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The Invasion of the VikingsShortly after the Anglo-Saxon settlement was established in Britain a large group of Vikings set sail from the homeland is Scandinavia on a course of Britain.
They arrived in 793 AD and immediately did what they did best, rape, pillage and conquer whatever they could, the Vikings were far better warriors than the Anglo-Saxons and so their conquest went off like clockwork and soon the Vikings had settled along most of the rivers and coastline on the North Eastern side of Britain. However while they did pillage and steal a lot of the valuable jewels and destroy a lot of the important scriptures of the time, the Vikings did give the settlers of Britain one big gift, the gift of their language, Old Norse. After the Viking Invasion and subsequent colonisation, English again to absorb the words of the language of the controlling race. All in all the English language gained approximately 2,000 words from the Vikings.Some of these are:
The English gained a lot of useful words and term from Vikings and greater than 60%-75% of them are still widely used today in Modern English. Due to the Vikings being a race that were fundamentally linked with the sea many of the words that came from Old Norse are of or relating to the sea. The Vikings had an entirely different religious system to that of the Anglo-Saxons and that which we know today, the Vikings worshipped a whole array of gods, each had a different specialty some of these gods and their specialties are as follows:
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