Skandinavisch-schottische Sprachbeziehungen im Mittelalter: Der altnordische Lehneinfluss. Von Susanne Kries. North-Western European Language Evolution. Supplement vol. 20. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2003. Pp xii + 498. €40.

I quote the opening paragraph of the English summary appended to Kries's study:

The convention of previous scholarship has been to regard Older and Middle Scots as variants of Middle English. Little attention has therefore been accorded to the intercultural and linguistic connections that spanned the northern North Sea and linked Scotland with Scandinavia. By contrast, English- Scandinavian contact has of course been the focus of prolonged and fruitful scholarly endeavour. This volume is a modest effort to move Scot-tish-Scandinavian relations into the academic limelight, so that we might better understand some aspects of how prolonged Scottish-Scandinavian cultural contact inflected the development of Older and Middle Scots. This is therefore a volume which, while solidly rooted in historical linguistics, . . . also raises broader issues which are more properly within the purview of historians of cultural relations. (p. ix)