14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Indispensable!, November 13, 2006
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.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential reference for students of Old Norse/Old Icelandic, March 26, 2006
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.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Needed Missing Piece, October 6, 2004
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".
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