, arrived in the mid-ninth century in what is today northwest Russia. Some of the Norsemen had continued farther south to become mercenaries in the Byzantine Empire, where they were known by the Greek name for Vikings, Varangians. The Rus who stayed in Russian territory had their own way of profiting from their neighbors,

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becoming entrepreneurial, international slave traders, while their tribal name mutated into “Russia” and Ruotsi, the Finnish name for Sweden (for a discussion of the history of the name Rus, see Söderlind 2009, 135–43). They founded several cities, including Kiev and Novgorod (“New City” in Russian, known in Old Norse as Holmgarðr). The Rus called their territory in Russia Garðariki ‘kingdom of forts’, probably named for the string of forts there (garðr = walled area, cognate with English “garden” and Russian город/gorod ‘city’). But eventually the Rus blended in with the local populace, giving up their Norse language and their Scandinavian identity. Left behind in tenth- and eleventh-century Garðariki were “almost unreadable runes, [possibly] degenerated runic script used by Slavicized Scandinavians” (Melnikova 1985, 172).

The end of The viking ag e The year 1066, date of the Battle of Stamford Bridge, when the English fought off a final Viking incursion, is often considered the closing date of the Viking age. Later in that same year, the English were successfully invaded and conquered not by Vikings themselves, but by their progeny, the Normans (“Northmen”). These were French-speaking descendants of Vikings who in ad 911 had settled and claimed a territory in the north of France at the invitation of King Charles, who had offered it to their chieftain, Rollo (ca. 846– ca. 932), hoping to bring an end to Viking raids there. They named it, after themselves, Normandy. By 1066 they had become gentrified, with a king and a monarchy. Having outgrown the grab-and-run tactics of their Viking forebears, they graduated to more modern forms of invasion and conquering. First Norway was Christianized, then Denmark, the Faroes, Iceland, and finally, in the thirteenth century, Sweden, and they gave up their harsh pagan ways (although the process of Scandinavian Christianization itself, except in Iceland and the Faroes, was a violent one). These national conversions were seen by their European neighbors as not only a victory for Christianity, but also relief from the Viking scourge. England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, as well as the other North Atlantic islands, were no more to be visited by Viking raiders. In Scandinavia itself, pagan violence was replaced not by peace but by several centuries of now-Christian internecine warfare among the Scandinavian monarchies.

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Let us leave the last word on the Vikings, so very interesting, yet too often glamorized as heroes instead of the violent raiders that they were, to historian Jonathan Clements, who writes, “The Vikings do not, should not, exist any more. The last vestige of the Viking spirit can be found in criminals and chancers, and hopefully, that is where it will stay” (Clements 2008, 228).

iceL a ndic na ming c onve n T ion s As in the Iceland of the sagas, Icelanders today still use a form of (usually) their father’s first name (or in a few cases their mother’s first name) as their second name. In effect, this patronym or matronym functions as a last name; but since the name is not inherited, in actuality most Icelanders have no last name. It works like this: each person has his or her own first name, for example siblings Jón (a man) and Svanhildur (a woman). Their father’s name is Óskar, so Jón’s patronym is Óskarsson, and Svanhildur’s is Óskarsdóttir. Less commonly, either sons or daughters may choose their mother’s name for a second name (a matronym), adding -son or -dóttir to the possessive form of that. For example, if Jón’s and Svanhildur’s mother were named Helga, Jón could become Helguson (Helgu being the possessive form of Helga), and Svanhildur could become Helgudóttir. A few Icelanders nowadays are even using both parental names, such as Jón Helguson Óskarsson. Naming with the patronym or matronym is a matter of law in Iceland, although Icelanders who, before the current law came into force, adopted a heritable family name may keep that name and pass it down to the next generation. Icelandic women may not adopt a foreign husband’s surname (if they stay in Iceland), but a foreign woman who marries an Icelander may adopt either his surname or his patronym. First names, too, are regulated by law: they must be in harmony with Icelandic orthography and grammar rules (capable of having an Icelandic possessive ending) and must be judged by the Personal Names Committee to be gender-appropriate to the child (Iceland Ministry of the Interior 1996).

mo T her nor se’s T wins Prove no T T o Be iden Tica L Faroese and Icelandic, today regarded as separate languages, may both be seen as living exhibits of Old Norse. Alone among the five surviving

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daughters of Old Norse, Icelandic and Faroese have retained much of Old Norse grammar: three genders, four noun cases, conjugated verb endings, and the characters æ; ð; and, only in Icelandic, þ. In Modern Faroese and Modern Icelandic, the orthography (spelling) is based on the Old Norse of the sagas, although the pronunciation has changed in both languages. Given the high literary status of the sagas, it is no wonder that the leaders of Iceland and the Faroes decided to use the language of the sagas as their polestar, their model for excellence. As the art of writing came to be practiced by more people, the purists insisted on keeping it from drifting too far away from the language of the saga writers. Nevertheless, languages change, no matter how hard their speakers try to preserve the past; it proved easier to freeze the written language than the spoken language. As the centuries passed, the North Atlantic sons and daughters of Old Norse, far away from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, remained immune to the radical trimming of grammatical endings and the phonological developments that resulted in today’s Mainland Scandinavian languages (on this topic, see chapter 3). The significant pronunciation shifts that occurred during the thousand-year stretch between Norse times and ours played out in different ways in the Faroes and Iceland. Modern Icelandic pronunciation is tracked relatively closely by its orthography. In Modern Faroese this is much less the case; for example, Faroese ð, when preceding r, is pronounced as gr; in other positions ð is pronounced as j, w, or v (Nauerby 1996, 189n4). And, unlike Modern Icelandic, Modern Faroese has considerable dialect variation, especially between north and south. These characteristics of Faroese, according to Nauerby, are “by no means the product of a spontaneous development, but the result of centuries of suppression on the part of the Danish, which—more than anything— has prevented the natural development of the Faroese language” (86). These inconsistencies between spelling and speaking may be compared with English, which exhibits a similar characteristic, though not because of past suppression of the English language. For example, gh in “straight” vs. “tough;” o in “women” vs. “bowmen”; oo in “floor” vs. “boot”; -ion in “station” vs. “lion” are noticeable and puzzling to school children as well as to foreign learners of English. However, the historical causes are, in specific detail, unique to English. Likewise, phoneticians of Scandinavian are able to provide historical explanations for

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the phonological (pronunciation) developments in Faroese and Icelandic (see Kristján Árnason 2011). Speakers of Faroese and Icelandic, however, experience only an unbridgeable gap between the two, at least in the spoken language.

Social Classes There were no large-scale kings (only clan chieftains) or other nobility to create a European-style feudal society in either the Faroes or Iceland. In frontier societies such as these, there may well have been, as the saga stories suggest, a kind of rough equality between persons, at least between peasants and the ruling classes; that was not the case on the Continent. Nevertheless, there was unequal distribution of both economic means and political power among the Norse populace, and the sagas tell of bondsmen (slaves) and of freemen, former slaves who had purchased their own freedom. Bondage was not only an Icelandic but a continental Norse societal pattern set in very early times. This may be seen from the Rígsþula ‘Lay of Rig’, a poem written in Eddic style and preserved in a manuscript containing Snorri Sturluson’s Poetic Edda, written down in fourteenthcentury Iceland. The Rígsþula recounts the legend of the pagan god Heimdallr, “powerful and crafty”, and how he lay with an earthly woman and begat a son, Þræll ‘slave’ (cf. English cognate “thrall”), who in turn mated with a “bow-legged maiden scarred of sole (because she worked hard while barefooted)” called Þir, whose many children were the beginning of the bóndi ‘slave’ class. The following year Heimdallr lay with a prosperous peasant woman, Amma, who bore a “pink and lovely” son Karl ‘fellow’, who became the ancestor of freeborn men (peasants); a subsequent son of Amma and Heimdallr became the ancestor of the jarlar ‘lords’. This was the traditional explanation of the class society in the North: at the bottom bondspeople, above them peasants, and at the top, lords, all born into their roles. Peasants in Norse society were farmers and self-purchased freemen and freewomen who might own their own farmland (and their own bondspeople), not feudal workers legally attached to the land of the estate owner, as in other European societies (Lindkvist 1993, 188). Bondsmen and bondswomen and all their children were chattel of their owners and had no rights at all. Another kind of bondsmen, found

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only in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden (because there were no kings in Insular Scandinavia), were the hird, the king’s most loyal bodyguards, over whom the king had absolute rights of life and death. Most other bondsmen had been taken as prisoners by Norse invaders in foreign lands, to become slaves in the North or wherever they might be sold; women were also taken prisoner, not only as concubines or servants, but as future breeders of more bondsmen. The system of bondage, including even slave markets, according to Swedish writer Vilhelm Moberg, closely models slavery in the Roman Empire as well as, a millennium later, in the American South. Norse bondage included not only onerous work and lack of personal freedom, but also petty humiliations. The first names traditionally given to bondspeople by their overseers, for example, Klur, Klegge, Drumb, and Lut (male) and Drumba, Kumba, and Ökkenkalva (female) were names considered ugly or comical by the free Norse. Slavery was not completely abolished in Iceland until well after Christianity had dominated the island (a lively discussion is found in Moberg 1972, 10–19). This is not to say, however, that Christianity played no part in ending the slave trade in the North. Ditlev Tamm and Helle Vogt write, “As the Crusades and Christianization of the Slavic East came to an end, the supply of pagan prisoners [a major source of slaves] dried up, [and] the large slave market around the Baltic Sea disappeared” (2016, 22). Details of early Norse social organization are hard to pin down except as they are documented in early writings, many of which did not appear until centuries after the periods they recount; and subsequent accounts of pagan life are thought to have glossed over some social realities because they were distasteful to the Christian authors. A few visual clues to social classes in early medieval mainland and insular Scandinavian life are provided by twelfth-century chess figures, made in Norway but brought by a trader to what is now Scotland.

Imitation of Life? The “Lewis Chessmen” as images of Norse Social Classes Ninety-two ancient ivory chess pieces found in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, now Scotland, have fascinated chess players ever since. One-and-a-half inches to four inches tall, the pieces, carved out of walrus ivory and whale tooth around ad 1150 (when the Outer Hebrides were part of the Norse kingdom), represent incomplete parts

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Fig. 7. Three of the Lewis chess figures: from left, the king, seated on his throne with his sword on his lap; the bishop, with the symbol of his office, the crosier, shaped to suggest a shepherd’s staff; and the queen, seated on her throne with her hand to her head as if in contemplation. Photo by Hugh Morgan.

of four chess sets (see fig. 7). They were found inside a stone chamber in a sandbank in Uig Bay (possibly a Celticization of Old Norse vik ‘bay’). Undoubtedly of Scandinavian origin, they were probably buried for safekeeping by a trader on the route between Scandinavia and the North Atlantic islands (British Museum 2012). Such chess figures were considered valuable possessions, bequeathed to others in the owners’ wills. The figures may be seen as a representation of Norse life either on the mainland or on the North Atlantic Norse islands. Sixty-seven of the original chess pieces, named the Lewis Chessmen and well known to chess aficionados throughout the world, are on display at the British Museum; eleven are owned by the National Museums of Scotland, and copies are available for purchase through many dealers, as are copies of the British Museum’s documentary video about the Lewis pieces. It is not known whether chess was brought to the North from the Middle and Near East by some widely traveled Norse seamen, or whether it arrived via continental Europe. However, the Lewis chess figures are not quite the same as the figures in European chess of the time. Originating as parts of four unique but incomplete chess sets, the figures apparently from different sets are not identical to each other. The figures of at least one of the sets, however, seem to represent a specifically Norse understanding of the world. The war elephant figure of the ancient Indian game is the bishop in the Norse game,

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representing the worldly power held over land, men, and arms by the Church. The knight is on his horse, as in European continental chess; but the king, the central figure in Indian, Persian, and European chess, is represented in the Norse game sitting on his throne, his sword across his lap. The Norse queen replaces the Persian vizier, or wise counselor. The queen sits with her hand supporting her cheek, as if in contemplation prior to giving advice. This pose recalls the heroines of Icelandic sagas, at least in their role as thinkers, problem solvers, and advisers. The rooks—the guards that sit in the four corners of the chess board—become on the Norse board berserks, often carved biting their shields with enlarged teeth, portraits of the crazed and ferocious warriors of the same name in Norse legend, who have often been taken to be real in at least some sense. However, as Winroth writes, “the stories of berserks carry all the hallmarks of being literary and legendary creations”; and “when a berserk accepted baptism, his berserk powers disappeared, according to the sagas” (Winroth 2014, 39). The pawns in these early chess games have no faces or figures at all—they are pillars or oblongs resembling gravestones, an appropriate symbolic portrait of Norse bondsmen and bondswomen, slaves possessing no individual agency. In addition to being one of the most popular of the exhibits at the British Museum, the Lewis Chessmen have entered popular culture. They were the chess pieces in the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, as well as in the 1968 film The Lion in Winter; they appeared in the 2011 children’s book The Sleeping Army, by Francesca Simon; the 2012 Disney-Pixar film Brave; and the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. While it has been assumed that the pieces were carved in Norway, a new hypothesis suggests that they were made by an Icelander, Margret the Adroit (Icelandic Margrét hinn oddhaga), whose skill was widely celebrated in twelfth- century Iceland and who may have had an ivory workshop under the Cathedral of Skalholt, also the home of Pall, its bishop. Author Nancy Marie Brown bases her hypothesis on aesthetic similarities between the chess pieces and other carving attributed to Margret, but she admits the case cannot be closed unless excavation uncovers this ivory workshop—unlikely since it is located directly beneath valued seventeenth- century artifacts (Brown 2015, 18–19).

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modern iceL a ndic a nd oLd ic e L an dic Starting in nineteenth-century Iceland, movements for language purism have attempted to keep a standard for written Icelandic that is the same, or nearly the same, as the language used in the sagas. Since 1984 the government-supported Icelandic Language Institute (Icelandic Íslensk málstöð) has maintained this standard officially, replacing foreign loanwords with Icelandic equivalents. Pronunciation of the spoken language, however, has changed considerably; and of course many words have been added since those long-ago days of the sagas, while others have gone out of use. The structure and grammar of the language are substantially the same as in Old Icelandic. The result is that school children in Iceland today can and do read the twelfthcentury sagas in the original language (in “normalized” spelling editions). This sample text, the opening paragraph of Egil’s Saga, given in the Old Norse–Icelandic original, in Modern Icelandic, and in English (all three from the online Icelandic Saga Database [2016]), will serve as an illustration. Notice that Old Norse–Icelandic and Modern Icelandic are very close, although not identical. Modern Icelandic Úlfur hét maður, sonur Bjálfa og Hallberu, dóttur Úlfs hins óarga. Hún var systir Hallbjarnar hálftrölls í Hrafnistu, föður Ketils hængs.

Old Norse Úlfr hét maðr, sonr Bjálfa ok Hallberu, dóttur Úlfs ins óarga. Hon var systir Hallbjarnar hálftrölls í Hrafnistu, föður Ketils hængs.

English There was a man named Ulf, son of Bjalf and Hallbera, daughter of Ulf the fearless; she was sister of Hallbjorn Half-giant in Hrafnista, the father of Kettil Hæing.

c onc Lu sion Modern Faroese and Modern Icelandic are historically and linguistically the daughters of the western (Norwegian) dialects of Old Norse. Both have been influenced not only by local factors, but also by international history and politics. Iceland’s thirteenth-century Grágás ‘Gray Goose’ Laws (created in the early tenth century and written down a century or so later) referred to the language of Icelanders, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes alike as dǫnsk tunga ‘Danish tongue’. However, change was already in the making. In the Faroes and Iceland, the daughter languages of Old Norse were developing gradually, in

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the process separating from their mother language. Fyrsta Málfræðiritgerðin (The first grammatical treatise), published in 1125–75, had called Icelandic vár tunga ‘our tongue’, contrasting it to Danish dǫnsk tunga, or norræna ‘Norse’. Legal parlance soon caught up to that of the grammarians, and Icelandic began to be recognized as a separate language. In the Faroese Islands, however, speakers of Faroese considered Icelandic the high-status variant and their own spoken language a dialect of Icelandic. Accordingly, Faroese was used only in homes or otherwise private conversations, a situation that remained unchanged for centuries. By the thirteenth century, the Insular Scandinavian languages remained largely as they had been in saga times, while Mainland Scandinavian was undergoing major change. Old East Norse in Denmark and Sweden was the next to part ways with the Old West Norse in Norway. That is the topic of chapter 3.

3 • East Is East heraLding Th e BirT h of dan ish an d sw edi s h Dræpær maþar svænskan man eller smalenskæn, innan konongsrikis man, eigh væstgøskan, bøte firi atta ørtogher ok þrettan markær ok ænga ætar bot. [ . . . ] Dræpar maþær danskan man allæ noræn man, bøte niv markum. (If a man kills a Swedish man or a Smålander, a man from inside the kingdom, but not a West Geat, he must pay eight örtugar [twenty-penny coins] and thirteen marks, but not restitution to the victim’s family. . . . If a man kills a Danish or a Norwegian man, let him pay nine marks. [My translation]) Västgötalagen (Westrogothic law, ca. 1225)

Beginning s A runic fairy godmother foretold the birth of Danish and Swedish several centuries before the event, on memorial stones dating to about ad 800. As fairy godmothers are wont to do, she did not make her prediction directly, but obliquely, in this case through runic inscriptions of texts that were the first recorded written use of two local variants of East Norse, one found in Danish territory and one found in Swedish territory. The variants differed only slightly from other East Norse inscriptions and from each other. These inscriptions, though, heralded the two languages to come. The separation of East Norse into two languages is noticed first for Danish. “After 1300 [written] Danish shows a vigorous innovative trend that creates a major cleavage with Swedish,” writes Haugen (1982, 11). In the spoken language, these changes almost certainly occurred even earlier. For example, the change from p, t, k to b, d, g in the middle and at the end of words had already been completed by around ad 1200, wrote Danish linguist Peter Skautrup in his four-volume Det danske sprogs historie (History of the Danish language, 1944– 68, quoted in Haugen and Markey 1972, 23).

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Even though Swedish and Danish were spoken as separate languages before they were written as separate languages, the historical record for these early times makes available only the written language, and only moments of it. Danish and Swedish became identifiable to later ages for the first time in two national law codices: Västgötalagen ‘Westrogothic Law’ (1225), which served as the premiere of Swedish, and Skånske Lov ‘Scanian Law’ (ca. 1250), which did the same for Danish. Skånske Lov is the oldest known text in Danish. Scania was part of Denmark until 1658, when it became a part of Sweden. Today’s Scanian dialect is currently considered South Swedish, although, owing to its history, it still resembles Danish in many ways (the manuscript is in the collection of Kungliga Biblioteket, the National Library of Sweden, in Stockholm). This chapter puts into the spotlight the historical moment when Danish and Swedish emerged from East Norse and the background of that emergence, starting with the runes. But it also accounts, although briefly, for development after that historical moment. Three sociohistorical forces played a major role in the early life of Swedish and Danish: • Coalescence of the Danish and Swedish provincial realms into the larger kingdoms that were the precursors to postmedieval nationstates, a political background that was key to the development of the two East Norse variants into national languages • Influence of the Roman Church and its lingua franca, Latin, on the languages of the North, most noticeable in Danish and Swedish • Large-scale borrowing of mercantile vocabulary into Swedish and Danish from Middle Low German (ca. 1100–1600), the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, a medieval international merchant organization of the Baltic and northern Europe Meanwhile, mainland West Norse, left to its own devices during the twelfth century, began in the next centuries a quite different course before its emergence as Modern Norwegian. See chapter 5 for that story.

Before The a Bc s: Th e run e s The earliest runic inscriptions discovered in Denmark and northern Germany date to the second century ad (Elliott 1996, 333); these very

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Fig. 8. The runic alphabet of twenty-four symbols, called the Elder Futhark, named after the sounds of the first six symbols of the top line: f, u, þ, a, r, k. It was used from the second to the eighth centuries in the North; from the ninth to the eleventh centuries, the sixteen-symbol Younger Futhark was used. Illustration by Lara Thurston.

early runes represented Germanic, but not yet identifiably Scandinavian, writing. However, the origins of the runes are still the topic of lively research. Runic writing has also been found in Sweden, Norway, Britain, Iceland, the Faroes, Greenland, and even eastern Europe, for example, Ukraine and Poland (Looijenga 2003, 12). Most scholars believe that the runes were invented by Germanic tribesmen who had become acquainted with the Latin alphabet either in their travels to the Roman Empire or in Roman-influenced areas of northern Europe. Norwegian linguist Terje Spurkland writes that the earliest runic characters, unlike all other alphabets derived from Latin or Greek, were represented in their own order (beginning with f-u-th-a-r-k; see fig. 8) rather than retaining the order of the Roman letters. This he calls “one of the great unsolved mysteries of the origin of the runes” (2005, 5). Perhaps it was religious pride that fueled the heavy use of the runes in the North; the Christians had their writing, and the followers of Odin would have theirs. Odin, after all, was credited by his believers with creation of the runes. “I carved the runes, those which came from the gods,” reads the inscription on the Noleby Runestone in Västergötland, Sweden (Björn Jónasson 2008, 52).

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In practice, however, the runes were used to record not only religious texts but, more often, secular ones. Some runes were carved to order by trained scribes, on spears, shields, or jewelry, where they often expressed just the name of the owner or the maker. Those on commemorative stones might contain a message for the ages (“Erik raised this stone for his father Arnulf ” is a typical formula). Even some of those found on medieval church walls are just graffiti, such as “I slept with Vigdis when I was in Stavanger.” Rune sticks, a kind of early medieval memo, might contain reminders such as “Buy salt, and don’t forget gloves for Sigrid” (examples from Spurkland 2005, preface). Designed to be carved on wood, metal, or stone, the earliest runes were all straight lines and angles; some later runes were curved. As Christianity gained influence in the North, so did the Latin alphabet, replacing the runes. The runes, however, “remained the letters of the unlettered down to the time of the Reformation” (Haugen 1976, 118).

T wo naTions of The norT h Denmark Early in the twelfth century, the already Christianized Denmark was made a church province by the Roman Church; in 1103 Lund, Scania, then part of Denmark, was made the see of the archdiocese of Scandinavia, including Greenland. This may serve as a starting point for the modern kingdom of Denmark. However, in 1658, after losing the second Northern War to Sweden, King Frederick III of Denmark-Norway was forced to cede Lund, and all of Scania, to Sweden. The Danes and their kingdom were known to the Western world centuries earlier. In his sixth-century work Getica, the Roman author Jordanes mentioned the Dani, a North Germanic tribe that lived in Denmark. Jordanes wrote that they were of the same stock as the Suetidi ‘Swedes’; and indeed for quite some time afterward in European popular imagination, the distinction between Danes and Swedes was not always clear. The first written record of the name “Denmark” (Runic Danish tanmaurk, Modern Danish Danmark) appears in the runic inscription on the tenth- century Jelling Stones still extant at Jelling, Denmark. The stones were carved during the rule of Harald Bluetooth Gormsson

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(Old Norse Haraldr blátǫnn Gormsson), who ruled a more or less united Denmark from ad 958 until his death in ad 985. Internal conflict and a bloody struggle over Danish disentanglement from the Danelaw in England delayed the founding of the modern kingdom of Denmark by three centuries. History reveals that by the late Middle Ages, the Danish language had two major roles: it was an imperial language, “suppressing other languages (Norwegian, Faroese, Icelandic) . . . while at the same time having to assert itself at home against Latin and German dominance,” writes Vikør (1993, 43–44). The Danish written in the law codes referred to earlier had begun to replace the original Latin, so that the people might understand their law; no unified or standardized Danish existed, and what was written was a reflection of the local dialects. Unsurprisingly, the language of Zealand, on the eastern coast and home to the major cities Copenhagen and Roskilde, was dominant, however; and by the late Middle Ages, a “Zealandic chancery style” was developing in the local administrative Roman Church centers (Vikør 1993, 44). The scribes of the chanceries used Danish in correspondence among themselves (though Latin in correspondence with Rome) and probably exercised more influence on local parishes than did Rome in those days of slow travel and slow communication. Latin was, however, still the language of Christianity, the language in which the people heard their church services every Sunday. Early Christian missionaries to Denmark were most often from Germany, though Denmark was not completely Christianized for two centuries afterward. St. Ansgar (801–865) was later named the patron saint of Scandinavia for his work in Denmark and Sweden, which were still largely pagan; and German-language influence in Danish was considerable for centuries, though not just because of the Church. The German-based Hanseatic League gained dominance over Danish trade in the 1370 treaty of Stralsund, bringing to Denmark the use of Middle Low German, the Hanseatic League’s lingua franca in both speaking and writing. The introduction of printing in 1482, and the Protestant Reformation in 1536, succeeded in finally putting the Roman Church’s Latin into the shade as far as religious life was concerned: Danish became the language of the Lutheran Church in Denmark. In secular Danish life, though, German proved more difficult to dislodge than Latin had been. Through the royal house of Oldenburg,

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which began its rule of Denmark in 1448 (still represented on the throne of Denmark by Queen Margaret II), German had became the prestige language of the Danish aristocracy and upper class. The use of German did not seriously decline in Denmark until the eighteenth century; by that time, however, it was High German, not Low German, that was a status language (more on this later in this chapter). Today, Danish is the de facto national language; like the United States, Denmark has declared no official language.

Sweden By the mid-thirteenth century, the kingdom of Sweden had emerged from the tribal and provincial realms of the eastern Scandinavian peninsula, although the lack of written records from that time makes it difficult to fix firm dates for the kingdom’s beginning. Two ancient tribes, the Svear ‘Swedes’ and the Gautar (Swedish Götar), had long ruled the eastern and western parts of south- central Sweden, respectively. The Svear gave their name to Sweden (Swedish Sverige ‘kingdom of the Svear’). The Götar, under their English name Geats, appeared in the Old English poem Beowulf as the tribe of the poem’s warrior protagonist. In addition, Gautar/Götar lives on in the Swedish place names Gotland (an island off the east coast), Västergötland, Östergötland (these two in southern mainland Sweden), and Göteborg (English “Gothenburg”), a southwestern coastal city, all located in the large former provincial kingdom Götaland. At some point, the Gautar and the Svear officially united. It is known that around 1250 Stockholm was established as the seat of a strong central government by the Folkung dynasty under the leadership of Birger Jarl, father of the current king, Valdemar of Sweden (Haugen 1976, 281). Birger Jarl enters our story again in chapter 4 as the major actor in Sweden’s annexation of Finland. Both Swedish unity and the still-present Swedish tribal identities can be seen in the thirteenth- century Västgötalagen (Westrogothic law). Under that law, a countryman’s life is worth more than a foreigner’s. A “Swedish man or a Smålander” (both of the tribe of the Svear) is not the same as a “West Geat” (i.e., a member of the tribe of the Gautar), but nonetheless he is “a man from inside the [Swedish] kingdom.” Therefore, the fine for killing him is “eight örtugar and thirteen marks,” while the fine for killing a Danish or a Norwegian man (a foreigner), is

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much smaller—nine marks (quoted in Siemund and Kintana 2008, 178; translation mine). The principle that the lives of other Scandinavians were not worth as much as those from one’s own kingdom was lived out by Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians over and over in subsequent bloody conflicts.

The Goths The Goths eventually split into two groups, the Visigoths (Visi = “good” or “noble”), and the Ostrogoths (Ostro = “shining” or “glowing”; Munkhammar 1998, 32). The Goths invaded and colonized much of continental Europe during the Völkerwanderung, the massive Germanic tribal migrations beginning in ad 376. The thirteenth-century Gutasaga, the original of which is in the Swedish Royal Library in Stockholm, tells of the Goths’ migration to the south and was the basis of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Swedish nationalist writings that sought to emphasize the great-power historical tradition of their nation. The Visigoths sacked Rome in ad 410—this was the second of three such attacks on Rome in early medieval times—and then established a Visigothic kingdom in Spain (for a discussion of the Goths’ complex ethnic and territorial history, see Söderlind 2009, 150– 65). Gothic, the language of both the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, was the only premedieval Germanic language to leave an extensive written record of itself. Since it emerged as a language separate from other Germanic languages before North Germanic or pre-Scandinavian split off from continental Germanic, it never developed characteristics that would identify it as a Scandinavian language. The Gothic realms and their language as good as disappeared in the eighth-century Moorish conquest of Spain. Ulfilas (Gothic Wulfila), a fourth-century missionary, converted the Goths to Christianity. While in residence with the tribe in the city of Nicopolis ad Istrum, in what is today northern Bulgaria, he formulated a Gothic alphabet based on Greek and translated the Bible and several other religious texts into Gothic. A particularly handsome manuscript copy of Ulfilas’s translation of the four Gospels of the New Testament, named for its silver letters the Codex Argenteus ‘Silver Bible’, was made around ad 500 by scribes at the Ostrogothic court of Theoderic in Ravenna (Italy). It was moved at some time during the next thousand years to the cloister in Werden (now

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Germany) and taken to Sweden in 1648 as booty by Swedish troops in the Thirty Years War. Today, Sweden is home to the Codex Argenteus, the major literary legacy of the Goths, which may be viewed at Uppsala University’s Carolina Rediviva Library in Uppsala. In 1995 two thieves smashed its glass case with a hammer and took the Silver Bible, covering their retreat with tear gas. After an anonymous tip, the Bible was recovered, but it is now kept in a special room with enhanced security (Munkhammar 1998, 197–203).

T h e BLoody end of engL an d’s dan e L aw Danish Viking invasions of England resulted in Danish control of about one-third of the country of that time, a territory that was defined in ad 866 by a treaty signed by England’s King Alfred, delineating its borders and naming it the Danelagh ‘Danelaw’ (see fig. 9). For the next two hundred years, the Danelaw’s Danish invaders and English speakers lived together in Britain, each speaking their own language (more or less mutually intelligible in those days) but with the Danish

Fig. 9. The British Isles, including the Danelaw, as of ad 866. Map by Lara Thurston.

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Norse language dominant. In 1066 descendants of Danish Vikings, now speaking French and calling themselves Normans, invaded again, this time from the south, conquering all of England in the Battle of Hastings. Norman rule of England brought to a bloody end the independence of the Danelaw, by way of the new King William’s 1069–70 violent scorched- earth campaign known as the Harrying of the North. The enormity of the death and destruction wrought at this time was recorded for posterity in the English Domesday Book of 1086. We know there were Danish survivors, however, because modern DNA studies show Scandinavian genes dating to those times in the modern population of what was then the Danelaw (Bowden et al. 2008). The Danish survivors blended into the local population. Linguists have traditionally understood that their language, spoken in the former Danelaw and elsewhere in the British Isles, faded, leaving only intriguing fingerprints on Modern English. Bits of it can also be detected in the languages of other places where the Danish Norse once ruled.

T r ac e s of The viking s’ L a nguag e in e ngL an d, ireL a nd, a nd fra nc e We now recognize the language of the Danelaw as Danish Old Norse and understand that it was brought to England by Danish Vikings. However, as Kirsten Wolf notes, East Scandinavian (now Danish and Swedish) and West Scandinavian (now Icelandic, Faroese, and Norwegian) at this time were not generally differentiated from each other; both were called the “Danish tongue” (2004, 58). Accordingly, the Old English word Dene ‘Dane’ was used at the time to refer to all Scandinavians, including those smaller numbers of Norwegians and Swedes who also settled in the Danelaw (cf. Lass 1994, 187). Today, language historians sometimes refer to this Danish tongue of England as Anglo-Norse. It had significant effects on its host language, English. Not only in England, but also in France, Viking invasions and subsequent settlements left a linguistic mark readily seen today in place names. In France, these place names are often mixed, with one Norse and one local element. Examples are Tocqueville (Old Norse [ON] Tóki + French ville), Carville (ON Kari), Ouville (ON úlfr), and Guichainville (ON Vikingeby). In England, Norse settlement is suggested by endings such as -ey (Norse ø ‘island’) in Jersey and Guernsey, -by (ON ‘farm’ or ‘settlement’) as in Derby and Whitby, and -thorp, -thorpe, -twait,

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or -thwaite (ON þorp ‘smallholding’) as in Mablethorpe and Althorpe. In Ireland, Norse place names include Dublin (ON Dyflin), Limerick (ON Hlymrekr), and Wexford (ON Veisufjørðr). In addition, historically related words in English and Norse reentered English in their Norse spellings. Examples are provided by the many doublets in English of related words beginning in sk- (originally Norse) or sh- (Old English [OE]): shabby and scabby, shirt and skirt. From Scots comes a similar example: kirk and church (ON kirkja, OE ċiriċe ‘church’). Hundreds of Norse common nouns, such as ON knífr ‘knife’, ON húsbóndi ‘husband’, and ON æg ‘egg’, replaced their Anglo- Saxon equivalents and became part of everyday English, as did personal pronouns of Norse origin including “they,” “their,” and “them.” About 40 percent of the first names listed in England’s 1086 Domesday Book are Norse ones, writes Danish linguist Torben Kisbye (1982, 93). Examples are Turstin, Osgod, Sigulf, Asgar, Ragenel, Gunnild, and Arne. Britain’s last names show Norse influence into modern times: -son as a patronym (especially in the Scottish Lowlands, Yorkshire, and Lancashire), MacLachlan ‘man from Lochlann’, a name for Norway. The Anglo-Saxon Đunor ‘Thunor’ and its Norse equivalent Þórr ‘Thor’, son of Odin and god of thunder and the sky, are remembered in English place and family names such as Thursfield, Thursley, Thurstable, and Thurston. Anglo-Saxon Wōden (precursor of Norse Oðinn ‘Odin’) are seen in Wednesday, Woodnesborough, Wednesfield (and both appear in today’s action comics and computer games). To show the extent of everyday words borrowed into English from Old Norse, Scandinavian specialist Roberta Frank has compiled a narrative in Modern English in which— except for function words such as conjunctions, prepositions, and articles— every word is, as Andrew Winroth writes, “arguably derived from Old Norse.” An excerpt: “The Odd Norse loans seem an awesome window onto a gang of ungainly, rugged, angry fellows, bands of low rotten crooks winging it at the stern’s wake, sly, flawed ‘guests’ who, craving geld, flung off their byrnies [chain mail tunics], thrusting and clipping calves and scaps with clubs” (quoted in Winroth 2014, 58). Anglo-Norse was probably a factor in the change of English from what linguists call a synthetic (heavily inflected) language to an analytic (fixed-word-order, with few grammatical endings) language. Case in point: the grammatical endings of Old English began to disappear first in the Danelaw, about two hundred years before the same change

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began to occur in the southern reaches of England (Kisbye 1982, 139). In any case, the result was the sleek, virtually inflection-free grammar of Modern English. However, not all scholars agree that Anglo-Norse faded away. Norwegian linguist Jan Terje Faarlund has hypothesized that, after the Norman Conquest, it was instead Old English that faded. He believes Old English was actually replaced by the Norse of the Danelaw, making Modern English not a descendant of Old English, but of Anglo-Norse (“Linguist Makes Sensational Claim” 2012). He bases his hypothesis on the significant similarities in syntax (grammar) between English and the Scandinavian languages. Faarlund provides examples of shared syntax between English and Norwegian: the preposition at the end of the sentence in “This we have talked about” (Norwegian Dette har vi snakka om); the split infinitive in “I promise to never do it again” (Norwegian Eg lovar å ikkje gjera det igjen); and what he calls the “group genitive” of “The Queen of England’s hat” (Norwegian Dronninga av Englands hatt). All of these structures are typical of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and English, but none of them is seen in the close Germanic relatives German and Dutch. Faarlund believes that this and other linguistic evidence should revise our understanding of the history of English. Faarlund’s hypothesis may be described as fairly earthshaking in the linguistic world, and it is still a long way from acceptance by his fellow linguists. If it withstands the intense scholarly scrutiny it will surely undergo, Norse will be seen as having furthered its linguistic destiny not only in its Scandinavian homeland and in the North Atlantic islands, but also in England and ultimately in America and all the other places where English is spoken.

c hr isTia niT y c ome s To The c uLT ur e a nd L a nguage s of The norT h The transition of the North from paganism to Christianity brought Latin to the North as the language of the Christian God, of learning, and of new societal institutions. The effects were seen first in Eastern Scandinavia, that is, Denmark and Sweden, whose people had the most contact with continental Europe. Denmark was ultimately Christianized, after a long period of conflict, in the reign of King Canute IV (Knud IV den Hellige, 1080–86), who was later accepted by the Roman Church as the patron saint of Denmark. In Sweden, the most

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resistant of the countries of the North to Christianity, a Roman Church archdiocese was established in 1164, but bloody conflicts between paganism and Christianity continued until the next century. Eventually Christianity became the religion of all three Scandinavian monarchies, and paganism was forbidden. But the old ways did not disappear immediately. For centuries after official Christianization in the North, popular belief in the old gods existed side by side with the new religion. Many a medieval Swedish corpse that had been buried under the cross has been found with a neck chain holding a pendant in the shape of Thor’s hammer. After Christianization, Latin gained ground in Sweden not only because of the Roman Church’s use of Latin for liturgy and Church writings, but because the Latin alphabet, rather than the runic alphabet, soon began to be used even for Swedish. Many words for Christian religious practice and traditions came in the form of loanwords (borrowings from Latin, either directly or through Latin loanwords in the English or the German of the time) or of semantic extensions, that is, use of a Scandinavian word in a nonnative, Christian meaning. When Swedes began to write in Latin letters (Swedish skriva, from Latin scribere ‘write’), priests (Swedish präst, from Latin presbyter) founded the first schools (Swedish skola, from Latin schola); and the bishop (Swedish biskop, from Latin episcopus) might preach (Swedish predika, from Latin praedicare) the Mass (Swedish mässa, from Latin missa via OE mæsse) at Easter (Swedish påsk from Latin pascha). These examples are from Bergman (1973, 76–77). Sometimes old Germanic words from pagan religious practice were extended to denote Christian practice, for example jól/jūl ‘Christmas’, from the pagan winter festival (this happened in English too; cf. Modern English “Yule”).

Social Institutions As the provincial kingdoms of the North combined to form nations, their governmental institutions took on forms like those on the Continent. Often these were of Roman origin but filtered through French or German, since they arrived in the North through French or German feudal societies. Schools and hospitals, institutions that were not directly religious but were run by Christian orders, got names directly from Latin. Some examples from Danish include skolæ ‘school’ from Latin schola ‘school’; lauerbær from Latin laurus ‘laurel’; spitalsk

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‘leprous’ from Latin hospitale ‘hospital for lepers’. Discussion and examples may be found in Haugen (1976, 214–18).

Personal Names The old pagan Scandinavian personal names known to us from the sagas and the runestones continued to be used even after Christianization, for example, the Norse female names Helga, Inga, Ingibjørg, and Sigrid, and the male names Bjørn, Eiríkr, Helgi, and Sveinn. But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, names from the new religion came to the North. Biblical names or saints’ names were Nordicized from Roman Church Latin. For example: Johannes → Johan or Jon; Nicolaus → Nils; Katarina → Karin; Mattias → Mats or Mads; Laurentius → Lars.

The ha nsa cro sse s Th e se a In the thirteenth century, the greatest economic competitor to the kingdoms of Sweden and Denmark was a commercial entity, located across the Baltic Sea: the Hanseatic League, or “Hansa,” headquartered in Lübeck, in German-speaking territory (Germany was not actually a nation until 1871). While the Hansa did not wage land war, it did ally its considerable sea power with one or another of the Baltic kingdoms at various times to assure dominance over the trade routes between the Hansa’s many member cities. The Holy Roman Empire was the spiritual and governmental ruler of central Europe; the Hansa was its counterpart in commerce. The Hansa, however, unlike the Holy Roman Empire, brought modern commercial practices and, with them, new wealth, into the North. Scandinavia enthusiastically embraced it. At its height a trade association of more than seventy cities of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, the Hansa, though not founded officially until 1356, began its life in 1241 as a commercial agreement between the German cities of Lübeck and Hamburg. This alliance, intended to rival the profitable trade center in the city of Visby on the Swedish island Gotland, quickly gained dominance in the Baltic. Visby was eclipsed by the much larger Hansa and was ultimately included in Hansa. For a start, in 1250 Birger Jarl, the leader of the powerful Folkung dynasty, signed Swedish agreements with Lübeck, Hamburg, and Riga, exempting them from customs duty in Sweden. Soon large numbers of Low German speakers, merchants and craftsmen, came to Scandinavia. In

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Fig. 10. Cities of the Hanseatic League. Map by Lara Thurston.

Sweden, German settlements were established in Stockholm, Söderköping, Kalmar, Uppsala, Sigtuna, Linköping, and many other towns. At least a sizable portion of the populations of Hanseatic cities such as Stockholm, Visby, Tallinn, and Turku were speakers of Low German, either natively or as a second language to ease their trade with the Hansa; and port cities traded with the Hansa all throughout the North, including the North Atlantic islands and Finland (see fig. 10).

Middle Low German Influence The language of the Hansa came along with the settlements and the vastly increased Baltic trade, influencing particularly the urban dialects of Denmark and Sweden, the Hansa’s two biggest trading partners. In its network of Baltic cities, many but not all of them already German-speaking, the Hansa did its business in Middle Low German (MLG). “Middle” refers to the Middle Ages, the period when Middle Low German flourished; “Low” means it was a northern, lowland language, as opposed to “High” German, which flourished in the highlands and mountains of central and southern Germany (for a detailed

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discussion of the sound shift that distinguished High from Low German, see Salmons 2012, 110–19).

Bilingual Cities of the North The tradesmen of the coastal urban centers of Sweden and Denmark had to master the Low German vocabulary in order to do business with the Hansa. In time the home languages of the Hansa cities built their modern commercial and government terminology on borrowed MLG vocabulary. This development follows the historical pattern of language influence arriving with foreign invaders or settlers with superior technology, power, or knowledge. The Hansa did not attempt to conquer Sweden, Denmark, or Norway militarily, but its executives and traders flooded their coastal cities, becoming the new urbanites of southern Scandinavia. Arriving with commercial expertise and shipping knowledge that the Swedes, the Danes, and the Norwegians craved for themselves, these wealthy and competent Low German immigrants brought about deep and widespread change to the Mainland Scandinavian languages. “The changes usually started in Danish, followed by Swedish and East Norwegian, then West Norwegian,” writes Faarlund (1994, 39). It is not surprising that Denmark and Sweden were the first to experience the impact of MLG; both already had a long- established relationship with German-speaking Europe that Norway did not share. While the first missionaries to Norway had been English, in Denmark and Sweden they had been Saxon, their language MLG. The Hansa, in the absence of governmental or other legal regulation of its international contracts, operated through nepotism and connections of friendship. German Hansa merchants made a habit of sending their sons, nephews, brothers, or other male relatives to their trade partners abroad, as mentors or as young apprentices and also as de facto guarantors that trade agreements made across the Baltic would be honored. These arriving Germans and their families, whose command of the local language was often poor or nonexistent, expected to communicate with the natives in MLG. The Hansa cities, not only in Sweden and Denmark but all around the Baltic, became effectively bilingual zones. However, German immigration and consequent dominance of MLG did not come without

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friction, at least in Sweden. In 1251 the state began requiring the German immigrants to become subjects of the Swedish king and to submit to Swedish law. As the number of newcomers grew, some Stockholm neighborhoods became German enclaves, and city government was dominated by Germans, still identified as such even though they were Swedish subjects. In fact, MLG, rather than Danish or Swedish, was used in the councils of the Nordic Hansa cities. Even the first mayor of Stockholm, around 1268, was German; by 1350 the stadslagen ‘City Law’ specified that no more than half of the magistracy (the mayor and the aldermen) could be of German origin. Practitioners of commerce and trades, as well as other urban dwellers, rapidly acquired, as a matter of practicality, a working vocabulary in Low German. The Swedish-Danish verb handla ‘to handle’, from MLG handelen, was extended to mean ‘trade’. New words were needed for new trades, such as Danish kræmmer and Swedish krämare ‘peddler’, from MLG krēmer. In the sense that “wife” is a calling, if not a trade, we can include it in this category too. In Modern Danish, the German loanword hustru ‘wife’(MLG hūsvruwe, Modern German Hausfrau) is “on an equal footing” with the Old Norse kona ‘woman, wife’; by contrast, in Modern Swedish, the German loanword fru is the normal word for wife and hustru ‘wedded wife’ a more formal equivalent; kona “has by degrees acquired the deprecatory sense of ‘whore’” (Bergman 1973, 75). The Hansa gradually declined in the sixteenth century and ceased altogether in the seventeenth, its last formal meeting taking place in 1669. It had succumbed under the pressure of growing competition from the rising nations of Europe and other international trade networks reaching as far as North America. Sweden, in the meantime, had matured into a rather banking-savvy nation. In 1661 Stockholms Banco, a private bank under state charter, issued Europe’s first paper currency, a one-hundred- daler note that can now be seen at the Banque de France’s museum, Cité de l’Economie et de la Monnaie in Paris (Citéco 2014). As was the case under the earlier Latin influence, the inventory of Scandinavian given names now was increased with borrowings, this time from Low German. Adolf, Bertrand, Bertil, Henrik, Agnes, and Gertrud were German names that became popular in Hansa times among the prosperous Scandinavian middle classes. As for family

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names, upper-class or well-off burgher families left behind the old patronyms and selected surnames that would be inherited through the generations, a cultural choice that became the law several centuries later.

Swedish and Danish Last Names Patronyms were common from very early times in all of Scandinavia as second names for both sons and daughters. In Swedish the patronym for a son consists of the father’s first name plus -son or -sson; in Danish and Norwegian, the father’s first name plus -sen: Johanson, Johansson, Johansen are all ‘Johan’s son’. In Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, the patronym for a daughter was the father’s first name plus -datter: Johansdatter ‘Johan’s daughter’ (cf. Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset’s trilogy set in medieval times, Kristin Lavransdatter, 1920–22). These names were not heritable; they changed for each generation. Heritable surnames, or true family names, were first used by the nobility in eleventh- century Sweden and Denmark; by the sixteenth century, upper-class families also began choosing and using them. Some in the educated classes took Latinized names, which might later be shortened and pronounced with the accent on the last syllable, differentiating them from a “native” Nordic name, which might be monosyllabic or at least accented on the first syllable. Lund might become Lundinius or Lundinus, and then Lundin, for example. The eighteenthcentury Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus was also known as Carl von Linné (Linné taken from the family estate, itself named for a linden tree; von is borrowed from German). Names could also be based on crafts or trades (for example, Danish Fisker ‘fisher’), or on a place name (for example, Danish Bakken ‘hill’). Most nonelite families, however, took as their new legal name the male head of household’s current patronym, a name type that has remained dominant to the present. After the mid-nineteenth century, when hereditary surnames became obligatory in mainland Scandinavia, families might also derive their names from natural phenomena. In Swedish, for example, tree names as well as landscape features commonly appear as elements of surnames: björk ‘birch’; gran ‘spruce’; ek ‘oak’; kvist/qvist ‘twig’; skog ‘forest’; sjö ‘lake’; berg ‘mountain’; ström ‘stream’. In Sweden in 2011 the twenty most frequent family names, from

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number 1 (Jonsson) to number 20 (Olofsson), were derived from male patronyms (the female patronymic ending in -datter nearly disappeared, though currently it is enjoying a small-scale revival, often as the name for woman- owned firms), while only at number 21 does a landscape name (Lindström) occur (Statistika Centralbyrån 2012). For Denmark in 2013, the picture is similar: from number 1 (Jensen) to number 18 (Johansen), the most frequent family names are male patronyms; at number 19 an occupational surname (Møller ‘Miller’) occurs, which is followed at number 20 by another patronym, Knudsen (Danmarks Statistik 2013). The upper-class, non-patronym-based names still have a certain luster in Scandinavia in the twenty-first century, according to the Economist Magazine’s report on a study by Gregory Clark at the University of California–Davis. The study found that “the unusual surnames of 17th-century aristocrats and the Latinised surnames adopted by highly educated 18th-century Swedes are overrepresented in various elite positions and professions today” (“Free Exchange” 2013). It appears that simply being a descendant of these seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury elite families— or perhaps, having an ancestor who later changed the family name accordingly—provides an economic and professional advantage several centuries later.

high germa n infLue nc e As the financial fortunes of the Hansa and, with it, Low German, peaked, the prestige of High German, the language of Luther’s 1534 popular and readable Bible translation, took effect in Scandinavia. The status of Low German declined along with the Hansa. Fairly quickly after the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, Lutheranism and High German were favored by the princes of Germany’s more industrialized northern half. These were the territories that, both during and after the Hansa’s influence, were most heavily involved in trade with the nations of the North. The German Reformist fever quickly spread to Scandinavia. Swedish religious reformer Olavus Petri had studied in Luther’s Wittenberg; and the Gustav Vasa Swedish Bible translation of 1541 followed the Luther translation closely. In Sweden, as in Germany, the translation style of Luther quickly became trendsetting among writers of the vernacular

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language. The Swedish Bible style, coupling spiritual seriousness with everyday and concrete vocabulary, served Modern Swedish as a model of accessible, dignified, and serious prose. In the next century, Sweden was a leading participant in the horrors of the Thirty Years War on the European continent (largely in German-speaking territory), as King Gustavus Adolphus (r. 1611– 32) stepped in to take up the cause of Lutheranism (albeit with support from Catholic France, which had its own, nonreligious agenda in opposing also-Catholic Spain). The war provided Swedish with many German words for warfare and technical processes. Examples are halt ‘halt’; handgemäng ‘hand-to-hand combat’; and kompani ‘[military] company’. High German influence continued in the centuries after the Reformation as Sweden entered a severely religious period, suppressing all non-Lutheran religious expression; the halo effect of the High German Bible of Luther continued to support the prestige of the German language. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century brought cultural influence from France to Sweden, and the establishment by the Swedish king Gustavus III of the Swedish Academy, whose brief was to promote the purity and status of the Swedish language, provided an impetus toward standardizing Swedish and spreading literacy. Educated Swedes, however, continued to maintain fluency in German as a tool that eased trade with their neighbors to the south. English ultimately eclipsed German as a primary source for borrowings, however. An early indication can be seen in the 1727 emergence of the Swedish potatis ‘potato’, rather than something based on the German Kartoffel, the New World vegetable that quickly became central to Swedish cuisine. French influence gained ground in the seventeenth century, at first in military and diplomatic terminology, such as manöver ‘maneuver’ and patrull ‘patrol’. By the eighteenth century, French words for the upper- class lifestyle came into Swedish: elegant ‘elegant’, frivol ‘frivolous’, paraply ‘umbrella’, and pjäs ‘[theater]piece’. But these remained in the upper elevations of society and did not penetrate to everyday life and ordinary people as the High German borrowings did, possibly because of the shared linguistic ancestry of the Scandinavian languages and German (the examples are from Bergman 1973, 80–81). Like Latin and Low German before it, High German found the Scandinavian languages prepared to digest dictionaries full of foreign words without giving up their identities.

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gr amma r a nd syn Ta x of The s c an dinavian L a nguage s: The c ommonaLiT ie s Inflections: Cases and Conjugations In the early Middle Ages, the inflectional systems of Danish and Swedish, as well as of Norwegian, began to break down, making subjects and objects of sentences distinguished more by word order (subjects before the verb, objects after) than by endings, as they had been in the old languages. In modern times, the process is complete for Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, though dialects in both Sweden and Norway have retained some inflections (for example, dative case) that were lost in the standard languages. Bergman proposes that in the case of Swedish, at least some role was played by the “mangling of Swedish by [Low] German immigrants” (1973, 79– 80). Currently, however, according to Vibeke Winge, linguists are not in agreement as to whether this change can be attributed to Middle Low German influence (2005, 2144). The sociological reality was that MLG was the status language; this would have made relations between MLG and Swedish/Danish asymmetrical, and Swedes and Danes would have learned MLG more often than the reverse. The MLG speakers in Sweden might have had some influence over the Swedish language even so; on the other hand, loss of inflection over time is a not-uncommon occurrence in language, and it is not always possible to pinpoint the cause. The Swedish verb “to be,” in Old Swedish and in Modern Swedish, illustrates the change of the inflectional verb system from the older language to the modern language, where the verb has become the same in all persons and in singular and plural (see box 4). The Modern Swedish verb inflection is even simpler than verb inflection in English, which still distinguishes a verb with a third-person subject (he/she/it) by an added s on the verb, and the verb “to be” retains full conjugation: “I am,” “he/she/it is,” and “we/you/they are.” A similar process has occurred in noun phrases, which in Old Norse showed four case endings and in the standard modern languages of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian have only two: the basic form and the genitive, indicating possession. For pronouns, however, the three languages, like English, show not only nominative and genitive but also objective (replacing accusative and dative) cases: jag/min/mig ‘I/my/

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modern swedish

engLish

jag æm or jag ær du æst han/hon/det ær vi ærum I ærin de æro

jag är du är han/hon/det är vi är ni* är de är

I am you [sg.] are he/she/it is we are you [pl.] are they are

*Historically, n was detached from a previous verb and attached to the pronoun; see below for discussion of this phenomenon.

me’; du/din/dig ‘you/your/you’, han/hans/honom ‘he/his/him’, and so forth. In 2015 the Swedish Academy added a new pronoun, hen ‘she/ he’, to the official dictionary of Swedish. It is to be used as an alternative to hon/han ‘he/she’ but without eliminating the traditional forms. The new pronoun is on the pattern of the unisex Finnish hän ‘he/she’. It may be some time until hen is widely used, but it has already been introduced in Swedish schools. Of Old Norse’s three grammatical genders (i.e., the fixed genders of both animate and inanimate nouns), Modern Standard Danish and Modern Standard Swedish have retained only two, neuter and a combined masculine and feminine called common gender. Both Norwegian languages, Bokmål and Nynorsk, have retained three genders.

The Articles The postposed definite article, a characteristic feature of Old Norse, also appears in Icelandic, Faroese, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish: that is, the word “the” (underlined in the following examples) appears as a suffix of the noun it modifies: for example, Icelandic hesturinn ‘the horse’. This article must agree in gender with its noun: for example, Danish kvinden ‘the woman’ (common gender) or Swedish språket ‘the language’ (neuter gender). When there is an adjective, the definite article is doubled: for example, “the good grain” is in Faroese taþ góþa kornið, in Norwegian (Nynorsk) det gode kornet, in Swedish det goda kornet. In Danish the definite article appears only once, in first position: det gode korn. In colloquial language, however, the first article is

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sometimes omitted: Swedish stora torget ‘the big marketplace’; Icelandic rauði hesturinn ‘the red horse’ (for a discussion of Scandinavian “double definiteness,” see Dahl 2003). The indefinite article, “a,” is used much as in English: for example, Swedish en stor familj ‘a big family’. In Icelandic, however, where no indefinite article ever developed, the indefinite pronouns einn ‘one’ and nokkur ‘a certain’ are used when necessary to the meaning.

Pronunciation Several changes in traditional pronunciation occurred as Danish and Swedish emerged from Old Norse in early medieval times. Swedish acquired its characteristic tonal accent (which also occurs in Norwegian), the spoken feature probably most noticed by foreigners listening to Swedish and Norwegian. Faarlund believes that “the tonal distinction must have arisen . . . no later than early thirteenth century” (1994, 45). Danish acquired a related phonological feature, the stød, a “creaky voice” or glottal stop (which sounds like a click made in the throat) in the middle of certain words; this is the feature of spoken Danish most remarkable to foreign listeners. We’ll take a closer look at both of these interesting but difficult-to- describe features, as well as several other features specific to Danish and Swedish, in what follows.

The da nish L a nguage A Brief History Danish scribal tradition goes back to the thirteenth century in both Jutland and Zealand, with particular development away from Old Norse grammatical forms noticeable from manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Zealandic Danish, spoken in the area around Copenhagen, became the literary language and is still the prestige version of Modern Danish. A Bible translation in 1550 further established the language standard. In spite of strong influence from German, both before and after the Protestant Reformation, eighteenth- century reforms consciously eliminated many German loanwords. Today, however, Danish is a cosmopolitan language that borrows freely from other languages, especially English.

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Dialects In Denmark today, as in other European countries, dialects are declining as urbanization, modern media, and ease of travel increase contact between all parts of the population. Danish dialects are now rarely spoken; they are usually grouped into three: Jutish in Jutland; Insular Danish, on the islands of Funen and Zealand; and East Danish in Bornholm, a medial dialect between Danish and Swedish. Scania, Halland, and Blekinge, historically part of Denmark but now part of Sweden, also have such dialects (see the Swedish section; for further discussion, see Vikør 1993, 46).

The Numbers One striking difference between Danish and the other languages of the North is its number system, which is not decimal but vigesimal (based on twenty, similar to the Modern French numeral system). In addition, the “units” are placed before the “tens,” as in German (for example, German vierundzwanzig ‘four and twenty’, or twenty-four), so that what is in Swedish tjugofyra ‘twenty-four’ is in Danish fireogtyve ‘fourand-twenty’. Further, the tens from 50 to 90 are named halvtreds, tres, halvfjerds, firs, and halvfems. These signify literally “half three times twenty,” “three times twenty,” and so on up to 90, halvfemsindstyve ‘half five times twenty’. When communicating with other Scandinavians, Danes usually use the decimal number system, as in Swedish and Norwegian, for clarity; but, as Vikør notes, “even in Denmark itself, North Scandinavian numbers are used for special purposes (such as on paper money, checks, money orders, receipts etc.), but not in daily speech” (1993, 46).

Pronunciation A notable feature of standard Danish is the stød ‘push’, a glottal catch. Danish linguist Hans Basbøll describes it as “a laryngealization—a kind of creaky voice— often beginning somewhere near the middle of certain syllables” (Basbøll 2003, 5). This most Danish of sounds has attracted the puzzled attention of foreign listeners for a long time. A Swede named Hemming Gadh wrote in a 1526 essay, titled in Latin

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“Vehemens contra Danos oratorio” (A vehement discourse against the Danes): “Så wærdas de icke heller att talla som annat folck, uthan tryckia ordhen fram lika som the willia hosta” (They don’t want to speak like other people, but press the words forth as if they wished to cough”; quoted in Grønnum 2008, translation mine). Some sound files that provide examples of Danish phrases that include stød may be found online at www.speakdanish.dk/en/lessons/0010-1------first -meeting.php (see also Grønnum 2003 and Basbøll 2005). The pronunciation of Danish is so strongly affected by the stød that, for example, some written consonants are not pronounced. Further, whereas the Danish r is uvular, as in German and French, it is tonguetrilled in Norwegian and Swedish. Recent studies of mutual intelligibility between speakers in Scandinavia have found that Swedes and Norwegians understand each other’s spoken languages more easily than either understand Danish. This is surprising because Swedish and Danish are actually more closely related to each other (both being daughters of Old East Norse) than to Norwegian, but unsurprising because the pronunciation of Norwegian is much closer to that of Swedish than the pronunciation of Danish is to either. In addition, there are lexical (vocabulary) and idiomatic differences among all three languages. In a 2005 study using recorded voices, Danish speakers understood around 58% of the spoken Norwegian and 48% of the spoken Swedish they heard. Norwegians understood 70– 80% of the Danish and 89% of the Swedish they heard (Gooskens 2007, 453). Of course, in personal conversation the comprehension reaches much higher levels, as speakers backtrack, repeat, rephrase, and so forth.

The sw edish L a nguage A Brief History The use of written Swedish intensified starting in the second half of the fourteenth century, largely because of the influence of Birgitta of Vadstena, a mystic who was canonized by Pope Boniface IX as a saint of Europe. The Birgittine Order, founded by her in 1344, employed Swedish, rather than the Roman Church’s traditional Latin, in its many publications. Some nuns at this time did not know Latin; but some of them at the St. Birgitta convent in Vadstena, along with the monks who were also a part of the convent (living in a separate wing), must

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have done so, for the order produced many translations from Latin into Swedish, as well as many original religious publications. The scriptorium at St. Birgitta’s monastery (which included both men and women) developed its own writing style, grammar, spelling system, and bindery, and in 1495 it acquired its own printing press (Morris 1999, 169). In fact, the Swedish used by the Birgittine Order included distinctive features differentiating it from other written Swedish of the time. It came to be known as vadstenaspråk ‘Vadstena Language’, was used through several centuries, and is acknowledged by scholars to be the foundation of later vernacular writing in Sweden (Morris 1993, 683). The Roman Catholic Birgittine Order continued to exist at Vadstena even after the Reformation and was not suppressed in Sweden until 1595. After that suppression, however, the order continued to flourish throughout Roman Catholic Europe. The Protestant Reformation and its 1526 Swedish translation of the New Testament boosted the status of Swedish in its own country; and the Reformation essentially halted the use of Latin in the church and in government. With the growing power and independence of the Swedish state starting in the early sixteenth century, the Swedish language continued to develop independently from its nearest Scandinavian sister, Danish. The Swedish Academy, founded in 1786, set the norms for a Standard Swedish language, which would, among other things, spell foreign loanwords, especially those from the Romance languages, to reflect Swedish pronunciation; for example, French bureau became Swedish byrå and French lieutenant became Swedish löjtnant. An official spelling was not established until 1899, however. In 1906 a significant spelling reform eliminated silent f and h before v (hvad ‘what’ became vad; hufvud ‘head’ became huvud) and made other changes as well.

Dialects Modern Standard Swedish developed mainly from the Mälar-Uppland region, where the capital city, Stockholm, and the major university city, Uppsala, are located. In addition, many dialects survive, though, as in other nations of the North, the dialects in Sweden are gradually disappearing. In Swedish these include Göta dialects in Götaland and Dalsland; Svea dialects in Uppland and Gästrikeland; Northern (Norrland) and Eastern (Gotland) dialects; and Southern dialects (Scania,

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Halland, Blekinge, and Dalecarlia). The dialects of Scania, Halland, and Blekinge are spoken in the far south of Sweden in an area that was once part of Denmark. These are medial dialects, transitional forms between Swedish and Danish. Dalecarlian (Swedish Älvdalska or Älvdalsmål ‘Elvdalian’) may be considered medial between East and West Norse (i.e., Norwegian and Swedish-Danish), though it is more unlike Standard Swedish than either Norwegian or Danish is. For this reason Elvdalian is considered by some linguists a separate language (for a discussion, see Dahl 2008). Both Estonian Swedish and Finland-Swedish are sometimes included among the Swedish dialects. Estonian Swedish, spoken by a minority in Estonia until almost all were evacuated to Sweden during World War II, has nearly died out. Finland-Swedish, on the other hand, is, linguistically speaking, not really a dialect but one of the two national languages of Finland (see chapter 4).

Grammar and Morphology Swedish, like Danish, retains two grammatical noun genders: neuter and “common,” a combination of the older categories masculine and feminine. Some dialects still maintain a distinction between masculine and feminine, and this is reflected in a few old-fashioned idioms of the standard language. For example, the old feminine klocka may be referred to as hon ‘she’. The answer to Vad är klockan? ‘What time is it?’ [literally, ‘what is the clock?’] may be phrased as Hon är fem ‘It [literally ‘she’] is five.’ However, when klockan refers not to the time, but to the clock (i.e., Är klockan i köket? ‘Is the clock in the kitchen?’), a correct answer might be Ja, den är i köket ‘Yes, it [common gender] is in the kitchen’. Swedish pronoun usage differs from that of Danish and Norwegian in several ways. First, its plural form for “you,” ni, is an odd historical combination of the old second person plural verb ending -n and the old second person plural pronoun i, so that the old älskan I mig? ‘do you (pl.) love me’, for example, becomes (including the new uniform verb ending -r) in Modern Swedish älskar ni mig? This process is seen in other languages too; a reverse example, where the n has moved back onto the previous word, is the fourteenth-century English “a napron,” which became in Modern English “an apron,” while “a nadder” became “an adder.”

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Before World War II, politeness was indicated by distance, that is, use of the third person: Vad önskar herrn? literally ‘What does the gentleman wish?’—which we might phrase in English as “What would you like, sir?” This cumbersome workaround to avoid the use of the singular pronoun du ‘you’ is out of fashion in Sweden today, and strangers commonly use du to speak to one another, although the wish in certain situations to indicate special politeness or distance is still present. This results in an often awkward use of the passive, such as Vad önskas? ‘What is wished?’ Finally, the third-person plural de ‘they’ is still distinguished in writing from dem ‘them’, but both are pronounced “dom” in Sweden. In Finland-Swedish, de is pronounced as “day” or “dee,” and dem is pronounced as “dem.” Neither in Sweden nor in Finland is de used as a polite form of address, as may be done in Danish (possibly patterned after the modern German usage of Sie ‘they’ as a polite form of “you”). Finally, there is a patterned difference between Swedish and Danish, in that a Swedish word may end in a where the corresponding Danish word ends in e, such as in Swedish kvinna ‘woman’ vs. Danish kvinde. At least one researcher attributes it to a Swedish national desire to differentiate Swedish from Danish (Vikør 1993, 49).

Pronunciation In Swedish a stressed syllable is pronounced with a falling tone. Obviously all one-syllable words will fit this pattern (called Accent 1, or acute, or monosyllabic accent). In a word with more than one syllable, the primary stress is pronounced with a falling tone, but if there is secondary stress, it will be pronounced with a rising tone (Accent 2, or grave or polysyllabic accent). It is this falling tone followed immediately by a rising tone that gives Swedish a sound that foreigners often describe as singsong. Some words of more than one syllable show only an Accent 1 pattern; whether a word shows Accent 2 is determined by grammatical conditions as well as the history of the individual word. An example of Accent 2 is the city name Uppsala (‘upp’ with a falling tone, ‘sa’ with a rising one, ‘la’ falling slightly). Determining which words take Accent 2 can be a challenge for the foreign speaker, and there are some words with multiple meanings that have different pronunciation according to meaning. Sound files of examples, and also a short text read in Swedish, are available online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology.

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Most, but not all, Swedish and Norwegian dialects show tonal Accents 1 and 2. Finland- Swedish does not have this accent pattern, though it is present in some dialects of Danish (but not Standard Danish).

summing uP Danish and Swedish began to differentiate from each other in the early Middle Ages, a time that introduced the Scandinavian family of languages to more foreign influence than they had ever seen. Earlier, Scandinavian travelers had left their language on foreign shores, where it usually thrived; now the process was reversed as Scandinavia began to be a destination for other languages, which started to intrude on Norse and its daughters. Swedish and Danish, however, proved equal to the challenge and took in the Latin and Low German visitors, absorbing and Nordicizing the words they brought with them. The influence of High German replaced that of both Latin and Low German as the Reformation brought Lutheranism and its High German Bible from Germany to Scandinavia, and as the Hansa declined. As always before, the languages of Scandinavian found each other their best friends as well as their most potent rivals. Chapter 4 describes the effect upon Finnish after Finland became part of Sweden via its three Finnish Crusades.

4 • The Ties That Bind fi nn ish is visiTed By swedi s h Sanoi lieto Lemminkäinen: “Vannon mie valat vakaiset, en kesänä ensimäisnä, tok’ en vielä toisnakana saa’a suurihin sotihin, noihin miekan melskehisin. Viel’ on haavat hartioissa, syvät reiät ryntähissä entisistäkin iloista, mennehistä melskehistä suurilla sotamä’illä, miesten tappotanterilla.” (Reckless Lemminkäinen said: “I swear firm oaths that not during the first summer or even during the second will I set out to big wars, to those clashes of swords. There are still wounds in my shoulders, deep holes in my chest from former delights, from bygone tumults on fought- over hills, on the battlefields of men.”) Kalevala

m edi eva L enc oun Ter s: a ca P suL e h isT ory Violent conflict often accompanied Swedish-Finnish encounters on Finnish soil in early medieval times. Viking expeditions from around ad 800 to 1025 were raids to plunder Finland’s highly salable natural resources—furs and minerals—as well as forays for trade and colonization. By the twelfth century, the Vikings were history, replaced by the Christian monarchies of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Finland remained a collection of tribal territories, only a few of which had been Christianized, the rest retaining their pagan pantheon: Ukko, god of thunder; Ahti, god of the sea; Tapio, god of the forest; Jumala, god of the sky; and others. Of these, only Jumala survived Christianization, his name becoming the Finnish name for the Judeo-Christian god. Between 1157 and 1293 the Kingdom of Sweden, with encouragement from the pope in Rome, launched three Finnish Crusades to convert the peoples of Finland to Roman Christianity, by military force if necessary. The pope wished to counter competing incursions into eastern Finland by the Byzantine Orthodox Republic of Novgorod, a

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Russian state ruled by the Slavicized descendants of the Rus, Swedish Vikings who had settled there in the ninth century. In the end, when Sweden annexed Finland, both religion and government became Swedish. Orthodox Christianity, however, has retained some influence in Finnish culture. Currently, about 1 percent of the population belongs to the Finnish Orthodox Church (Suomen ortodoksinen kirkko 2012) and 77 percent to the Finnish Lutheran Church (Suomen evankelisluterilainen kirkko 2012). The remaining 22 percent are either members of other religious congregations or unaffiliated. When the religious crusades ended, Sweden had acquired a strip of territory along the southwest coast of Finland; in the following centuries, Sweden’s base was enlarged, so that by the seventeenth century, Swedish Finland’s borders were roughly equal to those of today’s independent Finland. Since the Swedish conquest was not one over a political unit, since the conquered territory was sparsely settled, and since the Swedes established the first political organization there, it cannot be claimed that the Swedish acquisition of Finland was a takeover of one medieval state by another (Nordstrom 2000, 141). This history is a large part of the explanation for the centuries-long amicable relationship of Finland and Sweden, amid a Scandinavia in which the other nations at times came to blows over claims to territory.

Finland/Suomi: Finland’s Two Names By the fourteenth century, what is today Finland was known to its Swedish rulers as Osterlandia ‘Eastland’; the name Finland first appears in Swedish public records in 1419, writes Finnish historian Henrik Meinander (2014, 11). Finnish linguist Riho Grünthal (1997) notes that the name Finland has long been considered to be related to a Germanic word for “wander.” The Finnish word for Finland, Suomi, was the name of a tribe that lived in Finland’s southwest.

Swedish in Finland; Finnish in Finland After the annexation of Finland by Sweden, the Swedish language began to make itself at home in Finland. Many native speakers of Swedish settled in Finland, and many Finns became bilingual in Finnish and Swedish. Both the Finnish language and the Finnish culture were going to be significantly influenced by the coming centuries of their

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coexistence with the Swedish language and the Swedish culture on Finnish soil. Not Finnish, but Swedish, became Finland’s public written language, though Finnish remained the home language of the large majority of Finns during the six-hundred-year union of Finland with Sweden. In 1809 Sweden lost Finland to Russia in the Finnish War, and Finland, still not a nation, became a grand duchy of the Russian Empire. That is why “there is every reason to describe the history of Finland prior to the twentieth century as part of the history of Sweden and Russia” (Meinander 2014, xiii). However, even in the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland, Swedish remained the dominant language of public life and high culture, especially in the urban areas of Helsinki and Turku. Finnish was the language of the farms, the villages, and the rural churches. Not until 1917, when Finland gained its independence from Russia and became a nation, did the Finnish language gain official status in its own land. Swedish became Finland’s second language (a significant event to which this chapter will return). Finnish is, however, now strongly dominant, in both public and private discourse, spoken as well as written.

Swedes and Finns in Finland Finland had no royalty of its own, and the people owed fealty only to the Swedish king. From 1279 the king recognized certain families in Finland (most of them Swedish speakers, often relatives of the king) on the basis of “service to King and Crown” (Wuorinen 1965, 50) and exempted them from land taxes, creating a nobility on this basis. From these families a Finland-Swedish nobility grew, in time including ethnically Finnish families too. The male heads of the families received titles such as ruhtinas/ruhtinatar ‘prince/princess’, kreivi/kreivitär ‘count/countess’, and vapaaherra/vapaaherratar ‘baron/baroness’. Surprisingly, the titles, though not the tax privileges, have survived until today in otherwise egalitarian Finland. Finns coexisted more or less in equality with Swedes in Finland to a degree unknown, for example, in the German Baltic colonies south of Finland, where the Baltic peoples lived in serfdom. This difference might be ascribed to the fact that Sweden was not much larger in population than Finland: “The Swedes could impose their rule on the Finns, but they could not enslave them. . . . The Finnish farmer was not bound

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to the soil or to any narrow local sphere of life, like his central European fellows. . . . Whoever got fed up with the exactions of organized society and the mores imposed by the ruling class could always withdraw into the virgin wilds. Out there, church bells could never be heard ringing and the bailiff ’s watchful eye could not see the smoke rising from the backwoodsman’s cabin chimney” (Jutikkala and Pirinen 1988, 34–35). These facts on the ground contributed to a kind of pioneer independence cherished by Finns, in medieval and in modern times (a discussion of this quality, Finnish sisu ‘guts’, and its changing meaning through history, may be found in Tepora 2012). As subjects of the Kingdom of Sweden, Finns were legally equal to Swedes in eligibility for appointment to public office, and they were represented in the Swedish Riksdag ‘Parliament’. This relationship of equality under the law was the background to the peaceful relationship not only between Finland and Sweden, but between Finnish and Swedish speakers within Finland: “The absence of war in the relations between Swede and Finn during the seven centuries that preceded Finland’s cession to Russia in 1809 is one of the remarkable phenomena recorded in the history of Europe. . . . The historical experience slowly accumulated in the Middle Ages and greatly expanded during the centuries before the nineteenth gave the two peoples a common heritage whose presence and influence can still be seen in modern Sweden and Finland” (Wuorinen 1965, 47). Wuorinen overstates here, though; few Finns would completely agree on the nature of this “common heritage.” It is true that the centuries of benevolent Swedish rule have left a large footprint in the Finnish public and private culture of today, a Swedish heritage absorbed by Finland. This is not to say that Finnish folk culture has disappeared from modern Finnish life. A Finnish social landscape, distinct from the Swedish, is seen in both the urban and the rural food culture, the holiday traditions, the music (classical as well as folk and modern pop), and the literature of Finland. Further, the expression “common heritage” seems to presume that Finnish elements have similarly penetrated the culture of Sweden; instead, Finnish traditions are more likely seen by most Swedes as interesting or even charming, but not Swedish. Undeniably, during Swedish rule and for a century afterward, the law of the land was in Swedish and the Finnish language was not legally equal to the Swedish language, and thereon hangs our tale. But first let us take a little detour into very early times.

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Th e f i nnish L a nguage: deeP Bac kgroun d The Finno-Ugric languages Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Sámi (along with about twenty-five other languages, less well known in the West), as well as the related Samoyedic languages, have descended (with some intermediate steps, not all agreed upon by linguistic historians) from Proto-Uralic and possibly later Proto-Finno-Ugric. Proto-Uralic was spoken in prehistory in the territory around the Ural Mountains. Finnish separated from its ancestor language relatively late: “The language we know as Finnish certainly did not take shape until the end of the first [i.e., before ad 1000] and may only have acquired its essential characteristics during the early centuries of the present millennium [i.e., after ad 1000],” writes Finnish language historian Lauri Hakulinen (1961, 1). Despite significant Indo-European language influence that began very early in its history, Finnish today retains its identity as a member of the Finno-Ugric language family. The earliest surviving text in Finnish, from the journal of a bishop of Finland, dates to around ad 1450: “Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho somen gelen Emÿna daÿda” (Modern Finnish: “Minä tahdon kernaasti puhua suomen kieltä, [mutta] en minä taida” [I want to speak Finnish, (but) I am not able]) (Kotimaisten kielten keskus 2009). The bishop’s language errors indicate that he was not a native speaker of Finnish; given the date of the journal, it is likely that he was a native speaker of Swedish. The many dialects of Modern Finnish are usually considered to fall into two groups, the Eastern and the Western, a classification based on the geographic distribution of certain sounds as well as on settlement history—that is, which original tribes lived in which areas. For example, the west-Finnish dialect of Varsinais-Suomi ‘Finland Proper’, the Finnish dialect that is closest to Estonian, is similar to the dialects of Häme in central Finland. The eastern dialects include Savonian and West Karelian (in Finnish territory). Just across the border, though, is Russian Karelia, whose East Karelian, more distant from Standard Finnish than West Karelian, is often considered a language rather than a dialect. Lutheran clergyman Mikael Agricola’s Finnish writings, including his 1544 Rucouskiria (Prayer book) and his 1548 translation of the New Testament, Se Wsi Testamenti, both based on Western dialects of Finnish, were influential in the centuries-later standardization of

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Finnish. Not until 1835, with Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala, did Eastern dialects gain literary status. All of the areas in which the Finno-Ugric languages are spoken are islands in a sea of Indo-European languages and are separated from one another in some cases by thousands of kilometers. The reasons for such isolation are not yet known; as Swedish linguist Tore Janson comments, “It is believed that the situation is a result of a complicated series of migrations, but most of these are not actually attested by any evidence other than the linguistic situation itself ” (Janson 2012, 39).

modern finnish The following discussion refers to standard written Finnish; in addition, the spoken language has developed some short forms and idioms that are widely accepted in speech but not in writing (see the later section “Puhekieli: The Colloquial Language”).

Structure In Finnish, case forms for the noun signal whether it is the subject or the object or has some other role in the sentence. There are fifteen noun cases, to English’s two (nominative and possessive) and, for pronouns, also objective (“me,” “her,” “him,” “whom”). For example, for the Finnish word auto (a loanword from English meaning “car”), there are the forms autossa (inessive) ‘in the car’; autosta (elative) ‘out of the car’; and autoon (illative) ‘into the car’. Word order plays no role in differentiating subject from object, as it does in English. For example, the Finnish sentence Kalle söi omenan ‘Kalle ate an apple’ has exactly the same logical meaning as Omenan Kalle söi. The change of word order does not change the meaning, but only the emphasis: the second Finnish sentence might be translated as “It was an apple that Kalle ate” (examples in this section are taken from Karlsson 1986). Foreigners who study Finnish learn all fifteen of the cases, but three of them are seldom used, except in fixed phrases or idioms. Their meaning is usually expressible by a preposition. Finnish verbs are conjugated according to person and number (as in German or Latin), with particles sometimes added to indicate the speaker’s attitude toward the utterance. For example, in the verb “to

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say,” the stem is sano-; an appended -han, translated here as “do,” indicates emphasis: sanon ‘I say’; sanonhan ‘I do say’. A question is indicated by a suffix on the first (in some cases, the only) word of the sentence, whether a verb or some other part of speech, for example Kirjako? ‘A book?’

He, She, and It One Finnish word, hän, suffices for both “he” and “she,” and another one, hänen, for both “his” and “hers.” Se ‘it’ is used in the standard language (but not in the casual spoken idiom) to refer to inanimate objects. Lääkäriänsä may mean “his (female) doctor,” “his (male) doctor,” “her (female) doctor,” “her (male) doctor,” or “their (male or female) doctor.” In English, the feminine ending -ess (as in “authoress”) has nearly died out, surviving almost exclusively in “actress” and “temptress.” And even though “actress” is still commonly used, female practitioners of the dramatic arts prefer the designation “actor”; temptresses, though, appear to be satisfied with the status quo. In the casual spoken language, the neuter pronoun se is often used where hän appears in the written language. Historically, se was an allgender pronoun equivalent to “he/she/it”; hän is a later addition to the language. Interestingly, hän and se are etymologically related, both derived from the same word in the ancient proto-language underlying Modern Finnish. There are no articles (“the,” “a/an”) in Finnish. Rather, the semantic function of articles is often indicated by word order in Finnish. For example, Kadulla on auto ‘There is a car in the street’ vs. Auto on kadulla ‘The car is in the street.’

Sound Structure Finnish has a noticeably smaller inventory of phonemes (basic sounds) than most European languages. A total of twenty-four phonemes appear in Finnish, but only twenty- one in native words (as opposed to loanwords from other languages). The twenty- one include eight vowels and thirteen consonants (Karlsson 1986, 14). American English, by contrast, is usually reckoned at a total of forty-five (not counting regional differences): twenty vowel phonemes and twenty-five consonant phonemes. “Of all the languages for which we have data Finnish

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occupies first place as regards abundance of vowels and is the only language in which the frequency of vowels exceeds that of consonants,” comments Hakulinen (1961, 5). For example, in the average written text of Finnish, there are 96 consonants for every 100 vowels; in Hungarian, there are 141; in German, 188. In fact, Finns joke that at the prehistoric separation of Hungarian and Finnish, the Finns went north with the vowels, while the Hungarians went south with the consonants. Some difficulties for English speakers include the pronunciation in Finnish of doubled vowels and doubled consonants. These are clearly pronounced as doubles, and failure to do so may result in confusion with another word that does not have the double sound. Examples are kansa ‘people’ vs. kanssa ‘with’; tuli ‘fire’ vs. tulli ‘customs’; and one really hard case, muta ‘mud’ vs. mutta ‘but’, muuta ‘other’, and muuttaa ‘to move’. The alphabet contains the umlauted letters ä and ö. Not really Finnish is å (pronounced “oh”), which is used in loanwords from Swedish and in names of Swedish origin. In alphabetical lists, ä, ö, and å appear at the end of the alphabet.

Stress and Sentence Melody The main stress of every word is on the first syllable, and the sentence melody of Finnish is an even tone throughout the sentence, with a dropping intonation at the end, even in questions. For this reason, every question is marked, either by an interrogative word (such as kuka ‘who’ or mitä ‘what’) or an appended -ko/-kö on the first word. Likewise, surprise is indicated not by tonal stress, but by a particle such as -han/-hän (not related to hän ‘he’ or ‘she’). For these reasons, spoken Finnish can sound low-key, even a little depressive, to foreigners. Samples of spoken Finnish are available online at www.forvo.com /languages/fi. The grammatical inflections, or particles that may be added to word stems, lead to difficulty in checking meanings in a dictionary. For example, the learner may be presented with the word muuttaisitko? ‘would you move?,’ which is made up of the verb muuttaa plus four such additions. The dictionary won’t help much beyond giving the meaning of the stem. Fintwol ‘Finnish Morphological Analyser’, a computer program whose design was directed by Finnish computational linguist Kimmo Koskenniemi, breaks down such long combination

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words and is now being used for computer-based proofreading and other language tasks. For muuttaisitko, Fintwol provides the following information: @@@“muuttaa” V COND ACT SG2 kO (muuttaa, a verb, conditional, active, second person singular, question)

Fintwol may be tried out online at www2.lingsoft.fi/cgi-bin/fintwol /index.html. A description of its underlying linguistic and computational structure is provided by Koskenniemi (1983).

Puh ekieLi: The c oLLoquiaL L anguage There are, in effect, two standard Finnish languages today, the spoken and the written. In principle, most languages differentiate between spoken and written standards, as well as between formal and casual speech and writing. However, the differentiation is stronger in Finnish than the differences between spoken and written standard American English. Puhekieli ‘spoken language’ is not really equivalent to the English “slang” but consists of the words and idioms of the written language in altered form. Probably to nonnative speakers of Finnish, the most noticeable difference is the shortening of words: anteeksi ‘excuse me’ becomes anteeks; meillä on ‘we have’ becomes meil on; minä ‘I’ becomes mä. Puhekieli is used in casual or informal situations of all sorts all over Finland, and it is to some degree additionally influenced by regional dialects. Kirjakieli ‘book language’ represents the written standard but is also spoken on television, in public speaking, and in other formal or official situations. Stadinslangi, an urban dialect used primarily in Helsinki, is markedly differentiated from standard Finnish and has been significantly influenced by several foreign languages; it is discussed in the epilogue.

Dialects Today Finnish shows dialectical differences, although Finns from different regions understand each other’s dialects without too much difficulty. Dialects continue to be used not only in Finland, but also among

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descendants of early Finnish-speaking settlers in northern Norway (Kven) and northern Sweden (Meänkieli or its Swedish name, Tornedalsfinska; this has been designated a minority language in Sweden). As in other European countries, dialects are used by some rock groups in their lyrics; for example Verjnuarmu, a metal band from Kuopio, uses the Savonian dialect. However, only standard Finnish, written and spoken, is taught in schools and, as a general rule, appears in print.

Loanwords Finnish differs from English, French, German, and other IndoEuropean languages not only in syntax (grammar), but in lexicon (vocabulary). To the eye and ear of the English speaker who knows little or no Finnish, even everyday phrases (such as hyvää päivää ‘good day’ or ‘hello’) make Finnish seem very distant from European languages. Adding to the perceived distance, most loan words into Finnish from other languages are “phonologically normalized” to Finnish rules, so that the result may not resemble the borrowed word. For example, Finnish kuva ‘picture’ was borrowed from Swedish skugga ‘shadow’ (in the process its initial consonant was removed). In actuality, though, the ancestor languages of Finnish and English have some shared history. From very early times, when Finno-Ugric and Indo-European speakers lived in close contact with each other, Finnish borrowed from Indo-European. For example, two words for “beer” came into Finnish from Balto-Slavic-Germanic in around 3200– 2350 Bc. Kalja ‘weak beer’ and olut ‘beer’ can be traced from ProtoIndo-European halu to Lithuanian alús, Germanic aluþ, and Old Russian oliy (Koivulehto 2001, 257). Some of the borrowings would have come through Proto-Indo-Iranian, an Indo-European language whose speakers were present along with those of Proto-Uralic in the Eurasian steppes around 2500 Bc, writes Finnish linguist Petri Kallio (2006, 2). Even sauna, that “most widespread Finnish word in the world,” may be ultimately an Indo-European, specifically Paleo-Germanic, loanword, according to Kallio (2008, 315). Finnic tribes living on the shores of the Baltic Sea in the first and second centuries Bc “must have lived in rather close symbiosis with the Baltic tribes, and a little later with the Germanic ones,” claims linguist Raimo Anttila (1989, 155). As a result, hundreds of words were adopted from Baltic and Germanic, including those for which there must have

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been native Finnic equivalents. Germanic äiti ‘mother’, for example, replaced the native Finnish word emo/emä in the meaning of ‘human mother’; but the native word continues to be used in Modern Finnish for animal mothers and in compounds such as emäntä ‘housewife’ and emoyhtiö ‘parent company’ (Hakulinen 1961, 237). Most loanwords from Slavic entered Finnish from Old Russian, beginning around the fifth century ad; many of these probably came into the language with Orthodox Christianity, including raamattu ‘bible’ (Old East Slavic грамота/gramota). Further Russian influence on the vocabulary came during the period from 1809 to 1917, when Finland was ruled by Russia. It is no surprise that Swedish has had a strong influence on Finnish vocabulary, since, as we have seen, Finland was part of Sweden during virtually all of its recorded history until 1809. In addition, of course, there are borrowings via Swedish and German of Latin Christian terminology, such as adventti ‘Advent’. From German in medieval or modern times came secular terms such as herra ‘gentleman/Mr.’ French, Italian, and Arabic have contributed a few words, and of course, in modern times, English has contributed many (for more about current English influence on the languages of the North, see the epilogue).

Finnish Naming Conventions After Christianization, saints’ names or names from the Bible predominated in Finnish. These were Fennicized. Examples include (for women): Eeva ‘Eve’, Liisa or Elsa (from “Elisabeth”), Kaarina (‘Catherine’, via Swedish Karin), Johanna/Jenna/Jenni (female forms of Johan ‘John’), Pirkko/Pirjo ‘Birgitta’ (a Swedish saint); for men, Matti ‘Matthew’, Juhani/Johannes ‘John’, Antero ‘Andrew’, Tapani ‘Stephen’. Also of Christian origin are the feminine names Heljä (from Swedish Helg ‘holy’) and Kirsi ‘Christina’. Old Finnish (non-Christian) names were revived in the nineteenth century, for example, Aino for women, Ilmari and Kalevi for men, among many others. In rural Finland, people often took second names from the name of their farm or homestead (though these might not be passed down to their children), for example Jaakko Jussila ‘Jaakko [Jacob] from Jussi’s farm’. Patronyms, the father’s first name with the suffix indicating “son” or “daughter,” became common after the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, probably under Swedish or German

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influence. An example is Jaakko Juhaninpoika ‘Jaako Juhani’s son’. From sixteenth-century Finland comes the name Pirjo Olavintytär ‘daughter of Olaf ’, about whom nothing more is known than that she was the wife of the Finnish Bible translator and Lutheran Reformer Mikael Agricola. The Finnish patronym in both male and female versions has fallen out of use, although some male patronyms were translated into Swedish and are still used as surnames, for example Juhaninpoika could become Johansson. Clerks, teachers, and governmental administrators often adopted Swedish, German, or, in the case of the clergy, Latin names. Swedish surnames are commonly found in Finnish families even if none of the ancestral family members came from Sweden. Heritable surnames were required by Finnish law after 1923, and families could choose their name. Many names are based on features of the Finnish landscape, for example, in these surnames common as of 2012, given along with their base meanings (translations mine): Virtanen ‘stream’; Mäkinen ‘hilly’; Nieminen ‘cape of land, promontory’; and Mäkelä ‘hilly place’ (Nimipalvelu 2015).

f i n n i sh a nd The ProTe sTa n T r e for maT ion In accordance with Lutheran doctrine, the language of the Finnish Lutheran Church after 1554 became the vernacular—that is, Swedish in Sweden, both Swedish and Finnish in Finland—instead of Latin. However, except for short excerpts such as diary entries, Finnish had not yet appeared in written texts; Swedish remained the language of Finland’s written documents. This was changed by Mikael Agricola (1506–1557), the Lutheran bishop of Turku (Swedish Åbo; almost all named provinces and towns in central or south Finland have both Finnish and Swedish names). Agricola, a bilingual speaker of Swedish and Finnish who was born Mikael Olofsson in the Swedish-speaking region of Nyland (Finnish Uusimaa), adopted his second name (Latin for “farmer”), a popular one among adherents of humanism, while a schoolboy in then–Roman Catholic Finland. After the Reformation, he went to Wittenberg, Germany, to study theology, where one of his teachers was Martin Luther; in accordance with Lutheran doctrine, he came to believe that access to the Bible in their own language was essential to all Christians. Agricola developed a systematic spelling for Finnish in his Abckirja (ABC book,

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1543), published the Christian Rucouskirja (Prayer book, 1544), and translated into Finnish the New Testament, Se Wse Testamenti (1548) and the Old Testament psalms of David, Dauidin Psalttari (1551). Intending to describe a terrible world of pre-Christian times in Finland, Agricola, in the preface to the psalms, provided a list of pagan gods of Häme and Karelia, whose worshippers were “driven wild by the Devil and by sin,” as he wrote. In later times this introduction has been viewed quite differently, in fact as an early introduction to Finnish religious history, of which Agricola has been called the father (Heininen 2000). Historians of Finnish literature Kai Laitinen and George G. Schoolfield have noted that the two topics of Agricola’s writings, the biblical and the pagan, later became major sources of raw materials for Finnish literature. In addition, Agricola’s work provided the foundation for the development of a written standard for Finnish, as well as a treasure chest of native imagery for writers such as Elias Lönnrot (Kalevala, 1835), and artists such as painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931), to rummage in, in their creative processes (Laitinen and Schoolfield 1998, 36). In retrospect, this seems as if it should have been the beginning of a flourishing of literary Finnish for the postmedieval, modern world. Instead, King Gustavus Adolphus (1611– 62) made Swedish the language of even local government in Finland, as part of his goal to make Sweden a European stormakt ‘great power’. This aim was played out during the disastrous Thirty Years War (1618–48) on the European continent, in which Sweden (with its Finnish conscripts and Swedish officers) was a major participant. More solidification of Swedish in Finland was to follow. In 1632 the University of Turku, Finland’s first university, was founded with a curriculum in Swedish. There and in other Finnish towns, the citizenry became entirely Swedish-speaking, and Finnish remained a language only of country people, though, to be sure, in a country that was still mostly rural. “Finnish had no prestige value whatsoever. . . . The Bible of 1642 [i.e., the Vanha kirkkoraamattu ‘Old Church Bible’ (the first Finnish translation of the entire Bible)], printed in only twelve hundred copies and in a large and splendid format, could find its way to the chancels of Finland’s churches but not to the Finnish-speaking public at large” (Laitinen and Schoolfield, 1998, 39). Shortly thereafter, in 1649, Swedish replaced Finnish as the language of instruction in Finnish schools, but attendance was not mandatory. Church congregations

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could specify whether they preferred Swedish or Finnish. The 1686 Kyrkolagen ‘church law’ of Sweden and Finland required that each participant, man or woman, in church confirmation or marriage read the catechism aloud beforehand, in either Swedish or Finnish, depending on the preference of the local congregation. Teaching of this skill was managed by the church, often with the aid of some judicious memorization. The adoption of Swedish as the only language of the educated class was complete by the seventeenth century (Ahokas 1997, 19), even though no Swedish-language literature had appeared in Finland until the end of the sixteenth century. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a thin stream of Finnish-language prose and poetry kept the written language barely alive, even while Finnish continued to flourish as a spoken home language. However, the intellectual life of the country continued to be conducted in Swedish. After 1809, Russian rule, which lasted for the rest of the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, proved relatively benign, even allowing some avantgarde actions, such as the one Finland took in 1907 when it became the first Scandinavian nation, and the third nation in the world, to grant the vote to all women (not just taxpayers or privileged classes). Other Scandinavian nations were several years behind Finland: women’s suffrage came to Norway in 1913, to Denmark in 1915, and to Sweden in 1921. Women earned the right to vote in Russia in 1917 and in the United States in 1920. As a grand duchy of Russia, Finland kept its Swedish code of law and, for the most part, its local autonomy. However, in 1812, three years after the beginning of Russian rule, Finland’s capital was moved by the Czar from Swedish-speaking Turku (Swedish Åbo) on the west coast; and Helsinki, a short boat ride from Russia, became the capital of the new Grand Duchy of Finland. The primacy of the Swedish language in all of public life and much of private life continued, however. The language question was at this point not an issue of Russian rule, but a domestic class question— Swedish was the language of the elites, Finnish the language of the working classes. But then, in 1850, a Russian imperial decree seemed designed to increase support from Swedishspeaking Finns; it forbade the publication in Finnish of anything except religious, agricultural, or cultural texts, which included “old poems, songs, and tales, thus leaving folklorists, historians, and linguists free to pursue their work” (Ahokas 1997, 2). Finland’s Swedish-speaking

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aristocrats were in agreement with the imperial decree, insofar as they believed it “protected” Finland’s workers and farmers from the revolutionary ideas that were beginning to trouble the elites not only in Russia, but also in other European monarchies. The “Russification” of 1850 made Russian the language of Finland’s government administration, but this was not extended to schools or daily life. Some intellectuals did attempt, though, to enlarge the Finnish literary tradition. The nineteenth- century artistic wave of nationalism and romanticism that took Europe by storm gave energy to Finnishlanguage enthusiasts. As the Grimm brothers had done in Germany with their fairy-tale collection, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812), artistic talents in Finland turned to oral folk tales as a source of national creative tradition. Writer Elias Lönnrot brought Finnish literature to the world’s attention with his 1835 adaptation of Finnish tales of pagan gods and heroes, Kalevala. Its influence reached as far as America, where it inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem The Song of Hiawatha in both content (native American folktales) and rhyme scheme. The borrowed meter, preferred by earlier Finnish poets and well suited to Finnish but less so to English, was the trochaic tetrameter—lines with four repetitions of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable, for example in Hiawatha’s first two lines (stressed syllables are marked with accent): “Bý the shóre of Gítchee Gúmee/ Bý the shíning Bíg-Sea-Wáter.” A century later, characters from Kalevala were a source for J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937–49). Kalevala and Lönnrot’s 1840 collection of poetry Kanteletar—both written in Finnish— eventually provided not only literary, but also political, inspiration to the nationalists who advocated both political independence and the primacy of the Finnish language in Finland. Both Finnish and Norse mythology, with their gods, trolls, and otherworlds, were of course also influential in the work of both Longfellow and Tolkien. Many of the Swedish-speaking Finnish writers who were most eager to promote the use of Finnish, having been schooled entirely in Swedish, and even, for many, with Swedish as their home language, were unable to write in Finnish. The Ostrobothnian “nation” (provincial fraternity) of Helsinki University issued a patriotic publication, Joukahainen (named for a major character in Kalevala), one of several publications of the time with Finnish titles but written mostly in Swedish. By 1849 two Finnish-language newspapers had been born and died, the

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first, Suomalainen (The Finn), after Russian censors killed it for supposed socialist tendencies; the second, Suomi (Finland), faded out for lack of readership, since “willing readers of Finnish in Helsinki were still few and far between” (Laitinen and Schoolfield 1998, 60). Political motives remained at the forefront. Under the 1850 law, the publication of even novels in Finnish was expressly forbidden, because fiction of the day was frequently an expression of politics. The first Finnish-language novel, Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän Veljestä (Seven brothers), did not appear until 1870.

a c ha nge of forT une, a war of wor d s In 1863 Czar Alexander II, emperor of Russia from 1855 until his assassination in Russia in 1881, boosted Finland’s language nationalists with his Language Decree of 1863, which defined Finnish as one of two official languages (Swedish being the other) of Finland. The influence of Finnish politician and writer Johan Vilhelm Snellman is credited with encouraging Alexander’s declaration of Finnish “on a footing of complete equality with Swedish in all matters which directly concern the Finnish-speaking part of the population” (quoted in Wuorinen 1965, 158). The official status of Finnish was to be phased in, taking full effect in all offices and administrations of the Finnish government, within twenty years. For the Fennomanes (advocates of Finnish as the primary national language), the point was patriotism and nationalism: Finland was Finnish. The Svecomanes (advocates of Swedish as the primary national language), argued that Finnish was undeveloped, inadequate to serve the country’s needs. Since it had never been a national language in a modern country, it wasn’t suited to be one now, they claimed. But, despite their hearty disagreement, the Fennomanes and the Svecomanes shared a motive: both groups were acting from Finnish patriotism as they understood it. It was not a disagreement about Finland’s becoming more close or less close to Sweden or Swedish culture, but an issue concerning language and Finland’s future. In the closing years of the nineteenth century and the beginning years of the twentieth century, the claims of the Fennomanes gained traction. Soon a change in public education policy also made a decisive impact.

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f innish Begins iT s dominanc e The 1866 Act for the Organization of Elementary Schools began to turn the tide. From then on, Finnish-language primary and secondary schools were established alongside the Swedish-speaking schools; each had a curriculum that emphasized national culture. Kalevala, for example, was part of the curriculum in all primary schools, whether taught in Swedish or Finnish. At the University of Helsinki, the student body in 1870 was less than 10 percent Finnish-speaking; by 1879 this proportion had risen to more than 30 percent. By 1910 the Finnish-language secondary schools accounted for about 70 percent of the total number (Wuorinen 1965, 176). The use of Finnish as the language of instruction soon became common at universities, starting at the University of Helsinki. A working group of language specialists and professional writers set out to establish a standard for Finnish, seeking a compromise between several dialects and old literary Finnish, aiming at a “pure, homogeneous and regular Finnish,” writes Finnish linguist Lea Laitinen (2004, 247). Finnish writers, teachers, and politicians took up the new standard. During the long language debate, the Finnish language gained a place in the public forum and became its own advocate. In 1902 a new law decreed that all official matters in a locality would be carried on in the majority language of that locality, whether that be Swedish or Finnish.

indePendence for fin L an d After Alexander II’s death, the signals from Russia changed. In 1899 Czar Nicholas II asserted Russia’s right to rule Finland without the consent of local governmental bodies, unintentionally increasing support among Finland’s intellectuals for independence. The Russian Revolution of 1917 brought about the abdication of Nicholas II, and shortly thereafter, the Finnish-Russian regime in Finland collapsed. Finland declared its independence from Russia. Almost immediately a struggle for control of the former Grand Duchy of Finland commenced, becoming the Finnish Civil War of 1918. The parties were the Social Democrats, called the “Reds,” and the nonsocialist, conservative Senate, called the “Whites.” The Reds, dominant in urban

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Finland, were supported by the new, postrevolutionary Soviet Republic; the Whites, dominant in rural Finland, were supported by the German Empire. Although the Soviet government was not officially involved, the eventual peace settlement involved questions of borders and land rights with the Soviet Union, which for that reason became a party to the peace agreement. In the end the Whites of Finland gained a nonsocialist Finnish republic. Soviet Russia recognized independent Finland in 1918. The new national constitution of 1919 declared both Finnish and Swedish national languages and gave citizens the right to communicate with the government in their mother tongue, whether Finnish or Swedish. The two languages of Finland were now equal under Finnish law.

Finlandssvenska: A Note about Swedish in Finland At the time of Finnish independence, about 15 percent of Finns spoke Swedish as their first language; as of 2013, the figure is about 5.5 percent. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. In earlier times Swedish, although always a minority language, was the language of the intellectual elites. This changed after independence. Swedish changed from a dominant minority language to a nondominant minority language. Finnish linguist Mikael Reuter maintains that “one of the most important issues for the Swedish Finns today is how to sustain the will to survive as a group and maintain the Swedish language [in Finland] as a living means of communication” (Reuter 1990, 135). The Swedish of Finland, called Finlandssvenska ‘Finland Swedish’ by both Swedes and Finns, maintains some differences from Swedish as it is spoken in Sweden. For example, it lacks Accent 2 intonation (see chapter 3), it differs in pronunciation of certain vowels, and it includes many words and idioms borrowed from Finnish. Swedish-speaking Finns currently support efforts to keep written Finland-Swedish from drifting too far from Rikssvenska, or Central Standard Swedish, the language of Sweden. Finland’s Byrån för svenska språket ‘Office of Swedish language’, the state agency for Swedish language planning, endeavors to maintain standard Swedish in all government documents and official translations into Swedish. Swedish dialects that have arisen in Finland differ to some degree from Central Standard Swedish but are for the most part understandable to speakers of both Finland-Swedish and Central Standard Swedish. The dialects of Ostrobothnia, located on Finland’s western coast

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and the home of many native speakers of Swedish, are an exception: they tend to differ quite a bit from Central Standard Swedish. For example, the Swedish dialect of the Finnish town of Närpes (located in the western, largely Swedish-speaking province of Ostrobothnia) is considered to be more like Swedish as it was spoken in the early Middle Ages than modern Swedish, and it is not easily understood by other Swedish speakers, either in Finland or in Sweden. Except for some inhabitants of the Åland Islands off the west coast of Finland (Swedish-speaking and autonomous, although a region of Finland) and a few other historically Swedish-speaking regions, virtually everyone in all regions of Finland is competent in spoken and written Finnish. Finland is officially a bilingual nation, but Finnish is clearly dominant. Swedish lives two lives in Finland today: the first is as the second national language of Finland, native to a small minority of citizens; the second is as a required school subject, beginning in the third grade and continuing through high school. For those who learn Swedish only at school, fluency or even competence in Swedish is not a given, though. For example, most university-educated Finns have a good command of Swedish, and railroad and post office employees are usually able to deal with the public at least on a basic level in both languages. However, the Swedish-speaking foreign visitor in most parts of Finland soon discovers that Swedish may not be spoken or understood at the deli counter, the bakery, the coffee shop, or the hairdresser. For governmental purposes, individuals and families declare themselves to be either Finnish- or Swedish-speaking. However, increasingly, even some children of self-declared Swedish-speaking families know Finnish better than Swedish and sometimes have language difficulties if their parents send them to (public) Swedish-speaking schools, an option open to all parents in Finland. The percentage of Finns who claim Swedish as their mother tongue is slowly decreasing. However, government documents are issued in both Finnish and Swedish; and representatives in the parliament must be Swedish- or Finnish-speaking in proportion to the numbers of native speakers in their districts. Within a hundred years, Swedish has gone from the language of the dominant cultural elites to a minority language that needs government support to maintain Finland as the bilingual nation its constitution demands. Although Finland’s Finnish speakers and Swedish speakers, like the peoples of Finland and Sweden, remain good neighbors and good friends, it is unclear what the future holds for Finland-Swedish.

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c onc Lu sion Today Finnish is both the culturally dominant and the majority language of Finland. Parents may choose whether to send their children to a Finnish-speaking or a Swedish-speaking school, but in each, all children learn both languages. However, many children from Finnishspeaking families regard Swedish as a school subject only and do not become fluent speakers of the language. “Few Finnish-speaking Finns . . . have ever considered the possibility that, but for the contingencies of history and the actions of individuals, they might now be speaking Swedish as their first language,” writes linguist Michael C. Coleman (2010, 44). Recall that in the nineteenth century, many Finnish writers, even if supportive of Finnish language rights, were able to write only in Swedish. Coleman contrasts the nowdominant position of Finnish in Finland with the situation of Irish in Ireland, where English is dominant and about 90 percent of the population consider English their native language. What accounts for the different outcome for Finnish? Coleman suggests several reasons: the action of the czar in 1863 in making Finnish coequal with Swedish (Russian never gained traction in Finland, despite some half-hearted government attempts); the support for Finnish as a national language from both Finnish-speaking and Swedishspeaking Finns in the independence movement; and the support of the Lutheran state church for the use of Finnish in liturgy, preaching, and public discourse. By contrast, in Ireland, the English mandated the English language, while the Roman Church preference was for Latin rather than for Celtic Irish (Coleman 2010, 44–47). The story of Finnish, like the stories of the other six languages of Scandinavia discussed in this volume, illustrates that a combination of language-internal and language-external factors is the key to a language’s development and its rise or fall. Finnish, once under domination (even if largely benevolent) of two foreign-language powers, and suppressed for a time by both politics and economic realities, reinvented itself (with the significant help of its friends), gained a revised and renewed place among its own people, and is thriving. In chapter 5 we shall take a look at a very different story, that of Norwegian.

5 • The Black Death Comes for Norwegian dan ish m ak e s a hou se caLL En er þeir skiptu Nóregi með sér Sveinn Danakonungr ok Óláfr Svíakonungr ok Eiríkr iarl, þá hafði Óláfr Svíakonungr fiǫgur fylki í Þrándheimi ok Mœri hváratveggiu, Raumsdal ok austr Ranríki frá Gautelfi til Svínasunds. (Now when the realm of Norway was divided between Svein, the king of Denmark, Óláf, the king of Sweden, and Earl Eirík, then King Óláf ’s share comprised four districts in Trondheim, both parts of Mœr, Raums Dale, and Ranríki in the east, from the Gaut Elf River to Svína Sound.) Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ca. 1230

g o od T i me s, Ba d Time s, Then a g oLde n ag e Viking times were good times for Norway in many ways, increasing its influence as well as its territory. In the ninth century, Norwegian Vikings discovered and colonized much of the North Atlantic, including the Faroe Islands, Iceland, the Hebrides, Shetland, the Orkney Islands, and Greenland; they also established a colony in North America, calling it Vinland. Settling around ad 800 on the west coast of Ireland, the Norwegians founded Dublin and remained for about a hundred years before being driven away by local Celtic chieftains. But then Norway entered a time of civil wars and, after its 1070 Christianization, state- church conflict. Norway’s King Håkon Håkonsson (in Modern Norwegian, Haakon Haakonson), who ruled from 1217 to 1263, managed to bring peace, prosperity, and military might to his country. Iceland and Greenland became part of the kingdom. Norway was a medieval power to be reckoned with and, for a time, enjoyed what has been called its Golden Age. But events beyond any monarch’s power brought all of that to an end in less than a hundred years after Håkon’s death.

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13 49: PL ague a rrive s in norway The Black Death moved in the early fourteenth century from the steppes of Russia into continental Europe, resulting in “levels of mortality never before experienced,” as Norwegian historian Ole Benedictow writes (2004, 388). The economic, political, and social consequences for all of Europe can hardly be overstated. Rural tenants, laborers, and other workers were suddenly in high demand and short supply, raising wages dramatically, while landowners, religious houses, and the gentry experienced a concomitant dramatic decrease in income. Kings, princes, city-states, and urban governments professionalized and rationalized their operations in an ultimately ineffective effort to make up for lost taxes. Social rank was reset along with wages, as formerly upper-class landowners and petty nobility were forced to live by their own labors and became thus downgraded to middling tenantry. Soon the plague moved onto the Scandinavian Peninsula, and Norway was the hardest hit among the countries of the North. Possibly as much as 60 percent of Norway’s population perished, according to Benedictow (2004, 383– 84). Though language is not usually the center of plague history, there is much to observe, for the plague set in motion a series of events that seriously affected Norwegian. The first, and most direct, of these events was the decimation of Norway’s population.

Population Loss “Decimate” originally meant “to kill one in ten,” but nowadays the term has taken on even stronger meaning. Norway’s death rate resulting from the Black Death was far higher than 10 percent; and it took a heavy toll not only on the population, but on its language as well. Not all of the speakers need to die before a language enters a state of failure to thrive. In the European lands visited by the Black Death, priests, nuns, and monks were infected as they fulfilled their duties of caring for and praying over the huge numbers of dead and dying; therefore, the caregivers suffered an even greater proportion of plague casualties than the general population. In the Middle Ages, these religious in their convents and monasteries were the guardians of the written language; loss of clergy meant, to a great extent, loss of the literate class, in other

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words, readers and writers. Secular readers and writers of fourteenthcentury Norway died in somewhat smaller proportions than the clergy; this too was a loss to the language.

Economic Loss Brings Political Consequences The Norwegian monarchy suffered financially from the high death rate, since taxes could not be collected from nobles’ estates or peasants’ farms that had been abandoned and were disused because their inhabitants had died. The monarchy was weakened from the king down to newly impoverished aristocratic landowners. Denmark filled the gap left by a nonfunctioning Norwegian monarchy, as its elite classes took over the governance of Norway; in 1380 this move became an official union between Denmark and Norway, under Danish rule. Previously the kingdoms of the North had been ruled in turn by each other’s monarchs (one such time, in the tenth century, was described in Heimskringla, a compilation of Icelandic sagas [Snorri Sturluson 1964]). However, this time, Danish domination of Norway had longterm consequences. In the short run, Danish became the language of Norwegian government administration. In the long run, Danish became Norway’s de facto national public language. Norwegian was seldom read and seldom written, and no national standard developed for either writing or speaking Norwegian. However, the surviving spoken rural dialects served as a linguistic reservoir that made possible the renaissance, five hundred years later, of Norway’s written language. That nineteenth- century renaissance included an unanticipated consequence. Modern Norwegian is the only language among the seven of our story that was doubled in modern times. The twins are named Bokmål ‘book language’, based on the literary and urban Norwegianized Danish that developed while Denmark ruled Norway; and Nynorsk ‘New Norwegian’, based on the spoken Norwegian dialects of the towns and rural districts. Today they are the two faces of Modern Norwegian. This chapter focuses on the Black Death as setting into motion events— demographic, economic, political—that amounted to a turning point for Norwegian. After looking at the immediate effects of the Black Death on Norway and Norwegian, we will examine some of the

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subsequent events, the previous history, and the subsequent trajectory of Norway’s empire and language, including the nineteenth- century emergence of two Modern Norwegian languages.

Bac k droP To The PL ague: cLimaT e c h ange The Black Death, spread by fleas, finds its optimal environment in warm climates. Rats have long been considered the carriers, although a recent study hypothesizes that the great gerbils of Asia (Rhombomys opimus) were actually the “source” hosts (Schmid et al. 2015). Perhaps surprisingly, however, the cooling of the climate made the North especially susceptible to the disease. From about ad 800 to 1200, the climate was ideal for the Norwegian explorers to sail to and colonize the islands of the North Atlantic. The sea was without ice for long periods, sailing was good, and plentiful harvests made it possible for people to live fairly comfortably off the land. This was the Medieval Warm Period of the North and of the European continent. The mild weather also favored the development of medieval high culture. In mainland Scandinavia and on the European continent, cathedrals and castles were built during the long springs, summers, and autumns. The arts flourished as these large and beautiful venues hosted the audiences of worshippers and courtiers who took in the music and dramas performed there. “Like the Norse conquests, cathedrals too are a consequence of a global climatic phenomenon, an enduring legacy of the Medieval Warm Period,” writes Brian Fagan. He continues: For five centuries, Europe basked in warm, settled weather, with only the occasional bitter winters, cool summers and memorable storms, like the cold year of 1258 caused by a distant volcanic eruption that cooled the atmosphere with its fine dust. Summer after summer passed with long, dreamy days of golden sunlight, and bountiful harvests. Compared with what was to follow, these centuries were a climatic golden age. Local food shortages were not unknown, life expectancy in rural communities was short, and the routine of backbreaking labor never ended. Nevertheless, crop failures were sufficiently rare that peasant and lord alike might piously believe that God was smiling upon them. Nothing prepared them for the catastrophe ahead. As they labored through the warm summers of the thirteenth century,

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temperatures were already cooling rapidly on the outer frontiers of the medieval world. (2000, 21)

Cooling Begins, Crops Fail The North represented those “outer frontiers of the medieval world” where the cooling trend became evident early in the thirteenth century, increasing sea ice around Greenland and throughout the North Atlantic and causing difficulties for Norse shipping between Norway and its North Atlantic colonies. After 1300, increasingly wet and cold weather descended upon the European continent. In 1315 a deluge hit northern Europe, with rain throughout May, June, July, and August. “An unseasonably cold August became an equally chilly September,” writes Fagan, with the result that “hunger began within months. . . . By Christmas 1315, many communities throughout northwestern Europe were already desperate” (2000, 29–32). The farmers of northern Europe and Scandinavia hoped for a better year in 1316, but if anything, it was even worse, as crops simply did not ripen. That year brought a bitterly cold winter in which livestock animals starved or froze where they stood. Subsequent years were again characterized by cold, rain, failed harvests, and dead stock animals. Europe’s Little Ice Age had begun. It lasted for another six hundred years, dealing its final blows in Ireland’s ghastly An Ghorta Mór ‘The Great Hunger’, precipitated in 1845 by potato famine, and in catastrophic food shortages in Belgium and Finland in 1867– 68. The Little Ice Age faded gradually in effect and from human memory, and in our century it has been replaced by fear and uncertainty concerning the consequences of its opposite— global warming.

North Atlantic Cod Begins to Disappear Not only farming, but fishing too was affected by the cooling climate. The Norse had fished for cod in the waters of the North Atlantic even before Erik the Red sailed to Greenland, and they traded their catch far and wide throughout Europe. The Lofoten Islands in northern Norway had provided plentiful cod, while summer’s dry winds and sunny weather offered ideal conditions for drying and preserving the cod. All this started to change by the early fourteenth century. Cod, not only a trading commodity but also a food staple of Norway, Iceland, and

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the Faroes, began to fail as the waters grew too cold for it to thrive. Not only cod fishing, but soon all Norse shipping in the North Atlantic shrank and then ceased. Iceland and the Faroes became isolated from Norway, their mother country, while Norway had to make do without a large part of the cod it had been accustomed to. The plague feasted on a population that itself did not have enough to eat.

a shorT hisTory of The PL ague The Black Death received its name centuries after its first rampage through Europe, not from the physical symptoms it caused in its victims, but from its Latin medieval medical name, atra mors ‘terrible death’; however, atra can also mean “black.” In its own time the disease was called by many other names, for example, the Latin words pestis or pestilentia ‘epidemic’. In modern times, it is sometimes referred to as bubonic plague, for the buboes, round and tender swellings of the lymph system, that characterize it. Sometimes it is called by the scientific name of the bacterium now known to be responsible, Yersinia pestis, so labeled after Alexandre Yersin, the Swiss-French scientist who in 1894 discovered it and linked it to the disease. But while the cause of the pest was identified in the nineteenth century, the plague was not recognized as the cause of the previously ill-understood late-medieval social crisis. Its effects included dramatic, lasting diminution of population and profound structural changes in European societies, from Norway to Spain, from England to Russia. The Black Death of 1346– 53 was the most devastating of the many plagues in Europe in medieval and early modern times. Its incidence diminished as public sanitation improved, but it was never finally conquered until the advent of modern antibiotics.

Origins The first known occurrence of the Black Death in Europe was in the sixth century ad (about 100 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire), when it struck the Mediterranean world and was named the Justinian Plague, after Emperor Justinian of the Eastern Byzantine Empire. Eight hundred years after Justinian, the Black Death awoke and quickly spread throughout Europe, both by land and by water.

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The death toll in northern Europe and Scandinavia was greater than that in southern Europe, where climate cooling did not have the same devastating effects upon crop yields and stock animals as it had in the North. Norway suffered the greatest blows of all.

The Plague in the Nations of the North The Black Death raged in southeastern Norway by the summer of 1349. “Thereafter, the pestilence swept all over Norway and wrought such havoc that not one-third of the people survived,” reported Icelandic priest Einar Hafliðason in ca. 1361 (Benedictow 2004, 154). Three Norwegian colonies of the North Atlantic (the Shetland, Orkney, and Faroe islands) were infected subsequently via ships from Norway. Iceland escaped, because, by chance, no ship sailed from Norway to Iceland in 1349, although Iceland had its own epidemics of the Black Death in the following century, as we saw in chapter 2 (Seaver 2010, 128). Norway’s demographic and economic situation only maximized its vulnerability to the plague. Its population density was much below that of not only England or France, but also of Denmark and Sweden; oddly enough for modern expectations, this made infection even more likely. The reason is that the plague was spread in Europe primarily not by human-to-human contact, but through the fleas of rats. In the lesspopulated areas, there were more rats per human, making humans statistically more likely to be infected than in more densely populated areas. Sweden and Denmark, too, suffered large population and economic losses, but in smaller proportions than Norway; further, Norway had begun the era as the least-populated and weakest kingdom in the North, and so it was the least able to recover. Religion played a role, both as the consolation or hope people turned to for relief from the plague, and in placing blame for the disease. As in Germany, the Jews in the North were blamed (for a discussion, see Cantor 2002, 147– 67). An example comes from the Swedish shipping center Visby in 1350, the year of the first documented outbreak of the plague in Sweden. The Visby city fathers sent a letter of warning, still preserved, to the German city of Rostock regarding an unnamed “traveler” (a code word for Jews?—Jews were permitted to pass through but not to reside in Sweden at that time unless they converted

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to Christianity) who had admitted a diabolic plot against Christians, confessing in his last hours that he had poisoned wells in Stockholm, Västerås, and Arboga. No other historical references to the plague have been found in those three Swedish cities; and no Jewish communities, or even individual Jews, are documented to have been in Sweden at the time. Both traveler and plot were most likely fabricated on the basis of similar accusations against Jews in Germany, or in imitation of antiJewish Roman Church iconography and legends (Benedictow 2004, 177–78; see also 392– 93 for further discussion of persecution of Jews as a reaction to the Black Death). According to the scanty historical record and the estimates of scholars, the death toll of the 1348– 50 epidemic of the Black Death in the North was as follows: Denmark, one-third of the population (Danish Immigrant Museum 2013); Sweden, one-third (Scott 1977, 56– 57); Norway, two-thirds (Benedictow 2004, 383– 84).

a f Ter The PL ague In several important ways, “the Black Death left Norway very, very poor” (Larsen 1948, 203). There were not enough farmers to work the land and supply crops to the population, the monasteries were impoverished, church tithes had declined by half, and the king’s income from taxes was so diminished that even the royal family sometimes went hungry. Not only royal splendor, but also culture, was almost immediately affected. Norway’s king lived for the most part in Sweden, leaving Norway without the stimulus of the court and its support of literature. The written literary tradition was supplanted to a large degree by oral culture, tales and traditions told and retold; many of the tales were not written down until the nineteenth century, and others were probably lost forever. The Norwegian language, still spoken in its many dialects, lived on not in the written record but in these tales and in the conversations of its people on the farms and in the forests.

Norway Goes into Receivership Even before the plague time, Norway looked as if it might not be able to hold its own politically among the three perpetually warring powers of

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Scandinavia—Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, listed in order of their dominance. After the Black Death had passed through, things looked even worse for Norway. The population of Norway in the 1520s was two hundred thousand, much smaller than that of either Sweden or Denmark (Brecht 1995, 147). In 1397 Norway and its colonies became, with Denmark and Sweden, part of the Kalmar Union, so called because its charter was signed at the Castle of Kalmar in southern Sweden. Included were Norway’s colonies in Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes, the Shetlands, and the Orkneys (until the latter two were transferred to Scotland in 1471). The Kalmar Union, in its time the second-largest accumulation of European territories under a single sovereign (Derry 1979, 69), lasted until 1523. This “age of Scandinavian Union,” as it is known among historians, was, however, “in fact a period of disunity and disarray,” as Haugen writes (1976, 245). The Kalmar Union was characterized by royal intrigues, civil rebellions, coups, and frequent changes of monarchs.

End of the Kalmar Union The beginning of the end of the Kalmar Union was marked in 1520 by the Stockholm Blood Bath, a Swedish internal struggle between pro–Kalmar Union and anti–Kalmar Union factions. The Swedish king Christian I, who preferred ruling Sweden without control from Denmark, ordered the execution, which for most meant beheading, of the leaders of the pro–Kalmar Union faction, including two bishops. Blood ran in the marketplace of central Stockholm, and the incident precipitated three hundred more years of conflict between Denmark and Sweden. Three years later, the Kalmar Union officially dissolved, leaving a union of Denmark and Norway. In 1536 the Danish Privy Council declared Norway a Danish province, and Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands became Danish possessions. Norway remained in Danish hands until the 1814 treaty of Kiel, when it declared independence. However, in that same year, the loss of its short war with Sweden forced Norway to accept union with Sweden. Greenland, the Faroes, and Iceland were still in union with—not quite owned or ruled by—Denmark. Not until 1905 did Norway gain independence, after its parliament voted for dissolution of the union with Sweden.

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L a nguage c onsequ e nc e s Norwegian, the first literary language of Scandinavia, reached its height in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century sagas of Norway’s colony in Iceland (and a few “Kings’ Sagas” written in Norway; Andersson 1985, 201). However, in the long years of domination by Denmark, then Sweden, then Denmark again, written Norwegian gradually disappeared from the historical record. The climate can be considered partly responsible. After 1300, the increasing sea ice of the Little Ice Age stressed Norway’s connection with Iceland and the Faroes, reducing language contact among the Old West Norse languages of all three. At the same time, linguistic influence on Norway from its Old East Norse–speaking neighbors, Denmark and Sweden, grew along with increasing trade. In another instance of trade bringing language, Low German, the lingua franca of the multinational Hanseatic League, came to Norway with the 1360 establishment of the Hansa’s kontor (trade office) in the northern Norwegian port city of Bergen. The languages of Iceland and the Faroes, in near-isolation in the frozen North Atlantic, continued their literary traditions and to a large extent conserved the forms of Old West Norse under the stabilizing influence of the sagas, already acclaimed and studied in Europe. However, written language from Norway of this time has survived not in literary texts, but only in private letters and a few public documents. The documents were written in what Larsen calls “a strangely mixed language, Norwegian with a great many Swedish and Danish words” (1948, 239). Norwegian began to follow the Danish and Swedish models in its vocabulary, grammatical forms, and function words such as pronouns. For example, eastern Scandinavian forms, such as jak ‘I’ and ví ‘we’ appeared instead of the Norwegian (western Scandinavian) forms ek and vér. By 1560, state documents were written entirely in Danish except for “occasional slips” (Haugen 1976, 329–30). In 1370 Queen Margaret I, monarch of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, decided to use Danish rather than Latin in governmental administration. This had important consequences for the Norwegian language. Written Norwegian might have survived the use of Latin as an official language, but Danish, especially since it was closely related to Norwegian and could be rather quickly learned by the Norwegian literate classes, was quite another matter.

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Norwegian Officially Bows Out in Favor of Danish In 1450 a treaty (written in Danish only) establishing “everlasting union between Norway and Denmark” was signed by representatives of both countries. In that year Christian I, King of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, moved the royal chancery to Denmark and issued royal documents only in Danish. Education meant education in Danish, while regional variants of Norwegian continued to be spoken as a home language in village and rural districts. This language situation continued until Norwegian independence in the twentieth century.

The Protestant Reformation In 1537 the Protestant Reformation arrived in Denmark, and the Danish Lutheran Church was formally established in Denmark and all its possessions, including Norway, Iceland, and the Faroes. The linguistic effect of the Reformation on the Norwegian language (and similarly on the Faroese language) was enormous: in both Norway and the Faroe Islands, it was the beginning of nearly total Danish replacement of the local written languages. In Björn Hagstrom’s assessment, “It is no overstatement to say that the Reformation resulted in a linguistic catastrophe for Norway and the Faroes. In countries such as Denmark and Sweden the Reformation Bibles supported the development of a national standard language, and gave the mother tongue uniformity and prestige. In [Norway and] the Faroes the effect of the Reformation was quite the opposite. . . . In Norway, the Danish Bible was introduced, and with it Danish as the language of the church. From then on, Danish was the only written language” (2009, 173). In Denmark, Norway, and the Faroe Islands, the language of churches became Danish, replacing Latin. In Iceland, Latin remained the language of the Lutheran Church until 1686, and Icelandic retained its position as the principal language of Iceland despite Danish rule. In both Norway and the Faroes, Danish became the primary language for all public uses. Lutheran doctrine called for the laity to read the Scriptures for themselves in their own language, unmediated by the clergy. However, Danish rulers and church authorities considered Danish, not Norwegian, the language of Norway. Accordingly, in 1550 the Bible was translated into Danish. Translations had earlier appeared in Icelandic (1540) and

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in Swedish (1541); but there was no translation into Norwegian until 1816. Norwegian did not develop into a national language in the same way that Danish and Swedish did. As the centuries went by, however, Norwegian speakers “domesticated” the Danish language they learned in school, producing what linguists later described as “DanoNorwegian.”

ru ssenor sk: a ma rriage of ru ssian a nd norw egia n Meanwhile, an interesting mixing of Norwegian with a different language was taking place on the coast where the Arctic Ocean meets the Barents Sea and northern Norway arches over the Scandinavian Peninsula, touching the Russian Kola Peninsula. There, four centuries ago, a pidgin of Russian and Norwegian arose. The thriving sixteenth-century trade between the inhabitants of Finnmark (a county of Norway) and Russia reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth century but survived into the early twentieth century. Russenorsk (Russian Руссенорск), its vocabulary and structure a simplified blend of Norwegian and Russian, was coined by the fishermen for the Pomor trade, named after the Pomors, inhabitants of the Russian Pomor’e region around the White Sea and along the Murman coast. Linguistically, Russenorsk is interesting because it differs from other pidgins or trade languages based on European languages. First, there was no social-status differentiation between the Norwegianspeaking users and the Russian-speaking users, so neither language was dominant in the pidgin. Second, during the more than 140 years the pidgin existed, it remained a pidgin, limited in scope, never developing into a creole; to become a creole, a pidgin has to “expand functionally and grammatically until it becomes a mother tongue and fulfils all the functions required of a natural language,” explain Norwegian linguists Ingvild Broch and Ernst Håkon Jahr (2009, 21). Here are some fragments of Russenorsk, drawn from original sources. Readers who know at least some Norwegian or Russian, or both, may see how the languages have been combined. In these texts, for example, grammatical endings seem to be a simplified form of Russian (all verbs conjugated with -m), and the vocabulary a mix from

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both languages. The only preposition used here and in other surviving samples of Russenorsk (see Broch and Jahr 2009 38–47) is på (Russian no), conveniently enough a word (meaning “at,” “in,” or “on”) pronounced identically in Russian and Norwegian. Tvoja fisk kopom? ‘You buy fish?’ Ja robotom domo. ‘I work home.’ Værsågo, lite klæba på presentom. ‘Please, little bread as present.’ Broch and Jahr believe that the Sámi, long known for their competence in several languages, played a larger role in the formation of Russenorsk than is documented in the written texts. Those two, along with many other scholars, also believe that among the largely uneducated fishermen who used Russenorsk, both the Russians and the Norwegians thought they were speaking the other’s language when they spoke Russenorsk (Broch and Jahr 2009, 56). Russenorsk died out after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when barter trade was replaced by cash trade and merchant firms on the Norwegian side assumed control, their representatives having learned Russian during long visits in Archangel. Russian then became the lingua franca in this region, and Russenorsk no longer served any trade purpose.

norwegia n a nd The age of roma n Tic naTiona Lism By the mid-eighteenth century and after, many speakers of Scandinavian languages were familiar with “the major languages of wider communication: Latin, German, French, and eventually English . . . Latin as the international language of learning, German as a language of administration and economic privilege, French as the language of fashion and diplomacy, English as the language of the industrial revolution” (Haugen 1976, 353). A poem by the Danish poet Wilster, published in his Digtninger in 1827, sums up the situation of the “learned man”: Latin paa Papiret kun malte, (Latin on paper [he] only wrote) med Fruerne Fransk, (with the women French,)

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og Tysk med sin Hund, (and German with his dog,) og Dansk med sin Tjener han talte. (and Danish with his servants he spoke.) (Haugen 1976, 354; interlinear translation mine) After Norway’s 1536 union with Denmark, Norwegian was considered, even by some Norwegians, a regional dialect of Danish. Norwegian writer Henrik Gerner wrote in 1678–79: “Nor is Cimbrian [i.e., Jutlandic Danish], Norwegian, Icelandic, Swedish, Fynsk, Mønsk etc. to be considered the best Danish, for . . . while each of them is surely a kind of Danish, it is not the right or the best.” A hundred years later, Norwegian writer Marcus Schnabel considered Norwegian a language, although a tragically (or comically) mixed one. He wrote in 1774 that Norwegians “could easily be confused as to what is really Norwegian and Danish in their language; for the Danish language they learn and the closely related mother tongue will easily get mixed, so that at last one does not know which is which” (both quoted in Haugen 1976, 403).

Landsmål and Bokmål: Norwegian Twins In the nineteenth century, national languages became a strongly political issue in the North, because language began to be perceived as a national symbol. The Norwegian constitution of 1814 (signed after the Treaty of Kiel) made Norwegian the language of the government. But soon the question arose: What is Norwegian? The first answer to this question could have been “DanoNorwegian,” which had become the written and speech norm of Oslo and other urban centers of Norway. However, according to Norwegian linguist Magne Oftedal, Dano-Norwegian was “hardly anybody’s real mother tongue in Norway. . . . [It was] a spoken language . . . originally a reading language, based on the Norwegian reading pronunciation of written Danish” (1990, 122). In 1840 Knud Knudsen called this implicit norm den dannede dagligtale ‘cultivated daily speech’ and successfully advocated for it as a model for a spelling reform of Norwegian. “In spite of all attempts to reject or reshape [reformed Dano-Norwegian] it is still the most prestigious form of Norwegian speech and writing,” comments Haugen (1990, 109). Reformed Dano-Norwegian is now called Bokmål ‘book language’ (or, occasionally, Riksmål ‘national language’,

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its older name), and it is predominant in Norway today. In its written form strongly resembling Danish, Bokmål is, however, pronounced more like Norway’s eastern dialects and Swedish than like Danish. The wish for a language “more Norwegian” than Dano-Norwegian persisted. Enter Norway’s language planner, Ivar Aasen (1813–1896), who constructed a “new” Norwegian from Norway’s surviving dialects; his first grammar appeared in 1848. Aasen’s construction was, as Haugen puts it, “a kind of Middle Norwegian from which each dialect speaker could derive his dialect by a set of transformational rules. . . . . It was to be nobody’s dialect and everybody’s language, worthy to stand as an instrument of culture alongside Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese” (1990, 110). By 1853 Aasen had proposed a name for it: Landsmål, which means “national language”; but as Oftedal points out, the structure of this word suggests, inaccurately, ruralness or folksiness; in fact Landsmål means “local country dialect” in Swedish. In Norwegian, however, Landsmål is “quite the opposite: it was a language intended to be valid for the whole country as opposed to local dialects” (1990, 124). In 1928 the term Landsmål was officially changed to Nynorsk ‘New Norwegian’, which is still today the name of the language. In 1885 Bokmål and Nynorsk were made equal as official written forms of Norwegian. Repeated language reforms in Norway (all of which must be approved in Parliament) have resulted in more varieties of Nynorsk and Bokmål. Most of the reforms have moved the two Norwegian languages closer to each other. Advocates of both Nynorsk and Bokmål have formed camps, and the language question is still actively debated in Norway. Some activists, rejecting the latest changes, have established private norms through their political organizations. Thus, schools are to choose among four varieties of Norwegian: moderate Bokmål, radical Bokmål, moderate Nynorsk, and radical Nynorsk. Two additional varieties have advocates among writers and the public, though these two are not available in schools: they are conservative Bokmål and conservative Nynorsk. “In practice,” as Oftedal relates, “there are no strict boundaries between the conservative, moderate and radical varieties. Many writers use some forms from one variety and some from another, so that it is often quite impossible to tell whether a given writer, in a given piece of writing, intends to use one variety or another, or indeed if he wants to conform to a norm at all” (1990, 126).

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Both of the two standard varieties of each language (“moderate” or “radical” according to the writer’s choice) continue to be used, partly because government regulation supports both. Not only government documents, but also popular media, use both. Schoolbooks must be available in both Bokmål and Nynorsk. National standards are for the written rather than the spoken languages. As for the spoken languages, the official councils urge all Norwegians to use, in formal situations, the “correct” grammar of either version but to pronounce both Bokmål and Nynorsk according to the person’s home dialect. Children who move between school districts with different standard languages may speak in any dialect at school, though they are to read and write in the official version of their school. They generally adjust quickly. In any case, people outside of the urban areas usually speak in their home dialect, in both pronunciation and grammar or idiom.

Nynorsk When Ivar Aasen set out norms for Nynorsk in his Norsk Grammatik (Norwegian grammar, 1864) and Norsk Ordbog (Norwegian dictionary, 1873), he had two goals for this “New Norwegian.” On the one hand, he wanted to restore the native tradition of Norwegian writing that had ended abruptly at the time of political union with Denmark; on the other, he intended to create a modern language that would reflect the regional dialects of Norway’s common people. He believed he was restoring the Norwegian language, not to a historical form, but to a form it might have had if its development had not been cut short by political events. Aasen was also a language purist, attempting to eliminate foreign words such as the many, borrowed from German, with the prefixes an-, be-, er-, and ge- and the suffixes -else and -het. His attempt has not stood the test of time, and currently these and other words of foreign origin, such as radio and telefon, are part of Nynorsk, as they are of other European languages (Haugen 1976, 35–36). Nynorsk was successful in poetic and literary usage, because writers took advantage of its overtones and undertones as the language of homeland, home, and family. However, today, as Norway is becoming more urban and less rural, Nynorsk has been seriously overtaken in popularity of usage by Bokmål. For example, in the late 1930s about one-third of children learned Nynorsk at school; in 1990 about 16 percent did (Oftedal 1990, 128).

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Bokmål Linguist Knud Knudsen, in his grammar of 1856, advocated for a stepby-step Norwegianization of Danish spelling, rather than a radical re- creation of the language, as Aasen did. Knudsen’s version of Norwegian was the one used by Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) in his classic dramas Et dukkehjem (A doll’s house, 1879), Hedda Gabler (1890), and Vildanden (The wild duck, 1894). This combination of formal Danish with informal Norwegian suited the growing urban population of Norway. Some of Aasen’s spelling changes are accepted in Bokmål; some are not. Furthermore, an interesting (for linguists) development of Bokmål has been the adoption of words of Danish origin for formal or literal meaning, and Nynorsk equivalents for informal or slang meaning; for example, Nynorsk stein ‘boulder, rock’ as compared to the Danish equivalent, sten, used in Nynorsk slang to mean “jewel” (Haugen 1976, 38). This doubling of vocabulary to represent different registers, or formalities of usage, will be familiar to speakers of English, in which Anglo-Saxon words are used for home and farm culture, while the corresponding French loanwords represent high culture: Anglo-Saxon kitchen vs. French cuisine; Anglo-Saxon cow vs. French beef; AngloSaxon home vs. French domicile.

n y nor s k a nd Bokmå L : TexT s for c omPar is on Spoken Bokmål is the variety typically taught to foreign learners of Norwegian. It is the language of the majority and of the urban areas. Nynorsk is, however, the mother tongue of many city residents who relocated there from towns and rural districts where Nynorsk was the language of schooling. A selection in both Bokmål and Nynorsk is available for listening online at www.omniglot.com/writing/norwegian.htm.

Written In a passage from the Old Testament, Genesis 8:15–17, given in both Bokmål and Nynorsk in table 6, it is obvious that the two languages are very close; however, there are some consistent differences in orthography. For example, some words of Bokmål that end in -n, -en, or -et

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Table 6. Genesis 8:15–17 in Bokmål and Nynorsk BokmåL (2006)

nynorsk (2006)

king James version (1611)

15. Da sa Gud til Noah:

15. Då sa Gud til Noah:

15. And God spake unto Noah, saying,

16. “Gå ut av arken, du og din kone og dine sønner og sønnekoner med dig!

16. “Gå ut or arka, du og kona di og sønene og sonekonene dine med deg!

16. Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee.

17. Ta med deg alle dyrene som er hos deg, alt som lever, både fugel og fe, og alt kryp som det kryr av på jorden! De skal myldre av dem på jorden, og de skal være fruktbare och formere seg.”

17. Ta med deg alla dyra som er hjå deg, alt som lever, både fugl og fe og alt krypet som krælar på jorda! Dei skal yrja på jorda og alast og aukast.”

17. Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.

Source: Norwegian texts from Norske Bibelselskapet, 2006.

end in a vowel in Nynorsk: arken ‘the ark’ vs. arka. In both languages the ending signifies the definite article “the.” In Bokmål, possessive pronouns precede the noun they modify, while in Nynorsk they come after it, for example din kone ‘your wife’ vs. kona di, lit. ‘wife your’.

a “c ommon norwe g ian” ? Attempts to combine Nynorsk and Bokmål into a Samnorsk ‘Common Norwegian’ began in the 1950s. A spelling reform in 1907 had already initiated an effort to sever Bokmål from Danish, replacing the Danishstyle voiced plosives (b, d, g) in, for example reb ‘rope’, fod ‘foot’, høg ‘hawk’ with their unvoiced equivalents (p, t, k) to give rep, fot, høk. This provided the advantage not only of distinguishing Bokmål from Danish, but of representing what had become in any case the Norwegian pronunciation of these words. Additional spelling reforms in 1917 and 1938 brought Nynorsk and Bokmål closer together, even to the point where strong opposition to the changes arose from the urban districts (which favored the existing, Danish-influenced Norwegian), while support came from rural and leftist political groups. In the twenty-first century, discussion and controversy continue, and some changes in both Norwegians have tended toward commonality; however, there is still no Common Norwegian.

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norw egia n na ming c onve n T ion s Until 1923, when hereditary last names were legally required in Norway, all commoner Norwegians took patronyms, that is, their father’s first name plus an ending, as their second names. For a son, this ending could be -sen or -ssen or, in some dialects, -son or -sson; for a daughter, it would be -datter. Thus, Jon’s son Anders would be Anders Jonssen, and his daughter Anne would be Anne Jonsdatter (which might be abbreviated in genealogical records as Jonsdtr). If Anne and Anders lived on a farm named Bakken, they might take this as their third name. Originally, a woman would keep her second name for the rest of her life; if Anne and Anders moved to different farms, their third names would change to the name of that farm. In the eighteenth century, a woman might take her husband’s patronym; if Anne married Sven Viktorssen, she would become Anne Viktorssen (not Viktorsdatter!). As hereditary last names, some families chose place names, some patronyms, and some names of landscape features, such as haugen ‘hill’ or moen ‘meadow’ (Borgos 2013). All of the ten commonest last names in Norway as of 2012 are patronyms. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 are Hansen, Johansen, and Olsen; of the next ten, only number 14, Berg ‘mountain’; number 15, Haugen ‘hill’; and number 16, Hagen ‘woods’ are not patronyms (examples from Statistisk Sentralbyrå/Statistics Norway 2015). As for first names, biblical names continue to be popular in Norway, as they have been for a thousand years, but other names, such as the girl’s name Nora, are gaining on them. Mohammad is currently the most popular name for a baby boy in Oslo, though not in Norway overall; this is not because Muslims are a majority in Norway (Muslims, most of them Pakistani immigrants, make up about 2–3%; Leirvik 2012); it indicates rather that most Muslims in Norway live in Oslo, and a very large proportion of Muslim baby boys are named Mohammad.

c onc Lu sion The story of Modern Norwegian astounds those who are new to its history. It was born of Old Norse; its written language was stopped in its tracks in the fifteenth century; the spoken language was kept alive in its many dialects used among the common people, while a Norwegianized Danish language developed as a medium for literature,

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church, government, and urban uses; and it emerged in the nineteenth century as two languages. Yet, such a language story may have occurred many times throughout human history. In premodern times, though, it would have happened in a different way, since only in modern times have languages had their own political action groups, complete with language history experts, living speakers, and a supportive political climate. This happened for Norwegian: language reformers willing to invest years of time and effort in defining a written norm and a political climate receptive to the need for a national language, all of it ending in not one national written language but two; and finally a government structure willing to enforce the use of both Norwegian languages in schools and in official documents. Certainly there is no story quite like it in our book of languages of the North.

6 • Faroese Emerges Oman kemur lundi av bakka, titandi fóti, reisir upp nakka. Hvør ræður her fyri londum? Valdimenn og norðmenn. (Down comes the puffin from the cliff, walking quickly, stretches his neck. Who is governing the country? Assailants and Norwegians.) Faroese skjaldur ‘folk poem’

Bec oming fa roe se: Det færø s k e s pro g ‘ The fa roe se L a nguag e ’ For almost a thousand years after Norse settlement of the Faroe Islands, the Faroese people were considered, and considered themselves, speakers of Icelandic. “Faroese language” was not even a concept. From the time of the Faroe Islands’ ninth-century Norse settlement, the Old Norse spoken there began developing into a Faroese variant. After the establishment of the Roman Church in the Faroes around ad 1000 (its diocese in the village of Kirkjubøar, on Streymoy Island), church services and the Bible were both in Latin, though Faroese Old Norse remained the spoken language of the islands. Cultural anthropologists Jonathan Wylie and David Margolin describe the language history of the Faroes as one of ritual versus nonritual language. “What changed,” they write, “was the languages that filled these roles, and the definition of ritual and nonritual situations” (1981, 74). When the Protestant Reformation came to the islands in the sixteenth century, Danish, spoken and written, replaced Latin as the ritual language of the Faroes, now part of the united kingdom of Denmark-Norway. But then Danish was used not only in church, but also in government and in education. The local vernacular, still unnamed and unrecognized, remained the home language of the

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Faroese. A 1739 ordinance required all children to be literate in Danish before being confirmed in the church (Wylie and Margolin 1981, 73– 94), and Faroese writing (never having been extensive) more or less disappeared. However, the Faroese variety of Icelandic continued to be spoken on the farms and in the fishing villages. Not until the 1848 publication of Færøsk Anthologi, by the Lutheran minister and philologist Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb, was the language of the Faroese recognized as separate from Icelandic. Hammershaimb described its grammar in the terms of the then-new science of linguistics and christened it det færøske sprog ‘the Faroese language’ (1891, liv). Faroese became the official language in 1948, when the Danish Folketing ‘parliament’ granted home rule to the Faroese Islands (then and now part of the Kingdom of Denmark); Danish remained on the islands, as islanders’ “first foreign language.” This chapter reviews the history of the Faroe Islands from presettlement and then saga times through their life in Norway’s North Atlantic empire and their change of fortune when they became a part of the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway. The language of the Faroes is considered as it gained recognition in the nineteenth century and was officially recognized when the Faroes gained local control, though not independence. “The actual position of Faroese as the main language of the Faroe Islands is in no way the result of a quiet and ‘natural’ development, but rather the consequence of a conscious language policy,” writes Jóhan Hendrik W. Poulsen (1990, 145).

hisTory of The fa roe isL an d s Paleobotanical studies of the Faroe Islands show cultivation from ad 600– 650, probably the work of Gael hermits and monks from a Hiberno-Scottish hermitage in the Faroes. However, new research suggests the presence of grain pollen from hundreds of years earlier, which, according to Scottish and Danish archaeologists, is “evidence, but not proof ” of even earlier agriculture on the islands (Jensen 2013); the question is not yet settled. The Faroe Islands may have received their name, Føroyar (Old Norse Færeyjar ‘sheep islands’), from the Irish cleric Dicuil, who described the islands as innumerabilibus ovibus ‘with innumerable sheep’

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in his De mensura orbis terrae (On the measurement of the orb of earth; Dicuil 1967, 7.2). Norse explorers settled the Faroese Islands around ad 850, driving out or killing the Irish hermits (whom they called papar ‘fathers’) living there at that time, who are memorialized in several Faroese place names beginning with the element papa (Debes 1993, 184). Remains of Celtic influence are seen in other place names too, as well as in everyday speech. Today the Faroe Islands, consisting of eighteen major islands, located about 200 miles from Scotland, 280 miles from Iceland, and 420 miles from Norway, have a population of about forty-eight thousand. Fishing, both in open waters and through fish farming, is the major industry. Faroese international relations are under Danish control, but domestic issues are settled under a parliamentary system including the elected Løgting ‘Law assembly’. The islands and their people are not part of the European Union. Not because of its original Irish (celibate) inhabitants, but because of the origin of its settlers (Norse males who had previously lived on the Celtic islands of the North Atlantic with their Celtic wives), the modern Faroese population shows a DNA pattern similar to that of Iceland, which was also settled by a mix of Norse men and Celtic women. Most of the female population’s X-chromosomes today indicate Celtic, probably Scottish, origin, while most of the Y-chromosomes of its male population are of Scandinavian origin (Jorgensen and Buttenschön 2004). Only two early rune stones have been found in the Faroes, one at Kirkjubøar in 1832, dated about 1000, which reads, “granted peace to Vígúlfr after Hrói”; and another at Sandavágur in 1917, dated to about 1200, which reads, “Thorkell Onundarsson, a Norwegian from Rogaland, was the first settler in this place” (Thráinsson et al. 2004, 370).

fa roe se iceL a ndic A Faroese skjaldur ‘folk poem’ that includes the lines Who is governing the country? Assailants and Norwegians. (Leonard 2010, 9)

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may be dated to early settlement times, since norðmenn ‘Norwegians’ are mentioned as governors, as anthropologist Steven Pax Leonard notes in his discussion of the Faroese skjaldur. The Faroe Islands were part of Norway only until 1380, after which they became part of the Denmark-Norway dual monarchy (Leonard 2010, 9n17). For several hundred years, this political union did not disturb the language in the Faroes. The surviving texts in Faroese Norse are not historical or fictional masterpieces like the Icelandic sagas. Instead, they consist of two thirteenth- century legal regulations concerning animals, Seyðabræv (Sheep document) and Hundabræv (Dog document), and some letters dated to the years between 1403 and 1405 (Benati 2009, 189). The Seyðabræv (1298) is now kept with the Kongsbókin (The King’s book) at the National Archives in Tórshavn (Thráinsson et al. 2004, 378). The Icelandic sagas were known in both Iceland and the Faroes, but it was Iceland and the Icelandic language, not the Faroes and Faroese, that gained cultural recognition throughout Europe because of the sagas. Even the Færeyinga Saga (ca. 1200), a chronicle of the islands’ history, was written in Iceland and in Icelandic. The sagas were read by medieval European literate elites with admiration (as they continue to be read in modern times). In both Iceland and the Faroes, the sagas served as models for how the language of both should be written. The dialects of the widely separated Faroese fishing villages fostered a rich oral tradition of ballads, lullabies, and other verse forms, which were preserved in the folk culture, awaiting a reawakening that did not occur until the nineteenth century. In the immediate post-Reformation era, the Danish Crown was understood by the Faroese as the protector of the Faroese folk tradition; by the nineteenth century, the language and the economy of the Faroese Islands were viewed by the Danish government as backward and needing to be replaced as the establishment of free trade transformed and modernized the Faroes.

denma rk Begins iT s ruL e After Sweden withdrew from the Kalmar Union of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in 1523, the weakened Norway (see chapter 5) was left a virtually silent partner to Denmark. Norway’s North Atlantic islands Iceland and the Faroes remained under Danish control. Norwegian

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governance had not impacted the Faroese language very much, but Danish governance came to have significant impact, and this influence was soon increased by both religious and trade considerations. The Protestant Reformation came to the Faroes around 1538 (there is some uncertainty about the exact date; see Young 1979, 74); and for a generation, only religious life, not secular life, and certainly not language, seemed to register the change. However, it is not too much to say, with Björn Hagström, that the Reformation eventually resulted in a “linguistic catastrophe” (2009, 173) for both the Faroes and Norway, since thenceforth the written language of both countries became Danish. Church services as well as Bible translations went from the Latin of the Roman Church to the Danish of the Lutheran Church. Additionally, in these societies in which religion was central, the considerable prestige of the translated Bible ended up benefiting not Norwegian or Faroese, but Danish. The secular impact of Danish governmental control struck in 1619 when the newly founded Icelandic Company, based in Copenhagen, replaced Bergen as the Faroes’ commercial link to the outside world. Now Denmark, not Norway, connected the Faroes with continental Scandinavia and Europe. One year later, in 1620, the Faroe Islands were made part of the Danish Lutheran Church’s Zealand diocese, and Christian II’s 1524 Danish translation of the New Testament was its first Bible. Four hundred years later, in 1937, the first Faroese translations of the New Testament appeared, the first by Victor Danielsen, followed a few weeks later by a second, made by Jákup Dahl. Danish language influence proved far more intrusive than Norwegian had been.

faroe se sTeP s a side in favor of dan ish The year 1675 marked the end of the official use of spoken Faroese for the meetings of the local Løgting (Piotrowski 1997, 133). This was a governmental decision, but the state Lutheran Church followed suit. “West-Nordic Faroese and East-Nordic Danish were by now so different that Danish clergymen and officials could not understand the language of the Faroese. So the Faroese had to learn Danish to be able to communicate with the officials and to understand what was said in church,” writes Hagström (2009, 173). Consequently, Faroese vocabulary did not develop to include new worldly circumstances, but it remained a communication means for the islands’ farming needs.

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In Iceland, the Danish Lutheran Church had been content to leave the language situation virtually unchanged from its pre-Reformation status quo, with church services even continuing for a while in Latin before being changed to Icelandic. Why, then, did the Lutheran Church make Danish its primary language in the neighboring Faroe Islands? Two sociolinguistic factors seem relevant.

Cultural Power After centuries of Danish domination, not only the Danish, but also the Faroese themselves, had begun to think of Danish, not Faroese, as the language sufficiently dignified for church texts. The Faroese did not consider their own way of speaking a kultursprog ‘language of culture’ (Nauerby 1996, 41). The first book printed in Faroese appeared in Denmark in 1822, and the words were spelled phonetically, not at all as they would be today. It was Sigurd the Völsung and contained tales collected and written down by a Danish clergyman, H. C. Lyngbye. Like the German Niebelungenlied, it is about Sigurd, or Siegfried, the dragon slayer, long the subject of oral legends in northern and western Europe. In its own country, though, Faroese “was outlawed in Church, education and official matters until 1937” (Jóansson, 2010, 60), even while it continued to be used as the vernacular in homes and in fishing villages. Both the Danish government and Faroese popular opinion still held that Faroese was not good enough for religious matters. Johan Hendrick Schrøter’s 1823 Faroese translation of the Gospel of Matthew, published by the Danish Bible Society and distributed to practically every Faroese home, was poorly received. “Since the Faroese only knew the Holy Scriptures in Danish, this version was considered sacred and any Faroese translation would have been looked upon as a profanation,” writes Hagström (2009, 175). More than a hundred years passed before the Danish Bible Society published anything more in Faroese.

Financial and Political Power A second factor was the Faroe Islands’ isolation and lack of power, both commercial and political. “The Faroe Islands tend to be overlooked, even inside Scandinavia. This neglect is augmented by [the Faroes’] political dependence on Denmark, which for a long time looked on the

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Faroese as colonials destined to be completely Danicized” (Haugen and Markey 1972, 93). Much closer to the mainland than Iceland, the Faroes were more connected, first to Bergen and then to Copenhagen, than Iceland was to either. The Faroese might have been more willing than the Icelanders to look to mainland Scandinavia for cultural direction rather than trusting in their own resources. Further, Faroese settlements were no more than fishing villages; no urban center existed to lend its commercial strength in support of Faroese culture. Tórshavn, the capital city and the islands’ trading center, had at the time of the Reformation a population of only around one hundred; and even today it has only thirteen thousand. After the establishment of the Lutheran Church in the Faroes, the Danish language became “kirkesprog, retsprog, og undervisningssprog (church language, legal language, and language of instruction),” replacing the local tongue in all these roles, except for person-to-person conversation in the villages and homes of the Faroese people (Hammershaimb 1891, liv). Though there was no break in the tradition of spoken Faroese, written Faroese is absent from the historical record within a century after the Reformation. During the three hundred years until Faroese was reestablished as the primary language of its home islands, Faroese vocabulary developed only in directions that served the immediate domestic needs of its population; “all new impulses from the outside world were conveyed through Danish” (Hagström 2009, 171).

The Faroese People Make the Danish Language Their Own, in More Than One Way During the years of Danish domination, the vicar (usually Danish) spoke from the pulpit in the language of Copenhagen. However, the Faroese did not use this urban variety but began to domesticate Danish for themselves, developing a form of Danish in which each word was spoken “as it was spelt, with each letter being clearly pronounced” (Nauerby 1996, 40)— quite unlike Danish in Denmark, whose written form includes many unpronounced letters (something like Modern French). Further, Faroese Danish was spoken without the characteristic Danish stød (see chapter 5) and with influence from Faroese syntax and morphology. By modern times this localized Danish, pronounced like Faroese and even colored with Faroese slang, was very different

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indeed from Danish. Such Faro-Danish came to be called Gøtudanskt ‘street Danish’. The name is also attributed by some to the village of Gøta on the island of Eysturoy, where an influential teacher was said to have originated it (Petersen 2010, 17). Gøtudanskt was and is far better understood in the Faroese Islands than in Denmark. Since Danish was the language of school, church, and public life, everyone learned it alongside their home dialect, and Faroese society became bilingual. But because few Faroese had been to Denmark or heard the language spoken by native speakers, it had to be learned entirely from books. Gøtudanskt can still be heard in the Faroe Islands, although many Faroese today, especially in the young generation, learn standard Danish; and uninformed Danes who hear it sometimes mistake it for Faroese. Until the twentieth century, many Danes considered Faroese a form of Danish; the Faroese, on the other hand, were apt to consider Danish a form of Faroese (Nauerby 1996, 41).

The nineTeen Th ce n T ury Since Faroese schools throughout the nineteenth century taught only the Danish language, the establishment of Faroese as a national language occurred through a tremendous bootstrapping effort on the part of professional linguists, language teachers, and writers. The nationalist political movements of the time favored the effort by connecting language with national pride; and the interest in language nurtured a revival of Faroese folk traditions. In the early part of the nineteenth century, this took a rather timid form: for example, Jens Christian Svabo (1746–1824), interested in Faroese ballads, favored collecting “the ruins of the language” for posterity and then abandoning them to switch over to Danish, since the Faroese and the Danes “kneeled before one king” (Nauerby 1996, 37–38). The folkloristic turn gained strength and confidence as the century wore on, however. The nationalist project, by the turn of the twentieth century, encouraged “a release of energy which for a long time had lain dormant. Almost as if by magic a number of excellent poets and writers came to the fore using a completely new medium, their mother tongue, hitherto proscribed by convention except for the traditional oral literature” (Poulsen 1990, 150). The Faroese sagnir (folk legends), tættir (satirical ballads), and

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kvæði (heroic ballads) proved instrumental in preserving the Faroese language in the face of Danish domination. “Faroese culture,” Wylie and Margolin explain, “was a two-tiered affair. It consisted not only of village ways, but also of nominally foreign—Danish—ways. . . . But by the end of the nineteenth century, the royal [i.e., Danish] level of Faroese culture had failed, as a matter of policy and as a result of economic change, to preserve the integrity of village culture” (1981, 59– 60). The folktales and ballads served to preserve and explain the old language and the old ways to a people caught up in overwhelming change, while the generation of writers, teachers, artists, and politicians defined a modern Faroese culture synthesized from the new and the old. The lyrics of the kvæði, accompanied by the traditional “chain dance,” still performed today, have always been “told and sung word for word as they were by the old folks. This preserved the linguistic form and excluded Danish influence,” writes Swedish linguist Björn Hagström (2009, 174), for Danish was the official language of the Faroes until the Faroese Home Rule Act of 1948, when Faroese took its place. Faroese kvaeði, preserved in the oral tradition of the islands and not written down until 1770 (Thráinsson et al. 2004, 59), were the first to blossom under the increased attention of Faroese folklorists. These ballads, which often have a hundred or more verses, are the basis for the Faroese dansiringur ‘chain dances’, which are often performed both professionally and by amateurs. Wylie and Margolin write, “This kind of ballad dancing is not a native Faroese custom (almost nothing is); it is the last survival of a dancing style once common throughout Europe [as shown in] late medieval woodcuts and drawings” (Wylie and Margolin 1981, 12). An example of the chain dance, with subtitles in Faroese, may be seen and heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v= lL3e8doV9kI. Svabo, who had advocated abandoning Faroese in favor of Danish, turned out to play an important role instead in preserving it. He was not only a folklorist but also a language specialist whose largest project was a Faroese dictionary, never published but available in his handwritten manuscripts at the Royal Library of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen. For his recording of the Faroese ballads, Svabo undertook to reflect folk pronunciation, not an imitation of Icelandic pronunciation. Svabo’s orthography of the Faroese that had previously been only spoken, not written, was phonemic (the spelling reflected

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the pronunciation), so that Icelandic tið ‘time’ became Faroese tuj; Icelandic maður ‘man’ became Faroese meavur. However, the cultural power of Icelandic was sufficiently strong that these phonemic spellings and others like them met with public resistance: to some, the new spelling looked undignified compared to written Icelandic, even if it did reflect popular pronunciation. It was not Svabo, but his grandnephew Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (mentioned earlier), who devised the orthography that became the basis of Modern Faroese. In Hammershaimb’s “literary orthography” of 1846, the spelling was based more closely on Old Norse and Icelandic, and tið and maður returned along with many other Icelandic spellings. Hammershaimb strove to “put the written standard into equidistance from Faroese dialects” (Nauerby 1996, 75–76). His goals were to reconcile the dialects into a language that would have something of all of them in it and to emphasize the historical connection of modern Faroese to the Icelandic sagas. Hammershaimb’s proposals were accepted despite some calls for a closer sound-to-spelling correspondence. As the language movement became a central part of the nationalist agenda, Faroese nationalists wanted to emphasize the authenticity of their language and to minimize borrowings or influence from other languages. Where Faroese had borrowed from Icelandic, the new orthography maintained a difference from Icelandic; for example, the letter ð, which had disappeared from old Faroese writings, was reinstated by Hammershaimb, although it is pronounced in only a few words.

a TexT in iceL a ndic a nd faroe se Modern Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes can understand each other easily in writing and, with some difficulty, in speaking, but they cannot understand their Faroese or Icelandic sister languages in either writing or speaking. Faroese and Icelanders usually cannot understand each other easily when speaking their own languages but can understand each other’s writing. The opening verses of the Lord’s Prayer, often used for comparing Western languages, will illustrate the differences in the written languages (see table 7). To compare, look for identical or similar words, passing over differences in word order, and note that the Icelandic þ has mutated to t in Faroese.

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faroese (1937) b

king James version (1611)

9. Faðir vor, sá þú ert á himnum. Helgist nafn þitt,

9. Faðir okkara, Tú, sum ert í Himli! Heilagt verði navn.

9. Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

10. til komi þitt ríki, verði þinn vilji svo á jörðu sem á himni.

10. Títt! Komi ríki Títt! Verði vilji Tín, sum í Himli, so á jørðini við!

10. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

11. Gef oss í dag vort daglegt brauð.

11. Gev okkum í dag dagliga breyð okkara!

11. Give us this day our daily bread.

Note: These are the earliest or most distinguished translations, which, even if archaic, are understood easily by educated native speakers. aTranslation by Oddur Gottskálksson. bTranslation by Victor Danielsen.

naTiona L iden TiT y a nd faroe se In the early twentieth century, the issue of Faroese national identity gathered steam. By the middle of the century, World War II, although the Faroes did not take an active part in it, provided an opportunity for the Faroese to experience the wider world without even leaving home. In 1940 the British occupied the Faroe Islands as well as Iceland (both governed by Denmark, which at that time was occupied by Nazi Germany) in a preemptive move designed to foil Nazi plans for invasion of both in order to gain control of North Atlantic shipping. Britain then turned over military control to the United States, at that time still uninvolved in the war. American protective occupation of Iceland and the Faroes continued until the end of the war in 1945. During those years, the Faroese experienced, for the first time in centuries, nondependence on Denmark. After the end of the war, in 1948, the Danish Parliament rejected the Faroese declaration of independence but set up a nationwide election in which the Faroese chose local control. The Heimastýrislóg ‘Home Rule Act’ of 1948 gave the Faroese control over domestic policies. Immediately afterward, Faroese was named the primary language of the islands, with equal rights for Danish as the secondary language. The act, which was issued in both Faroese and Danish, stated: (in Faroese) “Føroyskt verður viðurkent sum høvuðsmál, men danskt skal lærast væl og virðiliga”; (in Danish) “Færøsk anerkendes som Hovedsproget,

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men Dansk skal læres godt og omhyggeligt” (Faroese is recognized as the main language, but Danish is to be learned well and thoroughly; quoted in Petersen 2010, 33).

The fa roe se L a nguag e T oday Orthography Since Faroese is, like Icelandic and Norwegian, a daughter of West Norse, it is no surprise that several of its phonological features are also found in southern and western Norwegian dialects (Kristján Árnason 2011, 3). Hammershaimb’s description of Faroese as “grammatically nearer Icelandic, in pronunciation nearer Norwegian” (Hammershaimb 1891, liv), still fits Faroese today.

Lexicon The lexicon of the new Faroese language was to show stronger local influence than its spelling had, and the stage had been set for it in the nineteenth century. The publication of Føroya kvaeði: Corpus Carminum Faroesium (1896), a nine-thousand-page and seventy-thousandstanza collection by S. H. Grundtvig and Jørgen Bloch, was followed in 1887 by their dictionary, Lexicon Faroense. Faroese contained a rich vocabulary of everyday terms for nature and fishing (the island’s major economic activity) but lacked abstract, religious, philosophical, and modern technical terms. These were worked out by Faroese nationalist authors using old Faroese roots. For example, Jákup Dahl’s grammar of 1908 introduced Faroese grammatical terms; and physician Hans Debes Joensen wrote the first physics textbook in Faroese, as well as launching new scientific and anatomical terminology (Poulsen 1990, 150). In the twentieth century, the 1985 Føroyska Málnevdin ‘Language Committee’ began to collect, register, and advise on the addition of new Faroese words, as well as to decide questions of correct usage. Such language commissions are usual in the Scandinavian countries and serve mostly to monitor the language as it is used in government documents and schoolbooks. The committee was purist in its outlook, preferring creation of Faroese-based words to express new concepts over incorporation of foreign loanwords—a mission pursued in

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Icelandic as well. The commission approved such new Faroese words as telda ‘computer’, derived from telja ‘compute’; útvarp ‘radio; and sjónvarp ‘television’ (examples from Nauerby 1996, 106–7). Traces of Celtic influence, possibly originating from the Celticspeaking women who, along with Norse men, settled the Faroes, remain in the modern language. A few idiomatic phrases are loan translations of originally Celtic syntax, for instance, the Faroese tað er óti á mær ‘there is fear on me’/‘I am afraid’; and a few Celtic loanwords are part of the basic Faroese vocabulary, such as dunna ‘duck’ and drunnur ‘rump of sheep or cattle’ (Thráinsson et al. 2004, 369). Faroese’s numerous dialects— dozens of towns and hamlets each have their own—are perhaps a result of geography, along with the area’s centuries of isolation. The Faroes consist of eighteen rather small islands, characterized by narrow sea inlets that isolate spits of land and strong tidal currents that make local navigation hazardous. Until relatively recent times, there was no central urban settlement. The geography may fuel a certain Faroese “sense of place” that seems more extensive than the actual area of the islands would suggest. “The Faroese know their tiny archipelago with a vocabulary so large and elaborate and pervasive that the islands come to feel like a continent,” and the extensive “idioms of orientation” of Faroese may result from this perception (Wylie and Margolin 1981, 13–17). The Faroese language “norm” is still being redefined. The Faroese commonly believe that written language is superior to spoken language, and as a result their dictionaries list only standard written forms, not idiomatic ones, as Nauerby comments. The resulting norm is based not only on old Faroese forms but on those from Old Norse and Icelandic. Further, everyday spoken language, with many Danish loanwords, is seen as “too Danish,” while the forms suggested by the language authorities are seen as “too Icelandic” and the written Faroese standard seems to many too high-flown for ordinary speech. One upshot is that the average person is often in doubt as to correct spelling, and even high school students may feel more proficient in written Danish than in written Faroese; in addition, as Nauerby suggests, “Danish is being redefined as an internal Faroese language variant.” A more positive result is that Faroese Gøtudanskt, far more comprehensible than Faroese to Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, is serving the Faroese as a pan-Scandinavian language (1996, 129–37), to the benefit of both tourism and trade.

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Grammar Nouns Faroese, like Icelandic, is a heavily inflected language. As in other Germanic languages, including Icelandic, Norwegian, and German, even inanimate nouns in Faroese have one of three genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter. The four noun cases are nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. The definite article “the,” as in other Scandinavian languages, is a suffix added to the noun (-in for masculine and feminine; -ið for neuter) and is declined for gender, number, and case. For example: Masculine: báturin (nominative); bátin (accusative) ‘the boat’ Feminine: hurðin (nominative); hurðina (accusative) ‘the door’ Neuter: borðið (nominative and accusative); borðinum (dative) ‘the table’ Adjectives are declined for case, number, and gender and also are differentiated as either strong or weak, depending on the presence or absence of the definite article in the noun phrase (see examples in Lockwood 1977, 45– 50). Verbs Like English and like other Germanic languages, Faroese has only two tenses that are expressed by a single word: the present and the past. Other tenses (perfect, past perfect, future) are formed by compound phrases. In addition, the various persons, in singular and plural (I, you, he, she, it, we, they), are expressed by both a pronoun and a verb ending. As in German, the second-person pronoun has a singular, a plural, and a “polite” form (all expressed in English by “you”). For example, the conjugation of the verb “to be” with the associated pronoun forms is seen in box 5 (examples from Lockwood 1977, 74). As in other Germanic languages, including English, verbs are “weak” (i.e., regular, with a dental consonant [d or ð, in Faroese] in the past tense and in participles, as in English “make/made/has made”), or “strong” (with vowel changes to indicate the past tense and participles, as in English “ring/rang/has rung”). Also typically Germanic are

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Box 5 singuLar

PLuraL

jag eri ‘I am’ tu ert ‘you are’ (singular, familiar form) han/hon/tað er ‘he/she/it is’

vi eru ‘we are’ tit/tygum eru ‘you [plural]/ you [polite] are’ teor (masc)/tœr (fem)/tey (neut) eru ‘they are’

Faroese prepositions, which “govern” (require objects in) the accusative, the dative, or the genitive; some prepositions govern two of these cases, depending on context. Faroese Names Historically, as in Iceland, both biblical given names and first names of Norse origin have been popular. Also as in Iceland, it was common for Faroese to have patronymic last names; however, names indicating location of the family’s homestead were also possible. After many decades in which heritable family names were required, a 1992 Danish law reintroduced the possibility of patronyms, mandating that Danish authorities work together with Faroese authorities to approve Faroese last names (Cannady 2014, 92). All but one of the top nineteen family names in the Faroes end in -sen (the Danish patronym meaning “son of ”), for example, Joensen, Hansen, Jacobsen; the exception is number 5, Djurhuus. “Daughter of ” is rendered by the Faroese -dóttir or the Danish -datter, but it is not often seen in names today (Hagstova Føroya 2015). First names must accord with Faroese language usage as approved by a government committee. Many of the approved first names are also commonly found in other parts of Scandinavia. The commonest first names for girls, as of 2012, include Anna, Ida, Jóhanna, Lea, Rebekka, Sonja, Vár, Eva, Julia, and Klara; for boys, Jónas, Rókur, Aron, Filip, Hans, Jákup, Mattias, Benjamin, Boas, and Brandur (Nordic Names 2012). Faroese people are sometimes identified in casual conversation by the name of their place of residence, but these are not official surnames. Examples are Pál í Buð ‘Paul-in-Storehouse, Tummas við Á ‘Thomasby-Stream’, and Anna í Króki ‘Anne-in-Corner’ (Lockwood 1977, 97).

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Sample Texts Oral Faroese pronunciation does not follow spelling very closely, because, as mentioned earlier, spelling was intended to preserve the historical connection between historical forms and today’s language. The distinctive word tones of Norwegian and Swedish (see chapter 5) are not present in Faroese. An explanation of Faroese pronunciation and an audio recording of a short text may be found online at www.omniglot .com/writing/faroese.htm. For some short samples of spoken Faroese, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=brwmKI9bsTk. Written Here are the first few verses of the Twenty-Third Psalm in the Faroese Bible of 1921 (translation by Jákup Dahl, 1921), paired with its equivalent in the King James Version: 1. Harrin er herði mín. Ongan sakn eg kenni. 2. Á grasgóðum fløtum hann letur megg liggja, Til hvíldaráir hann leiðir meg. 3. Hann sár mína lívgar, fyri navn sitt meg beinir á rætta leið.

1. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

c onc Lu sion Today the Faroe Islands are an autonomous region within the Rigsfællesskab ‘Danish Union.’ Faroese is the principal language; however, there are many non-Faroese-speaking Danish immigrants, and Danish is widely understood. All schoolchildren learn both languages in school, whatever their home language. Even during the years in which Danish replaced Faroese for all official and public uses, Faroese continued to be the spoken vernacular. Faroese has many regional dialects, but these are for the most part mutually intelligible in speaking. The

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standard written language is taught to all schoolchildren and used in all public documents, although many Faroese continue to use their dialect at home. Currently, linguists identify the dialect areas in the Faroe Islands based mainly not on grammar or vocabulary, but on pronunciation and, in dialects of Suðuroy, differing forms of the personal pronouns. The dialect spoken in the capital, Tórshavn, and the southernmost island, Southern Streymoy, functions as an official standard, called Central Faroese (Knooihuizen 2014, 88– 89, 91– 93). Several newspapers are published in Faroese; the oldest is Dimmalætting, founded in 1878. The broadcast station Kringvarp Føroya is available on radio and TV in Faroese; broadcasts from other nations are available on satellite TV. An excerpt from a Faroese television news program is available online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjN8_4a TtEg. The Faroes have local control in all domestic matters, while the Danish government still makes foreign policy for the Faroes. Laws are published in both Faroese and Danish. In the state (Lutheran) church, Faroese has had equal status with Danish as the language of worship services since 1930; in independent churches, such as the Plymouth Brethren, Faroese came into use even earlier (Poulsen 1990, 147). The University of the Faroe Islands in Tórshavn (Fróðskaparsetur Føroya) offers coursework and degrees with Faroese as the language of instruction. Modern Faroese is well established in its home; however, in the future it may be challenged not by Danish, but by English. We look at that issue in the epilogue.

7 • Sámi, Language of the Far North e nc ou n Ter s w iTh norwegi an, sw edish , an d finni sh Oulavuolie’s beautiful reindeer are finer Oulavuolie’s tall reindeer are finer . . . But now I have grown old grown old, grown old and my tall ones have changed changed, changed They are no, are no, are no longer. Oulavuolie’s huge ice fissure ice fissure huge ice fissure has sucked up my beautiful tall ones my beautiful slender reindeer. We remember and we have forgotten We are both old. From a yoik, “The Reindeer on Oulavuolie,” by Nils Mattias Andersson

T h e sá mi: norThernmo sT of T h e norT h The Sámi people arrived before any other peoples in the Arctic alpine region—northernmost Fenno- Scandia and northwestern Russia. But according to scientific findings, the language they brought with them immediately after the Ice Age was almost certainly not the language they speak now nor an ancestor of modern Sámi. Nor does anyone know what language it was. Generally recognized by scholars, as well as by the Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish constitutions, as the indigenous people of their homelands in the North, the Sámi first spoke an as yet unidentified language; later they adopted the ancestor language of what is now Sámi. According to Sámi tradition, the Sámi were long ago forced to speak the language of another people, and thereafter they were driven away from their home territories into the far north.

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At the present time, Sámi ethnic identity remains strong in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The Sámi language is a symbol of that identity, but centuries of colonial suppression have pushed it to the brink of extinction in many areas. In Scandinavia, the Sámi evince a strong ethnic identity even in the several-generation absence of the Sámi language in their family life. In the Russian Federation (not the focus of this book), Sámi ethnic identity also persists, but it is less visible to the majority culture than in the other three nations. However distinctive their ethnic identity among their neighbors, the Sámi did not develop their culture in isolation, according to Sámi ethnographer Véli-Pekka Lehtola. From early times, he writes, the Sámi have influenced, and have been influenced by, languages, traditions, and practices of the other peoples of the North; and the cultures of all these others reflect ancient and continuing contact with their cousins and neighbors the Sámi (2004, 14). Migration as well as cultural practices of the various peoples of the North can in some cases be documented by tracing the geographic distribution of particular words. For example, Finnish linguist Olavi Korhonen has identified the word for “a boat hollowed out of an aspen tree trunk” in Finnish, Sámi, Swedish, and Estonian, indicating cultural contacts among the speakers of these languages in the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages (2009, 67). To tell the story of Sámi, this chapter offers a brief history and discussion of the modern Sámi people, both in traditional Sámi territory and in the urban centers of mainland Scandinavia. Some varieties of the Sámi language in Norway, Sweden, and Finland are also described and sampled. The Sámi in the Russian Federation are mentioned only briefly.

sá Pmi: sá mi TerriT ory The Sámi have never lived in their own nation-state. Their traditional territory, with the development of monarchies of the North in medieval times, has been part of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, although they have maintained a kind of local control. Regional Sámi groups called siida have managed questions of their own law and land use into modern times; in mainland Scandinavia the Sámediggi ‘Sámi Parliament’, elected by Sámi people and funded by the majority governments, is responsible for deciding issues related to Sámi language

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and culture. The Sámi of Russia are concentrated in a single region, the Kola Peninsula, while the Sámi in Norway, Sweden, and Finland are not confined to, or even concentrated in, Sápmi, their traditional territory, but live in all parts of these three nations. The territories of Sápmi form a crescent stretching from the Atlantic shores of central and northern Norway to Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula. Currently the Sámi are a minority population in Sápmi overall, although there are communities in Sápmi where they are in the majority. Tax records and place names suggest that in the Middle Ages, Sámi communities were spread much more widely across Finland and Russian Karelia than is currently the case (Ojala 2009, 72). Today, Sámi individuals (in contrast to Sámi communities) live all over Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and both individuals and communities are integrated into Scandinavian life.

sámi, L a PP: a noTe a Bou T T h e name Sámi (alternate spelling Saami) is an endonym, the name the people have given themselves; and today that is the name used by most writers either inside or outside of that group. An etymological connection between Sámi and Suomi (the Finnish name for Finland) is hypothesized by at least one Finnish linguist, Jorma Koivulehto (Grünthal 1997, 2). Lapp and its adjective Lappish are exonyms, used by outsiders; these were both the scientific and the common terms into the 1970s. The etymology, or derivation, of the name Lapp has not been identified with scientific certainty. Some believe it is related to the Swedish lapp ‘patch’, referring to patched clothing of the Sámi, or löpa ‘run’, possibly a reference to skiing (Bosi 1976, 18); other researchers have connected it to Karelian loppi or Finnish lappi, both meaning “end” or “limits” (Kent 2014, 11). Since some of these could be pejorative in intent (as exonyms often are), the endonym is today preferred by both Sámi and non-Sámi writers. In this volume, Sámi is used except in direct citations from (usually pre-1980) sources. The geographic areas traditionally considered Sámi territory have retained their old names in Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish: in Sweden, Lappland; in Finland and in both the Finnish and North Sámi languages, Lappi. In English as well, Lapland continues to be common usage, while in Norway the Sámi region is called Finnmark, from Finn, the Old Norwegian word for Sámi.

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L a nguage, or L a nguage s? Currently, there are ten living Sámi variants, six of which have standard written forms. Those that do are marked with an asterisk in the list below. Estimates of speakers, mother-tongue speakers as well as second-language speakers, are from UNESCO’s “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger” (2010). The Western Sámi variants (with their Sámi names) include these: • *North Sámi (Davvisámegiella or Sámegiella), spoken by about 15,000 people in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. North Sámi is spoken by 75 percent of Sámi native speakers. • *Lule Sámi (Julevsámegiella): about 2,000 speakers in Norway and Sweden. • *South Sámi (Åarjelsaemien gïele): about 500 speakers in Sweden and Norway. • Pite Sámi (Bidumsámegiella): about 20 speakers in Sweden. • Ume Sámi (Ubmejensámien giella): about 20 speakers in Sweden. The Eastern Sámi variants, with their Sámi and, in one case, Russian, names, are these: • *Inari Sámi (Anarâškielâ): about 400 speakers in Finland. • *Skolt Sámi (Sää’mǩiõll/nuõrttsää’m): about 3,600 speakers in Finland and Russia. • *Kildin Sámi (Kӣллт сам ̄ ь кӣлл): about 787 speakers in the Kola Peninsula of Russia. • Ter Sámi (Saa’mekiill): fewer than 10 speakers in Russia (a news article from the region gives the number as 2; Nilsen 2010). • Akkala Sámi (Ákkil sámegiella, Russian Бабинский/Babinski, from the name of a Sámi community in Russia), considered extinct by 2003, has no native speakers, but at least two persons were more recently discovered who have some knowledge of the language (Scheller 2011, 90). Although its writing system was never standardized, translations into Akkala Sámi of the New Testament in 1755 and the entire Bible in 1811 were major influences in the written language (Korhonen 2005, 422). There is mutual intelligibility among the variants that are near neighbors, diminishing as the geographic distances between home

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territories of the variants increase. Thus, the Sámi variants look like a dialect continuum, although Scandinavian linguists generally consider Sámi a group of related languages rather than dialects. Sámi-Finnish linguist Pekka Sammallahti writes that “the regional variants of Saami have been treated as dialects because of the regular correspondences in phonology and similarity in basic vocabulary and grammar” but concludes that “since six of the main regional variants have independently standardized written forms . . . it is more justified to speak of different languages” (1998, 1). On the other hand, Sápmi, the journal of Sámediggi (the Swedish Sámi parliament), comes down on the other side of this question, explaining that, “as the Sami are a relatively small group of people, the decision has been taken to refer to all the variants of Sami as one Sami language” (“Language, Dialect, or Variety?” 2006). For the sake of clarity in this narrative account, Sámi is discussed as if it were a single language with regional variants; this should not be interpreted as an intent to enter the language-dialect debate. In Scandinavia this issue is a sensitive one, because “a language should have the same rights and resources as other languages, whereas someone might claim that a dialect should not have access to the same resources for economic or other reasons” (Valijärvi and Wilbur 2012, 296). For more on the minority languages of Scandinavia, see the epilogue. The science of linguistics does not present a good definition of “language” as opposed to “dialect.” Such differentiation is more likely to come from historical or political factors than from linguistic characteristics. We have seen this in the case of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. The late Max Weinreich, a linguist of Yiddish, is credited with the remark that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Of course, this isn’t quite true; like Yiddish, Sámi has neither army nor navy, nor even a state, though linguists consider both Yiddish and Sámi to be languages.

s ome hisTory Who Are the Sámi and Where Did They Come From? In around 1760, the Sámi told Norwegian Sámi language professor Knud Leem, as he wrote in his Beskrivelse over Finnmarkens Lapper (Description of the Lapps in Finnmark), that they had been pushed to the northernmost territories of Scandinavia by peoples who arrived later (quoted in Ojala 2009, 140). Finnish linguist Ante Aikio proposes that during the

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Sámi people’s stepwise emigration from south to north, the Sámi language emerged from its previous, yet-unknown language, which Aikio calls “Paleo-Laplandic” (2004, 26). Finnish linguist Mikko Korhonen pinpoints the direction of spread of the Proto-Sámi language from the Gulf of Finland westward into Sweden and eastward into the Kola peninsula (1981), after which what we know today as the Sámi language would have begun splitting off from its Proto-Sámi mother language. “By . . . the first millennium Bc . . . a Sámi people with a distinctive ethnic identity and a commonality of language becomes recognisable, speaking a Finnic language with close etymological links to Finnish” (Kent 2014, 21). Linguist Thomas DuBois dates the beginning of the development of Proto-Balto-Finnic into a Proto-Sámi language at around 2000 Bc and adds that along with the language division came a cultural division, into a coastal agro-pastoral (proto-Balto-Finnic) and an inland hunter-gatherer (proto-Sámi) culture (1999, 14). According to recent DNA studies, both mitochondrial DNA (from the maternal line) and Y-chromosomes (from the paternal line) of the Sámi indicate western European ancestry, even if in combinations not common in Europeans today. Geneticist Kristiina Tambets and her research partners conclude that this “suggests that the large genetic separation of the Saami from other Europeans is best explained by assuming that the Saami are descendants of a narrow, distinctive subset of Europeans. In particular, no evidence of a significant directional gene flow from extant aboriginal Siberian populations into the haploid gene pools of the Saami was found” (2004, 661). This research appears to negate earlier assumptions that the Sámi are predominantly descended not from European, but from Eurasian peoples to the east of Sápmi.

The Sámi in Historical Writings Two Russian ethnographers of the Sámi discussed very early transcriptions written by the Sámi, dating to around 2000 Bc. Nikolai Kharuzin (1865–1900) referred to them; and a few years later Yakov Alekseyevich Komshilov (1894–1964) compiled “what remains the largest collection of Sámi alphabetic markings, which many scholars initially viewed as being closely related to Viking runes” (Kent 2014, 179). The question of the origins of these markings is still unsettled. The first written reference to the Sámi by an outsider comes from the Roman historian Tacitus, in his Germania (ad 98), an ethnography

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of the Germanic tribes. In addition to his mention of Fenni, who ethnographers, working from his descriptions of their lives, believe were not Finns but Sámi, he mentions the Sitoni (here it is worth noting that Tacitus personally had never been in either Finnish or Sámi territory but is repeating what he has read or heard from others). Tacitus describes the Sitoni as a tribe living east of the Suomi ‘Finns’, governed by a woman. The concept of female rule may have been accurate, or it may have been part of the mythology the Romans created concerning what they expected to be the exotic North; among Romans women did not take public roles, only domestic ones. In the early Middle Ages, the Byzantine historian Procopius (ad 490– 562) must have been referring to the Sámi when he wrote about the Scritfinni (from Norse skrida ‘ski’ and Finnar ‘Lapps’). The Roman historian Jordanes, in his work on the Goths, De origine actibusqe Getarum (ca. ad 551; translated as The Origin and Deeds of the Goths [2011, 551]), called the Sámi Scerefinni and wrote that their territory stretched from the Gulf of Bothnia to central Sweden and Norway and that they were in contact with the Goths and knew about the Germanic runes. Much of what these early historians wrote has been verified by modern science. For example, Sámi designs on shamans’ drums were first linked to Norse runes by Norwegian missionary Knud Leem, who in 1748 wrote the first grammar of the Sámi language, En Lappisk Grammatica efter den Dialect, som bruges af Field-Lapperne udi Porsanger-Fiorden (A Lapp grammar of the dialect used by mountain Lapps in Porsanger Fjord; Grankvist 2009). Even earlier, in 1557, a vocabulary list of ninety-five words in both Sámi and English was collected by Stephen Borough, an English sailor who had stayed among the Sámi on the Kola Peninsula for a time (Kent 2014, 179). Possibly the most significant book about the Sámi, though, was Lapponia (1673), by Johannes Schefferus, which was first published in Latin, then in English (1674), German (1675), French (1678), and Dutch (1682), although it was not translated into Swedish until 1956 (Ojala 2009, 88). Anthropologist Christian Meriot describes Lapponia as “a classic among ethnological monographs,” containing “everything about the Saami in their natural environment from their religion and secret magic, their language and their techniques of attainment and consumption, their domestic and social life, to their spare time activities and amusement” (1984, 376–77). In addition, Lapponia contained the first two recorded poems in a Sámi language, by the Sámi priest and

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poet Olaus Sirma (1655–1719), one of which reached English-speaking audiences with its refrain, A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, quoted as “a Lapland song” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807– 1882) in his long poem “My Lost Youth.” Not until the early twentieth century were longer-form Sámi works, written for Sámi readers, published, including Johan Turi’s 1910 Muitalus sámiid birra (translated into English as An Account of the Sámi; see Turi 2011). Yet, although Lapponia provided meticulously researched, objectively described, and reliable information about the Sámi, its underlying motivation was not ethnology. Written at the behest of the Count de la Gardie, Lord Chancellor of Sweden, it was intended rather to counter rumors in Europe that the Swedish army had depended upon Sámi sorcerers for its victories in the Thirty Years War (1618–48): “A Christian kingdom like Sweden could not accept such unworthy allegations, and the book was published in order to repudiate these claims. The publication’s aim was to describe the Sámi people and the Sámi ways of life, including Sámi religious life, as realistically as possible, and thereby demonstrate the absurdity of the accusations of sorcery in the Swedish army” (Ojala 2009, 89). An unintended side effect of Lapponia was, however, to solidify European stereotypes of the Sámi primarily as sorcerers and primitive people of nature, a stereotype that has lasted to our own time. Sámi religious traditions may have fueled some of this, but the Sámi were hardly limited to their sorcery. In fact, during the time of early Norse contact with the Sámi and into the present, the Sámi acted as expert naturalists, boat builders, language interpreters, and trade partners to their fellow Scandinavians.

Tra diTiona L cuLT ur e Religion Sámi pre-Christian religion, or perhaps religions, were shamanistic and polytheistic and had rituals involving sacred animals such as the bear (Broadbent 2004, 3). Wind and fire were considered deities, and plants, animals, and inanimate objects were believed to possess souls.

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The shamans, or noiaddit, used their drums for divination, drumming to induce a trance in themselves as preparation for visiting the realm of the dead and foretelling the future. Accounts from missionary reports and Scandinavian court records that spoke of elements of Sámi religion such as sorcery, divination, and the figure of the noaidi attracted a great deal of attention from the Scandinavian and European world (Kent 2014, 79–122).

Yoiking Yoiks are traditional chantlike Sámi songs. Yoiking is considered one of the oldest folk music traditions in Europe, transcribed and discussed by outsiders as early as the 1673 treatise Lapponia. Yoiks have been linked historically and stylistically with the music of the Samoyed and Siberian peoples (Arnberg et al. 1969, 59). As late as 1977, yoiks, because of their association with pre-Christian religion, were banned in Sámi municipal centers and schools. By the end of the 1970s, they underwent a revival, Sámi musicians began blending yoiks with the techniques of contemporary music, and the yoik entered the realm of modern Western pop music (for a fuller discussion of yoiking and its modern singersongwriters, see Kent 2014, 202– 8). Many current yoiks exist in written form only in Swedish, Norwegian, or Finnish translations. An example is Mattias Andersson’s yoik “Oulavuolie’s beautiful reindeer are finer,” which was recorded in Swedish translation by Swedish Radio in 1965 (Arnberg et al. 1969, 26–27). The winning performance in the 2014 Sámi Grand Prix of yoiking, held in Kautokeino, Norway, may be seen and heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN9qXvBaags.

c on TemP ora ry sá mi Life an d c uLT ur e The 1970s saw a blossoming of Sámi-language literature that has continued to the present. Sámi artists focused their work on Sámi language and traditional Sámi themes, expressed in current forms, and became part of a grassroots movement to maintain and regain the Sámi language. Prominent figures include writer, singer, and multimedia artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (d. 2001); poet Paulus Utsi (d. 1975); feminist writer Vuokko Hirvonen; filmmaker Nils Gaup; singer Mari Boine; and songwriter-singer Sofia Jannok. In Norway, the yearly Riddu Riđđu festival in Olmmáivággi/Manndalen features music, art, and theater

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from Sápmi, including at times Sámi rap music, yoik rock, and dramas from Beaivváš Sámi Našunálateáhter, the Sámi national theater (current Sámi cultural production is discussed in Kent 2014, 179–214; and Lehtola 2004, 95–113).

sámi LiveLihood, Then an d now The Sámi were historically fisherfolk, hunters and fur traders, farmers (in territory where the climate permitted), and even very early manufacturers of goods. DuBois comments that “taxation of the inland Sámi (mainly by taking furs in tribute) appears to date from the first century ad, and became regularized into a trading relation of such significance that Sámi in the area eventually abandoned the manufacture of both iron and ceramics, relying instead on imported trade-goods from agrarian populations to the south” (1999, 14). In medieval times the Sámi lived in mountain, forest, and northern coastal territories of Sweden, Norway, and Finland that are not now part of Sápmi. A recent Smithsonian Institution study revealed extensive evidence of thirteenth- century Sámi farming, seal hunting, and religious practice on the northern Bothnian coasts of Sweden. Today, reindeer husbandry is widely practiced in Sápmi. In Finland, reindeer are herded by both Sámi and non- Sámi; but in Norway and Sweden, reindeer husbandry is limited by law to the Sámi (International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry 2015, 2.) Some Sámi communities in all three nations are not involved in the reindeer trade at all, but pursue hunting, fishing, farming, and the fur trade. Sámi individuals who live in the cities of the North, as many do, earn their livelihood in ways as varied as those of other Scandinavians.

chrisTia niZaTion Even in medieval times, there were Swedish missionaries in Sápmi. The process of conversion of the Sámi to Christianity stretched over several centuries and was accompanied by an absorption of Sámi territories into the developing monarchies of the North. In 1306 a treaty between Denmark (then including Norway), Sweden (then including Finland), and Novgorod (in what is today Russia) designated the inland areas of Sápmi, or Lapland, as common territory for the three kingdoms (Ojala 2009, 89). Afterward, the monarchies of Scandinavia

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encouraged non-Sámi immigration to the Sámi territories and forced the Sámi residents out, to legitimate national claims of Norway and Sweden to Lapland, with its potentially profitable supplies of furs and fish. In 1809, with the acquisition of Finland by the Russian Empire, Sápmi was divided into Swedish Lapland and Finnish Lapland (which became de facto Russian until Finnish independence a century later). In Norway, Sámi territory was controlled by the Danish Crown, which profited from the lucrative market in Europe for Scandinavian stockfish. Conversion efforts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the North concentrated on the elimination of sorcery. Witchcraft trials ended in the burning of the noaiddit along with their ritual drums. The Sámi drums that survived are in museum collections and in modern times have been the center of debates in Scandinavia on repatriation of the Sámi cultural heritage (Ojala 2009, 90). Today, many Sámi in Norway, Sweden, and Finland are members of the state Lutheran churches; others follow Laestadianism, a very strict form of pietistic Lutheranism introduced in Sápmi by Swedish- Sámi missionary and professional botanist Lars Levi Laestadius (1800– 1861). Almost all of the Finland Skolt Sámi are Orthodox Christians.

sáPmi: L a nd wiThin four naT ion s The traditions of the Sámi are still practiced in majority-Sámi communities of Sápmi. However, in Sápmi overall, only about 5 percent of the population are Sámi. The Sámi population in Sweden, Norway, and Finland is not concentrated in the traditional areas but is dispersed throughout the three nations. According to national census estimates, about half (35,000– 50,000) of the total Sámi population lives in Norway; about 20,000 in Sweden; 6,000–7,000 in Finland; and 1,600 in Russia. Norway. The old Norwegian word for Sámi was Finn, so that today many Norwegian words referring to the Sámi contain this word, although, confusingly, in Modern Norwegian it means Finn. The Norwegian part of Sápmi is a county called in Norwegian Finnmark, and cities there commonly have two names, the majority-language name and the Sámi name. Sámi is an official language of several cities in Finnmark, including Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino, home of Sámi allaskuvla ‘Sámi

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University College’ and the first municipality in Norway to get a Sámi name. Sweden. Swedish Lappland consists principally of two counties of the province of Norrland: Norrbotten and Västerbotten. The Swedish Bureau of Statistics gives the total population of Swedish Lappland as 94,350, of which about eighteen percent are Sámi (Statistiska Centralbyrån 2009). Finland. The Finnish government counts as Sámi anyone who has at least one grandparent who speaks or spoke Sámi from birth. Therefore it isn’t easily possible to know how many ethnic Sámi live in Lappi (Finnish Lapland). However, according to official registers in 2012, Finnish was the primary language of the majority (177,227) of the population in Finnish Lappi (most of whom are not Sámi); Sámi (Northern Sámi, Inari Sámi, or Skolt Sámi) was the primary language of 1,540; and Swedish was the primary language of 396 (Tilastokeskus 2012). Russia. The Russian Sámi homeland is in the Kola Peninsula, which was, coincidentally, in the thirteenth century a part of the Novgorodian Republic, founded by Swedish Vikings (see chapter 4). The largest city in the Kola Peninsula is Murmansk. According to the 2010 census, there were 1,599 Sámi living in the area (Pettersen 2013). Many Sámi people who live in Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, or other urban areas of Scandinavia have in the past not self-identified as Sámi because of anticipated discrimination (UNRIC 2013). This may or may not be changing; however, in a 2003–4 study carried out in twenty-four rural municipalities in central and northern Norway (Hansen 2015), those who did self-identify as Sámi reported such discrimination. Likewise, most Sámi who emigrated to North America in the nineteenth or early twentieth century did so not describing themselves as Sámi, but as Norwegians, Swedes, or Finns. Sámi descendants in North America include two in public life who are of partly Norwegian Sámi descent: the American actress Renée Zellweger (IMDb 2013) and the Canadianborn singer-painter Joni Mitchell (Aikins 2005).

sá mi na ming Tra diT ion s Many Sámi have Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish first and last names. It would not be unusual to meet a Norwegian Sámi named Christer Petterssen, for example; Norwegian names are typical among the

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Sámi who live on the coast in Norway. The Russian Sámi have Russian names, such as Vasilii Selivanov or Piotr Galkin. However, among the Sámi who live inland in the North, more traditional Sámi surnames are also common. These might include Hætta, Somby, Turi, and Magga. In the more southern parts of Norway and Sweden, particularly in the mountainous area along the border between the two countries, many Sámi surnames have the element fjell or fjeld ‘mountain’. Examples are Dunfjeld, Kvitfjell, and Kappfjell (Borgos 2013). First names of Sámi may also be names common in all of Scandinavia or Russia or derived from those names. Examples include Livli (the Sámi form of Lydia), Ánet (the Sámi form of Annette), or Bávvál (the Sámi form of Pavel). Other traditional Sámi first names are (for a boy) Njulgu or Oaván. And traditional naming practices, as in other Scandinavian cultures, include patronymics, but instead of including the father’s first name after the individual’s first name, as in Swedish or Norwegian, Sámi may mention the first name of the father or mother or even grandparent first, and then the son or daughter’s own first name: “Bavval’s son Oaván,” for example.

sá mi a s a minoriT y L anguage Among Sámi’s language varieties, only its largest, North Sámi, is currently not considered severely endangered or worse (see definitions below). Children of intermarriages between Sámi and non-Sámi in nonSámi-dominant areas have assimilated into the non-Sámi populations; in majority-Sámi areas, there are fewer such intermarriages, and children of them have tended to remain Sámi-identified. The churches of Scandinavia since the sixteenth- century Protestant Reformation have been supportive of Sámi language use; by contrast, the governments of Scandinavia in the twentieth century adopted policies of replacement of Sámi by Swedish, Norwegian, or Finnish. Only in this century were such policies discontinued. The development of large-scale trade and manufacture in Sámi territories brought increasing contact with non-Sámi trading partners and the need for communication in the majority languages, and this encouraged elders to believe that the majority languages would be more useful to their children than Sámi. Today schooling among the Sámi includes both Sámi and the nation’s majority language; but more Sámi people count Norwegian, Swedish,

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or Finnish as their mother tongue than those who consider Sámi their mother tongue. From the 1880s until the 1960s, the Norwegian government applied in northern Norway its policy of Fornorskningspolitikk ‘Norwegianization’, directed toward the Sámi population and the Kven (the Finnish minority in Norway). The policy was intended to make these populations fully “Norwegian,” and the Sámi and Kven languages were forbidden for use in the schools. In 1997, in a speech before the Sámediggi ‘Sámi Parliament’, King Harald V apologized for Norway’s policy. A fund of 75 million Norwegian kroner ($12,670,669) was created by the Norwegian Storting ‘Parliament’, to be used to strengthen the Sámi language and culture and serve as compensation. The fund is administered by the Sámediggi. In Sweden, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a policy of segregation, called Lapp-skall-vara-lapp ‘Lapp shall be Lapp’. The first part of the policy defined the Sámi people as reindeer herders by nature and directed that they be “protected” so that they could survive as nomads in the modern world. There had been schools particularly for Sámi children since the 1600s; but according to the Lappskall-vara-lapp policy, children of reindeer herders in Sápmi were now restricted to special Sámi schools. A second part of the policy applied to non-reindeer-herding Sámi in other parts of Sweden, who were to attend schools where only Swedish was spoken; they would be no longer considered Sámi, but Swedish. Under these circumstances, many Sámi were fully assimilated, and some of their descendants do not consider themselves Sámi or may not even know that their ancestors were Sámi. Today the policy no longer applies. Sámi children, whether their parents are reindeer herders or not, may attend any public school where they live; and the Sámi language is taught in schools alongside Swedish, if the local population wishes it (it may be interesting to North American readers to compare the old Sámi schools of Norway and Sweden with similar Indian boarding schools for the indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada; see Smith 2007). As of 1977 the Swedish Parliament, Riksdagen, recognized the Sámi as an indigenous people of Sweden, and since 2002 Sámi has been officially recognized as a minority language. Grassroots efforts to regain and maintain Sámi languages are ongoing throughout the North. Important among these are modern media.

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The oldest Sámi language newspaper, Nuorttanaste (Eastern star), a religious paper, began in 1898 and is still published in Norway. More general news sources include the Sámi-Swedish bilingual Samefolket (The Sámi people), begun in 1918, and Sapmelaš (The Sámi), founded in 1934 and renamed in 1993 Ođđa Sápmelaš (The new Sámi), which is published in Finland. Several Sámi-language cultural magazines have appeared. Sámi-language radio began broadcasting in Norway in 1946, in Finland in 1946, and in Sweden in 1953. Sámi news broadcasting is sponsored by a collaborative effort of Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish television (Lehtola 2004, 90– 93). Each of the three Scandinavian nations has a Sámi parliament, called Sámediggi, Sámedigge, and Saemiedigkie in Northern, Lule, and South Sámi, respectively. The Sámi Parliament of Finland was founded in 1973, of Norway in 1989, and of Sweden in 1993 (Ojala 2009, 100), but these do not necessarily have equal standing with the national parliaments. Sweden’s Sámediggi, for example, cannot act independently on its resolutions but must receive approval from the Swedish Parliament (Sveriges Radio 2005). The Sámi Parliament in the Russian Federation is not recognized by the Russian government. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has classified endangered languages in the following four categories: • Vulnerable: most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home). • Definitely endangered: children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home. • Severely endangered: language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves. • Critically endangered: the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently. • Extinct: there are no speakers left. All the surviving Sámi variants are in the UNESCO categories of “definitely endangered,” “severely endangered,” or “critically endangered.” Several other Sámi variants, not discussed in this volume, have been classified as “extinct” (UNESCO 2010).

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Language Features As we have seen, Sámi is a Finno-Ugric language with close historical and linguistic ties to Finnish (although the exact nature of those ties is still a matter of scholarly inquiry). However, Sámi and Finnish are by no means mutually understandable; at most, native speakers of each may see some similarities in vocabulary. Other similarities exist but are not easily perceived even by speakers of Sámi or Finnish, unless they have linguistic training. In the paragraphs that follow, summarizing some linguistic features that are similar, most of the Sámi examples are from North Sámi, the variety with the largest number of speakers. Word Order As in other highly inflected languages (such as Finnish), word order in Sámi is relatively free, since the case markings in Finno-Ugric make for more freedom in word order than in English. North Sámi, like Finnish and the other Finno-Ugric languages, usually follows a subject-verbobject order. However, as in Finnish, this order can be altered if the speaker intends to focus on the object rather than on the subject, since case endings will provide clarity (in English this switch of focus is accomplished by adding the phrase “it is the”). Bárdni (nominative) oidná nieidda (accusative): ‘The boy sees the girl’; but Nieidda (accusative) oaidná bárdni (nominative) ‘It’s the girl whom the boy sees’ (examples from Svonni 1993, 63). Lack of Initial Consonant Clusters Like other Finno-Ugric languages, Sámi originally had no words beginning with two or more consonants (unlike English, which is loaded with them: “slow,” “green,” “bridge,” “strong,” “spleen”). Accordingly, initial consonants have dropped from loanwords into Sámi. An example is Russian спасибо/spasibo ‘please’, which became in Kildin Sámi pāss’bo ‘please’ (Riessler 2009, 404). However, in very early times, word-initial consonant clusters were taken into Sámi through Scandinavian loanwords. Examples are kraevies ‘grey’ from the ProtoNorse word *grāwaR (marked with an asterisk because reconstructed from a proto-language), Old Norse grár, modern Scandinavian grå. And, for a modern example, Norwegian linguist Knut Bergsland takes

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his own first name, which in Sámi kept the two initial consonants but underwent other changes: “The first name Knut, for instance, needs a final vowel, say -a, and with the obligatory metaphony [a kind of vowel harmony] it becomes Knavhta” (1992, 10). Inflection Both Sámi and Finnish are highly inflected; that is, nouns and adjectives change form according to their grammatical roles in the phrase or sentence in which they appear. Northern Sámi, with the largest number of speakers, has seven noun cases: nominative, accusative (although nominative, for subjects, and accusative, for objects, are identical), genitive, locative, illative, comitative, and essive. Its verbs conjugate for three numbers, singular, dual (two) and plural (more than two). The Verb System Unlike Finnish, Sámi has a dual form in verb conjugations, in all three persons, distinguishing in its verbs and pronouns “we two, you two, they two” from “we (many), you (many), they (many).” Like Finnish, Sámi expresses negation not by an adverb (as in English “not”) but uses a negative verb (roughly equivalent to English “doesn’t/didn’t”) as an auxiliary to the main verb. Pronoun subjects may be omitted, since the inflected verb forms make them clear. Examples from North Sámi: present tense, in juga ‘I don’t drink” and ii juga ‘he/she doesn’t drink’ (Svonni 1993, 152). Pronunciation Like Finnish, Sámi words are generally accented on the first syllable. We have already noted that, in historically related words that exist in both languages, the consonants b, d, and g of Sámi (voiced in English) are, like p, t, and k in Finnish or English, pronounced as voiceless. An example is provided by Northern Sámi beaivi vs. Finnish päivä ‘day’. Examples of pronunciation of short texts in North Sámi (with translations, however, only into Swedish) are available online at http://www4 .ur.se/gulahalan/. A North Sámi wordlist with sound files is available at www.ling.ohio -state.edu/~odden/saamidict/Saami%20Online %20Words.htm.

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Alphabet The varieties of Sámi differ somewhat in the alphabetic characters used to write them. The Scandinavian varieties use the Latin alphabet with additional characters; for example, North Sámi uses the characters Áá, Čč, Đđ, Šš, Ŧŧ, Žž in addition to the Latin alphabet. Russian Sámi uses the Cyrillic alphabet with additional characters.

Official Status of Sámi Language In Norway, Sámi is an official language of nine municipalities in Finnmark. In Finland, citizens may use either Sámi or Finnish for all government purposes; and it is an official or administrative language in five municipalities in Lappi. In Sweden, Sámi may be used by residents of Sámi communities in communicating with their local or national government, that is, all written forms are available in Sámi, and the availability of officials competent in Sámi is required. The Sámi language has no official standing in Russia.

Sámi in the Media Streaming of radio and TV in various varieties of Sámi is available online at the Norwegian source www.nrk.no/nett-tv/klipp/840081/. In Finland, programs in North Sámi, Inari Sámi, and Skolt Sámi are available at http://yle.fi/uutiset/sapmi.

Influence from Other Languages Finno-Ugric and Indo-European spent a long time in the same territory in prehistoric days, resulting in the borrowing of some basic vocabulary into Finno-Ugric, and ultimately into Sámi, from the Indo-European languages Old Persian and Balto-Slavic-Germanic. Examples are Sámi and Finnish words for “domesticated reindeer”: North Sámi boazu, Lule Sámi boatsoj, Pite Sámi båtsoj, South Sámi bovtse, and Finnish poro are all traceable to *počaw, an Old Persian loanword deriving from Proto-Indo-European *peḱu- ‘cattle’ (examples from Koivulehto 2007, 253– 57). There are probably more than a thousand Finnish and Finnic loanwords in present- day North Sámi, the majority of them quite recent,

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and probably slightly over 10 percent of the known vocabulary of Proto-Sámi is made up of Finnic loanwords (Aikio 2007, 24). Conversely, Sámi has contributed loanwords to Finnish, although to a lesser extent. “In the northernmost dialects of Finnish the number of Saami loanwords amounts to hundreds, but there are also dozens of loanwords in the Finnish dialects spoken in central and southern Finland,” continues Aikio (2007, 25; cf. also the list of loanwords into Lule Sámi in Wiklund 1890, 179– 87; and an etymology of common North Sámi words in Sammallahti 1998, 227– 68). The process is continuing, as bilingual speakers of Sámi blend their languages. “Even the most competent speakers switch between their Sami and Scandinavian dialects, sometimes in the middle of a sentence.” For the reindeer-herding Sámi in Finland, “their second language has been Finnish for centuries, and the Finnish impact is evident” (Bergsland 1992, 7–13). Switching between languages in this way is called in linguistics code switching, and it is common among bilingual or multilingual speakers, including those in the English-speaking world. Sámi is also used, as language often is, to prevent communication—it functions as an “insider language” to keep non- Sámi Scandinavians from understanding certain business negotiations (Bergsland 1992, 13– 14; see also discussion of types of “disguised speech” in Sammallahti 1998, 59– 60).

sam PLe TexT: The T w en T y- T h ir d P saLm For comparison between two different Sámi variants, following is the beginning of the Twenty-Third Psalm (King James Version: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want”) in North Sámi and South Sámi. The languages are not mutually understandable, but you may see some similarities. Note the first word: North Sámi Hearrá ‘Lord’; South Sámi Jupmele ‘God’—same concept, different word. North Sámi 23 Dávveda sálbma. Hearrá lea mu báimman, ii mus váillo mihkkege.

South Sámi 23 Saalme Davidistie. Jupmele mov ryöjnesjæjja, ij leah munnjien mij fååte.

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c onc Lu sion Nine of the ten existing Sámi variants seem unlikely to survive the twenty-first century as complete spoken languages. In spite of the support of the Scandinavian church from the seventeenth century onward, they have not been favored by the high rate of intermarriage with nonSámi, by the forces of nationalism, industrialization, and urbanization, or by the harsh twentieth-century policies of the Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish governments. The tenth, North Sámi, seems likely to survive, partly because of support from educational and cultural institutions in Scandinavia and partly because it is the language of reindeer husbandry, which is still, as in ancient times, an important industry in Sápmi.

Epilogue: The Seven Sisters Now and in the Future Og hið þrettánda kveld er lokið var sögunni áður of daginn mælti konungur: “Er þér eigi forvitni á Íslendingur,” segir hann, “hversu mér líkar sagan?” “Hræddur em eg um herra,” segir hann. Konungur mælti: “Mér þykir allvel og hvergi verr en efni eru til eða hver kenndi þér söguna?” (On Twelfth Night, after the story had ended earlier in the day, the king said, “Aren’t you curious, Icelander, to know how I liked the story?” “I am afraid to know, my lord,” he answered. The King said, “I liked it very much, and it was no worse than the matter permitted. But who taught you the story?”) From Íslendings Þáttur Sögufróða (13th century)

L anguage cha nge a nd L a nguage r e n e waL Our narrative is almost finished now, the story of the seven languages of Scandinavia. We have looked at the languages’ life cycles and their encounters with one another: the birth in ancient times of Icelandic, Faroese, and Norwegian from Old West Norse; the emergence of Danish and Swedish from Old East Norse; the development of Finnish and Sámi from Finno-Ugric; the restoration in modern times of Norwegian, Faroese, and Finnish to national language status; and the influences on Sámi that have left only North Sámi likely to survive. The survival, flourishing, and decline of languages may be caused, or may be abetted, by several factors. For example, a foreign power may make its language dominant, to the detriment of the host language in the countries it governs, as was the case of Danish in Norway and the Faroe Islands and of Swedish in Finland. International commerce and capital may bring significant foreign influence to a language; this was how Low German influenced Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian and how early Germanic, Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish influenced Sámi.

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Native speakers affect the future of their language, both consciously and unconsciously. All native speakers contribute, although unconsciously, to language-wide changes, for example, the consonant and syllable-stress shifts differentiating the Germanic language family from Proto-Indo-European, or the regular sound changes that over time separated Germanic Scandinavian from other Germanic tongues. Hundreds or thousands of years later these language-wide sound shifts may be identified and analyzed by linguists; but during the time of their development, they were more or less unperceived by speakers. However, sometimes a language’s speakers consciously work to change their language or to alter its national status. Examples in this volume include the establishment of Faroese as a national language, of Finnish as a written and spoken first language in Finland, and of Bokmål and Nynorsk as Norway’s national languages, as well as the efforts of the Sámi in consciously nurturing their language. Not only speakers of the majority language, but also speakers of minority languages, may play a role in the language story of nations.

L a nguage s Today in Th e norT h Minority Languages Six of the seven modern languages that have been the focus in this volume did not always predominate in their national territory, though they do so today. Sámi, as we have seen, is an exception in that its people, though the indigenous settlers of their territory in the North, are currently in a minority there; and the majority of ethnic Sámi, wherever they live, no longer use any variety of Sámi as a mother tongue. In addition to those seven languages, twenty languages in mainland Scandinavia have been afforded minority language rights. This has been done in accordance with the 1997 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which aims to “protect and promote regional or minority languages as a threatened aspect of Europe’s cultural heritage” (Council of Europe 1997). The charter forbids discrimination concerning the use of minority languages and also prescribes support for their use in education, the media, the judiciary, and government.

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Scandoromani: An Unusual Case The Roma, or Gypsies as they are still often referred to in the United States (though they do not prefer this name), are an Indic people who first arrived in Scandinavia in the sixteenth century. Their language, Romani, is Indo-Aryan Indo-European, distantly related to Sanskrit. Romani is very unlike any Scandinavian, or, in fact, any Germanic or Finno-Ugric language. Yet the Romani spoken in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark has mutated in vocabulary and structure so much toward the majority languages in these countries that at least two researchers describe it as having significantly transformed in the direction of Scandinavian. Linguist Ian Hancock writes: “Einar Haugen concludes that, [in Norway], Romani is ‘just a dialect of Norwegian’, though the core of its vocabulary goes back to India” (1992, 37). The Romani spoken in Scandinavia is referred to by linguists as Scandoromani. In Denmark, the Committee of Experts for the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages found little evidence for a longtime continuing presence in Denmark of either Roma or the Romani language, although they heard testimony suggesting that, on the basis of family names, there might be five thousand Danes who could be descendants of the ten Roma families who came from SchleswigHolstein in the nineteenth century; and there are some Roma who are post-1960s immigrants to Denmark (Council of Europe 2011, 5, 20). The Roma in Scandinavia have assimilated with the majority population, frequently intermarrying; but they have also maintained a separate identity, of which language is a strong part. In fact, the Roma population has resisted the teaching of Romani in Sweden, because they consider it their own “secret language” (Vuorela and Borin 1998, 60). Hancock is optimistic for the future of Scandoromani, concluding: “As long as the Scandoromani population remains a distinct segment of the Scandinavian population, it is likely that their speech will survive in some form also” (Hancock 1992, 47). Katri Vuorela and Lars Borin are not so optimistic about the future of the Kalo language of the Kale, the Roma of Finland. Kalo is currently undergoing what seems to be a development similar to that of Scandoromani. Finnish Kalo is replacing its traditional form of Romani with a newer form, heavily influenced by Finnish. For example, where

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traditional Romani featured a two-gender system, the new Kalo, like Finnish, lacks gender altogether. Vuorela and Borin believe that the Kale of Finland will be able to maintain their ethnicity through their tight family and clan networks in spite of the “slow attrition” of their language. Although the two scholars make clear their wish for Kalo to survive and prosper, they seem pessimistic about the likelihood of this. Rather, Vuorela and Borin think Kalo will become a “para-Romani language, a variety of Finnish permeated by Romani lexicon” (Vuorela and Borin 1998, 61–74).

Other Minority Languages in Scandinavia In Norway (which, as we saw in chapter 5, has two written standard Norwegian languages), minority languages are Sámi, Kven (the language of the Finnish minority in Norway), and Rodi, or Norwegian Traveler, a variety of Scandoromani. In Denmark, where Danish is the first language, German is a recognized minority language. In the Faroes and Greenland (two island nations that are part of the Kingdom of Denmark), Danish is the favored second language, while Faroese and Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) are, respectively, the official languages. Until the 1980s, Greenlandic was the only language other than Danish represented in state radio programs, but after that time, immigrants who had arrived in Denmark starting in the late 1960s had radio and television in their languages, including Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Urdu, and Turkish; today there are many more. In Finland, both Finnish and Swedish are official languages, while recognized minority languages are North, Inari, and Skolt Sámi; Kalo/ Romani; Finnish Sign Language; and Karelian (the Finnic language of Russian Karelia). In the Åland Islands, part of Finland but with home rule, Swedish is the official majority language, but Finnish speakers have minority language rights. Jews, Tatars, and “Old Russians” have a long-term history in Finland but no language minority rights there. Under Swedish law, Jews were not permitted to settle in Finland until 1743. In 1918, after Finnish Independence, Jews gained the right to become Finnish citizens. Today there are approximately thirteen hundred Jews in Finland. Tatars came to Finland as merchants in the late nineteenth century. “Old Russians” are those who immigrated to

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Finland beginning in the eighteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, 40 percent of the merchants in Helsinki were Russian emigrés or their descendants (Kauranen and Tuori 2002, 3). In Sweden the sole official language is Swedish; in addition there are five recognized minority languages: Finnish, Meänkieli (a Finnic language of North Sweden), Sámi, Romani, and Yiddish. While the Sámi are recognized as the indigenous people of Sweden, Norway, and Finland, Roma and Jews have a long-term history in Sweden as well. Roma began arriving in Sweden via Denmark in 1512, and in modern times Roma have migrated from eastern Europe (Ethnologue 2016). Jewish businessmen first came to Sweden in the early eighteenth century and from 1782 were permitted to settle in Sweden without converting to Christianity (Weiner 2015). Jews are well integrated into Swedish society, and virtually all speak Swedish; historically, central and eastern Europeans spoke Yiddish, a Germanic language (for a short history of Yiddish, see Sanders 2010, 101–4). In Iceland, Icelandic is the official language, with Icelandic Sign Language having recognized minority status.

warTime immigraTion in s c an dinavia Until the rise of Nazism in Europe, followed by World War II and its aftermath, Scandinavia was not a destination sought by large numbers of refugees from other countries. During the war, Denmark and Norway, invaded and then occupied by Nazi Germany, obviously could not accept refugees from Nazism. Sweden, which remained neutral in the war, maintained its previous highly restrictive policies regarding immigrants from Europe and did not accept European war refugees, including German Jews, until 1944, just before the end of the war. Sweden did, however, accept refugees from Scandinavia during the occupations, including nearly all of Denmark’s eight thousand Jews and many of Norway’s, as well as many Finnish children, since Finland, unlike Sweden, was a war zone. Meanwhile Finland, not occupied though allied with Germany, retained its independence and refused to allow the Nazis to deport Finnish Jews, most of whom remained in Finland after the war (this complex situation is discussed in Bayvel 2006). After 1945, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden accepted both Jewish and non-Jewish refugees. Some of the Jewish refugees to Scandinavia, or their descendants, returned to their home countries or emigrated to

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Israel, the United States, or elsewhere. Those who remained in Scandinavia, and those who have come since, are well integrated into their societies. Today, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and, to a lesser extent, Finland, receive relatively large numbers of refugees and immigrants from eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Many of these find that their foreign origin is a disadvantage in their new lands. Scandinavians have recently begun to consider their own majority languages as standing in the way of the progress of immigrants’ progress. As a result, Scandinavian governments have supported “home language” or “mother tongue” instruction for children of school age who do not use Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, or Finnish at home. Some observers, however, believe such official encouragement of immigrant languages has the effect of isolating the immigrants, enabling a populist unwillingness to fully absorb foreigners. The horrors of Nazi race theories and racial genocide resonated strongly in postwar Scandinavian public opinion, and public expression of disparagement of foreigners or racial “others” was both officially and socially stigmatized. However, that may be changing. British sociolinguist Leigh Oakes suggests that Sweden, for example, is “in the midst of an ethnonationalist revival which may have linguistic implications. . . . [There is] some evidence that linguistic boundaries are used as a politically correct means of excluding linguistic minorities” (2001, 231– 32). This problem has only recently been openly discussed in Sweden and in the rest of mainland Scandinavia. The immigrants, especially the younger generation, are responding with linguistic means of their own.

muLTieThnoLecT s Reacting to their perceived exclusion, children and grandchildren of immigrants now living in the cities of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have created colorful dialects called by linguists “multiethnolects” because they represent multiple ethnicities (Nortier 2008, 1). In Sweden the dialect is called by its speakers Miljonsvenska ‘Million Swedish’ (named for a national public-housing project called Miljon), by outsiders more commonly Rinkebysvenska ‘Rinkeby Swedish’, after Rinkeby, an immigrant neighborhood in Stockholm (Nylund 2009, 121). In Norway, it is called Kebabnorsk ‘Kebab Norwegian’, and in Denmark,

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Pæredansk or Perkerdansk ‘Pakidanish’. The Norwegian and Danish names are of course ethnic slurs, even if relatively mild ones. If the Swedish experience is a guide, in-groups may be expected to replace them soon with names of their own devising. The multiethnolects serve not primarily as communication, since their speakers are virtually all competent in the local languages and can switch to the standard language when it is advantageous. Rather, the multiethnolects are an expression of countercultural rebellion, identity formation, reaction against minority status, and in-group identification (Svendsen and Røyneland 2008, 64). The multiethnolect speakers borrow their lexicon from many languages—Arabic, Lebanese, Turkish, Spanish, English—and deploy them into a Scandinavian-language framework (Swedish examples are found in Nylund 2009, 124; Danish in Quist 2008, 47; and Norwegian in Svendsen and Røyneland 2008, 68– 69). In Finland, Helsinki’s urban multiethnolect has a much longer history, starting in the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, Finland had been under Russian rule for more than seventy years, and heretofore Swedish-speaking Helsinki received immigrants on a large scale from the Finnish countryside as well as from Russia and Germany, as they were drawn by well-paid jobs in the new industries. A mixed-language lingua franca called Stadenslangi ‘city slang’ (Swedish stad ‘city’ and English “slang”) arose in the working-class districts of Helsinki (a history of this multiethnolect, in Finnish, is available in Paunonen 2003). Stadenslangi is based on Finnish but with a lexicon not only from Finnish, but also from Swedish, Russian, German, and English. After Finland gained independence in 1917, the city gradually changed from predominantly Swedish-speaking to predominantly Finnish-speaking. Stadenslangi did not cease to exist, but, especially after World War II, increased its borrowing from American English. It seems only a matter of time before Helsinki’s newer immigrants from Somalia and the Middle East begin to bring into Stadenslangi fragments of their home languages as well. Unlike the ethnolects of US immigrants (for example, “Spanglish” or “Finglish”—see p. 180), these multiethnolects reflect not a single immigrant language, but many. There does not seem to be any analog in the American experience; both American and Scandinavian linguists are reacting with interest.

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s can di navia n immigra n T s in norT h ame r ic a The earliest Norwegian immigrants to the United States were probably those included in the otherwise Dutch colony New Amsterdam, founded in 1625 at the tip of Manhattan. Closely following in 1638 were the Swedish settlers who founded the New Sweden colony in Delaware, followed by Finns starting in 1640 (Wedin 2012). Immigration to the United States from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland became a flood starting in the mid-1800s, peaking by the end of the century. In Canada, the greatest wave of Scandinavian immigration occurred between the end of the nineteenth century and the Depression of the 1930s. Many of the early immigrants to Canada were ScandinavianAmericans relocating because of decreased availability of homesteading sites in the United States and increased availability in Canada. A very high percentage of the Scandinavian immigrants to North America were literate in their own languages. For example, throughout the peak years of immigration, Finnish immigrants, at 96 to 99 percent literacy, were either the most literate or the second most literate of US immigrants from Europe, in some years surpassing and in other years losing by a percentage point to eastern European Jews (Loukinen 1996). Hundreds of home-language newspapers were founded in the United States for this reading public. Today, however, even in the areas of the United States that are still characterized by double- digit percentages of Scandinavian-American population, almost all of these newspapers have either ceased publication or are published entirely or primarily in English. Scandinavian immigrants to North America brought with them their home dialects, and the language of those of their children and grandchildren who know the ancestral language generally reflects the home dialect, even as it is colored by their American experience and the American language (Johannessen et al. 2015, 208; Hedblom 1973, 63– 65). In the case of the Norwegian immigrants, they spoke their home dialects, but they read and wrote only Dano-Norwegian, the national language of Norway at that time (see discussion in Haugen 1969, 188– 90.). Nearly eight hundred thousand Norwegians immigrated to the United States or Canada between 1825 and 1925, making Norway

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second only to Ireland in the percentage of its people who emigrated to the North American continent. Significant numbers of Norwegian immigrants to Canada began to arrive soon after 1849, the year Britain repealed its restrictive Navigation Acts. Norwegian immigration to Canada peaked in 1927, as Norwegians fled severe economic depression at home. Today, the 286,235 Canadians wholly or partially of Norwegian descent live more or less evenly spread out across Canada (Multicultural Canada 1988, n.p.). By the beginning of the Civil War, the census recorded 18,000 persons of Swedish birth in the United States. Just ten years later, during the Swedish crop failures of 1868– 69, the Swedish-born population was 97,000—five times higher. They had immigrated to Minnesota, North Dakota, and Nebraska, the three states with the highest percentage of Swedish-Americans. Danish immigration to the United States peaked in 1882, when 11,618 Danish Mormon converts arrived and settled in Sanpete and Sevier counties, south of Salt Lake City. Census figures from 2000 show that the three states with the largest Danish-American population are California, Utah, and Minnesota. In Canada, there was a wave of Danish immigration between 1919 and 1931 and another wave in the years immediately after World II, when Denmark was still devastated by German wartime occupation. By far the highest concentration of Finnish-Americans is located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where they form over 16 percent of the population, some from originally Swedish-speaking families, some from Finnish-speaking families. In neighboring Canada, to which the logging industry attracted many Finns in the early twentieth century, centers of populations of Finnish ancestry are Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, both located on the shores of Lake Superior, and areas of British Columbia in Western Canada. In rural “language island communities” of the United States, Finnish, though influenced by English, continued to be spoken in homes, churches, labor halls, and cooperative stores until the 1950s. The Finnish-Americans who spoke it called it “Finglish”; visitors from Finland called it incorrect. However, professional linguists had a different view: they appreciated it as a “repository of rural dialects no longer to be found at home” and considered the immigrants’ language to be not erroneous or deteriorated Finnish, but integration of “masses of

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new linguistic material in rational ways they had brought with them” (Karttunen 1977, 174). Around one-quarter of Iceland’s population emigrated to North America between 1870 and 1915. The reasons were not solely economic, but also religious and natural-disaster-related. In 1854, a small number of Mormon converts from Iceland’s Vestmannaeyjar ‘Westman Islands’ began emigrating and settled in Spanish Forks, Utah. These were the first Icelandic immigrants to the New World (Magee 1984, 81), their story told in fiction by Icelandic author Halldór Laxness in his 1960 novel Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed). The second wave of Icelandic emigration began in 1875, following the huge and damaging eruption, in the spring of that year, of Askja, a volcano in the Central Highlands; the ash blew to Austfirðir ‘Eastfjörds’ (Vatnajökulsþjóðgarður National Park, 2014). Hot pumice rained across a vast area, killing livestock and poisoning the land. Heavy ashfall continued across the area for a year, causing widespread abandonment of the towns in eastern Iceland and subsequent emigration of their inhabitants to western Canada, where a government tract on the southwest shore of Lake Winnipeg was reserved for them, named by the emigrants Nyja Ísland ‘New Iceland’ (Eyford 2010, ii). The largest of the communities they founded is Gisli, Manitoba; there are many others in Manitoba, as well as in Saskatchewan and Alberta. The ninety thousand descendants of the immigrants are called in Icelandic vesturíslendingar ‘Western-Icelanders’; they are the largest group of people of Icelandic descent outside of Iceland. In the United States, Icelandic immigrants founded communities in the upper Midwest, such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, giving them Icelandic names such as Gardar, Thingvalla, and Svold. The US census of 2000 found 5,660 Americans with Icelandic as a home language (Johannessen and Salmons 2015, 6). Studies of the Icelandic language currently used by these and other descendants of immigrants in the United States have documented the use of Icelandicized English loanwords (beisment for “basement,” sprústré for “spruce tree”) and other changes of morphology and word meanings of the kind often found in the use of “heritage” languages by second- and third-generation speakers living abroad. Sentence-length samples can be found in Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir (2015, 78). In 1924 the US Comprehensive Immigration Act tightened limits

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on immigration. The great waves of immigration to the United States from Scandinavia were no more. However, as noted, significant numbers of Scandinavian immigrants entered Canada continuing into the postwar years and afterward. An unknown number of Sámi people were included in the Scandinavian immigrations from Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Most of the Sámi entered as Norwegians, Swedes, or Finns, and some of their descendants, like many of those in the cities of Norway, Sweden, and Finland (see chapter 6) may not know of their Sámi ancestry. Research on the Sámi experience in North America is, however, ongoing (see interviews with Sámi Americans in Jensen 2012). Today, the home language of Scandinavian descendants of immigrants to North America is overwhelmingly English. Some of them study the language and culture of their Scandinavian ancestors in the many North American college and university programs of Scandinavian studies. Many of them, even if they do not know the ancestral language, keep a few phrases of it alive as humorous in-group markers. Examples are the Norwegian uff da ‘oh my’ and the fanciful Finnish snow god Heikki Lunta ‘Hank Snow’ (the pop group Da Yoopers, based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, may be heard singing to Heikki at www .youtube.com/watch?v=FvoyYFrQc5k).

engLish in s ca ndinavia Travelers to Scandinavia will have noticed that English seems to be nearly universally spoken, and spoken well, at least in the major cities of the North. Furthermore, at scholarly or other international conferences held in Scandinavia, it is not uncommon for every single paper to be presented in English and all discussions to be held in English, even if all speakers are Scandinavians. This is understandable: English is the main lingua franca of the Western world of which Scandinavia is a part, and even Scandinavian political, cultural, and economic cooperation is made easier with a common language. The influence of English is unmistakable. No Scandinavian language has a large number of speakers by world standards. Swedish has 8 million native speakers, Danish 6 million, Norwegian and Finnish, 5 million each; all are dwarfed in number of speakers by their neighbors in Europe; for example German, the largest first language in the European Union, has 120 million speakers,

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and French, the second-largest, has 75 million. At least one linguist, R. M. W. Dixon, suggests that the languages of Scandinavia, like the thousands of third-world languages that have gone extinct in modern times, are headed for inexorable decline under the force of globalization and world-wide English (1997, 146). Not everyone agrees. British linguist Leigh Oakes believes that the force of national identity is too easily underestimated. Swedish, for example, benefits from both the weight of the Swedish state and its official status in the European Union, he argues; and the Swedish sense of national identity is strong, even if negative reactions to Nazi racial theories have led to a muting of discussion of “Swedishness” (2004, 8–11). The same can be argued of Norway, Denmark, and Finland. In all of these countries and in Iceland and the Faroes, widespread knowledge of English as a second language has facilitated international trade and prosperity, with no evidence yet of decline of the languages of Scandinavia as home languages. How will Scandinavia’s language story continue? Those of us with merely human powers cannot know; perhaps only the Norns, the ancient Northern weavers of fate, can see the future of the Seven Sisters of the North.

Acknowledgments

It was during a year’s stay in Helsinki that I first developed an interest in the history of the languages of the North. Many thanks for that year of sabbatical leave are due to my own Miami University of Ohio. Thanks as well to the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki for providing me with an academic home there. Especially I thank my department hosts Kimmo Koskenniemi and Fred Karlsson for collegial support and for insightful discussions with them and the other scholars of the languages of Scandinavia I met there. Friends and colleagues who have read all or parts of this book’s manuscript during its development include (in alphabetical order) Richard Auletta, Susan Bennett, Gerda Bikales, Robert DiDonato, Elaine Franks, Mila Ganeva, Iain Gray, Jenný H. Jónsdóttir, David Kullman, Lynne Miles-Morillo, Renee Miller, Stephen Nimis, Karen O’Hara, Suzanne Picken, Charlotte Schaengold, K. E. Smith, Pirkko Suihkonen, and Audrone Willeke. Lara Thurston made the maps and illustrations throughout the volume, and Hugh Morgan took the photographs. Thanks to all of them, and to the staff of the Miami University Library for their help and patience, and for the Library’s wonderful collections. My sincere appreciation goes to my editor, Christie Henry of the University of Chicago Press, for her support and encouragement, to eagle- eyed copy editor Lois R. Crum, and to the Press’s anonymous academic reviewers, for their expert comments and suggestions. In remembrance of absent friends, I raise a virtual glass to two

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scholars of Scandinavian languages who influenced me: to the late Professors Leif Sjöberg and Jorma Koivulehto. Lastly, loving thanks to my husband Alton Sanders, whose patient reading and good advice have accompanied me throughout. This book is dedicated to him.

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Index

Aasen, Ivar, 127–29 Abckirja (Agricola), 104 Account of the Sámi, An (Turi), 157 Act for the Organization of Elementary Schools, 109 Adam of Bremen, 44 Africa, 6, 43–44, 175 Agricola, Mikael, 97, 104– 5 agriculture, 12, 18, 22–23, 31, 51, 59, 117, 159 Aikio, Ante, 15–16, 154 Akkala Sámi, 24, 153 Alexander II (czar), 108– 9 Alfred the Great (king of England), 25, 38, 72 Altaic, 25 Alþingi (Icelandic parliament), 47 An Ghorta Mór, 117 Anglic-Germanic dialect, 36 Anglo-Norse (language), 73–75 Ansgar, Saint, 69 Anthony, David W., 16, 18–19 Anttila, Raimo, 102 Arabic, 103, 173, 176 Ari hinn fróði (Ari the Wise), 45. See Ari Þorgilsson Ari Þorgilsson, 45 Arthur, King, 37 Auðr djúpúðga Ketilsdóttir (Aud the deepminded), 53 ballads, 141–42. See also oral traditions Baltic region. See Baltic Sea

Baltic Sea, 4, 7, 28–29, 55, 77, 79, 95, 102 Balto-Slavic-Germanic, 20, 167 Banque de France, 80 Beaivváš Sámi Našunálateáhter, 159 Benedictow, Ole, 114 Beowulf, 70 Bergman, Ingmar, 62, 84 Beskrivelse over Finnmarkens Lapper (Leem), 154 Bible, 7– 9, 86, 92, 105, 123, 138, 153 bilingualism, 7, 79, 139, 168 Birgitta of Vadstena, 88 Birgittine Order, 88– 89 Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, 179 Bjarni Herjólfsson, 44 Black Death, 114–17, 119–21 Black Sea, 18, 55 Bloch, Jørgen, 144 Boine, Mari, 158 Bokmål, 85, 115, 126–30, 171. See also Norwegian (language); Nynorsk Boniface IX (pope), 88 Book of Settlements, 30–31, 39–40 Book of the Icelanders, 30, 45 Book on the extent of the earth’s orb, 41 Borin, Lars, 172–73 Borough, Stephen, 156 Brendan, Saint, 41 Britain, 11, 55– 56, 67, 72–73, 143, 178. See also England Broch, Ingvild, 124–25 Brown, Dale Mackenzie, 42

202

i ndex

Brown, Nancy Marie, 62 bubonic plague. See Black Death Byrån för svenska språket, 110 Byzantine Empire, 55, 118, 156 Byzantine Orthodox Republic of Novgorod, 93– 94 Cambridge University, 33 Canada, 44, 161, 163, 177–78, 180 Canute IV (king), 75 Carolina Rediviva Library, 72 Caspian Sea, 55 Catholicism, 104. See also Christianity Celts, 12, 40–41, 51, 61, 112–13, 135, 145 Charles, King, 56 Christian I (king), 121, 123 Christian II (king), 137 Christianity, 67– 69, 75, 93, 103–4, 160 Christianization, 1–2, 37– 56, 68–76, 93, 103, 113, 157– 58 Cité de l’Economie et de la Monnaie, 80 Civil War (US), 178 Clark, Gregory, 82 Clarkson, Iain, 3 class (social), 46, 59– 63, 70, 80– 83, 96, 106–7, 114. See also Scandinavia Clements, Jonathan, 57 Clover, Carol J., 33, 45 Codex Argenteus, 71–72 Codex Runicus (Danish), 2 Coleman, Michael C., 112 colonization, 11, 38, 51, 71, 93, 95, 113–22, 151 Dahl, Jákup, 137, 144 Dalecarlian dialect, 90 Danelagh (Danelaw), 69, 72–74 Danielsen, Victor, 137 Danish (language), 2–14, 26, 30–40, 63– 92, 115, 122–49, 154, 170– 89. See also Old East Norse; Zealand Dano-Norwegian, 126, 177 daughter languages, 2– 5, 15, 18, 20, 24–27, 32, 37, 63. See also Old Norse; and specific languages Dauidin Psalttari (Agricola), 105 Deeds of the Danes (Saxo Grammaticus), 45

Denmark: the Black Death in, 119–21; Christianization of, 56, 68– 69, 75–76; Faroe islands and, 136–38, 148–49; Hanseatic League and, 77–79; immigration and, 13, 175–78; life in, 18–22, 46, 54, 60, 70, 181; minority language groups in, 160, 172–74; naming conventions in, 81– 82, 147; relations with neighboring countries, 10, 115, 121, 126–41, 159, 170, 173; Vikings and, 55, 72–73, 93. See also Christianization; Hanseatic League (Hansa); immigration; religion; Roma; runes; Sámi (people); Vikings Denmark-Norway (Kingdom), 133, 136 De origine actibusque Getarum (Jordanes), 29, 156 Det danske sprogs historie (Skautrup), 65 dialect continuum, 5– 6, 154 dialects: Anglic-Germanic, 36; Danish, 69, 78, 87, 92, 126, 140; Faroese, 58, 136, 142, 145, 148–49 (See also Faroese [language]); Finnish, 17, 24, 97– 98, 101–2, 109–10, 152, 168, 172–73; Germanic, 28, 30; Icelandic, 10, 32, 64; immigration and, 175, 177–78; Mainland Scandinavian, 5– 6; Norwegian, 3, 92, 115, 120, 127–31, 144, 172; of Old Norse, 63; of Proto-IndoEuropean, 16, 27; Sámi, 24, 154, 156, 168; Swedish, 66, 78, 89– 92, 110–11; Swedish-Danish, 90. See also Norwegian (language) Dicuil, 41, 134 Dimmalætting (newspaper), 149 Dixon, R. M. W., 181 Domesday Book, 73–74 DuBois, Thomas, 155, 159 eastern Scandinavian languages. See Danish (language); Finnish (language); Old East Norse; Sámi (language); Swedish (language) Ebenesardóttir, Sigríður Sunna, 45 Egil’s Saga, 63 Einar Hafliðason, 119 Eiríkr raudi Þōrvaldsson, 42, 117 Eiríks saga rauða, 44–45

Index England, 36, 56, 69, 72–73. See also Britain English, 36, 72–76, 83– 86, 99–103, 112, 176–81 En Lappisk Grammatica efter den Dialect (Leem), 156 Erik the Red, son of Thorvald, 42, 117 Estonian (language), 14, 24–29, 90, 97, 151 Et dukkehjem (Ibsen), 129 ethnicity, 16–18, 95, 151, 155, 173–76 Eurasian steppes, 16, 18–19, 102 Europe, 11–13, 18, 37– 56, 107, 114–21, 136–38, 157– 58, 174–77, 180. See also specific languages and nations European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 171–72 Faarlund, Jan Terje, 33, 75, 79, 86 Færeyínga Saga, 40–42, 136 Fagan, Brian, 115, 117 Faro-Danish, 139 Faroe Islands, 3– 5, 31, 37– 67, 113, 118–23, 133–49, 170, 173, 181 Faroese (language), 2–10, 30–47, 57, 63– 64, 85, 133– 50, 170–73. See also Insular Scandinavian; Modern Faroese Faroese Home Rule Act, 141 Fenni, 29–30, 156 Fennoscandia, 2, 4, 13, 17, 21–22, 25, 30, 150 Ferguson, Robert, 54 Finland: immigration and, 11–13, 175–77, 180; life in, 21–22, 30, 117; minority languages in, 172–75; naming conventions in, 103–4; relations with neighboring countries, 6, 10, 18, 70, 90–112, 160; Sámi in, 150– 52, 159– 67. See also Lapland; Lutheranism; Sámi (people) Finlandssvenska, 110 Finland-Swedish, 90 Finnic, 19, 24 Finnish (language), 9–27, 85, 92–112, 151– 52, 161–80. See also Karelian (dialect); Modern Finnish Finnish Civil War, 109 Finnish Crusades, 92– 93 Finnish Independence, 110, 173

203

Finnish-Russian regime, 109 Finnish Sign Language, 173–74 Finnish War, 95 Finnmark, 124, 152, 160. See also Norway; Sámi (people) Finno-Permic (languages), 25 Finno-Ugric (languages), 3– 8, 24–26, 97– 98, 102, 165–72. See also Estonian (language); Finnish (language); Hungarian (language); Sámi (language) First Grammatical Treatise, 31, 47, 64. See also Fyrsta Málfræðiritgerðin First Sound Shift, 27–28 fishing, 21–22, 31, 37, 50, 117–18, 135–39, 159 Flateyjarbók (Flat island book), 41 Flóki Vilgerðarson, 39 folk tales, 32, 43, 107, 136, 139–41 Folkung dynasty, 70, 77 food, 22, 47–48, 53, 96, 116–17. See also agriculture; fishing; reindeer Føroyinga søga, 40–42, 136 Føroyska Málnevdin (Language Committee), 144 France, 11, 73, 80 Frank, Roberta, 74 Franks, 55 Frederick III (king of Denmark-Norway), 68 French (language), 26, 73, 76, 83, 102–3, 125, 181 Funen, 87. See also Zealand Fyrsta Málfræðiritgerðin, 31, 47, 64 Gadh, Hemming, 87 Gaelic (language), 36. See also Ireland Gallen-Kallela, Akseli, 105 Gaup, Nils, 158 Geats, 70. See also Sweden gender (language), 26, 34, 85, 90– 91, 99, 173. See also grammar German (language), 33–34, 75–79, 83, 92, 100–104, 125, 176, 180. See also Balto-Slavic-Germanic; Hanseatic League (Hansa); High German; Low German; Middle Low German (MLG) German Empire, 110 Germania (Tacitus), 29, 155

204

i ndex

Germanic languages, 1–7, 14–16, 27–28, 35, 156, 170–72, 174. See also Danish (language); English; First Sound Shift; German (language); Germanic Sound Shift; High German; IndoEuropean (languages); Low German; Norwegian (language); Second Sound Shift; Swedish (language) Germanic Scandinavian languages, 3, 7–8, 16, 171 Germanic Sound Shift, 27–28 Germanic tribes, 29–30, 55, 68, 71, 156 Germany, 11, 54, 66, 69, 82, 95– 96, 107, 119–20, 143, 174–78 Gerner, Henrik, 126 Gesta Danorum (Saxo Grammaticus), 45 Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum (Adam of Bremen), 44 Getica (Jordanes), 68 Ghazāl, Al-, 54 Gimbutas, Marija, 18 glottal stop, 86–88 Götar, 70, 89. See also Sweden Goths, 29, 71, 156 Gøtudanskt, 139, 145 Grænlandslýsing (Greenland report), 43 Grænlendinga saga, 44 Grágás (Gray Goose Laws), 63 grammar: Danish, 87– 88; Faroese, 144–47; Finnish, 98–100; German influence on, 122; of Modern Scandinavian languages, 84– 86; of Old Norse, 33–35, 58, 74–75; of proto languages, 23–29; Sámi, 156– 57, 165– 66; Swedish, 88– 92 Grand Duchy of Finland, 106, 109 “Gray Goose” Laws, 63 “Great Hunger,” 117 Greece, 18, 55, 67 Greenland, 1, 10, 31, 39–44, 67– 68, 113, 117, 121, 173 Greenland report (Grænlandslýsing), 43 Gregory (pope), 47 Grimm, Jacob, 27–28 Grimm brothers, 107 Grímr Kamban, 41 Grundtvig, S. H., 144 Grünthal, Riho, 94

Gunnhildr, 52 Gustavus III (king), 83 Gustavus Adolphus (king), 83, 105 Gustav Vasa Swedish Bible, 82 Gyarmathi, Sámuel, 25 Haakon Haakonson (Håkon Håkonsson) (king of Norway), 113 Hagström, Björn, 123, 137–38, 141 Hajdú, Péter, 24 Håkon Håkonsson (king of Norway), 113 Hakulinen, Lauri, 97 Halland, 87– 90 Häme, 97, 105 Hammershaimb, Venceslaus Ulricus, 134, 142 Hancock, Ian, 172 Hanseatic League (Hansa), 66, 69, 77– 82, 92, 122 Harald V (king of Norway), 163 Harald Bluetooth Gormsson, 68 Haraldr hárfagri (king) (Harald Fairhair), 41 Harrying of the North, 73 Haugen, Einar, 65, 77, 121, 126–27 Hauksbók, 40 Hávamál, 1–2. See also Odin Heather, Peter, 40, 50 Hebrides, 113 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 129 Heimastýrislóg (Home Rule Act), 143 Heimskringla (Snorri Sturluson), 45 High German, 28, 70, 82– 83, 92. See also German (language); Low German Hirvonen, Vuokko, 158 History of the Danish language (Skautrup), 65 Holy Roman Empire, 77 Home Rule Act (Heimastýrislóg), 143 Hrolfssaga, 33 Hungarian (language), 24–27, 97, 100 Ibn Dihya, 54 Ibsen, Henrik, 129 Iceland: life in, 44, 51– 53, 59– 60, 113, 139, 179; literary sagas of, 30– 50, 54, 136, 142; minority languages in, 135, 174; naming conventions in, 57, 147;

Index

205

relations with neighboring countries, 121–22, 136, 143; religion in, 47, 56, 123. See also Alþingi (Icelandic parliament); immigration; Paganism; religion; sagas Icelandic, 2–10, 17, 30– 64, 73, 85– 86, 115, 123, 133–46, 170, 174. See also Insular Scandinavian; Modern Icelandic Icelandic Language Institute, 63 Icelandic Sign Language, 174 immigration, 10, 79, 160, 174– 80. See also migration Inari Sámi, 24, 26, 173 Indo-Aryan Indo-European (language), 172 Indo-European (languages), 3, 26, 97– 98, 102, 167, 172. See also Danish (language); English; French (language); German (language); Germanic languages; Italian (language); Norwegian (language); Spanish (language); Swedish (language) Indo-Iranian, 20 inflection, 20, 35, 74–75, 84, 100, 146, 166. See also grammar Insular Scandinavian, 6, 31, 64 intonation, 26, 100, 110 Inuit people, 42–44 Ireland, 38, 41, 56, 112–13, 117, 135, 178 Ísland. See Iceland Íslendingabók, 30, 45 Íslendingasögur, 45 Íslensk málstöð (Icelandic Language Institute), 63 Italian (language), 26, 103 Ívar Bárðarson, 43

Judaism, 38, 54, 120 Justinian (emperor), 118 Justinian Plague. See Black Death Jutland, 38, 86– 87. See also Danish (language)

Jahr, Ernst Håkon, 124–25 James, King, 8 Jannok, Sofia, 158 Janson, Tore, 98 Jarl, Birger, 70, 77 Jesch, Judith, 51, 53 Jews, 119–20, 173. See also World War II Jochens, Jenny, 53 Joensen, Hans Debes, 144 Jordanes, 29, 156 Joukahainen (newspaper), 107

Laestadianism, 160. See also Lutheranism Laestadius, Lars Levi, 160 Laitinen, Kai, 105, 109 Landnámabók, 30, 39–40 Landsmål, 126–27. See also Norwegian (language); Nynorsk language: the Black Death and, 114–21; class and, 46, 59– 63, 70, 80– 83, 96, 106–7, 114; colloquial, 101, 129, 139, 176; development of, 2–3, 5– 6, 7– 8, 15,

Kalaallisut. See Greenland Kalevala (Lönnrot), 98, 107, 109 Kallio, Petri, 102 Kalmar Union, 121, 136 Kalo, 172–73. See also Finland; Roma Kanteletar (Lönnrot), 107 Karelia, 4, 97, 105, 152. See also Russia Karelian (dialect), 24, 97, 152, 173. See also Finnish (language) Kharuzin, Nikolai, 155 Kildin Sámi, 24, 165 Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Grimm brothers), 107 Kingdom of Denmark-Norway, 134. See also Denmark; Norway Kingdom of Sweden. See Sweden Kivi, Aleksis, 5, 108 Knud IV den Hellige, 74 Knudsen, Knud, 126, 129 Koivulehto, Jorma, 19–20, 152 Kola Peninsula, 152, 161 Korhonen, Mikko, 155 Korhonen, Olavi, 151 Koskenniemi, Kimmo, 100 Kringvarp Føroya (broadcast station), 149 kvæði (heroic ballads), 141. See also ballads Kven, 24, 163, 173 Kyrkolagen (church law), 106

206

i ndex

language (continued) 18, 30, 71, 171; endangered, 162, 164, 181; gender in, 26, 34, 85, 90– 91, 99, 173; grammar, 84– 86; immigration and, 174–80; inflection, 20, 35, 74–75, 84, 100, 146, 166; minority, 90, 110– 11, 154, 160, 163, 171–76; naming conventions and, 57, 80– 82, 103–4, 131, 147, 161– 62; nationalism and, 107– 8, 125, 132, 139, 142, 169, 181; oral traditions and, 30, 40, 50, 107, 120, 136–41, 158; policy, 5, 106–10, 112, 147; power and, 17, 70, 73, 84, 142, 170; proto, 15– 16, 20, 23–24, 99; purism, 63, 128, 144; religion and, 69, 75–76, 103, 106, 112, 133, 137–39; trade and, 76–78; written, 37–42, 141. See also Bible; Christianization; grammar; intonation; Latin; loanwords; Lord’s Prayer; Lutheranism; Protestant Reformation; religion; slang; written language; and individual languages Languages in Contact (Weinreich), 3 Lapland, 4, 13, 159– 61 Lapp. See Sámi (people) Lappi. See Sámi (language) Lapponia (Schefferus), 156– 58 Lapp-skall-vara-lapp (Lapp shall be Lapp), 163 Larsen, Karen, 122 Late Loan Hypothesis, 20, 76 Latin, 1–2, 45–47, 66– 69, 75–76, 88– 89, 92, 103–4, 122–25, 133, 167. See also Christianity; Christianization; naming conventions; religion; Roman Church Laxness, Halldór, 179 Leem, Knud, 154 Lehtola, Véli-Pekka, 151 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 25 Leif Eriksson, 44 Leonard, Steven Pax, 136 Lewis Chessmen, 60– 63 Lexicon Faroense (Grundtvig and Bloch), 144 Liber de mensura orbis terrae, 41 Life of St. Margaret, The, 49 Lindow, John, 33

Linnaeus, Carl, 81 Linné, Carl von. See Linnaeus, Carl literacy, 1–2, 46–49, 177. See also written language literature, 32, 44, 52, 54, 59, 105– 9, 156– 59. See also poetry; sagas loanword hypotheses, 19–20 loanwords, 6, 63, 74–76, 86, 89, 100–103, 129, 144–45, 165– 68, 179 Lofoten Islands, 117 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 29, 107, 157 Lönnrot, Elias, 98, 105, 107 Lord’s Prayer, 7– 9, 35, 142–43. See also Bible; Christianity; language; religion Low German, 28, 70, 78– 80, 82, 92, 122. See also German (language); High German; Middle Low German (MLG) Lule Sámi, 24, 153, 167– 68 Lutheranism, 69, 82– 83, 92, 94, 104, 112, 123, 137–39, 149, 160. See also Laestadianism Lyngbye, H. C., 138 Mainland Scandinavian. See Danish (language); Norwegian (language); Swedish (language) Margaret I (queen), 122 Margolin, David, 133, 141 Margrétar saga, 49 Margrét hinn oddhaga (Margret the Adroit), 62 Martel, Charles (ruler of the Franks), 55 Mattias Andersson, 158 Meänkieli, 24, 174 Mediterranean Sea, 22 Meinander, Henrik, 94 Meriot, Christian, 156 Middle East, 13, 175–76 Middle Low German (MLG), 66, 69, 78, 84. See also Low German migration, 13, 17, 22, 36, 71, 79, 174. See also immigration minority languages, 90, 110–11, 154, 163, 171–76. See also dialects; Sámi (language) Mitchell, Joni, 161 Moberg, Vilhelm, 60

Index Modern Faroese, 58– 59, 63, 142, 149. See also Faroese (language) Modern Finnish, 24, 97– 99. See also Finnish (language) Modern Icelandic, 58– 59, 63. See also Icelandic Modern Norwegian, 115, 131, 142. See also Norwegian (language) Modern Swedish, 83– 85, 89, 110. See also Swedish (language) mother languages, 10, 15–16, 30–31, 37, 57, 63– 64, 155. See also daughter languages; Faroese (language); Icelandic; Old Norse; Sámi (language); and individual proto languages Muitalus sámiid birra (Turi), 157 music, 102, 158– 59. See also oral traditions mythology, 24, 51, 107, 156. See also Paganism naming conventions, 57, 80– 82, 103–4, 131, 147, 161– 62. See also patronyms nationalism, 107–8, 125, 139, 142, 169, 181 Naturalis historia (Pliny the Elder), 4 Nauerby, Tom, 41, 58, 145 navigation, 39–41 Navigation Acts, 178 New Norwegian, 127, 171. See also Nynorsk New Testament, 49, 89, 97, 105, 137, 153. See also Se Wsi Testamenti (Agricola) Nicholas II (czar), 109 Nicopolis ad Istrum, 71 Nordic, 5. See also Seven Sisters of the North Nordic Bronze Age, 12 Nordstrom, Byron J., 3 Normans, 56, 73, 75 Norn, 32, 35, 181 Norse: life of, 50– 54, 59– 63, 117; religion of, 24, 47, 50, 59, 93, 107, 173; settlements of, 10, 31–45, 51, 133, 135, 145. See also Celts; Old East Norse; Old Norse; Old West Norse; Paganism; religion; Vikings Norsk Grammatik (Aasen), 128 Norsk Ordbog (Aasen), 128

207

North, the. See Scandinavia North America, 10, 31, 38, 42, 44, 60, 113, 161, 177– 80. See also Vinland North Atlantic, 6, 10, 30–32, 37–41, 44, 51, 58, 113–19, 134–36, 143. See also Faroe Islands; Orkney Islands; Shetland Islands North Germanic, 1, 7, 71. See also Danish (language); Faroese (language); Icelandic; Norwegian (language); Swedish (language) North Sámi, 4, 16, 165–70 North Sea, 4, 13, 77 Norway: the Black Death in, 114–21; Denmark and, 10, 115, 121–36, 159, 170; immigration and, 13, 38, 102, 175–78, 180; language policies in, 5, 79; life in, 18, 21–22, 30, 52, 60, 62; minority languages in, 24, 171–74; Sámi and, 150– 52, 156, 159– 64, 167; Vikings and, 93, 113. See also Kven; Norse Norwegian (language): dialects, 3, 92, 114, 120, 127–31, 144, 172, 175; external languages and, 75, 115, 122–26, 129–30, 170; grammar, 84– 85, 90; minority languages and, 162– 63, 172; Modern, 5, 32, 34; naming conventions in, 81, 131; Old Norse and, 2, 6, 30–33, 40, 58, 63– 64, 66, 132, 144, 170; written, 128–30. See also Bokmål; Landsmål; Modern Norwegian; Nynorsk; Old West Norse Novgorod, 93– 94, 159, 161. See also Russia Nuorttanaste (newspaper), 164 Nynorsk, 85, 115, 127–30, 171–72. See also Landsmål; Norwegian (language) Oakes, Leigh, 175, 181 Ođđa Sápmelaš (newspaper), 164 Oddur Gottskalksson, 49 Odin, 1–2, 47, 67, 74 Oftedal, Magne, 126–27 Ohthere, 25 Ólafur Egilsson, 44 Old East Norse, 5, 30, 32, 36, 64– 66, 90, 122, 170. See also Danish (language); Swedish (language)

208

i ndex

Oldenburg, royal house of, 69 Old Icelandic, 32–33, 35, 37, 41, 51, 63– 64. See also Icelandic; sagas Old Norse, 1, 6, 16, 31–36, 57– 58, 73–75, 84–86, 131–33, 142. See also Danish (language); Faroese (language); Icelandic; Norn; Norwegian (language); Old East Norse; Old West Norse; Swedish (language) Old Norse-Icelandic, 32–34, 38, 45, 47, 63. See also Icelandic; Old Icelandic; Old Norse Old West Norse, 5, 10, 30, 32, 63– 66, 90, 122, 144, 170. See also Faroese (language); Icelandic; Norwegian (language); Sámi (language) Oliver, Neil, 43, 55 oral traditions, 30, 40, 50, 107, 120, 136– 41, 158. See also ballads Origin and Deeds of the Goths, The (Jordanes), 29, 156 Orkneyinga Saga, 50 Orkney Islands, 32, 35, 40, 113, 121 Ottar, 25 Paganism, 1–2, 47, 50– 60, 67, 74–77, 93, 105. See also Christianization; mythology Paleo-Germanic (language), 102 Paleo-Laplandic (language), 15–16 Paradísarheimt (Laxness), 179 Paradise Reclaimed (Laxness), 179 patronyms, 57, 74, 81– 82, 103–4, 131, 147, 162. See also naming conventions Petri, Olavus, 82 Pite Sámi, 24 plague. See Black Death Pleiades, 5 Pliny the Elder, 4 Poe, Edgar Allen, 29 Poetic Edda (Snorri Sturluson), 2, 59 poetry, 2, 52, 54, 59, 106, 156. See also literature Poland, 11, 67 pre-Scandinavian. See North Germanic Price, T. Douglas, 12 Procopius, 29, 156 Prose Edda, The (Snorri Sturluson), 45

Protestant Reformation, 69, 82– 89, 92, 103– 8, 123–24, 133–39, 162 Proto-Balto-Finnic, 155. See also Finnic; Sámi (language) Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU), 6–7, 14–16, 18, 24, 97. See also Estonian (language); Finnish (language); Sámi (language) Proto-Germanic, 7, 14–16, 27–28. See also Danish (language); English; German (language); Norwegian (language); Swedish (language) Proto-Indo-European, 6–7, 14–21, 27–28, 102, 167, 171. See also Germanic languages Proto-Indo-Iranian, 102 proto-languages, 15, 23–24, 99. See also individual languages Proto-Norse, 1, 16, 165. See also North Germanic; Old Norse Proto-Sámi, 155, 168. See also Sámi (language) Proto-Scandinavian, 16 Proto-Uralic (PU), 6, 15–21, 25, 97, 102. See also Russia Puhekieli (Finnish), 101–4. See also Finnish (language) Pytheas, 29 Rask, Rasmus, 27 reindeer, 12, 21, 159, 163, 168– 69 Reisubók Séra Ólafs Egilssonar, 44 religion, 1–2, 24, 46–47, 82– 94, 103–7, 119, 123–24, 133–38, 149, 156– 60. See also Christianization; Lutheranism; mythology; Paganism; Protestant Reformation Renfrew, Colin, 18 Renfrew’s Anatolian Hypothesis, 18 Rerum Geographicarum (Strabo), 29 Reuter, Mikael, 110 Richards, Julian, 51 Riddu Riđđu festival, 158 Rígsþula, 59 Riksdagen, 163 Rikssvenska, 110 rímur (ballads), 49 Rollo (Viking chieftain), 38, 52, 56 Roma, 172–74

Index Roman (people), 29–30, 76, 156. See also Latin Roman Catholic Birgittine Order, 88– 89 Romance languages. See individual languages Roman Church, 62, 66– 69, 75–76, 93, 120, 133, 137. See also Christianity; Christianization; Latin Roman Empire, 13, 60, 118 Romani (language), 172–74 Rucouskiria (Agricola), 97, 105 runes, 1–2, 13, 30, 37, 66– 68, 76, 156 Rus, 55. See also Sweden; Vikings Russenorsk, 124–25 Russia, 11–26, 55– 56, 93– 97, 102–25, 150– 55, 159– 67, 173–76. See also Karelia; Novgorod Russian (language), 4, 103, 107, 124, 166– 67, 173, 176 Russian Empire, 95, 108, 160 Russian Federation, 151, 164 Russian Revolution, 109 sagas, 32– 52, 57– 59, 122, 136, 142. See also individual sagas sagnir (folk legends), 139. See also folk tales Sámediggi (Sámi parliament), 154, 163– 64 Samefolket (newspaper), 164 Sámi (language), 2–26, 30, 97, 150–74, 166, 180 Sámi (people), 4, 10, 161 Sámi allaskuvla (Sámi University College), 160 Sammallahti, Pekka, 154 Samoyedic languages, 6, 97 Sapmelaš (newspaper), 164 Sápmi, 4, 152, 159– 60. See also Sámi (language); Sámi (people) Sápmi (journal), 154 Savonian (dialect), 97, 102 Saxo Grammaticus, 45 Scandinavia: the Black Death in, 114–21; Christianity in, 2, 46–47, 56, 66– 69, 75–76, 93, 103–4, 160; Danish rule in, 137–41; definition of, ii, 4– 6; early history of, 10–30, 37–42; English

209

and, 75, 180– 81; foreign languages in, 83, 92, 125–26, 171; Hanseatic League and, 66– 69, 76– 82, 92, 122; immigration and, 13–21, 24, 174– 80; international relations within, 6, 70, 90–112, 115, 121, 126–41, 159– 60, 170; minority languages in, 160, 171–75; naming conventions in, 77, 81– 82; the Protestant Reformation in, 69, 82– 89, 92, 103– 8, 123–24, 133–39, 162; Russian in, 122–25; Sámi in, 150– 69; sister languages of, 1– 6, 32, 58, 84, 87, 124, 142, 170; society of, 23–24, 29, 31, 50– 60, 76, 84, 106, 113, 117–18. See also Christianization; Denmark; Faroe Islands; Finland; Hanseatic League (Hansa); Iceland; Nordic; Normans; Norse; Norway; religion; Sámi (people); Seven Sisters of the North; Sweden; Thule Scandinavian Language Contacts (Ureland and Clarkson), 3 Scandoromani, 172–73 Scania, 12, 66, 68, 87, 90. See also Sweden Schefferus, Johannes, 156 Schleswig-Holstein, 172 Schnabel, Marcus, 126 Schoolfield, George G., 105 Schrijver, Peter, 3, 6 Schrøter, Johan Hendrick, 138 Scotland, 32, 35–36, 38, 54, 56, 60– 61, 74 scribes, 48–49, 86, 156. See also literacy; literature; written language Seaver, Kirsten, 42–43 Second Sound Shift, 28 Seitsemän Veljestä (Kivi), 5, 108 Serbo-Croatian, 173 Seven Sisters of the North, 2– 5, 10, 170– 81. See also Danish (language); Faroese (language); Finnish (language); Finno-Ugric (languages); Icelandic; Norwegian (language); Old East Norse; Old Norse; Old West Norse; Sámi (language); Scandinavia; Swedish (language); and individual languages Seventh Seal, The (Bergman), 62 Se Wsi Testamenti (Agricola), 97, 105

210

i ndex

Shetland Islands, 32, 35, 40, 113, 121 Siberia, 6, 11, 155, 158 Sigríður Sunna Ebenesardóttir, 45 Sigurd the Völsung (Sigurd, the dragon slayer), 138 Silver Bible, 71–72 Simon, Francesca, 62 Sirma, Olaus, 157 sister languages, 1– 6, 10, 32, 50, 58, 84, 87, 124, 142, 170– 81. See also Old Norse; Seven Sisters of the North Skåne. See Scania Skånske Lov, 66 Skautrup, Peter, 65 Skolt Sámi, 24, 160, 173 skrælingar. See Inuit people slang, 101, 129, 139, 176 slavery, 56, 59– 60 Sleeping Army, The (Simon), 62 Slocum, Jonathan, 25 Smiley, Jane, 46 Snæland. See Iceland Snellman, Johan Vilhelm, 108 Snorri Sturluson, 45, 59 “Snowland.” See Iceland Song of Hiawatha, The (Longfellow), 107 Soviet Union. See Russia Spain, 54, 71, 118 Spanish (language), 26, 176 Spurkland, Terje, 67 Steinunn, 52 Stiernhelm, Georg, 25 Stockholm Blood Bath, 121 Stockholms Banco, 80 stød, 87–88. See also glottal stop Stone Age, 12, 17, 21 Strabo, 29 Suomalainen (newspaper), 108 Suomi, 152, 156 Suomi (newspaper), 108 Svabo, Jens Christian, 139, 141 Svea dialects, 89 Svear. See Sweden Sweden: the Black Death in, 119–21; Hanseatic League and, 77– 80; immigration and, 11, 13, 55, 174–78, 180; life in, 18, 21–22, 60, 83; naming conventions in, 81–82; relations with neighboring

countries, 6, 68, 70, 93–112, 122–24, 136, 159; religion in, 56, 75–76, 82– 83, 89; Romani in, 172–73; Sámi in, 21–22, 150– 52, 154, 156, 159– 64, 167; written language in, 67, 89 Swedish (language): development of, 2, 6, 10, 30, 32, 40, 58, 63– 65, 76, 170; dialects, 87, 89– 90, 92; in Finland, 18, 94– 97; grammar, 34, 75, 84– 85, 87, 90– 91; minority languages and, 162– 63; policy, 83, 175–76, 181; pronunciation, 86, 91. See also Old East Norse Swedish Academy, 83, 85, 89 Swedish Bible, 83 Swedish Lappland, 161 Swedish Royal Library, 71 Swein Asleifsson, 50 Tacitus, 29, 155– 56 tættir (satirical ballads), 141 Tambets, Kristiina, 155 Tamm, Ditlev, 60 Tapio, god of the forest, 93 Thirty Years War, 72, 83, 105, 157 Þorsteinn Vilhjálmsson, 39 Thorvald, 42 Thule, 28–29. See also Norway; Sweden Tolkien, J. R. R., 107 trade, 17, 77– 80, 93, 122, 136. See also Hanseatic League (Hansa) Traveler, 173. See also Romani (language) Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, The, 44 treaty of Kiel, 121 treaty of Stralsund, 69 Turi, Johan, 157 Turkey, 16, 18, 173, 176 Turkic, 25 Turtushi, Ibrāhīm b. Ya’qūb, al-, 54 Udmurt, 25 Ugric (language), 24 Uig Bay, 61 Ukraine, 67 Ukrainian steppes, 29 Ultima Thule (Longfellow), 29 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 164

Index United States, 70, 106, 143, 163, 172, 175–80 University of California–Davis, 82 University of Copenhagen, 46, 141 University of Faroe Islands, 149 University of Helsinki, 107, 109 University of Turku, 105 Unnur Ketilsdottir, 53 Uppsala University, 72 Ural Mountains, 15, 25, 97 Ureland, P. Sture, 3 US Comprehensive Immigration Act, 179 Utsi, Paulus, 158 Utsjoki, River, 13 Vadstena, 89 vadstenaspråk, 89 Valdemar of Sweden, 70 Valkeapää, Nils-Aslak, 158 Västgötalagen, 66 Viikinäinen in Heinola, 21 vikingr. See Norse Vikings, 5, 37–39, 50– 57, 72–73, 93– 94, 113, 161, 174, 177 Vikør, 69 Vildanden (Ibsen), 129 Vinland, 38–39, 44–45, 113 Vinland sagas, 44–45 Visigoths, 71 vocabulary, 20, 27, 167. See also language; loanwords Vogt, Helle, 60 Votic, 24–25 Vuorela, Katri, 172–73

211

Weinreich, Max, 154 Weinreich, Uriel, 3 western Scandinavian languages. See Danish (language); Faroese (language); Icelandic; Norwegian (language) Western Settlement (Norse), 42–43 west-Finnish dialect, 97 Westrogothic Law. See Västgötalagen West Scandinavian. See Faroese (language); Icelandic; Norwegian (language); Old West Norse William, King, 73 Winge, Vibeke, 84 Winroth, Andrew, 74 Wittenberg (Luther), 82 Wolf, Kirsten, 73 women, 22, 44–46, 50– 54, 57, 60, 106, 135, 145, 156 World War II, 90– 91, 143, 174– 81 written language: early history and, 37–42; grammar and, 26–32, 99–107; literature and, 107– 9, 142–49; plague and, 114–15; religion and, 123–33; runic, 1–2, 67– 68; of Sámi, 153– 58; scribes and, 48– 50, 86, 156. See also literacy; literature; runes; sagas Wuorinen, John H., 96 Wylie, Jonathan, 133, 141 Yersin, Alexandre, 118 Yiddish, 154, 174 Yoiks, 158– 59. See also oral tradition Zealand, 69, 86– 87, 137