Customer Reviews

A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Dover Language Guides)

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Zoëga's dictionary has been a classic in the field since it first appeared almost a century ago. Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien knew the dictionary and had their own well-thumbed copies. Lewis mentions in his letters his great enjoyment in perusing "his Zoëga" at leisure, and Tolkien alludes to it as the "standard" in the preface to his Middle English Glossary. Also, the preeminent Old Norse scholar, William Craigie (also a mentor to Tolkien), assisted Zoëga with the manuscript and the proof-revisions. This is a terrific volume even for idle browsing -- you'll almost always discover some interesting word, compound, or cognate -- and it's absolutely indispensable to have at your side if you want to take a shot at reading the Old Norse literature in the original language. It even has a short grammatical outline at the end of the book.

This dictionary packs a lot of information into a relatively small space. Zoega is a condensation of the massive 1869-1874 Old Icelandic dictionary by Cleasby and Vigfusson. Since most students of Old Icelandic didn't have access to this work, for many years Zoega was pretty much the only game in town for English speakers. Now both it and Cleasby-Vigfusson are available online, but it's still nice to have a hard copy of Zoega in you hands while trying to figure out just what that weird idiomatic construction is supposed to mean. There is no formal grammar included here, but there are some vital charts at the back of the book that provide basic information about endings for nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc. Zoega was originally published by Oxford University Press, and it's nice to see that Dover has decided to reprint it. Believe it or not, this dictionary is nearly one hundred years old! It's got a lot of staying power.

The write stuff:
Practically the only fault I can find is the lack of an English-
Norse section, which would simplify things for novelists who
want their Viking characters to sound authentic. Still, you can
find a wealth of material in sample sentences. The more difficult
of these are given English translations. Since it's a scholarly
work, don't look for slang or very much colloquial speech.

On the technical front:
Standard format is followed, where vowel fusions, umlauts, etc.
are presented at the end of their respective letter sections.
Words beginning with such characters begin after the V section.
Most useful is the separation of nominative from genitive forms.
This makes wading through medieval readers much easier (the
stated goal of the author). When you come upon an unfamiliar
word--nowhere to be found in the reader's glossary--you can
find it in the dictionary, whereupon you're directed to the
root word for a full definition.

For students:
It's informative to compare modern Icelandic with Old Norse.
For example, you'll find that "athugi" becomes the modern
form "athygli".

In my studies of Old Norse, I have found Zoega's work to be entirely indispensable, and the ability t see the entire work online has not made my hard copy any less useful or valuable. It has been particularly helpful in my studies of Sigdrifumal where a lot of meaning is hidden in compound words.

This book is not small, seems reasonably complete, and is helpful in all areas of Old Norse studies.

In general, this is one of the most important Old Icelandic-English dictionaries around. If you need one, get this one.

I found this dictionary a good complement to the Icelandic to english dictionary/thesaurus that I also had bought. Between the two I was able to find most words that I was looking for and good meanings to understand the differences or the different ways that a word is produced in the Ilandic language. Even though I'm not the best at english spelling with every word I look up in this Dictionary I find the I increase my correct spelling in english.

I teach Old Norse-Icelandic, and in spite of all the resources available online, I still recommend that my students buy this book. It isn't as comprehensive as Cleasby-Vigfússon (but doesn't claim to be, and C-V will cost you an arm and a leg for the improved 2nd edition), and I don't like it as much as some of the Old Icelandic dictionaries available in the Scandinavian languages (I'm a fan of Hægstad-Torp). But as far as what you can realistically get on a student's budget, in English, this is great. Easier to use than any online dictionary (including the various scans of the 1st edition of Cleasby-Vigfússon that are out there), and probably less bewildering for beginners by including fewer rare idioms and compounds, this book is easy to use, easy to carry around, and makes a good attempt at including all the vocabulary in the prose sagas and the Poetic Edda. There's also a handy reference grammar in the back for noun and verb inflections.