Customer Reviews

An Introduction to Old Norse

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This is a very nice book and the one we used in my Old Norse class at BYU, and the selections are all very good, very interesting. However, I agree with the reviewer that this is, despite the title, hardly the best introdruction to the language.

What I recommend is this: Get yourself Stefán Einarsson's fine book, "Icelandic: Grammar, Texts, Glossary", which is set up in lessons for the beginner and which you can get real cheap here at Amazon. That book is modern Icelandic, so the readings aren't about Egill Skallagrímsson or Snorri's Edda, but not only is the Old Norse spirit very much alive in modern Iceland (and all the people very familiar with the old stories), but the language has changed extraordinarily little in the last thousand years (very very minor things), so that if you learn modern Icelandic even reasonably well (which you will from Einarsson), you can easily pick up the sagas with no problem.

Then, when you've finished with his book, you can get Gordon, which will be much more enjoyable then. Alternatively, you can get the texts of lots of the sagas online from Icelandic sites and get hardcopy English versions here at Amazon to use as "ponies". (Hrafnkels saga is a good one to start with, or Snorra Edda.) Good luck!

Please don't send away 30 dollars thinking that this book is going to teach you to read Old Norse / Old Icelandic. If you're hoping for a basic grammar, with graded lessons, you're going to be disappointed. This is an excellent work, an indispensable work, but it's a reader for those who have already learned the basics of Old Icelandic.

After a brief introduction to Scandinavian history, the Viking expansion, and saga literature, the author gives about 160 pages of West Norse, normalized into classical Icelandic. Most of the selections are from the sagas, and they are well annotated, and a full vocabulary is included in the back of the book. There is also a section on what he calls "East Norse" (the Old Norse particular to Denmark, Norway and Sweden), and a small section dealing with the language of the runic inscriptions.

There is a 40 or 50 page section where he presents the grammar, but it's more along the lines of an outline of the grammar. It's sufficient for someone who already has a good knowledge of Old English, OHG, or Gothic, but my hat's off to anyone with the determination to acquire a reading knowledge of the language from this grammatical sketch alone.

There's the rub: where DO you get the introduction to Old Icelandic that will enable you to use this book with benefit? The superb learning grammar "Old Icelandic: an Introductory Course" by Valfells and Cathey is out of print. Kenneth Chapman wrote "Graded Readings and Exercises in Old Icelandic" about 35 years ago, but that's disappeared as well. Until either of those works is reprinted, or a new introduction is written, it's going to be tough.

But none of this is meant to take anything away from Gordon's work; it's a wonderful, scholarly work. Problem is, you really do need to have something of a background before you use it.

It seems like this book has been around forever. It was first published in 1927 and for many years was the only English language resource for learning Old Icelandic. But that didn't mean that Gordon made the process easy. There are no basic lessons of the "Helgi is a Viking. See Helgi loot" type that you normally expect to find in an introductory language text. On the contrary, Gordon provides the grammar and vocabulary all right--at the end of the book--but it's up to the user to apply them to the wide selection of classic Norse literature that he's included. It's not an impossible way to learn the language, but it can be confusing at first. Those who have a background in Old English will find it easier going because of the similarities between the two languages.

Gordon was the text my class used many years ago when I took Old Norse in grad school. I still remember my professor pointing out all its inaccuracies and criticizing the author. Nonetheless, between Gordon, Zoega's dictionary (now available online), and a xerox of "Gunnlaug's Saga," we muddled through. Learning a language by parsing each word is tedious, but it does give one a sense of accomplishment.

In addition to the grammar and literary selections, Gordon contains a lengthy historical introduction to Old Norse literature. It's out-of-date by now, but still a good place to start. As for the selections themselves, they provide a fairly broad overview. "Hrafnkel's Saga," a gem of a character study, is given in its entirety. There are selections from Snorri and from the Vinland sagas, among other pieces. The only complaint that I have is that Gordon is a little light on the poetry. The humorous "Thrymskvida" (sorry about the spelling) and "The Waking of Angantyr," an eerie little piece not included in the standard eddic canon, are the major poems.

Whether or not you use Gordon as your primary grammar, its selection of litearture makes it a worthy companion for the student of Old Icelandic. My copy is now battered and missing its spine, but it still has a place on my bookshelf.

G.V. Gordon's book is an excellent introduction to the Old Norse Language. It explains the intricacies of Norse grammar lucidly, and is very easy to work with. The fact that one cannot obtain it here, is really unfortunate; however, on the positive side, I know for a fact that at least one other major internet site has it.

E.V. Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse is coveted among students of the language and literature of medieval Iceland because it's so well done and so hard to get. In my O.N. courses at the Universities of New Mexico and Texas the professors had to lend out their own copies. The complete grammar of O.N. and thorough glossary are tremedously useful.

This should have been called "An Old Norse Reader" rather than "An Introduction to Old Norse," for it assumes more than some beginning students might be able to handle. Despite the valid criticisms of other reviewers here, however, I was surprised by how quickly I was able to read The Vineland Sagas in Old Norse after just a perusal of the grammatical overview found at the back of this book. Each word in Old Norse is found in the Glossary so you will be able to find the meaning of all the words one reads, but it would have been more efficient to have placed them alongside the text as is more commonly done with more recent Readers. The selection of Old Norse readings is broken up into West Norse, primarily, but not exclusively, Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian texts and East Norse, primarily comprised of some very interesting Old Swedish texts. You might be surprised to see how similar East Norse is to Old Gothic. More and more Old Norse sagas are available in full online, but if you want a handy Old Norse reader with a very fine smorgasbord of texts, then this is the book for you. Gordon first offers parts of Snorri's Edda describing the death of the gods at Ragnarok and then parts of The Vineland Sagas detailing the discovery of America along with some other famous texts such as Thormod's poem and account of the battle of Stiklestad where Holy King Olaf fell. That is a part of the still untranslated Fostrbraedra Saga. Other accounts describe the settling of Iceland, a Norwegian's trek to Greenland to acquire a polar bear, Hrafnkells Saga in full, the famous Burning of Njal, excerpts from Snorri's Heimskringla and the battle of Stamford Bridge that effectively ended the Viking age.

But if you are serious about learning Old Norse you will have to track down the justly praised Vallfells and Cathey's "Old Icelandic: An Introductory Course" (Oxford University Press, 1981)and the most outstanding dictionary is Cleasby and Vigfusson's "An Icelandic-English Dictionary" (Oxford, 1874) that includes both Old Norse and Modern Icelandic. More student and reader friendly is the still in print "Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic" by Zoega (1911). If you are not willing to buy an expensive copy of Vallfells and Cathey, but are interested in seeing Old Icelandic declensions given in great detail and don't mind some German, then see Adolf Noreen's "Altislaendische und Altnorwegische Grammatik" (1923) that is in print. Gordon considered it the chief authority on Old Norse grammar and Orrin Robinson also recommends Noreen in "Old English and Its Closest Relatives" in his comparative linguistic survey of Old Norse.

Please know that Cleasby and Vigfusson's dictionary, Zoega's dictionary and Noreen's grammar are also available online at the Germanic Lexicon Project of U Penn. Amazon.com.uk also offers a 3 part Old Norse grammar at a reasonable price.

The other reviewer's suggestion about studying Old Norse via Modern Icelandic is a good one and Stefan Einarsson's "Icelandic Grammar" of 1945 is a suitable introduction to Modern Icelandic grammar with accompanying readings on topics that are somewhat out of date. Mal og Menning (Language and Culture), Iceland's premier bookstore, located in Reykjavik offers more up to date - as in 2000 and 2002 - resources for learning modern Icelandic.

Of particular interest to me are the Old Norse sagas that touch on the same legends as the Old English epic Beowulf. As Gordon notes on p.26 in the introduction to Hrolfs Saga Kraka "The episode of Bothvar Byarki is strikingly parallel to Beowulf's visit to Hrothgar's court." Of course I applaud Gordon's inclusion of this analogous story!

One should note, however, that King Hrolf in the Norse saga is analogous the Hrothgar's nephew Hrothulf in Beowulf. Beowulf scholars observe that Hrothulf was a pretender to Hrothgar's throne, and that the pleas of Waeltheow (King Hrothgar's wife and Queen) to Beowulf on behalf of her young sons was aimed at guarding them against Hrothulf usurping the throne and banishing or murdering his cousins. If these legends successfully capture history, we might venture a guess that Hrothulf (Hrolf) did indeed succeed in his quest for the throne! See Klaeber Klaebers Beowulf, Fourth Edition for further discussions of these issues.

As essential to students of Old Norse as Mitchell is to students of Old English. A wonderful starting place, but not for novices.

Man, this book was something I'd been searching for. I am one of the self taught speakers of Old Icelandic, and it's not like there is a whole lot of Runic inscriptions to be translated in Richmond Virginia. Rather then allowing my Old Icelandic skills to sit their and gather dust on a shelf in my skull, I now have something to read!