Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the South-West Midland Texts. By Richard Dance. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 246. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003, Pp. xi + 542. $40.

Several recent studies have shown how much remains to be said about Scandinavian words in English, a topic investigated with great thoroughness by older language historians. Richard Dance set out to look at the raw data anew and to refute or modify some time-honored dogmas. Perhaps his main conclusion is that the proportion of Norse-derived words in a Middle English text is an insecure clue to the text's place of origin. Similarly, according to Dance, the decision about the Norse descent of any given word should not be based on the provenance of a literary monument (e.g., Norse-derived words may occur predominantly in a work recorded in the south). He concentrates on the South-West Midlands (SWM) because this region is the home of the greatest number of well-researched texts "contained . . . within the modern counties of Herefordshire and Worcestershire or at very little remove therefrom" (p. 17), and because it stands at the head of the post-Conquest tradition of writing in English. Direct settlement by Scandinavians, as Dance emphasizes, could not be responsible for the multitude of Norse-derived words in the SWM—one has to pay special attention to contact with neighboring areas to the north and east. In matters of chronology, we are reminded that words of presumably Norse origin in the SWM dialects may have been borrowed long before the emergence of such texts as Ancrene Wisse and Lagamon's Brut.

Anatoly Liberman
University of Minnesota