[BRIEF NOTE] On Scandinavian traces in Great Britain

[rfmcdonald]

British writer Mark Simpson's post "Bring Back the Danelaw!" starts by observing that the Scottish National Party, in the run-up to a referendum on independence, promises to establish closer ties between Scotland and its North Sea neighbours in Scandinavia. Why not?

[C]loser ties with its Scandinavian neighbours seems to me a perfectly sensible move for Scotland. The Scots have much in common with their Scandinavian neighbours. Many are descended from them. Scotland and Scandinavia are oil-producing, socialist-leaning regions which also tend to produce very similar hard-drinking morose TV detectives.

England, Simpson suggests, could also lay claim to a shared history with Scandinavia, especially his own native north of England.

But then, England, when it isn’t tuning into the latest series of The Killing is in denial about its own Scandinavian heritage. By rights, we should talk not about ‘Anglo-Saxon’ but about ‘Anglo-Saxon-Danish’. As a result of large-scale settlement by Vikings the English language has been greatly enriched by a host of rather useful Danish words, such as ‘law’, ‘sky’, ‘window’, ‘knife’, ‘husband’, ‘call’, ‘egg’, ‘she’, ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’. Without the Danish contribution to English our TV soap opera scripts would be very difficult to write indeed.

As a measure of the influx of Danish blood, any of today’s English patronymics ending in ‘son’– e.g. ‘Clarkson’ or ‘Simpson’— is likely to be Danish in origin. And under the Danelaw in the 8th and 9th Century, half of England was occupied and run by the Danes, from my hometown of York (then Jorvik), which was at the centre of a thriving trade network stretching from Iceland and Dublin to the Black Sea.

In the early 10th Century the Danish King Cnut the Great managed to preside over a kingdom that included Norway, Denmark, all of England and much of Sweden. His reign in England was said to have been maintained in part through ‘bonds of wealth and custom’ rather than sheer might. In other words, a shared trade and culture. A wise and popular king, it was only the Cnut’s failure to produce a lasting heir that brought the collapse of his Anglo-Scandinavian kingdom (and single currency) which would have changed the history of these islands, and perhaps Europe itself.

This kingdom failed, and the Norman conquest reoriented England (and eventually the rest of the British Isles) towards western Europe, but, still, Simpson romantically claims, something may yet come of it.

So as a ‘-son’ of York who dwelled in London for a decade or so but has since returned to his ancestral stomping grounds to become a provincial lesbian, I say good luck to Scotland with its dreams of a future safe in Scandinavia’s arms. And if a newly single England still won’t acknowledge its own Scandinavian heritage, or the south keeps inflicting a London/Norman/Tory government on the rest of us, maybe the east and north, where valleys are Danish ‘dales’ and streets Danish ‘gates’, should just bring back the Danelaw.

It is worth noting that this romance is quite unrealistic. In referendums in 2004 on limited regional autonomy, the region of northeastern England that was the core of the Danelaw voted massively against devolution. Scotland may yet have a quasi-Scandinavian future, if it becomes independent and its government decides to try to plug the country into another community; England, whole or entire, has left this in the past, not seeing any particular reason to try to activate that ancient connection.