Shameless sinners and superstitious amulets: translating the Gospel in the Viking Age

Archaeologists and historians have made great progress in sketching out a general picture of the conversion of Norse-speaking peoples during the Viking Age, though many details remain obscure to us. Lesley Abrams has lamented how the Anglo-Saxon church seemed singularly uninterested in recording the details of a Christianisation effort with which they were nevertheless intimately involved. Crucially, we have next to no evidence for how the stories and tenets of Christianity were communicated to Norse-speaking catechumens.

This paper turns to philology in order to provide a small glimpse into how this process might have been carried out, examining the evidence of two Old English loanwords in Old Norse that first appear in tenth- and eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon translations of the Gospel. It will suggest that these words—translating Latin publicanus and phylacterium—point to a thoughtful process of cultural translation that must have been a key aspect of biblical explication during the Christianisation process.