Hi, I'm Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford. I teach at the University of Colorado Boulder;
previously at UC Berkeley and UCLA.
What did Old Norse sound like? Linguists have a better idea than for many other extinct languages
because we have several sources of information.
Not only do we have modern descendant languages in Scandinavia
including Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese,
but we can compare to other well-known contemporary languages such
as medieval Latin, Old High German, Old English, etc.
One way that we find information from, say, medieval Latin is that since the alphabet used to write Old Norse
—at least most of the documents that we have—is the Roman alphabet, adapted from the way medieval
Latin was written. You're not going to change what a letter means when you write a new language
so for instance a K is gonna mean something like what a K means in medieval Latin.
We also have direct evidence from a document called the First Grammatical Treatise
written by an anonymous author in Iceland in about 1140
in which this person—whoever it was—
discussed ways that the Roman alphabet could be adapted to better write sounds in Old Norse that are not
normally represented by the Roman alphabet. And so in describing those sounds we also have a
better idea about what those unique sounds of Old Norse were.
And then we also can turn to poetry in Old Norse—see what rhymes and what alliterates for hints about
changes relative to the modern Scandinavian languages.
No language stays the same over this long of a period of time—a thousand years in the case of Old Norse.
Icelandic is structurally very similar, but doesn't sound exactly the same. So what I'm going to do here now
is read you a few quotes from the poem Hávamál, the wisdom of Óðinn in
Old Norse as
reconstructed by linguists.
Deyr fé
deyja frændr
deyr sjálfr it sama.
Ek veit einn
at aldri deyr:
dómr um dauðan hvern.
That means: Cows or sheep or property dies.
Kinsmen die. You yourself die the same way.
I know one thing that never dies: the judgment on each one, dead.
Then we have the testimony of Óðinn about how he learned the runes in stanzas 138–139.
Veit ek, at ek hekk
vindga meiði á
nætr allar níu
geiri undaðr
ok gefinn Óðni
sjálfr sjálfum mér
á þeim meiði
es manngi veit
hvers hann af rótum renn
Við hleifi mik seldu
né við hornigi
nýsta ek niðr
nam ek upp rúnar
øpandi nam
fell ek aptr þaðan
I know that I hung / on a windswept tree / nine long nights / wounded by a spear / and given to Óðinn
myself to myself / on that tree whose roots grow / in a place no man has ever seen
No-one gave me food / No-one gave me drink / I took up the runes / I peered down
Screaming I took them / and I fell then from that place
Stanza 15
Þagalt ok hugalt
skyli þjóðans barn / ok vígdjarft vesa
Glaðr ok reifr
skyli gumna hverr
unz sinn bíðr bana
Silent and thoughtful / should a prince's son be
and bold in battle
Cheerful and glad / let each man be
until his inevitable death-day
I'll conclude with stanza 20 from a different poem—Grímnismál—in which Óðinn talks about his ravens.
Huginn
ok Muninn
fljúga hverjan dag
jǫrmungrund yfir
Óumk ek of Hugin
at han aptr né komi-t
en sjámsk meirr um Munin.
Huginn and Muninn fly every day the whole world over
I fear for Huginn that he won't come back
But I fear more for Muninn.
And of course "Huginn" means thought; "Muninn" means memory.
So of course Óðinn—like other old men—might fear more for losing his memory than for his thought.
Information about Old Norse tends to be locked up in an ivory tower,
published by specialists, for specialists.
And what's available on the Internet is often the result of
rampant speculation by people who may lack the relevant professional expertise.
I am trying to bridge that gap by bringing
all of my professional expertise from 15 years of researching and teaching this in great universities
around the United States
straight to you on YouTube in free videos made in beautiful places in my Rocky Mountain homeland
of Colorado and Wyoming.
If you are interested in learning more about Norse language and myth,
I hope you'll check out one of the more than 200 videos on this channel about those subjects and
related subjects in linguistics and mythology.
And if you want to help support what I'm doing,
I warmly appreciate donations through Patreon or PayPal.
For now, from the beautiful Rocky Mountains, I'm wishing you all the best.