[wrp]

I think you are misunderstanding what Poul Anderson was doing there. He was proposing that without the Normans, English would have drawn on the German lexicon. As the link in the sister comment argues, Old Norse had replaced German as an influence well before the 11th century. So Anderson's construction of hypothetical English vocabulary should have been based on Norse, not German.

[iskander]

>He was proposing that without the Normans, English would have drawn on the German lexicon.

That's not what's going on here, he's limiting the vocabulary to existing English words which derive from Old English and inventing some new words using existing morphemes of Old English origin.

(if you're going to look outside English btw the nearest neighbor languages are Frisian and more distantly Dutch)