Description:
Old Norse-Icelandic, or simply Old Norse, is the written and spoken language of the Icelandic sagas and of Eddic poetry, as well as all the other forms of documents written in Iceland and Norway. It is classified as Old West Norse, to distinguish it from Old East Norse (from which formed Danish and Swedish) and Old Gutnish (the language of Gotland, a Baltic island that is part of modern day Sweden). Old West Norse developed into modern Icelandic, Faroese, and Norwegian. In the Middle Ages, these languages were very similar, and over time they have mixed and influenced one another in their development into modern languages.
Old Norse was spoken from about the 8th–14th/15th centuries, spanning the Viking age, Christianization, and the consolidation of the kingdoms of Scandinavia.
Written Old Norse-Icelandic uses the Latin alphabet which arrive on the back of Christianity and its text-dependent culture. Following Old English's example, they incorporated extra letters for sounds that were not present in Latinate languages, particular the /th/ sound. Since both were Germanic languages, Old English and Old Norse shared these sounds, so early Norse scribes incorporated the same letters as their English counterparts: these were þ, "thorn," and ð, "eth." Both make a /th/ sound, but if you pronounce each to yourself out loud, you may notice that þ produces an airy, unvoiced sound; while ð, following the /e/ vowel sound, created a voiced sound. These are generally their pronunciation in Old Norse-Icelandic, where þ only appears at the beginning of words and ð in the middle. There are, however, exceptions where compound words are formed where the second compound with have an þ at its beginning which thus ends up in the middle of the two compound elements, as in the name of the poem Vafþrúðnismál.
| Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Völuspá | Völuspá, "the Prophecy of the Seeress," is a mythological poem that is part of the Skáldskaparmál |
Skáldskaparmál, "the language of poetry," is a section of the Prose Edda, Younger Edda, or Snorri's Edda (LINK). The section begins as a dialogue s... |
| Hárbarðsljóð | Hárbarðsljóð, "the Lay of Hárbarðr," is a poem in the Poe... |