Were they any cultural or linguistic similarities or ties between the Danish vikings pillaging England with Jutes who had migrated there early? Were there Jutes in the Danelaw?

by raminus

I'm curious as to whether tribesmen who had emigrated from what corresponds to Denmark would preserve any sort of familiarity with invading Danes some centuries later.

mcapello

Probably.

We don't actually know much about the Jutes -- Bede, the first to identify them as among the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England -- was writing centuries after the fact and, to my knowledge, there is no archaeological or linguistic evidence to identify them as a distinct people.

If we take Bede to be accurate, the Jutes settled in Kent, the Isle of Wight, and southern Wessex. These areas are all outside of the Danelaw, but the Danes raided and interacted with people throughout Britain; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, documents battles between the Danes and the Angles in Kent, Wessex, and elsewhere.

If the Jutes were in fact culturally and linguistically similar to the Anglo-Saxons, then they would have spoken a West Germanic language similar to Old English or Old Frisian. There's been some work done to show, based on Anglo-Saxon place-names, that the original homeland of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes may have further south than what's ordinarily supposed -- i.e., northern Germany and Frisia as opposed to the Jutland peninsula proper.

This would have been a bit different from the language that would have been spoken by the invading Danes, which would have been dialectical Old Norse. I'm not in a position to say to what extent they would have been mutually intelligible.

The English at the time of the Viking invasions were primarily Christians, although some of their ancestors would have worshiped a Germanic pantheon very similar to the one venerated by the Danes. Woden is identified with Odin, wyrd with the Norns, and so on, though there is very little direct evidence of Ango-Saxon paganism -- and no way of telling, for example, to what extent the religion(s) practiced by the Britons would have carried over into the Anglo-Saxon period. I guess what I'm saying is, the ancestors of the English would have presumably observed some form of Germanic paganism, but for how long and to what extent, we don't know.

By the time the Danes arrived, though, they were mostly Christian.

Some sources:

Language Contact and Development around the North Sea, Stenroos, et. al., editors.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, Bede.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. James Henry Ingram