Old Norse

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.

Much of what is known today about pre-Christian Norse religion, including the structure of the Norse cosmos across nine worlds connected by the world tree Yggdrasil, the coming apocalyptic battle of Ragnarok, and the specific characters and relationships among the Aesir and Vanir gods, survives specifically because Snorri Sturluson, writing in Old Norse in officially Christian thirteenth-century Iceland, chose to systematically record this mythological material as cultural and literary heritage rather than active religious belief, since Iceland had formally converted to Christianity around the year 1000. This means virtually all detailed surviving Old Norse mythological material was recorded by Christian authors working from a position of some historical and religious distance from the beliefs being described, a source-critical complication scholars including John Lindow have addressed extensively when using the Eddas to reconstruct actual pre-Christian Norse religious belief and practice. Old Norse runic inscriptions, predating and continuing alongside the later manuscript tradition, provide an independent, if much more fragmentary, epigraphic source for Norse religious and magical vocabulary from the Viking Age itself.