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Of considerable import, but still of less depth, are those commonlyassigned characteristics of the Scandinavian languages, viz. the post-positive article, and the expression of the passive verb by flexion.

The characteristics now enumerated are indeed common to the whole Scandinavian group; but they are seen to the greatest advantage in the Icelandic, which is the oldest form of those dialects, and which indeed represents the parent language from which they have all diverged. These dialects are, first of all, the two national languages of the Danish and Swedish; then the Norwegian or Norsk, just now beginning to recover a distinctive character after long subordination to the ruling Danish ;* and, lastly, a variety of sub-dialects such as that of Jutland, but especially in Sweden, where, next after Iceland, the antiquities of the language are preserved in their richest deposit. It is the pride of the Icelandic that it wonderfully preserves the parent language which was spoken in common before these several dialects and languages had branched off; and although we can now hardly avoid giving it the local name of Icelandic, because the term Danish now belongs to a special division of the group, yet we should remember that in the age of the Vikings, when it was the common speech of the Northern rovers, its old ancestral name was Danish †- Dönsk tunga.'

To this primitive name we call particular attention, because it is the name which has a special interest for ourselves; it is the name by which this language has come into contact with our own language and history. From the second half of the eighth to the first half of the eleventh century 'the Danes' are always hovering in the background, and often pressing forward and even occupying the forefront of English history. During a tract of time that was not inconsiderable-indeed, for the halfcentury before the Conquest-the Court of this country must have been almost as conversant with the Danish language as it soon was to become conversant with the French language.‡

That

* The present position and future prospects of the national language of Norway, about which there has been some misunderstanding, is well stated in ""Danish" and "Norse," a paper read before the British Scandinavian Society, by Mr. Andrew Johnston, May 25, 1875.

+ Snorri (13th century) in the Prologue to the Heimskringla uses the term Danish as generic, and Norsk as its modification. The native tongue of the original settlers in Normandy is also called Danish by Wace.

See this remarkable passage from the Saga of Gunnlaug Ormtungr: Chap. vii. þá red fyrir Einglandi Adalrádr Konungr Játgeirsson ok var gódr höfðingi; hann sat þenna vetr í Lundúnun. Ein var þá túnga í Einglandi, sem í Danmaurku ok Noregi, enn þá skiptuz túngu í Einglandi er Vilhiálmr Bastardr vann Eingland; geck þaðan af í Einglandi Valska, er hann var þaðan

kyniaðr.

That is to say, the parent language, Dönsk tunga, was for a time current in the mouths of courtiers in London. Since the subdivision of the language, the name which was once general has become special to that southern branch of the family which has been most exposed to external influences; while that which is truest to old memories has taken the new name of Icelandic -a name which we cannot avoid using, though we shall not use it to the exclusion of the name Danish in its old historic sense.. The Icelandic language is the representative of the old Danish ;. while modern Danish, though not really far removed, all things considered, is yet that member of the Scandinavian group which has varied most from the ancestral meaning of its name. Perhaps it would be clearer, if we wrote the old language not as Danish, but Denish,' at least occasionally and when there is danger of confusion, restoring the old Saxon vowel of the word 'Denisc,' as it was written in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Along the whole stretch of the coasts of Denmark and Norway one language was spoken in the ninth century. Incipient and minor differences there must, however, have been, as the nations had already their distinct centres, and jealousies began ere long: to appear. By the year 1000 we find the distinction between Danes and Norwegians strongly indicated in Olaf Tryggvason's boast: Never yet did Danes beat Norskmen, nor shall they not to-day.' At so early a date did the generic name of Danes. begin to have a more confined application. Indeed, we can recognise the difference between Danes and Northmen in the traces they have respectively left in this island. The Danes. settled over a large tract of country, of which the base-line extends from East Anglia to Durham.* This country was called the Danelag, because it was governed by Danish law. It is marked by the many local names ending in thorp and by, forms kyniaðr. Gunnlaugr geck brátt fyrir Kóng ok qvaðði hann vel ok virðuliga.'Sagan af Gunnlaugi, Hafn, 1775.

Then King Ethelred, son of Edgar, ruled England, and was a good chieftain; he dwelt in London that winter. Then was there the same tongue in England as in Denmark and Norway, but the tongues changed in England when William the Bastard conquered England; thereafter prevailed in England Welsh (i.e. French), from which race he came by kin. Gunnlaug went promptly before the king, and salut d him well and honourably,'

[Since the above was in type, the Saga of Gunnlaug Wormtongue has been made accessible to the English reader. It is one of the 'Three Northern Love Stories,' translated by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon.]

*During the present year, an English traveller in Denmark was struck with the similarity of the Danes to his own country-folk of North Lincolnshire. Writing to a relative in that part of the county, he said that when he was on the steamboat from Kiel to Copenhagen, the appearance of the people and the tones of the conversation around him were so like those of his native district, that he could have fancied himself on the Trent steamer, running from Gainsborough to Hull,

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which are distinctly Danish, and which are, indeed, a mere reflection of the names in trup and by, which are everywhere found on the map of Denmark. A peculiar and remarkable feature of this district is the word egir, by which they designate the tidal wave or 'bore' in the rivers. This appears to be rightly identified with the name of the Scandinavian sea-god Egir, to be mentioned below; the Neptune of the North.

As we move northward, we pass out of the region of these Danish names, but we do not escape from the evidences of Scandinavian life. The whole Lowlands of Scotland all up to Sutherland, the islands of the north and west, the Isle of Man, Cumberland, Westmoreland, and parts of Ireland and Wales, retain to this day, in one form or other, the traces of this restless people. But in these northern parts it is no longer the Danes (in the restricted sense), but the Northmen, the children of the fiords of Norway. The local names by which we trace the footsteps of these Northmen are such as dale, fell, firth, force, gill, garth, haugh, holm, tarn, thwaite. To these may be added the use of the word 'water' to designate a lake; as in Ullswater, which seems to claim affinity with Icelandic lake-names in '-vatn ;' as Mý-vatn, Midge-water; Fiski-vötn, Fish-lakes. A term which is common to both of these districts is -gate, in the sense of street, as in Micklegate, Canongate. This is probably as well known in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire as in Scotland.

A strong mark of the Northmen in the Lake-district is the frequent termination of river-names in -a, which, in the accented form á, is the Icelandic word for river, and is the almost universal ending of river-names in Iceland: as Reykadalsá, the river of the valley of smoke: so in the Lake-country we have the Bretha, Calda, Greta, Rotha, and others. And not only are large tracts of the north of our island dotted over with names made of Norwegian elements: there are also names which betray a Norwegian stand-point; as when the most northern country of this whole island is called Sutherland, that is, Southern-land; and when our ecclesiastical title, 'Sodor and Man,' is traced back to the Norwegian name for the Hebrides, viz. Sudreyjar, that is, Southern Islands.

In local names the Norwegian traces are more various and abundant than those which we owe to the Danes of Denmark : and the same thing holds in regard to the local colouring of common speech. The Danish of the Danelag is but a local dialect: the Norwegian infusion in the Lowlands of Scotland has produced a national language, and a world-famed vehicle of song. This has not altogether resulted from the superior vigour

of

of the northern over the southern portion of the Scandinavian race, but has been largely due to political circumstances. The Denish dialect in some parts of the eastern coast is much more like the broad Scotch than is generally supposed, and this is brought well out in Mr. Atkinson's Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect.' For example: the auxiliary maun, which figures as one of the most marked features of Scotch, as in this from Burns:

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'I maun see thee never, Jamie,

I'll see thee never,'

this auxiliary, concerning which we are told in the Dictionary now before us (v. munu) that hardly any verb is more frequent in the old literature of Iceland, is not really peculiar to Scotland, though it is through Scotch writers that it has become known to most of us. From Mr. Atkinson we learn that there is in the dialect of Cleveland a present tense, min, and a preterite, mond, analogous to our English can and could. And it is not of Scotland specially, but of the North generally, that Southey in his Doctor' tells the following story:

A north country dame, in days of old economy, when the tailor worked for women as well as men, delivered one of her nether garments to a professor of the sartorial art, with these directions: "Here, Talleor, tak this petcut: thoo mun bin' me't, and thoo mun tap bin' me't: thoo mun turn me't rangsid afoor, tapsid bottom, insid oot: thoo can do't, thoo mun do't, and thoo mun do't speedily."

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But it is through Scottish writers that this dialect has become famous, a dialect which carries with it-whether in lyric poetry or in dialogue-a certain_nameless and inexplicable delight; and not only throughout England, but far beyond its coasts, it is known as a thing of beauty.' Of this imperishable language it is not an exaggeration to say that, so far as its effect can be traced to words, those words, all those which, to a southern ear, render it strange and fascinating, are distinctly Scandinavian. Indeed, almost all those words which we regard as distinctively Scotch are not to be traced, as has been generally supposed, to Anglian sources, but to Norwegian. Such are the words bairn, big (= build), byre, fey, gar (make), greet (= weep), ken, lax, sackless, speer (=ask), and particularly the constant use of till for to; the Scotchman talking of going 'till Stirling,' just .as the Norwegian does of going 'til Bergen.'

There is an auxiliary which is common to early Scotch literature, and a section of early English literature, and, so far as we know, it has never received a satisfactory explanation. This

is the use of can in the auxiliary sense of did. In Wyntoun the death of David II. is thus told *:

'He had bot sevyn yere and fourty,

Quhen he out of this liffe can pas.

When we find that Icelandic kunna is not straitened like our common English can, but has a long catalogue of uses-among others that of the Greek εἰδέναι, as in εἰδέναι χάριν, to be thankful, which appears in early Icelandic as 'kunna thökk;' and when, following the list down, we find that it is also used for 'to chance, happen;' as 'ef Björn faðir theirra kann fyrr andask,' 'if Biorn their father should happen to die first:' hvar sem thik kann at bera,' 'wheresoever thou may happen to arrive ;'—we feel footing under us for the first time as to the origin of that old English and Scotch auxiliary 'can.'

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A very remarkable word in the English language is get, and we shall have to consider it by-and-by when we come to the Danish influence upon English; but, for the moment, we are engaged upon the marks of Norwegian influence in the speech of North Britain; and among these we venture to reckon certain peculiar and frequent uses of this word which fall so strangely upon an English ear. In Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland in 1803,' the surprise of this ' is well brought out :—

get "The woman of the house was very kind. Whenever we asked her for anything, it seemed a fresh pleasure to her that she had it for us. She always answered with a sort of softening-down of the Scotch exclamation, "Hoot !"—"Ho! yes, ye'll get that," and hied to her cupboard in the spence. We were amused with the phrase, "Ye'll get that" in the Highlands, which appeared to us as if it came from a perpetual feeling of the difficulty with which most things are procured. . . . We asked for sugar, butter, barley-bread, and milk, and with a smile and a stare more of kindness than wonder, she replied, "Ye'll get that," bringing each article separately.'

The Scotch legal term wadset must be referred to the Icelandic ved-setja, to pawn or mortgage. In the 'Fortunes of Nigel,' c. 4, we read: "There is a mortgage over your father's extensive estate, to the amount of 40,000 marks.' "I know nothing of a mortgage," said the young lord, "but there is a wadset for such a sum." "A wadset in Scotland," said Heriot, "is the same with a mortgage on this side the Tweed.”’

These are but fragments of the evidence that might be collected to identify the peculiar characteristics of Scotch with

*The Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland,' by Androw of Wyntoun. Edited by David Laing. Edinburgh, 1872. Vol. ii. p. 507.

Scandinavia.