- The nineteenth century English linguist George Stephens claimed that the sound system of English has preserved more Old Norse features than has Danish and that many Old Norse words and expressions "extinct in Denmark are lively in use among the common people of England." Old English, "de Danskes Modersmaal" (the Danish mother tongue), has such great simplicity, such striking usefulness, that it understandably came to supplant first Latin and then French as the universal language.
- As the Danish philologist Otto Jespersen once noted, 'an Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare.' The list of Scandinavian words we use goes on and on: take, call, window, husband, sky, anger, low, scant, loose, ugly, wrong, happy, etc.
- The earliest scraps of the English language that we have today are in the form of runes and were found in Anglian England scratched on a bone. They are not Saxon or 'Anglo-Saxon'. The runes are Scandinavian.
- Hundreds of years later, the language evolved into Middle English. One of the earliest forms we have of Middle English is found, once again, in Anglian England. It is also written with Scandinavian runes.
- Considered to be the earliest European epic, Beowulf was originally composed in the early 8th-century by an Anglian poet in Anglian England. It wasn't composed by a 'Saxon'. Traditionalist dons would argue that studying Beowulf is absolutely essential because it involves the study of 'English roots'. Beowulf is not a story about Saxons, Franks, or Alamanni. It is a story about Scandinavian tribes: the Goths, the Jutes, the Swedes, and the Danes. Are these then not the real English roots?
- The Old English poem Widsith, meaning 'Far Traveller', is considered to be even older than Beowulf. It is a catalogue of all the great ones of the earth as their names are remembered by an Englishman in the AD 600s. Most of the leaders he mentions were Scandinavian kings and heroes. He tells us about King Gefwulf of the Jutes, King Offa of the Angles, and King Eormenric of the Goths in Sweden. One of the first English kings was named Eormenric.
- In addition to the Norwegian and Danish settlers in England, traces of a Swedish element among the Scandinavian immigrants are indicated in certain words.
- The runic alphabet, or futhark, originated within the Anglian homelands. When the Angles migrated en masse to Britain they took with them the 'Anglo-Saxon' runic script. But it had nothing to do with the 'Saxons' or Old Saxony.
- Shakespeare based the character Hamlet on the historic figure Amlethus who was a king of the Jutes in Denmark. Shakespeare's use of verb auxiliaries is more Danish at times than English. The sentence just written is an example of the Modern English habit of placing the genitive modifier before its possessed noun, an inheritance from Scandinavia in contrast with Old English and Modern German.
- Almost every work of prose or poetry was originally composed in an Anglian dialect within Anglian England. King Alfred bemoaned the fact that not a single person south of the Thames could read Latin!* He had to recruit Archbishop Plegmund (from Anglian England) to teach him how to read and write the language.
Here are a few Old English works that were originally composed in Anglian England:
The Lindisfarne Gospels - composed shortly before 700 A. D. in Northumbria.
Widsith - the earliest poem of any Germanic people - composed no later than 700 A. D.
Beowulf - "the roots from which we ultimately derive"; "the masterpiece of the language and greatest poem in any European vernacular before the work of Dante." - composed Ca. 700 A. D.
The Vespian Psalter - early ninth century.
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum - one of the most important sources of our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon history - early eighth century - Northumbria.
Bede's Death Song - one of the earliest records that we have of English vernacular writing - 735 A. D. - Northumbria.
Caedmon's Hymn - originally composed by a lay brother in the abbey of Whitby - 657-680 - Northumbria.
The Leiden Riddle - 8th c. - Northumbria.
The Dream of the Rood - "stands out as the finest lyrically meditative dream vision in all of Old English." - early ninth century - Mercia.
The Rushworth Gospels - Latin text written in the eighth century.
The Wanderer - this poem has a number of Norse borrowings, for example, the word ferth, "journey" - Anglian: either Mercian or Northumbrian.
The Ruin - Ca. 1104 - Mercia.
Cynewulf's "signed" poetry - he signed his name in runes - (The Fates of the Apostles, Ascension, Elena, Juliana) - perhaps Ca. 800 - Anglian: could be either Mercian or Northumbrian.
Durham - 1110 - Mercia.
Genesis A - closely similar to Beowulf in style, vocabulary, and metre - 8th c. - Northumbria.
Guthlac - Anglian.
Andreas - 9th c. - Anglian.
Exodus - 8th-9th c. - Anglian.
Daniel - 8th c. - Anglian.
Azarias -Anglian.
Phoenix - Anglian.
The Gifts of Men - Anglian.
The Seafarer - Anglian.
The Fates of Men - Anglian.
Address of the Soul to the Body - Anglian.
Deor - Anglian.
Wulf and Eadwacer - Anglian.
The Riddles - Anglian.
The Lord's Prayer - Anglian.
Gnomic Verses - Anglian.
Fight at Finnsburg - Anglian.
Waldere - Anglian.
The Runic Poem - Anglian.
The Grave - Anglian.
The so-called Cotton Gnome - Anglian.
The Charmes - Anglian.
Christ and Satan - Anglian.
The Peterborough Chronicle - 1070-1154 - This very late version of Old English was written in the Anglian dialect known as "East Midland". This is the true ancestor of the language that we speak today.
Of course, the reason that many of these works exist today is because of King Alfred's determination to preserve them for posterity. This is why we have copies of them in the West Saxon dialect.
*One reason that "Saxon" England took so long in developing a scholarly tradition may be that the inhabitants were too busy killing each other. Wessex was the only Anglo-Saxon kingdom whose creation came about through the extermination of another race of people - the Jutes of the Isle of Wight. Between AD 550 and 700, Wessex was engaged in 15 separate conflicts and, in all but one, they were the aggressors. By comparison, the South Saxons, the kingdom of Kent, and the Isle of Wight were never the instigators, while Wessex attacked them a total of seven times! Is it any wonder that the West Saxons could not be conquered by the Vikings? For hundreds of years the people had simply become inured to constant warfare.
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