On the origin of the oldest borrowed Christian terminology in Icelandic

Abstract

This article deals with the origin of the oldest core of borrowed Christian terminology still extant in Icelandic, i.e. those words which were introduced in Old Norse in the period ranging from the first evangelical missions in Scandinavia (9th c.) to the establishment of the archbishopric in Niðarós (1153). After a short introduction (1), a brief overview of the aforementioned historical period is given (2). The corpus, which consists of 45 words, is subsequently presented alongside its semantic classification (3), of which a chronological (text-based) reading is given. In the next section (4), particular attention is drawn to a sample of ten words, which have been chosen for their importance both from a historico-linguistic and etymological perspective. Special emphasis is placed on addressing the role of Old Saxon in the dawn of Christianity in Scandinavia and Iceland and on revising some of the etymologies proposed by the three major Icelandic etymological dictionaries (AeW, IeW and ÍOb). In the final section (5), it is stressed that a methodology which rests upon historical, alongside linguistic and philological, facts is needed if one wants to better understand the cultural and linguistic background of a particular portion of the lexicon: here, the oldest part of the borrowed Christian lexicon is analysed as a particularly interesting example.