| Summary: | It is a well-known fact that the Mainland Scandinavian languages Swedish,Danish and Norwegian were highly influenced by Middle Low German(MLG) in the period from about 1200 to 1500. In this article, an attempt ismade to show how this also applied, although to a lesser degree, to Icelandic.The influence on Icelandic was not direct; it came primarily through Norwegianand later Danish, but it still shows how the powerful MLG Zeitgeist ofthat time not only swept through Scandinavia but also reached Iceland.Borrowing of foreign metaphors, idioms and other kinds of fixed expressionsand multi-word items (phraseologisms) represents not only a stronglinguistic influence but also a forceful cultural one. Interesting as it is, however,phrasal borrowing in historical context is a rather understudied field. Fortunately,there is some important recent work that deals with this topic just forlate medieval Swedish. The present article takes its starting point in some ofthis research and discusses such borrowings from MLG in late medieval Icelandic,in comparison with 14th to 16th-century Swedish. This is done by listingand discussing a number of phrases and lexical items that were borrowed intoboth of these languages. In contrast to Sweden, Iceland had no direct connectionto the North-German Hanseatic League until about 1470. Some of theIcelandic phrases and lexical items discussed are, however, considerably older,and were probably borrowed through Norwegian. Some may have been takenfrom foreign books or borrowed through other means, but hardly any of thesecame directly from MLG.
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