Time for a deep dive on Norway, our new Winter Olympic overlords

Shoot. No. Finland again. This is hard.

That wouldn’t be the Norse way, anyway. Their world takeover has been a peaceful one.

This wasn’t always the case, however. Those who listen to Viking metal know that Vikings once existed. Other people probably do too.

Back in those days, it was tough to be anyone who wasn’t Norse. The Vikings would come in, pillage and worse, and then claim the land/people as theirs. That very much goes for the English, where the language “English,” comes from.

The Norse wove themselves so deeply into their culture that we still speak the effects today. Languages often borrow words from other languages, and English is especially capable of this. Usually, it’s nouns or descriptors like “quartz” or “bourgeois.” Or it’s a word that doesn’t have a one-to-one translation like zeitgeist.

The Norse went further. The pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their” all have their root in Old Norse. No other pronouns are like this. Take a look at this pronoun chart of Old English.

You can see that not much has changed in some cases. “Us,” “he,” “me,” etc. are all very much the same. But when you look at the third person plural, that isn’t anything like the “they,” “them,” and “their” we use today. Those came from the Norse invasion, and they haven’t gone away.

Language doesn’t change quickly when it comes to pronouns. For example, it is the only place in the English language where we still have object vs. subject declension (“us” vs. “we,” “I” vs. “me,” “they” vs. “them,” and so on). For something to take root that deeply, to plant itself in the skeletal structure of how we speak every day, it takes time and pressure.

My point is that we were already kind of Norse in the first place. They made us this way.