Cultural links between Anglo-Saxon England and Germania

Frisians are interesting but understudied folk. (The work of Stéphane Lebecq remains essential.) I suspect that if you lived in Frisia during the early middle ages, it would be easy to convince yourself that you lived at the center of the world. Frisians appear to have dominated the economic and cultural traffic that moved across the Channel. Bede, for example, wrote about Frisian traders in the 600s, and archaeologists have shown that Dorestad developed to be one of the most important trading places of the North Sea in the 700s and early 800s. Frisians also occupied a highly contested frontier, first between the Franks and the Saxons (through Charlemagne, c. 800), and later between the Franks and the Danes (from Charlemagne on). And they were at the forefront of religious change, targeted by missionaries from England and Francia (700s) and later sending out their own missionaries into the heart of Germania and the far reaches of Scandinavia (800s).

All these factors, I suspect, must have impacted the Frisian language in ways large and small. Overall, it seems to have had many grammatical links to Old Saxon. It also bears many grammatical and phonetic similarities with Old English, and although these features aren't necessarily unique among Germanic languages, they've long convinced scholars of an Old English influence.

Exactly when Frisian became an independent language, and whether it initially developed in tandem with Old English or whether Frisian-speakers later adopted Old English elements, is impossible to tell. Our earliest surviving texts date from the 900s, but the earliest surviving copies of these texts date from the 1200s. It's not impossible that a scribe writing in the 1200s would update old spellings and grammatical forms to be more readable for contemporary audiences.

I'm not sure John Hines could marshal much further evidence to support his comment, but I think it's a very valid way of assessing the evidence we have for strong and ongoing interactions between Frisians and Anglo-Saxons. We probably shouldn't assume that the Frisian language developed independently from its Germanic roots, but rather that Frisian speakers had a long and complex history entangled with speakers of other Germanic languages who almost necessarily must have influenced their speech. Regarding the Frisian language, this isn't a particularly new trend in thought—I've been referencing a study from 1965—but I think Hines is right in assessing the study of cultural interactions as a current trend in thinking across disciplines.