This edited collection examines the lasting impact of medieval Scandinavian contacts with England and the insular world mainly through linguistic and philological approaches, rather than historical or archaeological perspectives. However, this is understandable and compensated for by the fact that the primary motivation for creating the book was the “Gersum Project” from 2016 to 2020, in which the editors of this volume sought Old Norse etymology in Old and Middle English, creating a database with ca. 1000 identified words. The volume is divided into two sections. Section A “Meeting, Talking, Writing” comprises six articles centered around different historical sources while section B “Finding Viking Words” relies more heavily on reinvestigations of existing dictionaries and newer evaluations of the importance of tracing Norse loan words in various contexts.

In the first article in section A, Lesley Abrams explores the ecclesiastical perspective on the ninth-century Viking attacks in England, using the two surviving reports on the baptism of the Viking leaders Guthrum and Guthred as prime examples of ecclesiastical involvement in politics. Furthermore, Abrams ponders the survival of church infrastructure under Viking rule in Northumbria through the investigation of joint burial practices of Anglo-Saxons and Norse in ecclesiastical contexts. The following article by Judith Jesch outlines the absence of runic inscriptions in England compared to other parts of the isles, calling it “a faint reflection of intense runic activity of the tenth-century Irish Sea region” (106). After these more historical and epigraphical investigations, George Walkden reiterates the questions of how, when, and where the grammatical structure of strict verb-second was introduced into Old English by observing Norse influence in Northumbrian Old English. Nikolas Gunn’s contribution examines the use of Old English loan words in skaldic poetry, enhancing the effect of skaldic poetry for contemporaries and emphasizing the finesse of skalds under the idea of indexicality and audience awareness. Returning to the ecclesiastical-political matters raised by Abrams, the article by Elizabeth Ashman Rowe stresses the significance of such connections between England and Norway in the eleventh century for the study of language contacts, as the early church in Norway was initially established through English missionaries. David N. Parsons writes the last contribution in section A, dealing with the pre-Norman conquest text known as “Gospatric’s Writ” and its unique display of mixed notions of Celtic, Scandinavian, and English peoples.

Section B opens with Máire Ní Mhaonaigh’s fascinating article on the Scandinavian influence on Irish vocabulary, supported by evidence from the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL), a valuable online resource for studying Old and Middle Irish texts, which includes 134 entries that are loanwords from Old Norse. The author provides a brief and most helpful history of the Viking Age in Ireland, outlining the contacts between the Irish and the Norse. Turning from Ireland to England again, Jayne Carroll’s article follows with an investigation of Old Norse watery terms in the English landscape of different regions: Cumberland and Westmorland as well as northern Lincolnshire, hinting at 1500 place names containing such terms, indicating an intense Scandinavian influence. The “Gersum Project” itself is presented in two contributions by two of the volume’s editors. First, Brittany Schorn presents the lexis of Old Norse origin in the poetry of Middle English. While certain ambiguities arise, these problems are addressed not by ruling out any etymology but rather by looking at several possible etymologies alongside each other. The point Schorn stresses is that language has a lasting impact that extends beyond the actual contacts. Then, Sara M. Pons-Sanz analyzes lexico-semantic units of Norse-derived terms in Middle English alliterative poems from the Gersum database. Her contribution suggests that the “Gersum Project” has set a new standard for systematizing and classifying Old and Middle English terms with Norse influence. Categories created are, for example, “faith,” with subcategories of worship or artefacts, and another is “communication,” with the subcategories of manifestation, information, and writing. Quite a different article is presented by Thorlac Turville-Petre, writing about the topographical vocabulary in “The Wars of Alexander,” which he describes as “one of the most accomplished alliterative poems of the later Middle Ages” (369). Turville-Petre stresses the fact that the poem employs many rare words that are seldom seen in other contemporary texts and that it displays familiar terms for its medieval audience in its descriptions of exotic, foreign places, making it a remarkable piece of medieval poetry, even though it enjoys less popularity than “Gawain and the Green Knight” or the Arthurian legends. Similarly to Ní Mhaonaigh’s revisiting of the Irish dictionary, Philip Durkin embarks on a “fresh examination” of the Norse borrowings in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), concluding his observations by noting a total quantity of 587 nouns, 297 verbs, 136 adjectives, 41 adverbs, 6 prepositions, 3 pronouns, and 1 conjunction of Norse origin in the dictionary, including definite and probable words of Norse origin. Marking the end of the volume, Matthias Townend presents a chronology of dialect studies in the Victorian Era and a (re)invention of the North by Victorian scholars. Townend showcases the achievements of philologists through a concise summary of the scholarly developments from Worsaae to Joseph Wright, arguing that a “truly huge” yet largely “unexamined” (434) body of evidence (collections of word-lists) built by those scholars lies ready to be researched, but seems to have been forgotten by modern philologists.

While the title of the book might at a first glance suggest a broader interdisciplinary approach to the topic, the research presented, from and beyond the “Gersum Project,” is intriguing and pinpoints the overall idea of this collection: to stress the importance of modern philology as a foundation for every text-related study. It demonstrates through numerous significant observations how it enhances further research through collections like the database of the “Gersum Project,” revealing the lasting impact of contacts between the Norse, England, and the insular world through the medium of language, fixed in time.