Definition of Old Norse (2024)

A simple definition of Old Norse is: The vernacular (common) written language of Scandinavia during the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, from shortly before the beginning of the Viking Age (A.D. 800 or a little earlier) until approximately the Black Death (ca. A.D. 1380 on mainland Scandinavia).

But how do we distinguish Old Norse from what came before it and what came after? Let's start with defining it at the beginning of that time range, by looking at an inscription in the preceding language stage, Proto-Norse. This is part of the inscription on a bracteate discovered in Denmark recently (probably from ca. the 300s A.D.), which is the oldest known inscription to name a Norse god:

ᛁᛉᚹᛟᛞᚾᚨᛊᚹᛖᚱᚨᛉ

This is in the oldest known form of the runic alphabet, the Elder Futhark. Transliterated into our Roman alphabet, and with word spaces inserted, we read:

iz Wōðnas weraz
"He (is) Odin's man."

Rendered in Old Norse (here I'll use the Classical Old Icelandic of the sagas, ca. 1200s A.D.), the language of several centuries later, we would need to say:

Hann er Óðins verr.

Immediately we see some of the characteristic sound changes of Old Norse that separate it from its ancestor language, and indeed from the other Germanic languages (such as German and English), namely:

These changes are already evident in inscriptions from the 700s A.D. (e.g. on the skull fragment from Ribe, Denmark) and the 800s A.D. (e.g. on the Rök runestone in Sweden), and mark the transition from Proto-Norse to Old Norse. In addition, many of the vowels that are lost in words' endings (by the tendency in no. 4 above) leave their mark in Old Norse by mutating the vowels that preceding them (a process called "umlaut" in historical linguistics). This results in a language characterized by a large number of vowel alternations within the root of one word, such as in the verb "take" (taka) in Old Norse:

hann tekr "he takes" (root vowel /a/ mutated by /i/ in Proto-Norse ending: *takiz)
vér tǫkum "we take" (root vowel /a/ mutated by /u/ in the ending)

Other such vowel mutations are visible in the plurals of many nouns, often with close cognates in the closely-related English language (which was affected by a similar process):

maðr, root mann- "man, person," plural menn "men, people"
fótr, root fót- "foot, leg," plural fǿtr "feet, legs"

The resulting Old Norse language was fairly stable for the next half millennium, so that the words of an inscription like that on the Rök runestone (early 800s, Sweden) are readily readable to someone accustommed to reading the variety of Old Norse usually taught in classes and textbooks, the Old Icelandic of the 1200s A.D.

There was some variation between regions during the Old Norse period, principally between two broad dialect groups referred to as Old West Norse (including Old Norwegian and dialects derived from it, especially Old Icelandic) and Old East Norse (Old Swedish, Old Danish, and Old Gutnish). Noticeable differences include the pronoun "I" (Old West Norse 'ek,' Old East Norse 'jak') and the lack of mutation in the root of the present singular of the so-called "strong" verbs in Old East Norse (Old West Norse tekr "takes," vs. Old East Norse taker).

Early Old Norse was written in the 16-letter Younger Futhark runic alphabet, descended from the 24-letter Elder Futhark of the Proto-Norse period, but with several letters dramatically overworked--for example, ᚢ writes u, o, ø, ǿ, and v! Following the adoption of Christianity around the turn of the millennium in A.D. 1000, the Roman alphabet was adapted for writing Old Norse under the guidance of scribes who knew the closely-related Old English language. These scribes introduced several special letters for writing sounds not present in Latin, for example "thorn" (þ), which represents the "th" sound of "thin," and "eth" (ð), which represents the "th" sound of "then." The earliest documents in the Roman alphabet in Old Norse come from the 1100s A.D. Most regions abandoned runic writing in the next few centuries following, though in remote parts of Dalarna (Sweden), they were still used well into the 1800s.

The Black Death, a bubonic plague pandemic, occured in Europe killing as many as 50 million people, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population

Meanwhile, on the continent, the three standard languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) have undergone extensive change both in sound and grammar. The changes in sound are less dramatic; in fact the vowels of Modern Norwegian and Swedish are more like those of Old Norse than the vowels of Modern Icelandic are. But all the languages on the continent have lost the "th" sound in "thin" (written with the letter "thorn" þ in Old Norse and Modern Icelandic), and most have lost the "th" sound in "then" (written with the letter "eth" ð in Old Norse and Modern Icelandic), though Danish retains it in some contexts (spelled with d), and some isolated dialects retain it elsewhere.

In grammar, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish radically simplify the Old Norse case system. Consider a word like "fjord," which in Old Icelandic has sixteen different forms, depending on the role of the word in a sentence:

"A fjord is blue." (fjǫrðr)
"I see a fjord." (fjǫrð)
"A certain fjord's waters are blue." (fjarðar)
"I swim in a fjord." (firði)
"Fjords are blue." (firðir)
"I see fjords." (fjǫrðu)
"Some fjords' waters are blue." (fjarða)
"I swim in fjords." (fjǫrðum)
"The fjord is blue." (fjǫrðrinn)
"I see the fjord." (fjǫrðinn)
"The fjord's waters are blue." (fjarðarinnar)
"I swim in the fjord." (firðinum)
"The fjords are blue." (firðirnir)
"I see the fjords." (fjǫrðunu)
"The fjords' waters are blue." (fjarðanna)
"I swim in the fjords." (fjǫrðunum)

Standard Swedish has only half as many forms answering to these sixteen: a normal singular ("fjord," fjord), a definite singular ("the fjord," fjorden), possessive forms for both ("fjord's," fjords, "the fjord's," fjordens), a normal plural (fjordar), a definite plural (fjordarne), and possessive forms for both ("fjords'," fjordars, "the fjords'," fjordarnes), with Standard Danish and Norwegian having corresponding forms. Along with a less complicated system of noun endings, verbs are conjugated very simply in present-day Scandinavian languages on the continent. Compare the Old Norse present-tense forms of the verb "to be" (vera):

ek em "I am"
þú ert "you are"
hann er "he is"
vér erum "we are"
þér eruð "y'all are"
þeir eru "they are"

...with the drastically reduced system in Modern Swedish, where "am/are/is" is represented by only one verb form, är (er in Danish or Norwegian). The reduction in noun and verb endings didn't happen overnight, and it took place much faster in Denmark than in Norway or Sweden. Nevertheless, by the end of the Old Norse period in the late 1300s, the standard languages on the continent had taken big steps away from this system of endings already.

The modern languages are also removed from the cultural and conceptual world that underpinned Old Norse--notably, there is a reluctance to use abstract nouns in Old Norse, where one will read often about brave and honest men but almost never about bravery and honesty. And while Old Norse has borrowings from other languages (Celtic names are particularly noticeable in Old Icelandic), and contributed a huge amount of vocabulary to English following the Viking conquests in Britain, a thousand more years of time has led to the Scandinavian languages adapting massive amounts of vocabulary from Europe's recent prestige languages such as German, French, and English.