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Pilgrim, just a couple of Points you may find interesting. You are quite right in thinking that "that lot mainly went round the top of Ireland and came into 'England' from the west". However, the 'lot' you are referring to came from the area which we today call Norway. Those Vikings who came from the areas today known as Sweden and Denmark, entered 'England' from the east arriving mainly at Humberside. Some made the journey via France and arrived in the South of England. They did however leave their mark, and not an insignificant mark, on the English language. One way of assessing such influence is to look at the number of borrowings (loan Words). Scandinavian borrowings are relatively few, when compared to borrowings from Latin, German and French. There is a very good reason for that. Old Norse and Old English are almost mutually intelligable languages. It would not have been difficult to pick up each other's languages. The similarities, particularly in the vocabulary, are so many that should you put two documents, one in either language, in front of any language historian he would be able to read both even though only schooled in one. Lack of borrowings does not, in this case, reflect lack of influence. There was simply no great need to borrow. I support wholeheartedly your theory that most influence came about through the two languages rubbing shoulders on a social and business level rather than through battle. The ON loan words that linger on in English today, some 2 000 of them, reflect domesticity rather than political power, suggesting that the Vikings lived peaceably side by side with the Brits for several hundred years. They also show the closeness of the relationship between the two Cultures as many of the borrowings belong to the central core of the vocabulary- family relationships, body parts etc. Even more interesting is that English has borrowed some grammatical Words from ON. Several conjunctions are ON in origin and so are several pronouns. It's very rare that these are borrowed in any language and therefore a sign of very strong influence. Some of these grammatical words, like they, them and their are first used in the northern dialects. Borrowings may have been relatively few but there were other influences on the English vocabulary brought about by the initial difficulties in daily exchanges. Sometimes they used an ON pronunciation for an OE word. This is the reason why the English words church and ditch becomes kirk and dike in some areas. Sometimes they would use an OE Word but with the meaning of an ON Word. Loaf and bread are examples of this. OE hlaf (meaning bread) became loaf. while OE bread meant fragment. ON braud, on the other hand, did mean bread so we've ended up with an OE word that has taken on an ON meaning. Last but not least some ON inflections have found there way into English words, having been mistakenly understood as part of the stem. That Little 't' at the end of words like thwart, want and scant or the -sk in bask are both inflectional endings from ON. There is plenty of evidence of this type of influence. So, the number of borrowings is not always the best tool with which to measure influence on a language. The vocabulary of a language changes quite quickly. Today, it's changing at a gallop rather than a trot. For this we can thank the Internet and social media. A newly coined word has done two laps of the globe before you can say Bob's your uncle and the need for brevity in script has increased enormously thanks to text messages and Twitter.