Language

Old Norse

Also Known As Old Icelandic Alias rather than a new entry: Old Icelandic is the West Norse literary form in which nearly all surviving Norse mythological texts were written, and scholarship treats it as Old Norse in its Icelandic form rather than as a separate language.

Sacred & Content Languages

Old Norse is the language of medieval Scandinavia in which the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda were composed, the two principal surviving sources for Norse mythology, including its accounts of Odin, Thor and the other deities, the creation and destruction of the world, and the cosmology of the nine realms. The Prose Edda, compiled by the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson in the thirteenth century, was written down well after Scandinavia's conversion to Christianity, so its portrait of pre-Christian belief passes through a Christian author's framing, a transmission gap the atlas notes rather than glosses over. Old Norse sagas also preserve narrative and legal material illuminating how mythology intersected with everyday medieval Scandinavian life. The atlas holds Old Norse as the primary source language behind the Norse mythological material it catalogs.

Facts

Origins

Language Family

North Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken across Scandinavia and Viking-era settlements (roughly 9th-13th centuries CE); modern Icelandic has changed comparatively little from it. 2

Place of Origin

Old Norse originated among the Scandinavian peoples of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, the language of the Viking Age and the medieval Icelandic sagas. 2Ethnologue: Languages of the World

Identity

Native Script

The younger futhark, an alphabet of sixteen runes, for inscriptions, and the Latin alphabet for the manuscripts written after the conversion, which is where nearly all the surviving literature is. 1

Practice

Liturgical and Scriptural Role

Language of the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (circa 1220), the principal surviving sources for Norse mythology including Odin, Thor, Yggdrasil and Ragnarok. 3

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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.

Preserving Norse Mythology Through the Eddas

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.

Connections

Associated With

Norse Paganism

Old Norse is the language of the Poetic and Prose Eddas and of skaldic verse, the surviving textual corpus for Norse mythology. It is a historical source language; modern Heathenry does not require it liturgically.

Source Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and BeliefsJohn Lindow

Attested in Region

Scandinavia

Old Norse is documented in use as a written language in Scandinavia. The claim is where the language is documented in use as a written, literary or liturgical language. It is not a claim about the full extent of its speakers, and it is not a claim about where the language originated.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)