Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

all the Germanic peoples of the Middle Ages. They were the best sailors of their time. They had ships, which they called “longships,” that had a dragon, the head of a dragon, on the prow. They had masts, sails; and they were fitted with rows of oars. It was said of one of the Norwegian kings, Olaf, that he was so agile he could jump from oar to oar as he sailed the ship. 4 The maritime and bellicose adventures of the Vikings were extraordinary. To begin with, we have the conquest of northern and central England, where they founded a region called Danelaw, “the law of the Danes,” because that is where Danish law ruled. That’s where the people settled. They were farmers, and they were also warriors, and they ended up mingling with the Saxons and disappearing among them. But they left many words in the English language. Generally speaking, languages take nouns and adjectives from other languages. But English still has Norse pronouns. For example, the word “they” is a Danish word. The Saxons said
hi
, but as English had “he,” the words were confused, and they ended up adopting the Danish “they.” 5 The word “dream” is also Danish. In the dialect of the farmers of Yorkshire, the site of one of the principal Danish settlements, many Norse words persist. When I was in York, I had the opportunity to speak with the art critic, SirHerbert Read, and he told me that years before, a Danish or Norwegian ship—I cannot remember which—was shipwrecked off the coast of Yorkshire. 6 Naturally, the people who lived in the town went to help the shipwrecked sailors. He spoke with the captain, who spoke English, like all educated Scandinavians—in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, English is taught in primary school—but the sailors and the less educated people did not speak English, though they managed to communicate with the fishermen and farmers who came to help. And this is remarkable, if we consider that at least ten or eleven centuries had passed. Nevertheless, there were still enough remnants of the Norse language in English for these common folks to understand each other. He said that a Yorkshire farmer would not say, “I am going to York,” but rather “I’m going
till
York,” and that “till” is Norse. We could offer multiple examples. But for the sake of brevity, here’s one: the day of the week “Thursday,” which in Saxon is
thunresdæg
, and contains the Norse name for Thor. But let’s return to the Vikings.
    The Vikings were individual adventurers. This is one reason there was never a Norse empire. The Norsemen had no consciousness of race. Each person pledged loyalty to his tribe and his chief. There was a moment in English history when there could have been a Norse empire, when Cnut was king of England, Denmark, and Norway. 7 But he had no consciousness of race. He chose Saxons and Danes, indiscriminately, as governors and ministers. The truth is, the idea of empire was a Roman idea, one totally foreign to the Germanic mind. But let’s look at what the Vikings did. They established kingdoms in England and in France, in the county of Normandy, which means “men from the north.” They sacked London and Paris. They could have remained in those cities, but they preferred to demand a tribute and withdraw. They established a Danish kingdom in Ireland. It is believed that the city of Dublin was founded by them. They discovered America—they settled on the east coast of America—and they discovered Greenland. 8 This idea of calling it Greenland is almost like an auctioneer’s trick, because Greenland is a land of ice floes. But they named it Greenland to attract colonists. Then they abandoned America. They could have been the conquerors of America, but such a poor land, a land inhabited by Eskimos and redskins, a land without precious metals—they never reached Mexico—held no interest for them. Then, to the south, they sacked cities in France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, and even reached Constantinople. The Byzantine emperor of Constantinople had a guard of Scandinavian warriors. 9 They had come from Sweden, after traversing all of Russia. It has been said that the first kingdom of Russia was founded by a Norseman named Rurik, from whom the country derives its name. Viking graves have been found along the banks of the Black Sea. They also conquered those small islands to the north of the British Isles, the Shetlands, the Orkneys. 10 The inhabitants now speak a dialect that contains