Photo: an aged Nordic runestone in a blooming field, from the Scandification media library. A general view, not a specific named stone.
Old Norse is the language of the Vikings, the sagas and the Eddas, and it never really died. It split into the Nordic languages spoken today, and one of them, Icelandic, has changed so little that a schoolchild in Reykjavík can read texts written 800 years ago. So what exactly was Old Norse, how did it sound, and can you learn it as a hobby in the twenty-first century? The short answer to the last question is yes, and people do.
What Is Old Norse?
Old Norse is the North Germanic language spoken across Scandinavia and the Viking settlements from roughly the 8th to the 14th century. It descends from Proto-Norse, the language of the earliest runic inscriptions, and it is a relative of Old English, Gothic and Old High German. In the Viking Age the language was remarkably uniform. A Dane, a Norwegian and a Swede could talk to each other without trouble, which is why the Vikings themselves called it dǫnsk tunga, the “Danish tongue”.
From about 1050 the language began to drift into two branches. Old West Norse was spoken in Norway and its settlements in Iceland, the Faroes, Greenland and the British Isles. Old East Norse was spoken in Denmark and Sweden. Those branches eventually became Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. If you have ever wondered why the three mainland languages are partly mutually intelligible, this shared ancestor is the reason.
How Do We Know Old Norse?
There are two main sources: runes and manuscripts.
Runic inscriptions
The oldest Norse writing is carved in the runic alphabet, called the futhark after its first six letters. The Elder Futhark had 24 letters. Around 800 it shrank to the 16-letter Younger Futhark, which is the alphabet on most Viking Age runestones. Thousands of stones survive, most of them in Sweden, and they are mostly memorials: “Tófi raised this stone in memory of his brother.” The famous Jelling stones in Denmark are a good example.
Medieval manuscripts
The great literature of Old Norse was written down in Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries, using the Latin alphabet. This includes the Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda and the Icelandic sagas. Almost everything we know about Odin, Ragnarök and Valhalla comes from these texts, so learning the language means reading them as their audience heard them.
What Does Old Norse Sound Like?
No one recorded Vikings, so pronunciation is reconstructed from poetry, spelling, loanwords and comparison with later languages. Scholars are fairly confident about the broad picture:
- Vowels were pure and long or short. An accent mark such as á or í marks a long vowel.
- The letters þ and ð represent the “th” sounds of English “thing” and “this”. Icelandic still uses them.
- The letter ǫ was an open “o” sound, similar to the vowel in English “thought”.
- The r was likely trilled. Many words end in a distinctive -r, as in Þórr (Thor) and ulfr (wolf).
A short taste: Ek heiti Ólafr. Ek em maðr ór Nóregi. It means “I am called Olaf. I am a man from Norway.”
How Hard Is Old Norse to Learn?
Old Norse is a highly inflected language, in the same family of difficulty as Latin or German. Nouns have three genders and four cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive), and verbs conjugate for person, number, tense and mood. It also has no definite article as a separate word. The suffix -inn or -it is attached to the noun, a trait that survives in modern Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
The good news is that English speakers have a head start. Hundreds of everyday English words come straight from Old Norse, among them egg, knife, window, skull and they, as we explain in our guide to Norse words in English. Many days of the week are Norse gods in disguise: Thursday is Thor’s day, and Friday is named after Frigg or Freya.
Can You Learn Old Norse Today?
Yes. There is no native community of speakers, so you learn it the way you would learn Latin: through grammar, vocabulary and reading texts. Popular routes include:
- Textbooks. Michael Barnes’s A New Introduction to Old Norse is a standard university text, and Jesse Byock’s Viking Language series is a gentler self-study route.
- Online dictionaries. The Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionary is freely available, as are many digitised sagas.
- University courses. Universities in Iceland, Scandinavia, the UK and North America teach Old Norse, often as part of medieval studies.
- Start with modern Icelandic. Because Icelandic kept so much of the old grammar, it is the closest living relative, and Icelandic speakers read the sagas with only a modest glossary.
A realistic goal for a motivated learner is reading simple saga prose after six months to a year of steady study. Poetry is harder because skaldic verse uses complex word order and kennings, poetic circumlocutions such as “whale-road” for the sea.
Old Norse Beyond Iceland
Old Norse also left its mark outside the Nordic world. In England the Danelaw produced thousands of place names ending in -by (village) and -thorpe (hamlet), and the language of Viking settlers blended into English. In Russia, the Varangians gave the Slavic world personal names such as Oleg (Helgi) and Igor (Ingvar). The Vikings who voyaged to Greenland and North America, which you can read about in our piece on Leif Erikson and Erik the Red, carried Old West Norse across the Atlantic. Norse words also entered the Sámi languages over many centuries, and the Viking world spoke one common tongue from Dublin to Kyiv.
Conclusion
Old Norse is not a dead end. It is the root of five living languages and the key to some of the most dramatic stories ever written down. Whether you want to read the Eddas in the original, understand your Scandinavian heritage or simply decode the runes on a stone, learning a little Old Norse is a surprisingly rewarding hobby. Start with a few words, the runic alphabet and one short saga, and the Viking Age will start to speak back.
