I have tried to find the discussion in HTLAL about the thesis that Middle English is a direct descendant from Old Norse with some loans from Anglosaxon rather than the opposite, but so far to no avail. Instead I have read some of the oldest texts in Anglosaxon (Cædmon) and Old Saxon (Heiland) to get a 'feel' for the grammar and the words of these languages. You may ask: why Old Saxon? Well, the simple fact is that we know next to nothing about the thing the article calls "gammelengelsk" (which in the context must mean Anglosaxon from
before the arrival of the vikings). But this vernacular must have descended from the langages spoken along the continental coast of the North Sea, also known as the Ingwäonic languages. But just as is the case with Anglosaxon these languages are only attested from the mid 700s, apart from things like single words from inscriptions. So even if archaic Anglosaxon ("gammelengelsk") was partly based on even older Saxon we can't be sure about how the grammar and daily vocabulary of any of the languages looked before the mid 700s or even later. The Vikings made their first big conquest in the mid 800s, so they could in principle have influenced all texts in Anglosaxon apart from Caedmon's short poem from that time on.
In Saxo this first viking conquest (apart from isolated robberies) is described as the vengance of Ubbe the Boneless and his brothers after the murder of his father Regnar by the English king Ella. The details may be spurious (including the gruesome death of king Ella), but the invasion as such is well attested, and it really only left Wessex to the English king Alfred. Then king Ethered decided to kill off the Danes, and as I mentioned in my first answer this led to fullscale conquest of more or less the whole English territory - but soon after the Normans came and changed the whole game: the rulers for a couple of centuries spoke French, not Anglosaxon and definitely not Old Norse, and it was in this period that whatever was spoken in England metamorphosed into Middle English.
It is logical that that the center of the Nordic influence - as long as it lasted - would be along the East coast, but the power center of the Vikings was Jorvick, modern York, which is quite far North. And one more more detail worth noticing: the genetical analysis of modern Brits shows very little Nordic influence, so even at its peak the number of vikings can't have been overwhelming compared to the local population. Already here the argumentation in the article seems somewhat shaky.
I have not had time to do the necessary research myself and I'm not an expert of any of these old languages, but I find it somewhat unsettling that the lingusts quoted in the article use modern stages of the languages for their grammatical argumentations instead of referring back as far as possible. I actually know that some of the features of later English also can be attested in for instance Low German or other languages from the North Sea coast. For instance Low German uses "doen" for emphasis in a way that very well could have developed in the use of "do" in Anglosaxon during the 'dark' period. This is not seen in the Nordic languages, so it must be an inherited trait from 'old' Anglosaxon.
As for the word order with analytic past tenses ('has/had done') I have the impression that these forms generally weren't used nearly as much in any of relevant old languages as in Modern English, which diminishes the chances of getting enough examples to analyse. But we find examples in the old Saxon texts with a word order that isn't allowed in modern High German or Dutch. Here a quote from "
Heiland" (line 94-96) with the corresponding
translation by Karl Simrock and my own tentative hyperliteral translation..
Thô uuarð thiu tîd cuman, -- | that thar gitald habdun
uuîsa man mid uuordun, -- | that scolda thana uuîh godes
Zacharias bisehan.
Nun war die Zeit gekommen, die bezeichnet hatten
Wohlweise Männer, daß Gottes Weihtum
Zacharias versähe. Literally ... "
Thus was time that come(PART.P.) / that there told had / wise men with words(?) / that should that blessing(?) God's / Zacharias equip(-with)The article does not explicitely quote the absence of -ge as a Nordic trait in English, but as you can see the form "cuman" has no prefixed "ge-" (as in Dutch and High German) - and it is still not used in Modern Platt - so this is a case where inheritance from Old Saxon would have yielded the same result as inheritance from Old Norse. On the other hand the infinite verbal forms are placed at the end of both the dependent clauses and the sentence parts that precede htem. And the finite verbal forms are put before the subjects, which gives a fairly exotic colouring to the whole thing. If this is one possible line in the developments from very OLd Saxon, how can you then be sure about the possibilities of another descendant, the oldest Anglosaxon from Britain?
Let's have a look at a couple of
quotes from that little-known gem of Ancient English prose, the Anglosaxon chronicle (translation
here). The first one about the year about the year 455, where Great Britain was invaded by Saxons-Anglish-Jutish mercenaries on the invitation of king Vortigern. Not much to say about the grammar here, except that the sentences are extremely simple in their structure - which isn't what we are looking for. But the message is worth noticing:
455: Her Hengest ⁊ Horsa fuhton wiþ Wyrtgeorne þam cyninge, in þære stowe þe is gecueden Agælesþrep, ⁊ his broþur Horsan man ofslog; ⁊ æfter þam Hengest feng to rice ⁊ Æsc his sunu.
A.D. 455. This year Hengest and Horsa fought with Wurtgern the king on the spot that is called Aylesford. His brother Horsa being there slain, Hengest afterwards took to the kingdom with his son Esc.In this translation "his broþur Horsan man ofslog" is translated as a passive construction, but "Horsan" seems to be an accusative. So it is more likely that 'man' is an unspecified dummy: "(man) slew Horsa". This is extremely common in for instance Danish ("man dræbte Horsa"), but not in Modern English .. but how come then that it is used in a source that would be expected to use Anglosaxon as it was before the viking invasions? And why didn't it persist into modern English?
Another point: the word order in several sentences is [SOMETHING]-subject-verb. In the modern Scandinavian languages we have a tendency to use an inversion when there is something heavy at the start of a sentence - and sometimes without any reason in Old Norse. But in the chronicle there are also inversions which hardly can be blamed on the vikings, like for instance this horror tale:
491 Her Ælle ⁊ Cissa ymbsæton Andredescester ⁊ ofslogon alle þa þe þærinne eardedon; ne wearþ þær forþon an Bret to lafe.
A.D. 490. This year Ella and Cissa besieged the city of Andred, and slew all that were therein; nor was one Briten left there afterwards.
491: Here Ælle and Cissa around-sat Andreds(castle)town and killed all those that therein were; nor be for-that one Brit to-leftIt is claimed that the chronicle was started on orders from king Alfred the Great (who hardly would be expected to borrow heavily from the language of his worst foes) and written in the dialect of Wessex, but then generation after generation of scribes added their own informations, and the last entries are written in something close to Middle English, which should in itself be an illustration of the continuous development from Anglosaxon towards Middle English - though not without some heavy influence from the vikings.
I have deliberately chosen quotes from the first part because they would be among the first ones written. And in some cases their grammatical constructions seem to anticipate things you also find in Old Norse, so again the vikings can't be blamed. As for the 90% old words that were dropped by the inhabitants of Britain in favour of viking words according to the article: when you consider how
little people back then wrote about the daily life of the population then I would not be shocked if some of the words mentioned in the article already existed in Anglosaxon, maybe because of earlier contacts.
When I wrote that Anglosaxon in all likelihood was formed from a mix of several Ingväonic languages and that Middle English (and later stages of English) might possibly be conceived as a Creole based on Anglosaxon and Old Norse I did go some distance in the direction of the researchers mentioned in the Norwegian newspaper article - but I think they go too far by claiming that Middle English
only is a direct continuation of Old Norse (after it killed off the true old Anglosaxon). And if they were right then they should be able to come up with more arguments based on the relevant languages in their oldest forms rather than references to how the languages function
now.