THE SCANDINAVIAN

INVASION OF ENGLAND
The Viking Age Period
The Viking Age lasted roughly from the eighth century to
the eleventh, with the Viking attacks on Europe
beginning around 750 AD (Barber 1993:127). The
Scandinavians were excellent sailors, and they had
impressive ships and navigational However, the
Vikings were mostly seen as barbaric warriors, rather
than tradesmen, and the areas of western Europe that
suffered the most from Viking attacks were Britain and
Ireland.
Main Viking Expansion Routes
There are several reasons why the Scandinavians took to the sea
and headed for the British Isles; one might have been
overpopulation in the harsh and poor landscape of the north. 
 Another reason was that in the old Scandinavian society it was
customary to leave inheritances to the eldest son, which led to
the younger sons wanting to seek their fortune elsewhere.
However, the major reason might have been the fall of the
Frisians, who were, until the late eighth century, the greatest
maritime power of North-West Europe. This opened up the
sea-routes and thus enabled the Scandinavians to travel south.
The first Viking attacks on England took place
around 800 AD and started as merely plundering
raids, but some fifty years later the attacks had
become more serious and groups had even
started spending the winters in Britain. Previously
these expeditions had been seasonal; winter was
not a good time for war or travel, neither by sea
nor by land. They found that winters in the south
were milder, there was plenty of good land to take
and, of course, the seas stayed open, so there was
no reason to return home.
MAP of England Counties
Scandinavian Settlement
THE SETTLEMENT OF THE DANES IN
ENGLAND
From around 800 AD waves of Danish assaults on the
coastlines of the British Isles were gradually followed
by a succession of Danish settlers. Danish raiders first
began to settle in England starting in 865, when
brothers Halfdan Ragnarsson and Ivar the Boneless
wintered in East Anglia. They soon moved north and in
867 captured Northumbria and it´s capital, York.
Some indication of their number may be had from the
fact that more than 1,400 places in England bear
Scandinavian names.
The area occupied by the Danelaw was roughly the area
to the north of a line drawn between London and
Chester, excluding the portion of Northumbria to the
east of the Pennines.
Five fortified towns became particularly important in the
Danelaw: Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and
Lincoln.
ENDURING IMPACT OF THE DANELAW

The influence of this period of Scandinavian

settlement can still be seen in the North of
England and the East Midlands, and is particularly
evident in place-names: name endings such as
-howe, -by ("village") or "thorp" ("hamlet") having
Norse origins. There seems to be a remarkable
number of Kirby/Kirkby names, some with
remains of Anglo-Saxon building indicating both a
Norse origin and early church building
Scandinavian names blended with the English -ton
give rise to typical hybrid place-names.     
Old East Norse and  Old English  were still
somewhat mutually comprehensible. The
contact between these languages in the
Danelaw caused the incorporation of many
Norse words into the English language,
including the word law itself, sky and
window, and the third person plural pronouns
she, they, them and their. Many Old Norse
words still survive in the dialects of
Northeastern England.
THE AMALGAMATION OF THE TWO
PEOPLES
The amalgamation of the two peoples was greatly
facilitated by the close kinship that existed between
them. The policy of the English kings in the period
when they were re-establishing their control over the
Danelaw was to accept as an established fact the mixed
population of the district and to devise a modus vivendi
for its people. In this effort they were aided by the
natural adaptability of the Scandinavian.
The Danes assimilated to most of the ways of English
life. Many of them early accepted Christianity.
The long-term linguistic effect of
Vikings
The long-term linguistic effect of the Viking settlements
in England was threefold:
(1) over a thousand words eventually became part of
Standard English;
(2) numerous places in the East and North-east of
England have Danish names;
(3) and many English personal names are of
Scandinavian origin. Scandinavian words that entered
the English language included landing, score, beck,
fellow, take, busting, and steersman. 
The vast majority of loan words did not appear
in documents until the early twelfth century;
these included many modern words which used
sk- sounds, such as skirt, sky, and skin; other
words appearing in written sources at this time
included again, awkward, birth, cake, dregs,
fog, freckles, gasp, law, moss, neck, ransack,
root, scowl, sister, seat, sly, smile, want, weak,
and window. Some of the words that came into
use are among the most common in English,
such as both, same, get, and give.
The system of personal pronouns was affected, with they, them,
and their replacing the earlier forms. Old Norse influenced the
verb to be; the replacement of sindon by are is almost certainly
Scandinavian in origin, as is the third-person-singular ending -s
in the present tense of verbs.
There are more than 1,500 Scandinavian place names in
England, mainly in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (within the
former boundaries of the Danelawmarker): over 600 end in -by,
the Scandinavian word for "village" or "town" — for example
Grimsby, Naseby, and Whitby; many others end in -thorpe
("farm"), -thwaite ("clearing"), and -toft ("homestead").
SCANDINAVIAN LOANWORDS AND THEIR CHARACTER

Scandinavian vocabulary penetrated nearly every area of the language,

but most words of Scandinavian origin in English are everyday
words:
(1) The nouns bank, birth, booth, egg, husband, law, leg, root, score,
sister, skin, trust, wing and window.
(2) The adjectives awkward, flat, happy, ill, loose, low, odd, sly, ugly,
weak, and wrong.
(3) The verbs to cast, clip, crawl, cut, die, drown, gasp, give, lift,
nag, scare, sprint, take, and want.
(4) And of course the present plural of ‘to be’, are.
(5) The pronouns both, same, they, them and their.
A few examples of later borrowings from the Scandinavian languages
are fjord, saga, ski, slalom, smorgasbord and viking.
THE RELATION BETWEEN
BORROWED AND NATIVE WORDS
In many cases the new words could have supplied no real
need in the English vocabulary. They made their way
into English simply as the result of the mixture of the
two peoples.
PERIOD AND EXTENT OF INFLUENCE
It is possible to estimate the extent of the Scandinavian influence by the
number of borrowed words that exist in Standard English. That number
is about 900.
These are almost always words designating common everyday things and
fundamental concepts. There are, according to Wright, the editor of the
English Dialect Dictionary, thousands of Scandinavian words that are
still a part of the everyday speech of people in the north and east of
England and are much as part of the living language as those that are
used in other parts of the country and have made their way into literature.
Locally, the Scandinavian influence was tremendous. The period during
which this large Danish element was making its way into English was the
tenth and eleventh centuries. This was the time in which the merging of
the two people was taking place.