Warriors, as all members of society in medieval Scandinavia, were bound by a course of rules that were imposed on them both culturally and by governing entities. In many cases, warriors were able to challenge these prescribed margins that held them in their place with limited success. Many warriors used their strength, wealth or powerful connections to exploit the judicial system and the inconsistent enforcement of legal proceedings. However, most of the warriors, who challenged these societal boundaries were checked either by a local ruler or by the people themselves who were often imposed upon or feuded with. This paper aims to look at what allowed warriors to push the margins in the Icelandic sagas, Hrólfs Saga Kraka ok Kappa Hans, Fóstbræðra Saga, and Egils Saga. It also looks at how this corresponds to the laws outlined in the Icelandic Grágás and the Norwegian Frostathing and Gulathing laws. While the law code postdates the settings in many of the sagas, they are more likely to apply.
This paper aims to give a greater understanding of how these warriors and overbearing men interact with the boundaries pressed upon them by medieval Scandinavian society and how these warriors made their place in a warrior culture. Especially in Iceland, where warriors increasingly fell out of place with Icelandic society, they struggled to fit themselves within the bounds of a society that did not have need of a standing army, but retained the warrior culture that is commonly seen in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark at this time.

This paper argues that the Anglo-Saxons were runic-literate. Although there is scant runic evidence, conclusions are based largely upon an initial learning paradigm (although it is unclear what this paradigm might have been), and the subsequent transmission of runic knowledge orally. Runic evidence includes Cynewulf's poem, the Old English Rune Poem, the Falstone Text, the Coffin of St. Cuthbert, and the Franks Casket. Missionary work and the syncretic approach of the Church is also examined in order to shed light on runic literacy, as well as how a reformation of the futhorc (if it did occur) impacted runic literacy. The state of runic knowledge across the entire Anglo-Saxon period is also considered, since there was, by no means, an overwhelming runic literacy for the entire 500 years under examination. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a consistent knowledge of the runes, which precludes any possibility that runic knowledge was completely lost during this period. The Ruthwell Cross is examined, since it raises an argument against a widespread runic literacy. With all of this evidence in one place, and in no particular order, we can see that it was very probable that the Anglo-Saxons, lay and elite alike, were runic-literate.

Scholars have long debated whether Old and Middle English (ME) are different diachronic stages of one language, or whether they are two closely related languages that have different historical roots. A general assumption is that Middle and Modern English descend from Old English (OE), similar to the way Middle and Modern German descend from Old High German. Traditional scholarship places English into the West-Germanic language subgroup (which includes Old English, and continental Germanic languages) Historically, criteria used by linguists to establish genealogy of languages involve sound change from parent to daughter languages and the sharing of core vocabulary. Until recently, consideration of the influence of contact-induced change, except in the lexical domain, has been minimized, favoring generative language-internal factors. While it is generally accepted that internal motivation shapes the outcome of language change, contact may provide the catalyst for the change. The syntax of ME emerged with linguistic variation that distanced it from its Germanic relatives. In order to understand how the grammar of ME evolved and differs from its West-Germanic cousins, the syntax and morphosyntactic properties of ME, evident in The Orrmulum, an early ME work written in the Danelaw region of England, are analyzed in comparison to Old English (OE), Old Norse (ON), and Celtic, and in relation to formal grammaticalization theory, social factors and historical events. An analysis of the grammar in The Orrmulum supports current research regarding Scandinavian influence on the syntax of OE and ME, because there is extensive historic evidence regarding effects of language tangency of the relevant cultures; the properties of a grammatical lexicon influence retention of syntactic patterns, despite additions/changes in lexical categories; and The Orrmulum is a revealing source of the transition of OE to ME regional dialect variations.

This study examines the ways in which translators writing in two contemporary medieval languages, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle English, approached the complicated doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary. At its core this project is dedicated to understanding the spread and development of an idea in two contemporary vernacular cultures and focuses on the transmission of that idea from the debates of Latin clerical culture into Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature written for an increasingly varied audience made up of monastics, secular clergy, and the laity. The project argues that Middle English and Old-Norse Icelandic writing about the bodily Assumption of Mary challenges misconceptions that vernacular translations and compositions concerned with Marian doctrine represent the popular concerns of the laity as opposed to the academic language, or high Mariology, of the clergy.

ABSTRACT There are many parts of speech and morphological items in a linguistic lexicon that may be optional in order to have a cohesive language with a complete range of expression. Negation is not one of them. Negation appears to be absolutely essential from a linguistic (and indeed, a psychological) point of view within any human language. Humans need to be able to say in some fashion "No" and to express our not doing things in various ways. During the discussions that appear in this thesis, I expound upon the historical changes that can be seen within three different language branches - North Germanic (with Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Norse, Swedish, and Icelandic), West Germanic (with English), and Celtic (with Welsh) - focusing on negation particles in particular and their position within these languages. I also examine how each of these chosen languages has seen negation shift over time in relation to Jespersen's negation cycle. Finally, I compare and contrast the results I see from these languages, demonstrating that they all three do follow a distinct negation cycle. I also explain how these three negation cycles are chronologically not in sync with one another and obviously all changed at different rates. This appears to be the case even within the different branches of the Germanic family.

In this dissertation I argue that medieval peoples used a different style of identity from those applied to them by later scholarship and question the relevance of applying modern terms for identity groups (e.g., ethnicity or nationality) to the description of medieval social units. I propose we think of identity as a social construct comprised of three articulating facets, which I call: form, aspect, and definition. The form of identity is its manifestation in behavior and symbolic markers; its aspect is the perception of these forms by people; and its definition is the combination of these perceptions into a social category. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, I examine each facet individually before synthesizing the results. I study the form of identity through an analysis of styles in material culture using a consensus analysis to determine how well objects decorated with the same motif do communicating a shared idea to members of a social group. I explore the aspect of identity through a whole-corpus linguistics approach to Old English, in which I study the co-occurrence of words for "a people" and other semantic fields to refine our understanding of Old English perceptions of social identity. Finally, I investigate the definition of identity by comparing narrations of identity in Old English verse and prose in order to see how authors were able to use vocabulary and imagery to describe the identity of their subjects. In my conclusion I demonstrate that the people of Medieval England had a concept of identity based on the metaphor of a village meeting or a feast, in which smaller, innate groups were thought to aggregate into new heterogeneous wholes. The nature and scale of these groups changed over the course of the Anglo-Saxon period but some of the names used to refer to these units remained constant. Thus, I suggest scholars need to apply a culturally relevant concept of identity when describing the people who lived in Medieval Britain, one that might not match contemporary models, and be cognizant of the fact that medieval groups were not the same as their modern descendants.

Despite the vast research on language carried out by the generative linguistics of Noam Chomsky and his followers since the 1950s, for theoretical reasons (mainly their attention to the mental abstraction of language structure rather than language as a performed product), historical linguistics from the start lay outside their research interest. This study is an attempt to bridge the gap between the formalism and theoretical constructs introduced by generative grammar, whose ultimate goal is to provide not only a description but also an explanation to linguistic phenomena, and historical linguistics, which studies the evolution of language over time. This main objective is met by providing a formal account of the changes hwæðer undergoes throughout the Old English (OE) period. This seemingly inconspicuous word presents itself as a case of particular investigative interest in that it reflects the different stages proclaimed by the theoretical assumptions implemented in the study, namely the economy principles responsible for what has become known as the CP cycle: the Head Preference Principle and the Late Merge Principle, whereby pronominal hwæðer would raise to the specifier position for topicalization purposes, then after frequent use in that position, it would be base-generated there under Late Merge, until later reanalysis as the head of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) under Head Preference. Thus, I set out to classify the diverse functions of OE hwæðer by identifying and analyzing all instances as recorded in the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data have rendered the following results: 1) a fully satisfactory functional and chronological classification has been obtained by analyzing the data under investigation following a formal theoretical approach; and 2) a step-by-step historical analysis proves to be indispensable for understanding how language works at the abstract level from a historical point of view. This project is part of a growing body of research on language change which attempts to describe and explain the evolution of certain words as these change in form and function.

Linguistic subjectivity and subjectification are fields of research that are relatively new to those working in English linguistics. After a discussion of linguistic subjectivity and subjectification as they relate to English, I investigate the subjectification of a specific English adjective, and how its usage has changed over time. Subjectivity is held by many linguists of today to be the major governing factor behind the ordering of English prenominal adjectives. Through the use of a questionnaire, I investigate the effect of subjectivity on English prenominal adjective order from the perspective of the native English speaker. I then discuss the results of the questionnaire, what they mean in relation to how subjectivity affects that order, and a few of the patterns that emerged as I analyzed the data.

While tournaments, duels, and challenges were analyzed within literary texts prior to the 1980's, the most recent trend in scholarship has been to focus on how these proceedings fit into a historical context. Many authors have noted how medieval rulers used tournaments, duels, and challenges as a way to keep their militaristic knights under control; however, there has been relatively little study on the way that these three events function as a means of social control in medieval romances. This paper examines how the public nature of these events and the chivalric nature of their participants combine to subvert the agency of not only the nobles, but also King Arthur himself in four of the Sir Gawain romances, "Ywain and Gawain", "The Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain", "The Awntyrs off Arthur at the Terne Wathelyne" and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

I investigate how complementizers, which connect subordinate clauses to the main sentence, develop from other parts of speech, namely prepositions and adverbs. This occurs by the process of grammaticalization, in which a word loses lexicality and gains grammatical function instead. I use computer-based corpus analysis to determine how often certain words are used as each part of speech in my selected texts, and whether they are accompanied by other grammatical words. I use two Old English glosses of the Latin gospels, the Rushworth and Lindisfarne glosses, in order to analyze possible diachronic and geographical differences between the texts. I demonstrate that prepositions develop into adverbs and thence into complementizers with the assistance of certain grammatical accessory words which are later lost. This occurs by the process of reanalysis, in which the language user interprets a word or phrase differently than before.