Resumen de Scandinavian influence in Old English poetry: A study of The Battle of Brunanburh
One of the ways in which the general interest on the Viking world has been reflected in academia is the study of the influence that the language of these Northern peoples had in Old English during the Scandinavian invasion (8th-11th century). This paper aims to shed some light on this topic by studying the Scandinavian elements appearing in the Old English poem The Battle of Brunanburh (937). In order to do so, the events involved in the contact between Old English and Old Norse, as well as in the composition of the poem will be contextualised. After this, a review on the nature of The Battle of Brunanburh (i.e. heroic poetry) will be presented together with the proposal of a translation of the poem into contemporary English, with the objective of improving the understanding of the work and thus facilitating its subsequent analysis. Finally, the phenomenon of Scandinavian borrowing in Old English will be introduced, followed by a study of the etymologies of the vocabulary employed in The Battle of Brunanburh. The results of the analysis of the poem’s lexicon show that at least 5 out of 343 words in the text are of Scandinvian origin. These findings seem to indicate that, rather than measuring the extent of Scandinavian influence in The Battle of Brunanburh in terms of the quantity of borrowings found in the poem, the influence of Old Norse is better assessed in terms of the nature of these loanwords. Further, factors such as the date and the origin of the poem have also been taken into account for the sake of reaching sensible conclusions.
