Customer Reviews

Old Icelandic: An Introductory Course

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If you're interested in the Icelandic language, whether modern or Old Icelandic, you're probably frustrated by the lack of learning aids / grammars. I stumbled on this book about 15 years ago in Schoenhof's Foreign Language Bookstore in Boston, and I've treasured it ever since.

It consists of 35 lessons, and each lesson introduces a couple of grammatical points, with plenty of examples. The grammar section in each lesson is followed by one or two reading selections, vocabulary and exercises. The exercises consist of grammatical drills, and sentences to be translated from English into Old Icelandic. (Why translate into a language that's not spoken any more? As the authors say in their preface, "Even a passive linguistic ability must have its active intellectual input." I love that sentence!) Best of all, the answers to the grammatical exercises and translation sentences are included in the back of the book.

The authors realize that students of Old Icelandic generally fall into two camps - those in it for the literary value of the sagas, and those more interested in comparative Germanic linguistics. And they've designed the book to benefit both.

Be warned...Old Icelandic is a difficult, highly inflected language. Be prepared for a hard road; there are a lot of grammatical rules, a lot of noun classes, a lot of verbal intricacies, with a dizzying array of phonological laws underlying all of this. But if you've got at least a little bit of linguistic sophistication (and a lot of patience!), this is the best thing going.

The first 10 lessons have "made-up" reading selections, but after that, it's all the real thing. Each lesson introduces a large number of vocabulary items; by the end of the book you're going to have the grammatical knowledge and the vocabulary to read just about anything on your own (with the help of a dictionary, of course).

Bottom line, it's a tough language; but if you've got the desire and the stamina, this book will give you a very, very good knowledge of the Old Icelandic language.

After searching for a good textbook for Old Icelandic/Old Norse, I came across this book. The authors' approach is not the conventional one which focuses on diachronic phonology and presents no insight into the synchronic phonology of the language. Instead, their book actually contains interesting hypotheses about the structure of Old Icelandic grammar. They teach vocabulary by using underlying forms and introduce the phonological rules required to compute the output forms. Really, this is the most sensible way to learn a language with as complicated a phonology as Old Icelandic has. This was really a pleasure for me. I find it exceptionally irritating when traditional handbooks merely present paradigms and then one is expected to memorize them by rote. Not so with this course. Also refreshing is the attention to syntactic issues, which is rarely to be encountered in handbooks. Now for my objections, which are not very great but do exist. Although the theoretical assumptions of the authors lead them to abandon the traditional mode of presenting the phonology and morphology of the language, they neverthless persist in what I feel are two very unfortunate practices. The first is that nearly ALL the nominal declensions are presented before ANY verbal conjugations appear. In my view this is not an intelligent approach: students should learn the most frequent inflections first, and not have to wait till nearly a third of the book is over to even get a single verb conjugation. Second -- and this relates to the first objection in some ways -- a rather large vocabulary of nominal forms is presented in the early chapters, while verbs are given as unanalyzed "wholes" simply to be memorized as part of the vocabulary. The result is that some nouns, which are quite infrequent, are introduced before the student even learns some of the most common verbs. Likewise, it would be enormously helpful if the vocabulary introduced in each chapter were divided into "important/frequent" vs. "less important/occasional" forms. When the authors introduce real texts from the sagas, naturally there will arise in each reading selection at least a few infrequent vocabulary items. However, since in the vocabulary list these are not distinguished from the more frequent and truly essential vocabulary items, one has to expend much more effort on memorizing vocabulary than is essential at the beginning stage. Sometimes the translations given for vocabulary items are only the ones which pertain to the reading text for the chapter, leaving out (I believe) the more usual meanings of some words. Nevertheless, I should acknowledge that these objections are not unique to this book: many texts suffer from these flaws. However, because the book is in every other respect exceptional and really wonderful, I can only hope that someday a revised version might appear that will be "the perfect textbook" for Old Icelandic.

OLD ICELANDIC: An Introductory Course by Sigrid Valfellis and James E. Cathey was published in 1981 by Oxford University Press in association with the American-Scandinavian Foundation. It is a primer for all aspects of the Old Norse language designed to serve the needs of both linguists and literary scholars.

After an important phonological introduction, it contains thirty-five lessons, each of which introduces a new grammatical concept and readings. Valfellis and Cathey realise that the student of Old Norse probably has prior experience in classical languages or general linguistics, and so their writing is direct and no-nonsense, yet at the same time quite friendly. This is one of the most useful grammars for the autodidactic student that I have ever encountered, as each lesson contains not only a passage or two from the sagas, but also grammar drills and composition exercises in Old Norse. Keys are provided for the composition exercises. So, the student outside of a formal course has the opportunity to keep track of his progress and apply what he has learnt so far.

I was a little unhappy that the book examines Old Norse from an nearly entirely synchronic perspective. There is no tracing of the language's evolution out of Proto-Germanic that would aid the student of comparative Indo-European linguistics. Historical matters are discussed only in the context of ablaut or assimilation of consonants. Therefore, such a student would need to supplement the book with other resources on early Germanic grammar. There are also many typos, especially in the key to the exercises. Nonetheless, when it comes to gaining a good amount of comfort with the Old Norse language, and the ability to read its great literature, I know no better way than this primer by Valfellis and Cathey.

The book has long been out of print, and used copies cost dearly, but Prof Cathey now offers the book as an economical course packet directly from UMass.

OLD ICELANDIC: An Introductory Course by Sigrid Valfellis and James E. Cathey was published in 1981 by Oxford University Press in association with the American-Scandinavian Foundation. It is a primer for all aspects of the Old Norse language designed to serve the needs of both linguists and literary scholars.

After an important phonological introduction, it contains thirty-five lessons, each of which introduces a new grammatical concept and readings. Valfellis and Cathey realise that the student of Old Norse probably has prior experience in classical languages or general linguistics, and so their writing is direct and no-nonsense, yet at the same time quite friendly. This is one of the most useful grammars for the autodidactic student that I have ever encountered, as each lesson contains not only a passage or two from the sagas, but also grammar drills and composition exercises in Old Norse. Keys are provided for the composition exercises. So, the student outside of a formal course has the opportunity to keep track of his progress and apply what he has learnt so far.

I was a little unhappy that the book examines Old Norse from an nearly entirely synchronic perspective. There is no tracing of the language's evolution out of Proto-Germanic that would aid the student of comparative Indo-European linguistics. Historical matters are discussed only in the context of ablaut or assimilation of consonants. Therefore, such a student would need to supplement the book with other resources on early Germanic grammar. There are also many typos, especially in the key to the exercises. Nonetheless, when it comes to gaining a good amount of comfort with the Old Norse language, and the ability to read its great literature, I know no better way than this primer by Valfellis and Cathey.

The book has long been out of print, and used copies cost dearly, but Prof Cathey now offers the book as an economical course packet directly from UMass.

To date, would-be readers of this book likely sought online, soon finding what once cost $30 now sold in upwards of $250. Now I am not prepared to pay any such price. I came by a loan through ILS, and while finding it a great book, I put away any notions of stealing. The dearth has frustrated my ambitions for some time. But I let not such roadblocks linger long. Let us say that I used 'common sense' and went to the book's 'source'. Apparently, OUP has resold him the rights to his book, and he has made it available and affordable once more. Through a lady of his acquaintance I am getting a new copy for $25. What's more, the 'flaws' other readers have complained about are largely corrected by the author himself. You are picqued now, but, to counter solicitors, the lady's email will be sconced in a code. (...)

I am currently running an Old Norse language course on egroups (check us out) and can't wait until this book comes out. I have spoken with people who already own this book and they say it is very informative.