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by thaumasiotes
58 days ago
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Well, it's fair enough to observe that the Vikings spoke a North Germanic language while the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Franks, and Frisians spoke a West Germanic one. Other than that, it seems pretty clear that the category "Germanic groups such as the Saxons, Franks, and Frisians" would include Vikings. "Such as" isn't exactly the mark of an exhaustive list. (And interestingly enough, the cognate word ("wicing") is attested in Old English a long time before it's attested in Old Norse. It means "pirate". It wouldn't be at all surprising if Saxons raiding England referred to themselves that way, just like Danes raiding England did later.) |
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The Old English wīc, on the other hand, has an old Germanic etymology referring to 'camps', 'villages' and the like.
God knows there are a lot of inlets and fjords in Scandinavia, which incidentally were also places from where the surplus "víkingr" males surged west, possibly having adapted the term as an ethnonym by then; at least in modern Scandinavian languages cognates like 'viking' (pl. 'vikingar') are definitely associated with the geographic root 'vik' — as are innumerable surnames like Sandvik, Vikman, etc. Then again, those roving Vikings did of course build up "camps" and "settlements" wherever they went, although this perhaps sounds more likely a name someone else would give to them...
As for the difference between the Norse (ie North Germanic/Scandinavian) tribes/people and their more southern cousins (Angles, Saxons, Franks etc.) prior to and at the beginning of the Viking era, you might say the former were in fact quite clearly relatively more isolated in terms of geography, language and still-very-much-pagan culture. (And while eg Angles and Saxons did invade and settle much of Britain from current Northern German and parts of Denmark, this was already a couple of hundred years before, and a lot happened since.)