Forníslenska er Torvaldur (Old Icelandic is Difficult)

Halló,

As many of you may or may not know, learning Old Icelandic is a large component of my coursework. The pedagogy of Old Icelandic has not changed much since the first real text on the subject was published in the early 20th century. E.V. Gordon's An Introduction to Old Norse is the aforementioned text. My particular copy is from 1927 and although the book has been in and out of print since it first was printed, not much has changed over the years.

Essentially, we are given brief lessons about the most basic grammar of Old Icelandic and then expected to conquer the literature directly. This is accomplished with a handy dictionary and lots of patience. Apparently this brutal way of acquiring a language is rather satisfying. But I have yet to see it.

Old Icelandic is a highly inflected language. This means that all substantives change their form depending upon their function on the sentence. The previous sentence does almost nothing to describe how complex that makes the language. English is not inflected. Nor is Spanish. German is only vaguely inflected. None of the other Scandinavian languages (save Færoese) are inflected in this manner.

Here is an example. The phrase "a desolate garden" can be written in the following ways depending upon what verbs or prepositions are governing the sentence:

auðr garðr
auðan garð
auðum garði
auðs garðs

And this is how one could say "desolate gardens":

auðir garðar
auða garða
auðum görðum
auðra garða

Nouns decline, adjectives decline, pronouns decline, definite articles decline... You get the idea. There are four cases governing the language. All quite common and all quite unpredictable. So you can see the task is daunting, but also rewarding because it unlocks all the subtleties of the texts in their original form. Poetry, prose, it will all come alive.

And the race is on again.

-Nick

P.S. HVAÐ SEGIRÐU? What do you say? Any questions in particular about Old Icelandic?