Old Norse Language

Old Norse language, classical North Germanic language used from roughly 1150 to 1350. It is the literary language of the Icelandic sagas, skaldic poems, and Eddas. The term Old Norse embraces Old Norwegian as well as Old Icelandic, but it is sometimes used interchangeably with the latter term because Icelandic records of this period are more plentiful and of greater literary value than those in the other Scandinavian languages. In a wider sense, Old Norse is distinguishable from the other old Scandinavian languages of this period only by minor differences in the writing traditions.

Grammatically, the Old Norse language remained remarkably stable for 200 years. Like other older Germanic languages, it had a relatively free word order, although certain basic principles were adhered to, such as the finite verb in first or second position, and the object mostly following the verb. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives were inflected for four cases, and verbs were inflected for tense, mood, person, and number. There were separate dual forms for pronouns only. Stress was placed on the first syllable of a word, and stressed syllables could be short, long, or “overlong.”

Old Norse is the parent language of the three modern languages, Icelandic, Faroese, and Norwegian.