Posted on 10/14/2014 5:24:26 PM PDT by ConorMacNessa
Were the Viking kings (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, or the contemporary equivalents) also Orthodox in this tradition? If not, from whence the Orthodox influence?
... would the Noblemen have risen up and forced the king to sign the Magna Carta in 1215 ...
Given that the 'noblemen' were themselves Anglo-Norman to the man as witnessed by their names. So the absolute monarchy question may be moot here.
... England wasn’t ruled by the Plantagenet family ...
While very true, assumes, as do all alternative history speculations (alt.hist.), that the potential historical streams continue to diverge rather than combine. This becomes very metaphysical and philosophical and as such will never have an answer outside a working time machine. My point is that even an England more firmly bound to the Scandinavian tier would still inevitably interact with France and Europe. Would there have been an earlier occurrence of the Hanseatic League? Would a descendant of Harold still desire Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiriss and beauty of her age? I think so and if so off we go!
Beyond that close in history speculation we would lose the threads in the warp and woof of changed history. However, you touch upon a true thread of difference in your Would we here in America be speaking English query as it was the intermix of Church Latin, Norman French and Olde English that has produced our current English Language. Lacking the Norman Conquest, Olde English would continue as a modified Germanic and Scandinavian tongue and may very well have ended much different from what we speak today.
Parts of Scandinavia were arguably Orthodox longer than the rest of Western Europe as well.
Whence the Orthodox influence? You are forgetting that Catholic and Orthodox originally referred to the same Church, both distinguishing it from Arian, Nestorian or monophysite Christianity. It was only when the Popes of Rome started arrogating purported jurisdiction over other partiarchates and finally accepted the addition of the filioque to the Creed in the early 11th century (which they had resisted for a long time — Pope Leo, who crowned Charlemagne, set up the original Creed without the filoque in both Latin and Greek on silver tablets in St. Peters), that one ceased to be able to call the Church of Rome itself Orthodox.
In Northern Europe, both the addition to the Creed and the loss of local episcopal authority to the Roman Papacy happened less quickly than in the rest of the Patriarchate of Rome, so the local churches their remained Orthodox after 1054 (or 1009 — the date folks under the Patriarchate of Constantinople should probably use for the schism, since Rome was dropped from the Diptychs of Constantinople then, or maybe in 1014 — though probably none were so after 1098, the date from which those of us under the Patriarchate of Antioch should probably date the schism).
Actually, I just learned another piece of the argument supporting the Orthodoxy of England until the Norman conquest: Ethelric of Durham (whom those of us who support the view commemorate as The Holy Confessor Ethelric of Durham, Last English Orthodox Hierarch) issued an anathema against the Pope of Rome in the wake of the Norman invasion. (It’s unclear from what I’ve read whether the anathema was issued from prison, or was the cause of his imprisonment by the Normans.)
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