Norse Roots in Modern Language: Gods, Place Names and Everyday Words

Language carries history in ways that are easy to overlook precisely because they are used unconsciously, every day, by people who are not thinking about etymology at all. Modern Norwegian — in both its main written forms, Bokmål and Nynorsk — descends in an unbroken line from Old Norse, the language spoken across Scandinavia during the Viking Age. The traces of that ancestry are everywhere in contemporary Norwegian, from the names of the days of the week to the place names that structure how Oslo residents navigate their own city.

The Gods in the Calendar

The Norwegian names for the days of the week are a direct inheritance from a pre-Christian system of naming days after deities, a system shared across the Germanic-language world and ultimately derived from a Roman practice of naming days after planetary gods, adapted to Norse mythology. Tirsdag (Tuesday) carries the name of Tyr, the Norse god associated with law, justice and single combat. Onsdag (Wednesday) is named for Odin — in his older form Wodan — the chief of the Norse gods, associated with wisdom, war and poetry. Torsdag (Thursday) bears the name of Thor, the god of thunder, perhaps the most widely recognised Norse deity in contemporary popular culture. Fredag (Friday) is named for Frigg, Odin's wife, or possibly the goddess Freyja — scholarly opinion differs on which deity the name originally honoured, the two figures having become entangled in the surviving sources.

These names are spoken by every Norwegian, multiple times a day, without any conscious invocation of the mythology they encode. The gods of the Viking Age survive, hollowed out of religious meaning but structurally present, in the basic temporal vocabulary of a thoroughly secular modern society.

Reading the Landscape Through Place Names

Norwegian place names are overwhelmingly descriptive, and the descriptive vocabulary they use is, in many cases, Old Norse vocabulary that has remained in continuous use for over a thousand years. Once the patterns are recognised, the landscape around Oslo becomes legible in a new way. The suffix -øy or -øya, meaning island, appears in Hovedøya and the other islands of the inner fjord. The element -vik, meaning bay or inlet, appears throughout the coastal geography of the region — and is itself the root of the word "Viking," generally understood to derive from a word meaning a person from a vik, an inlet or bay, who undertook seaborne raiding or trading expeditions.

The element -nes, meaning headland or promontory, the element -dal, meaning valley, and the element -berg or -fjell, meaning mountain or rock, recur constantly across the map of the Oslo region and Norway more broadly. Bygdøy — the peninsula that houses the Viking Ship Museum and the Fram Museum — combines bygd, meaning a settled rural district or community, with øy, island, in a name that describes the peninsula's historical character as a settled area distinct from the surrounding fjord.

Words That Travelled

Old Norse vocabulary did not remain confined to Norwegian and the other Scandinavian languages. The Viking Age expansion across the North Atlantic and into parts of the British Isles left a substantial layer of Old Norse loanwords in English — words including "sky," "window," "egg," "knife," "law" and "they" all derive from Old Norse roots introduced during the period of Scandinavian settlement in England. The relationship runs in both directions in the modern period as well: the word "slalom," now used internationally for a form of skiing competition, derives from the Norwegian word slalåm, itself a compound of older dialect words referring to a sloping track.

Beyond vocabulary, certain structural features of Norse-derived governance survive in modern Norwegian institutional language. The word ting, an Old Norse term for a legislative or judicial assembly, survives in the name of Norway's national parliament, the Storting — literally the "great assembly" — a direct linguistic link between the modern democratic institution and the assembly traditions of Viking Age and medieval Scandinavian society, in which free men gathered at a ting to settle disputes, make laws and make collective decisions.