Old Norse

• 1. Introduction

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  Old Norse was a North Germanic language spoken across Scandinavia and far beyond during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages, roughly the 8th through 14th centuries. In the 11th century, it was the most widely spoken European language, stretching from Vinland in the west to the Volga River in the east. That is a staggering span of territory for a single tongue to cover. How did a language born in Scandinavia plant itself so far from home? And what happened to it once the Viking Age ended? The answers lie in the sagas, the rune stones, the dialects that split and drifted apart, and in the everyday English words that speakers use today without realizing where they came from.

• 2. Reach Across the World

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  Old West Norse took root in Greenland, the Faroes, Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, northwest England, and in Normandy. Old East Norse spread through Denmark, Sweden, Kievan Rus', eastern England, and Danish settlements also in Normandy. In Kievan Rus', the language survived the longest in Veliky Novgorod, probably lasting into the 13th century there.

  The words Rus and Russia, according to one theory, may be named after the Rus' people, a Norse tribe from present-day east-central Sweden. The current Finnish and Estonian words for Sweden are Ruotsi and Rootsi, respectively, echoing that same root. Irish absorbed a number of Norse loanwords, many associated with fishing and sailing. Scottish Gaelic took in over one hundred loanwords estimated to be in the language, most of them also tied to the sea. Even Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Latvian carry a few Norse traces.

  The sheer geographic spread of Old Norse was not an accident of language drift. It followed the movement of Norse settlers, traders, and raiders outward from Scandinavia across seas and river systems alike, and the language went with them to places as distant as North America and the banks of the Volga.

• 3. Runes, Manuscripts, and Memory

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  The earliest inscriptions in Old Norse are runic, from the 8th century. Those runes were written in the Younger Futhark, which had only 16 letters, a reduction from the earlier Elder Futhark used for Proto-Norse. Because the Younger Futhark had so few letters, several runes did double and triple duty for different sounds, and long and short vowels went largely undistinguished in writing.

  With the conversion to Christianity in the 11th century, the Latin alphabet arrived and changed everything. The oldest preserved Old Norse texts in the Latin alphabet date from the middle of the 12th century. Most of the surviving literature was written in Iceland, and it ranges widely: the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, skaldic verse, law codes, religious texts, translations of courtly romances, classical mythology, and even the Old Testament. Runes continued to be commonly used until the 15th century and have been recorded in use in some form as late as the 19th century in some parts of Sweden.

  The First Grammatical Treatise, composed in Iceland in the 12th century, is one of the most remarkable documents in this corpus. Its anonymous author, called the First Grammarian, documented Old Norse nasal vowels with a dot above the letter, a notation that did not catch on. Without that treatise, scholars might never have known those nasal vowels existed at all.

• 4. The Great Dialect Split

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  Proto-Norse began evolving into Old Norse around the 8th century, and at first the changes spread fairly evenly across the whole Norse-speaking world. But then divergence set in, and by the 9th and 10th centuries the language had divided into two main branches: Old West Norse, centered on Norway and the Atlantic settlements, and Old East Norse, centered on Denmark and Sweden.

  One of the earliest markers of this split was a consonant shift. The combinations -mp-, -nt-, and -nk- mostly merged into -pp-, -tt-, and -kk- in Old West Norse around the 7th century, while Old East Norse preserved the older forms. A word like the Proto-Norse ancestor of "mushroom" became swampʀ in Old East Norse but shifted in Old West Norse. The table of comparisons the scholars use shows this pattern again and again.

  Monophthongization is another dividing line. Old East Norse turned the diphthong æi into ē and the diphthong au into ø̄, starting in mid-10th-century Denmark. Old West Norse kept those diphthongs intact. Old Gutnish, the dialect of Gotland, stood apart from both branches in this regard, developing as an entirely separate branch due to the island's early isolation from the mainland.

  When the Black Death struck and social upheaval followed, the pace of change in Norway accelerated. From the late 14th century, the language used in Norway is generally referred to as Middle Norwegian. Iceland, sheltered from some of these disruptions, preserved Old Norse forms far more faithfully.

• 5. English Words You Already Know

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  Old Norse left a deep imprint on English that goes far beyond borrowing a few exotic terms. Everyday words like egg, knife, sky, and window all derive from Old Norse. So do anger, bag, dirt, fellow, gap, husband, kid, law, leg, root, skill, skin, seat, sister, steak, trust, and wing, among many others. The verbs are just as pervasive: call, cast, cut, die, get, give, hit, lift, raise, run, scare, scrape, take, thrive, and want all come from Norse.

  The personal pronouns they, their, and them are Norse imports too, displacing the Anglo-Saxon words híe, hiera, and him. The adjectives flat, happy, ill, loose, low, odd, rotten, and wrong trace to Old Norse originals. Even the simple word "are" connects back to Norse cognates. A sentence like "They are both weak" uses three or possibly four Norse-derived words depending on whether "both" counts as a borrowing.

  Both Middle English, especially in northern dialects within the Danelaw, and Early Scots were strongly shaped by Norse and carried many loanwords into their successors. The development of Norman French was also influenced by Norse, passing some of that influence along to modern French as well. While Norse loanwords in English were fewer in number than those from Norman French or Latin, their everyday nature places them at the very core of modern English vocabulary.

• 6. Grammar and Sound

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  Old Norse was a moderately inflected language with high levels of nominal and verbal inflection. Nouns, adjectives, and pronouns were all declined in four grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative, in both singular and plural. The language had three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, and adjectives or pronouns referring to a noun had to mirror that gender.

  The definite article in Old Norse worked differently from its modern descendants. It was appended as a suffix, so that troll became trollit, hǫll became hǫllin, and armr became armrinn. But it only became attached to the noun at a later stage of the Old Norse period; earlier it was a separate word.

  The sound system was equally complex. Old Norse vowel phonemes came mostly in pairs of long and short, and the language had nasalized versions of all ten vowel qualities. These nasal vowels were present as allophones before nasal consonants, and they probably merged with their oral counterparts around the 11th century in most of Old East Norse, though the distinction still holds in Dalecarlian dialects today. Stress fell generally on the first syllable of the word, a feature still visible in modern Icelandic and Faroese. A contrastive tonal distinction was also forming, possibly as early as late Proto-Norse, which later produced the tonal accents of modern Swedish and Norwegian, and in Danish a creaky-voice register called stød.

• 7. Living Descendants

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  Among the modern languages, Icelandic, Faroese, and Övdalian have changed the least in grammar from Old Norse over the past thousand years, though pronunciations have shifted considerably in both Icelandic and Faroese. Contemporary Icelandic speakers can still read Old Norse, which differs mainly in spelling, some vocabulary, and word order.

  Faroese has been pulled in several directions at once, retaining many Old Norse features while also absorbing influence from Danish, Norwegian, and Gaelic. Danish rule of the Faroe Islands over centuries left a visible mark. Older accounts reported a tonal distinction in Faroese, but a study conducted 18 years later found it absent, attributing the loss to Danish influence.

  Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian have drifted farthest from the Old Norse source, but they still retain enough mutual intelligibility that speakers of all three can mostly understand one another, particularly when speaking slowly. Written forms are even more mutually accessible. Middle Low German influenced all three languages as they developed, partly explaining their convergence. Norwegian was also heavily influenced by the East dialect and today sits closer to Danish and Swedish than to Icelandic or Faroese.

  One extinct descendant, the Norn language of Orkney and Shetland, traced its lineage through Old West Norse. When the Greenlandic Norse colonies died out around the 15th century, the local dialect of Old West Norse vanished with them, leaving only the manuscript record and the runic stones behind.