Once upon a time, I was thumbing through Dagblaðið, or ‘day-sheet-the’, which is to say, the daily paper in those days, in Reykjavík. I was reflecting on how Icelandic related to other languages. Reykjavík means ‘smoky harbor’, more or less.

A vík is an inlet from the seas and think where Vikings come from after all. The first part of that word is related to ruh or ruch in Old High German. In modern German, rauchen means ‘to smoke’. And there you go.

There was a picture on the front page in which a prefabricated house had fallen off a trailer turning through a downtown intersection.

The caption read, ‘Húsið brotnaði í flutningum’.  That means ‘house-the collapsed in transportation’. That ð character is a soft ‘th’, like in ‘the’. There’s a hard one, like in ‘with’, that looks like this: Þ.

These are runic characters that have dropped out of English but that endure in Icelandic. Another one of these is a grapheme that English used to call ‘ash’ – Æ – that makes the ‘a’ sound, like in ‘cat’, or else it makes the ‘i’ sound like in ‘bide’. Besides the Icelanders, the Norwegians and the Danes still use this.

Well, the Scandinavian languages have all evolved to look pretty different from Icelandic. Icelandic is the odd man out, linguistically speaking.

Scandinavians can all talk to each other pretty well by choosing vocabulary that’s generally familiar to everyone. However, they can’t do that very easily if one of them speaks Icelandic.

Well, they can a bit: I needed to ask a little cousin in Norway once if he had a sliver in his finger, the poor lad. I didn’t know how to say ‘sliver’ in Norwegian, so I asked him in Icelandic. ‘Ertu með flís?’

It’s got Anglo-German DNA in it: ‘Art thou’ and ‘mit’. ‘Are you with (a) sliver?’ He blubbered, ‘Já’. So he understood it but mostly, except in little ways, a Norwegian couldn’t talk with an Icelander.

But an Icelander could talk with a Viking. That’s how much Icelandic has not changed in the last 1,000 years.

They say the vowels differently now and a Viking would wonder why words had come to be spelled with extra vowels too:

maðr (man) is spelled maður these days, for example, but the differences between written Icelandic and Old Norse, as we call its medieval forbear, are pretty trivial.

 If you want to talk to Vikings, speak Icelandic

Icelandic is a west Scandinavian fossil. It’s got some borrowed Celtic words like the names Kjartan and Njáll, and sofn, a fire-word that came to mean ‘kiln’. 

It has more exotic loan-words here and there, that must reflect how widely they were known abroad. ‘Torg’, or ‘marketplace’, is Slavonic. ‘Fíll’, or ‘elephant’, is Persian. 

Lots of Germanic imports came with Christianity, like engill, prestr, kirkja,and biskup.  There came even later loaners, like kurteisi, silki, skarlat, and klaret.  It’s hard to know exactly how imports like these arrived. 

The earliest written-down Icelandic we have on manuscripts is from the thirteenth century, which is well after the Viking period (750 to 1050, or thereabouts).  Before that, we have to rely on runes. (I’ve written about this elsewhere.)

They called their language ‘norræna’, or sometimes ‘donsk’. It varied by region and age.  What they speak in places like Reykjavík now is the closest we have to how it used to be. 

In case you’re wondering, we don’t have many loan-words from old Norse in modern English.  We have lots of words that look like they’re loaners, but they’re not.

They’re migratory Germanic words into Norse (and we speak a Germanic descendant language). The only Norse loaner I can think of offhand is starbord – literally the board that you steer your boat with.  (Think for a minute about why that would refer to the right-hand side of a Viking ship.) 

What Old Norse was built like

Norrænais built much like you’d expect if you have any German or know where English came from. It’s got gendered nouns and it’s got cases. This latter makes it an ‘inflected’ language that means that you modify words to modify the meaning.

In modern English, we modify word-order more than we mess with words themselves. Inflection is an Indo-European thing. Most of the western world does it. Latin modifies suffixes. Celtic modifies prefixes. Norse modifies endings and also stems. 

A kona is a woman at the beginning of a sentence; a kvenna (still used in Swedish) is the root word for a woman at the end of a sentence. In English, ‘Olav saw the old woman’, inverted to ‘The old woman saw Olav’, means something different.  

In Old Norse, it doesn’t. Óláfr sá konu Þa ina gomlu and Konu Þa ina gomlusá Óláfr both mean that Olav saw the old woman. 

Remember those things and learn the grammatical modifications which can get quite complicated and then you can start looking for words you know. You’ll know quite a few of them because to say it again, English and the Nordic languages have a lot of Germanic cognates. Presto!

Þetta er maðurinn sem Ég talaði við í gær: That is man-the whom I spoke with yesterday or That’s the man I spoke with yesterday. 

That’s modern Icelandic. There were some vowel sound-shifts a Viking wouldn’t know but adjusting for that accent difference, this is exactly what he would expect to hear in medieval Kaupmannahöfn (pronounced ‘koypmannarhupn’, sort of).  

Kaup: think kaufen, to shop, in German

Manna: men

Höfn: Hafen, or harbor in German; ‘haven’ in English - Place where men gather to trade.  

You know it now as København … Copenhagen.  

Speaking of another name for watery inlet, the one I used at the beginning of this post when I went to college in a town in northern Germany. My neighborhood was called ‘Wik’. This was only a few miles from the present-day border with Denmark and about 100 yards from a big harbor full of ships.  

Here are some Old Norse sentences for you to look at...

Hann kastar beinum smám um Þvert gólfit: He casts bones small a-thwart floor-the  means He’s throwing little bones all over the floor.  

Váru dyrr á enda: Was door at end means There was a door at the end.  

Þat var á dogum Haralds konungs ins hárfagra, Hálfdanar sonar ins svarta, at sá maðr kom skipi sinu til Islands í Breiðdal, er Hallfreiðr hét.  

‘That vawr ow duyum Haralds koonoongs ins harfaerya, Halvdahnar soonar ins svawrta, at so mathur comb schippi seenoo til Eeslawnds ee Braythdawl, ar Hallfraythur hyet.’  (That double L is weirdly pronounced, a side-of-tongue flip that I can’t figure out how to write phonetically. I’ve only ever heard it in Icelandic.)  

That was in the days Harald-of king the hair-fair, Halfdane’s son the black, that that man came ship-with his to Iceland into Broad Valley [modern German breit and Tal), who Hallfrethur called-was. 

It was in the days of King Harald the Blond, son of Halfdane the Black, that a man named Hallfrethur brought his ship to Iceland, to [a place called] Broad Valley. 

Now go listen

That’s what Old Norse was like on the page. For as close as you can get to the sound that Vikings knew, at least without professors near to correct your vowels, go to a streaming TV site like https://www.ruv.is and have a listen. 

I think of Icelandic as the oboe of western languages. In the hands of a beginner, it’s pretty ugly. But in the hands of an expert, it’s one of the most beautiful things you’ll ever hear. Poetically it can work wonders too if you’re really good at it.

It’s worth remembering that the Vikings were famous for their love of well-sung verse and cleverly layered storytelling.  I should probably do a post on that. After you’ve done that, pull up a page of Icelandic text on your screen, and have a look at it again. 

You’ll see it’s quite beautiful, once you know what you’re looking at. Dagblaðið has merged with another paper, by the way.  You’ll find it these days at https://www.dv.is.  It’s a bit of a tabloid now but is the language ever lovely.  

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