Publisher's Synopsis
In a preface to his ground-breaking and highly praised volume From the Viking Word Hoard: A Dictionary of Scandinavian Words in the Languages of Britain and Ireland, author Diarmaid O Muirithe wrote that what he recorded was but a sampling from the Norse word-hoard. A visit to northern Scotland has now prompted him to publish words from the Islands and the counties in the far north colonized by the Norse for many centuries - words generally neglected by lexicographers. A conversation on the Isle of Skye was the prompt O Muirithe needed. A shop assistant, native to Shetland, offered him what might have been a Tibetan cow, but in fact was a fashionable and serviceable item of tweed clothing and spelled yack, a word that came from the Danish jakke, a jacket. There are many other words in this volume that he found far from the highlands and islands of Scotland. It is a further fascinating collection of words that have survived the centuries all over Britain and Ireland - wonderful, expressive words that O Muirithe records as a mark of respect for Scandinavia and what its peoples did to enrich the languages we speak.
