Old Norse

Name	Old Norse
Nativename
Region	Nordic countries, Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales, Isle of Man, Normandy, Vinland, the Volga and places in-between
Extinct	developed into the various North Germanic languages by the 14th century
Familycolor	Indo-European
Fam2	Germanic
Fam3	North Germanic
Script	Runic, later Latin alphabet (Old Norse variant).
Iso2	non|iso3=non}}

Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300.

Proto-Norse developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid- to late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century.

Old Norse was divided into three dialects: Old East Norse, Old West Norse, and Old Gutnish. Old West and East Norse formed a dialect continuum, with no clear geographical boundary between them. Old East Norse traits were found in eastern Norway, and Old West Norse traits were found in western Sweden. The most speakers spoke Old East Norse in what are present-day Denmark and Sweden. Old Gutnish, the more obscure dialectal branch, is sometimes included in the Old East Norse dialect due to geographical associations. It shared developments with both Old West Norse and Old East Norse, and acquired features unique to it.

The 12th century Icelandic Gray Goose Laws state that Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Danes spoke the same language, dǫnsk tunga. Speakers of Old East Norse would have said dansk tunga ("Danish tongue") or norrønt mál ("Nordic speech"). Today Old Norse has developed into the modern North Germanic languages (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish), but mutual intelligibility has not fully disappeared.

In some instances the term Old Norse refers specifically to Old West Norse.

Geographical distribution

Old Icelandic was essentially identical to Old Norwegian, and together they formed the Old West Norse dialect of Old Norse and were also spoken in settlements in Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Norwegian settlements in Normandy. The Old East Norse dialect was spoken in Denmark, Sweden, settlements in Russia, England, and Danish settlements in Normandy. The Old Gutnish dialect was spoken in Gotland and in various settlements in the East. In the 11th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language, ranging from Vinland in the West to the Volga in the East. In Russia, it survived the longest in Novgorod, probably lasting into the 13th century there. Although Swedish, Danish and the Norwegian languages have diverged the most, they still retain asymmetric mutual intelligibility. Speakers of modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish can mostly understand each other without studying their neighboring languages, particularly if speaking slowly. The languages are also sufficiently similar in writing that they can mostly be understood across borders. This could be because these languages have been mutually affected by each other, as well as having a similar development influenced by Middle Low German.

Phonology

Vowels

The vowel phonemes mostly come in pairs of long and short. The standardized orthography marks the long vowels with an acute accent. In medieval manuscripts, it is often unmarked but sometimes marked with an accent or through gemination. All phonemes have, more or less, the expected phonetic realization.

Old Norse had nasalized versions of all nine vowel places. These occurred as allophones of the vowels before nasal consonants and in places where a nasal had followed it in an older form of the word, before it was absorbed into a neighboring sound. If the nasal was absorbed by a stressed vowel, it would also lengthen the vowel. These nasalizations also occurred in the other Germanic languages, but were not retained long. They were noted in the First Grammatical Treatise, and otherwise might have remained unknown. The First Grammarian marked these with a dot above the letter. The dots in the following vowel table separate the oral from nasal phonemes.

Note: The low/low-mid vowels are sometimes indicated differently:

= = =

Sometime around the 13th century, Ǫ () merged with Ø or O in all dialects except Old Danish. In Icelandic, all Ǫ merged with Ø. This can be determined by their distinction within the 12th-century First Grammatical Treatise but not within the early 13th century Younger Edda. The nasals, also noted in the First Grammatical Treatise, are assumed to have been lost by this time. See Old Icelandic for the Œ ⇒ Æ and Ę ⇒ E mergers.

Consonants

Old Norse has six stop phonemes. Of these is rare word-initially and and do not occur between vowels, except in compound words (e.g. veðrabati), because of the fricative allophones of the Proto-Germanic language (e.g. *b > [v] between vowels). The phoneme is realized as after an n or another g and as before and . It is realized as a voiced velar fricative , by some accounts inside words, and by others between vowels (and otherwise as ).

Orthography

Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark, runic Old Norse was originally written with the Younger Futhark, which only had 16 letters. Because of the limited number of runes, the rune for the vowel u was also used for the vowels o, ø and y, and the rune for i was used for e. Medieval runes came into use some time later.

As for the Latin alphabet, there was no standardized orthography in use in the Middle Ages. A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly for the sounds , , and . Long vowels were sometimes marked with acutes, but also sometimes left unmarked or geminated. The standardized Old Norse spelling was created in the 19th century, and is for the most part phonemic. The most notable deviation is that the non-phonemic difference between the voiced and the unvoiced dental fricatives is marked — the oldest texts as well as runic inscriptions use þ exclusively. Long vowels are denoted with acutes. Most other letters are written with the same glyph as the IPA phoneme, except as shown in the table below.

Accent

Primary stress in Old Norse falls on the word stem, so that hyrjar would be pronounced . In compound words, secondary stress falls on the second stem (e.g. lærisveinn, ).^:1

Modern Swedish and Norwegian have two tone contours (acute accent and grave accent in Swedish terminology, tone 1 and tone 2 in Norwegian). Words with tone 1 in Norwegian and acute accent in Swedish have stød in Danish. Because of these phenomena, it is posited that Old Norse, particularly East Old Norse, had developed tonal word accent.

Stød is a glottal gesture considered a kind of creaky voice, and it seems to have been documented by Swedish sources as early as the 16th century. The origin of Scandinavian word tones is unclear. They may have developed from a non-distinctive tonal feature thought to have existed in Proto-Norse which then became distinctive when the endings of words were reduced in continental Old Norse. Neither Icelandic nor Faroese have tonal phenomena. and were obtained by i-umlaut from , , , , , , , and respectively. Others were formed via ʀ-umlaut from , , , , and .

OEN often preserves the original value of the vowel directly preceding runic ʀ while OWN receives ʀ-umlaut. Compare runic OEN glaʀ, haʀi, hrauʀ with OWN gler, heri (later héri), hrøyrr/hreyrr ("glass", "hare", "pile of rocks").

West Norse u-umlaut

U-umlaut is more common in Old West Norse in both phonemic and allophonic positions, while it only occurs sparsely in post-runic Old East Norse and even in runic Old East Norse. Compare West Old Norse (accusative of faðir, father), (guardian/caretaker), (eagle), (in Modern Icelandic: , earth) with Old Swedish faþur, varþer, örn, jorþ and Modern Swedish örn, jord, with only the two latter demonstrating a more seldom u-umlaut in Swedish.

This is still a major difference between Swedish and Faroese and Icelandic today. Plurals of neuters do not have u-umlaut at all in Swedish, but in Faroese and Icelandic they do, for example the Faroese and Icelandic plurals of the word : and in contrast to the Swedish plural and other numerous examples. That also applies to almost all feminine nouns, for example the largest feminine noun group, the o-stem nouns (except the Swedish noun jord mentioned above), and even i-stem nouns and rootnomina, such as Old West Norse mǫrk (mörk in Icelandic) in comparison with Modern and Old Swedish .

Assimilation or elision of inflectional r

When a noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb has a long vowel or diphthong in the accented syllable and its stem ends in a single -l, -n, or -s, the -r (or the elder r- or z-variant Ʀ) in an ending is assimilated. When the accented vowel is short, the ending is dropped.

The nominative of the strong masculine declension and some i-stem feminine nouns uses one such -r (Ʀ). Óðin-r (Óðin-Ʀ) becomes Óðinn instead of *Óðinr (*ÓðinƦ), but karl-r (karl-Ʀ) remains karl.

Blása, to blow, has blæss for "you blow" instead of *blæsr (*blæsƦ).

The rule is not hard and fast, with counter-examples such as vinr, which has the synonym vin, yet retains the unabsorbed version, and jǫtunn, where assimilation takes place even though the root vowel, Ǫ, is short.

Words with a final r in the word stem, such as vetr, do not add another -r, as the sounds are already the same. The effect of the dropping usually results in the lack of distinction between some forms of the noun. In the case of vetr the dropping renders the nominative and accusative singular and plural identical; the nominative singular and nominative and accusative plural would otherwise have been *vetrr (*vintrƦ), while the accusative singular would still have been vetr. This is because the 3rd strong masculine declension, to which it belongs, marks the nominative singular and nominative and accusative plural, but not the accusative singular, with inflectional Rs.

Phonotactics

Blocking of ii, uu

I/j adjacent to i, e, their u-umlauts, and æ was not possible, nor u/v adjacent to u, o, their i-umlauts, and ǫ. The jj and vv of Proto-Germanic became ggj and ggw respectively in Old Norse, a change known as Holtzmann's law.

Syntax

Old Norse had a freer word order than English. Old Norse used different listing structures than the English, "a, b, and c," and, "a, b, or c." In those two cases, Old Norse would have, "a and b and c," or, "a and b or c."

Grammar

Old Norse was a moderately inflected language with high levels of nominal and verbal inflection. Most of the fused morphemes are retained in modern Icelandic, especially in regard to noun case declensions, whereas modern Norwegian in comparison has moved towards more analytical word structures.

Gender

Old Norse had three grammatical genders – masculine, feminine or neuter. Adjectives or pronouns referring to a noun must mirror the gender of that noun, so that one says, "heill maðr!" but, "heilt barn!" Like in other languages, the grammatical gender of an impersonal noun is generally unrelated to an expected natural gender of that noun. While indeed karl, "man" is masculine, kona, "woman", is feminine, and hús, house, is neuter, so also are hrafn and kráka, for "raven" and "crow", masculine and feminine respectively, even in reference to a female raven or a male crow.

All neuter words have identical nominative and accusative forms, and all feminine words have identical nominative and accusative plurals.

The gender of some words' plurals does not agree with that of their singulars, such as lim and mund. Some words, such as hungr, have multiple genders, evidenced by their determiners being declined in different genders within a given sentence.

Hierarchy

Old Norse inherited the Proto-Germanic feature of having neuter as the default gender. This means that when the gender of a noun is unknown, adjectives and pronouns referencing it use the neuter gender forms, rather than the masculine or feminine. Thus, if speaking or writing to a general audience, one would say velkomit, "well is it come," rather than velkominn or velkomin, "well is [he or she] come," as one does not know whether the person hearing it is going to be male or female.

One generally sees adjectives in their neuter form when used pronominally for this reason. For words more commonly used in this way (rather than to describe a noun) one sees their neuter forms more often than their masculine or feminine. Normally the masculine form would be the most beneficial form of an adjective to learn first, given that the majority of nouns are masculine. In these cases, however, the most practical form to learn first would be the neuter.

Morphology

Nouns, adjectives and pronouns were declined in four grammatical cases — nominative, accusative, genitive and dative, in singular and plural numbers. Adjectives and pronouns were additionally declined in three grammatical genders. Some pronouns (first and second person) could have dual number in addition to singular and plural. The genitive is used partitively, and quite often in compounds and kennings (e.g.: Urðarbrunnr, the well of Urðr; Lokasenna, the gibing of Loki).

There were several classes of nouns within each gender, the following is an example of the "strong" inflectional paradigms:

In addition to these examples there were the numerous "weak" noun paradigms, which had a much higher degree of syncretism between the different cases in its paradigms, i.e. they didn't have as many different forms as the "strong" nouns.

A definite article was realised as a suffix, that retained an independendent declension e.g. troll (a troll) – trollit (the troll), hǫll ( a hall) – hǫllin (the hall), armr (an arm) – armrinn (the arm). This definite article, however, was a separate word, and did not become attached to the noun before later stages of the Old Norse period.

Texts

The earliest inscriptions in Old Norse are runic, from the 8th century. Runes continued to be commonly used until the 15th century and have been recorded to be in use in some form as late as the 19th century in some parts of Sweden. With the conversion to Christianity in the 11th century came the Latin alphabet. The oldest preserved texts in Old Norse in the Latin alphabet date from the middle of the 12th century. Subsequently, Old Norse became the vehicle of a large and varied body of vernacular literature, unique in medieval Europe. Most of the surviving literature was written in Iceland. Best known are the Norse sagas, the Icelanders' sagas and the mythological literature, but there also survives a large body of religious literature, translations into Old Norse of courtly romances, classical mythology, and the Old Testament, as well as instructional material, grammatical treatises and a large body of letters and official documents.

Relationship to English

Old English and Old Norse were closely related languages, and it is therefore not surprising that many words in Old Norse look familiar to English speakers, e.g. armr (arm), fótr (foot), land (land), fullr (full), hanga (to hang), standa (to stand), etc. This is because both English and Old Norse stem from a Proto-Germanic mother language. In addition, a large number of common, everyday Old Norse words mainly of East Norse origin were adopted into the Old English language during the Viking age. A few examples of Old Norse loanwords in modern English are (English/Viking age Old East Norse):

Nouns – anger (angr), bag (baggi), bait (bæit, bæita, bæiti), band (band), bark (bǫrkʀ, stem bark-), birth (byrðr), dirt (drit), dregs (dræggiaʀ), egg (ægg, related to OE. cognate "æg" which became Middle English "eye"/"eai"), fellow (félagi), gap (gap), husband (húsbóndi), cake (kaka), keel (kiǫlʀ, stem also kial-, kil-), kid (kið), knife (knífʀ), law (lǫg, stem lag-), leg (læggʀ), link (hlænkʀ), loan (lán, related to OE. cognate "læn", cf. lend), race (rǫs, stem rás-), root (rót, related to OE. cognate "wyrt", cf. wort), sale (sala), scrap (skrap), seat (sæti), sister (systir, related to OE. cognate "sweostor"), skill (skial/skil), skin (skinn), skirt (skyrta vs. the native English shirt of the same root), sky (ský), slaughter (slátr), snare (snara), steak (stæik), thrift (þrift), tidings (tíðindi), trust (traust), window (vindauga), wing (væ(i)ngʀ)

Verbs – are (er, displacing OE "sind") blend (blanda), call (kalla), cast (kasta), clip (klippa), crawl (krafla), cut (possibly from ON kuta), die (døyia), gasp (gæispa), get (geta), give (gifa/gefa, related to OE. cognate "giefan"), glitter (glitra), hit (hitta), lift (lyfta), raise (ræisa), ransack (rannsaka), rid (ryðia), run (rinna, stem rinn-/rann-/runn-, related to OE. cognate "rinnan"), scare (skirra), scrape (skrapa), seem (søma), sprint (sprinta), take (taka), thrive (þrífa(s)), thrust (þrysta), want (vanta)

Adjectives – flat (flatr), happy (happ), ill (illr), likely (líklígʀ), loose (lauss), low (lágʀ), meek (miúkʀ), odd (odda), rotten (rotinn/rutinn), scant (skamt), sly (sløgʀ), weak (væikʀ), wrong (vrangʀ)

Adverbs – thwart/athwart (þvert)

Prepositions – till (til), fro (frá)

Conjunction – though/tho (þó)

Interjection – hail (hæill), wassail (ves hæill)

Personal pronoun – they (þæiʀ), their (þæiʀa), them (þæim) (for which the Anglo-Saxons said híe, hiera, him)

Prenominal adjectives – same (sami)

In a simple sentence like "They are both weak" the extent of the Old Norse loanwords becomes quite clear (Old East Norse with archaic pronunciation: "Þæiʀ eʀu báðiʀ wæikiʀ" while Old English "híe syndon bégen (þá) wáce"). The words "they" and "weak" are both borrowed from Old Norse, and the word "both" might also be a borrowing, though this is disputed. While the number of loanwords adopted from the Norse was not as numerous as that of Norman French or Latin, their depth and every day nature make them a substantial and very important part of every day English speech as they are part of the very core of the modern English vocabulary.

Words like "bull" and "Thursday" are more difficult when it comes to their origins. "Bull" may be from either Old English "bula" or Old Norse "buli" while "Thursday" may be a borrowing, or it could simply be from the Old English "Þunresdæg" which could have been influenced by the Old Norse cognate. The word "are" is from Old English "earun"/"aron" as well as the Old Norse cognates.

Dialects

Most of the innovations that appeared in Old Norse spread evenly through the Old Norse area. As a result, the dialects were very similar and considered to be the same language, a language that they sometimes called the Danish tongue (dǫnsk tunga), sometimes Norse language (norrœnt mál), as evidenced in the following two quotes from Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson:

Móðir Dyggva var Drótt, dóttir Danps konungs, sonar Rígs er fyrstr var konungr kallaðr á danska tungu. Dyggve's mother was Drott, the daughter of king Danp, Ríg's son, who was the first to be called king in the Danish tongue.

…stirt var honum norrœnt mál, ok kylfdi mᴊǫk til orðanna, ok hǫfðu margir menn þat mᴊǫk at spotti. …the Norse language was hard for him, and he often fumbled for words, which amused people greatly.

However, some changes were geographically limited and so created a dialectal difference between Old West Norse and Old East Norse.

As Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse, in the 8th century, the effects of the umlauts seem to have been very much the same over the whole Old Norse area. But in later dialects of the language a split occurred mainly between west and east as the use of umlauts began to vary. The typical umlauts (for example fylla from *fullian) were better preserved in the West due to later generalizations in the east where many instances of umlaut were removed (many archaic Eastern texts as well as eastern runic inscriptions however portray the same extent of umlauts as in later Western Old Norse).

All the while the changes resulting in breaking (for example hiarta from *hertō) were more influential in the East probably once again due to generalizations within the inflectional system. This difference was one of the greatest reasons behind the dialectalization that took place in the 9th and 10th centuries shaping an Old West Norse dialect in Norway and the Atlantic settlements and an Old East Norse dialect in Denmark and Sweden.

Old West Norse and Old Gutnish did not take part in the monophthongization which changed æi (ei) into ē, øy (ey) and au into ø̄, nor did certain peripheral dialects of Swedish, as seen in modern Ostrobothnian. Another difference was that Old West Norse lost certain combinations of consonants. The combinations -mp-, -nt-, and -nk- were assimilated into -pp-, -tt- and -kk- in Old West Norse, but this phenomenon was limited in Old East Norse.

Here is a comparison between the two dialects as well as Old Gutnish. It is a transcription from one of the Funbo Runestones (U 990) meaning : Veðr and Thane and Gunnar raised this stone after Haursi, their father. God help his spirit: : Veðr ok Þegn ok Gunnarr reistu stein þenna at Haursa, fǫður sinn. Guð hjalpi ǫnd hans. (OWN) : Veðr ok Þegn ok Gunnarr ræistu stæin þenna at Haursa, faður sinn. Guð hialpi and hans (OEN) : Veðr ok Þegn ok Gunnarr raistu stain þenna at Haursa, faður sinn. Guð hialpi and hans (OG)

The OEN original text above is transliterated according to traditional scholarly methods, wherein u-umlaut is not regarded in runic Old East Norse. Modern studies have shown that the positions where it applies are the same as for runic Old West Norse. An alternative and probably more accurate transliteration would therefore render the text in OEN as such: : Veðr ok Þegn ok Gunnarr ræistu stæin þenna at Haursa, fǫður sinn. Guð hialpi ǫnd hans (OEN)

Old West Norse

The combinations -mp-, -nt-, and -nk- mostly merged to -pp-, -tt- and -kk- in Old West Norse at around the 7th century, marking the first distinction between the Eastern and Western dialects.

Old Icelandic

In Iceland, initial before was lost. Compare Icelandic rangr with Norwegian vrangr, OEN vrangʀ. This change is shared with Old Gutnish. Thus, pre-13th century grœnn (green) became modern Icelandic grænn. The 12th century Grágás manuscripts distinguish the vowels, and so the Codex Regius copy does as well.

Towards the end of the 13th century, Ę () merged to E ().

Old Norwegian

Around the 11th century, Old Norwegian , , and became , , and . It is debatable whether the sequences represented a consonant cluster, , or a devoicing, .

Orthographic evidence suggests that, in a confined dialect of Old Norwegian, /ɔ/ may have been unrounded before /u/, so that u-umlaut was reversed where the u had not been eliminated. e.g. ǫll, ǫllum > ǫll, allum.

Greenlandic Norse

This dialect of Old West Norse was spoken by Icelandic colonies in Greenland. When the colonies died out around the 15th century, the dialect went with it. , and some merged to , so that Old Icelandic Þórðr becomes Tortr.

Text example

The following text is from Alexanders saga, an Alexander romance. The manuscript, AM 519 a 4to, is dated c. 1280. The facsimile demonstrates the sigla used by scribes to write Old Norse. Many of these were borrowed from Latin. Without familiarity with these abbreviations, the facsimile will be unreadable to many. In addition, reading the manuscript itself requires familiarity with the letterforms of the native script. The abbreviations are expanded in a version with normalized spelling like the standard normalization system's. Comparing this to the spelling of the same text in Modern Icelandic shows that, while pronunciation has changed greatly, spelling has changed little.

{| class=wikitable |- ! Digital facsimile of the manuscript text ! The same text with normalized spelling From the 11th to 14th centuries, the unstressed vowels -a, -o and -e (standard normalization -a, -u and -i) started to merge into -ə, represented with the letter e. This vowel came to be epenthetic, particularly before -ʀ endings.

Translation: : So, by their own will, the Gotlanders became the subjects of the Swedish king, so that they could travel freely and without risk to any location in the Swedish kingdom without toll and other fees. Likewise, the Swedes had the right to go to Gotland without corn restrictions or other prohibitions. The king was to provide protection and help, when they needed it and asked for it. The king and the jarl shall send emissaries to the Gutnish thing to receive the taxes. These emissaries shall declare free passage for the Gotlanders to all locations in the sea of the king at Uppsala (that is the Baltic Sea was under Swedish control) and likewise for everyone who wanted to travel to Gotland.

Relationship to modern Scandinavian languages

See also

Old Norse orthography - The spelling of the language.

Old Norse morphology - The grammar of the language.

Proto-Norse - The Scandinavian dialect of Proto-Germanic that developed into Old Norse.

An Introduction to Old Norse - A common textbook on the language.

List of English words of Old Norse origin

Old Norse poetry

Germanic a-mutation

Dialectal information:

Old Swedish

History of Danish

Greenlandic Norse

Old Gutnish

History of the Icelandic language

Old Norwegian

Literature

;Introductions

Gordon, Eric V. and A.R. Taylor. An Introduction to Old Norse. Second. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

O'Donoghue, Heather. Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (Blackwell Introductions to Literature) Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004.

Henry Sweet, An Icelandic Primer, with Grammar, Notes, and Glossary (1895) Univerzita Karlova - UK

Torp, Arne, Lars S. Vikør (1993), Hovuddrag i norsk språkhistorie (3.utgåve), Gyldendal Norsk Forlag AS 2003

;Dictionaries

An Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874), Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson. @ Internet Archive, Germanic Lexicon Project (HTML, PNG, TIFF)

G. T. Zoëga, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910) The Northvegr Foundation, Univerzita Karlova - UK "Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog – A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose." Copenhagen 1989–. (Scientific dictionary yet to be completed. Edited volumes 1–3, word-list, Indices and all of the dictionary's unedited slips/citations (en-ǫ) available on-line. and )

Jan de Vries, Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1977)

;Grammars

Bayldon, George. An Elementary Grammar of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language London: Williams and Norgate, 1870.

Faarlund, Jan Terje. The Syntax of Old Norse New York: Oxford University Press, (2004).

Notes

Cleasby-Vigfússon:

References

Cleasby, Richard. Vigfússon, Guðbrandur. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, (1874). @: Germanic Lexicon Project (images, text), Northvegr (images), Google Books (images)

Gutasagan, Lars Aronsson, ed. Project Runeberg (1997)

Harbert, Wayne. The Germanic Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007)

Haugan, Jens. Right Dislocated 'Subjects' in Old Norse (Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax Number 62. 1998)

Iversen, Ragnvald. Norrøn Grammatikk, Aschehoug & Co., Oslo 1961.

Lass, Roger. Old English: A Historical Linguistic Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1993)

External links

Heimskringla.no, an online collection of Old Norse source material

Indo-European Language Resources The resources in question are mostly Germanic, including two dictionaries of Old Icelandic , two grammars of Old Icelandic (one in English, one in German) and a grammar of Old Swedish .

An English Dictionary of Runic Inscriptions of the Younger Futhark, at the university of Nottingham

Old Norse for Beginners

*Old Norse sound sample

Old Norse Online, by Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum from the Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.

Old Norse conjugator at Verbix.com

Norse language, Old Category:Nordic folklore Category:Norse history and culture Category:North Germanic languages Category:Old Norse language Category:Viking Age