Old Norse: The Language of the Eddas and Norse Mythology

Old Norse is the North Germanic language spoken across Scandinavia and its Viking-era settlements, including Iceland, Greenland and parts of the British Isles, from roughly the ninth through thirteenth centuries CE, belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Indo-European family alongside Old Danish and Old Swedish, from which modern Icelandic, notably, has changed comparatively little since the medieval period, making Old Norse texts considerably more accessible to modern Icelandic readers than most other historical languages are to their modern descendants.

Old Norse is the language of the Poetic Edda, a collection of anonymous mythological and heroic poems preserved chiefly in the thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript known as the Codex Regius, and of the Prose Edda, composed by the Icelandic chieftain and scholar Snorri Sturluson around 1220 as a handbook of traditional Norse poetic technique that in the process preserved an enormous amount of otherwise lost Norse mythological narrative concerning gods including Odin, Thor and Loki. Old Norse also produced the sagas, extended prose narratives blending historical and legendary material about Icelandic families, Norwegian kings and legendary heroes.