This article explores the way in which loanwords become incorporated into a recipient language. It concentrates on the interim period, the time between the borrowing of a new word from a donor language and its incorporation into a recipient language. During this period the new word still retains some of its “foreignness”, its associations with another language and culture, therefore its stylistic potential is enhanced. The material is taken from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an English poem written in the latter half of the 14th century, at the time of the greatest influx of French words into English. This article shows that the Gawain-poet uses gallicisms as an expressive part of his poetic technique due to their stylistic potential as what were at the time recent borrowings.

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Ælfric's writings, in particular his Catholic Homilies, were not forgotten by the generations that followed; they continued to be copied and read even after the Norman Conquest. It is sometimes assumed that Orm, the author of the Ormulum - a collection of poetic homilies written in the middle of the 12th century, could have relied on Ælfric's works as well. This article examines how the writings of Ælfric and Orm represent the preacher and his sources as well as how they handle the relationship between the preacher and his audience.

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