Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund: English: The Language of the Vikings

Sammendrag

Publications in the humanities take many forms. A major distinction is between on the one hand the dispassionate, evidence-driven investigation, and on the other the kind of study in which the desired outcome forms the starting-point and data are marshalled and analysed with the aim of supporting a conviction already held. In the dispassionate investigation, counter-evidence will be welcomed as a corrective, leading ultimately to a better understanding of the problems; where the conclusion is already foregone such evidence may be considered an irritation, to be ignored or dismissed. English: The Language of the Vikings belongs firmly in the latter camp. The two authors, Joseph Embley Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund, advance the hypothesis that modern English is descended not from Old English, as widely held, but from the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles during the Viking Age. And they muster as many arguments as they can find in favour of this view, while tending to ignore or explain away counter-evidence. Possibly Emonds and Faarlund were influenced by the strident tone of Ludmila Veselovská, series editor, who contributed a preface to the book. She writes of "seeming counter-examples, which […] just have to be put to the side", and of "the fetish for counter-examples" (p. 14). I am unfamiliar with Veselovská's own work, but in a world where inconvenient pieces of evidence are brushed aside with a contemptuous wave of the hand, I would expect some rather perverse results.