Old Norse Wiki



Welcome!
This Wiki is for the purpose of assisting in learning Old Norse. My end goal will be tables of as many Norse words as are found in the texts, their inflections, meanings and uses, linguistic classification (weak and strong verbs etc), East and West forms listed and the sources for the uses (Hávamál etc). A work in progress so may be sparse at first. This is not intended to teach you the language, but as a resource to top up learning from elsewhere.

Background
The Old Norse language (Dǫnsk Tunga in West Old Norse, Dansk Tunga in East Old Norse) is a fascinating language that has inspired readers and writers for decades, whilst providing the means for Scandinavian mythology to be read by us today. I am particularly interested in Old East Norse, which was a collection of dialects spoken more or less in modern day Sweden and Denmark, with Old West Norse being a collection of dialects spoken and written in modern day Norway and Iceland. These two forms of Old Norse were internally very similar, and even between them there are many similarities. Another descendant of Old Norse, Gutnish, fits into neither of these two groups. The modern day descendants of Old Norse are Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic (from the Western branch) along with Swedish and Danish (of the Eastern branch). Until a couple of centuries ago, there was another descendant of Old West Norse, called Norn, which existed in th Shetland and Orkney isles, however this went extinct around the 19th century.

Categories

 * Adjectives
 * Adverbs
 * Determiners
 * Nouns
 * Pronouns
 * Verbs

Reading material
I have started building a corpus of texts for this site. Eventually, each and every word will be linked to the relevant page.

Suggested links
From this site you may be interested in Old Norse Online provided by the University of Texas in Austin, or Dr. Jackson Crawford's YouTube series on learning Old Norse.





