A better way to put it is that the syntax is neither. There was that whole Danelaw episode to mess up the grammar. Along with word borrowings (which are pretty much inevitable when an adult population--the Viking settlers--is forced into something of a pidgin situation with a related language), there is going to be some damage done to word order and endings/affixes. And since both Old English (or, rather, the Old Englishes--there were regional differences among the Angle-, Saxon- and Jute-dominated areas), a set of languages very much like Old Frisian, and Old Norse were card-carrying Germanic languages with grammatical gender, which is largely arbitrary and the gender assignments didn't align well with each other, grammar simplified. The characteristic German habit of postponing verbs under various circumstances (which also differed between languages) gave way to a more streamlined and generally more consistent SVO. Gender was pretty much abandoned for words that didn't denote things having an actual sex. (Afrikaans underwent a very similar simplification under very different circumstances.) Rather than speaking English words in a Norse grammatical framework, people were speaking a mixture of English and Norse words in a common framework, avoiding the difficult subtleties of either language. But I'd imagine that the children of those Norse settlers (who probably had native British mothers) thought in the hybrid and spoke neither parent's language perfectly.
Mainland Scandinavian languages have also simplified somewhat, but in the time since native Norse speakers had a direct influence on English. The Danes that occupied northern Great Britain spoke something that looks and sounds a lot more like Icelandic or Faroese than modern Danish, Swedish or Norwegian. To suggest that the simplification of grammar in mainland Scandinavia after the Norman invasion of Britain is the reason for English's current structure is to posit a sort of quantum entanglement between languages.
Correlation is not causation. I still hear mostly English (highly dialectical English, but English of England nonetheless) when I listen to recordings of modern Frisian. I hear something merely related to English when I listen to Scandinavian languages.
Mainland Scandinavian languages have also simplified somewhat, but in the time since native Norse speakers had a direct influence on English. The Danes that occupied northern Great Britain spoke something that looks and sounds a lot more like Icelandic or Faroese than modern Danish, Swedish or Norwegian. To suggest that the simplification of grammar in mainland Scandinavia after the Norman invasion of Britain is the reason for English's current structure is to posit a sort of quantum entanglement between languages.
Correlation is not causation. I still hear mostly English (highly dialectical English, but English of England nonetheless) when I listen to recordings of modern Frisian. I hear something merely related to English when I listen to Scandinavian languages.