Prace komisji nauk.pdf - Instytut Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu ...

undertakings. Thus Thore’s death with his men could be a natural consequence
of Viking Age lifestyle. Moltke ([1976] 1985: 311-312) adds that:
The Viking Age was an age of violence and warfare. This comes out in
runic inscriptions too. When they state that a man warþ døþr – literally,
“became dead” – they mean that he met a violent end, met death in battle:
he met death when “drengs” besieged Hedeby (Hedeby 1); when kings
fought (Århus 3); – with Thore in Øresund (Mejlby); he was slain (…) on
… – heath (Thorup in Ty – the Sjelle stone also records death on a heath),
or killed (…) in the sea-fight off Udlænge (Ny Larsker 2).
It is quite possible that in order to make the stone more visible and the name of
Eskil better remembered, the stone was painted in black, red, and orange, and
looked as it does now, kept in the custody of the Randers Museum.
As for “other Vikings”, one could claim that the “British Vikings” who
were living in the British Isles were using yet another set of metaphors. This was
due to the changing situational embeddings of their discourses (i.e., their
geographical location), and other changing ecological variables of their
discourses, (like, e.g., the neighboring peoples, who in Scandinavia spoke
predominantly Germanic languages, Finnish or Saami – with a few distant
contacts with, e.g. Eskimo languages – whereas in the British Isles they had
many contacts with Celtic language speakers). Therefore, it seems appropriate to
distinguish certain socio-linguistic characteristics of that particular society by
surveying the clusters of metaphors which the society in question takes into
account. Most obviously one must not judge any society based on the metaphors
of which it makes use. However, by researching the metaphors of any society of
the past, one gains considerable insight into certain aspects of the society’s
linguistically oriented culture formation mechanisms. In the light of this, it
appears that insight into the society’s culture and its ways of organization can
thus be acquired by means of a linguistic analysis.
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