Survey: Where’d you learn Old Norse that way?
The new academic year is kicking into gear now, and that means that all around the world a gratifying number of brand new students will be opening Old Norse textbooks for the first time, and getting stuck into the declensions. As ever, I’m feeling nervous about the prospect of facing an unknown class, full of people with radically different expectations and levels of experience–particularly in language-learning. I usually am very lucky with my classes, but I’m in the (probably very unusual position) of teaching in a department where Norse is a compulsory first-year course, so I always have some students who would rather be doing something else and for whom learning a dead language is difficult, boring, and superficially pointless. Not many, but one or two.
Of course, one learns strategies for coping with the uninterested or poorly prepared student, but it’s led me to think a bit more about how we start beginners on the path towards learning Old Norse. And one aspect of the proccess that I return to is the adequacy or otherwise of the resources at our disposal. And by this I mean the books: I use the Viking Society’s New Introduction to Old Norse (ed. Barnes, Faulkes, et al.). Or more precisely, I use the Reader and Glossary in class, strongly suggest to students that they also purchase the Grammar, and then sit back and watch as most of them never look inside the ‘red book’. Second-hand copies of the NION Grammar that float around my department always tend to be pristine, since the students who do use it would never part with it.
Perhaps it’s my own fault: I find Barnes’s Grammar incredibly useful as a reference resource, but highly frustrating to use when teaching. There’s no index, and the programmatic aspects of the work never seem to be pitched at the right level. I know plenty of people use it for independent study, but I wouldn’t like to do so myself. So I made a simplified digest of the grammar, a Barnes-Lite perhaps, which is pinned more closely to the structure of the course as I like to teach it. And nowadays I do lots of PowerPoint alongside it, which can be a useful tool.
But what I want is a single-volume all purpose Introduction to Old Norse that students can use as grammatical reference, text reader, and progressive course book all at once. I do not think that such a thing exists. (I’m thinking along the lines of Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English, which I think is very good and would always be my first choice for an Old English text book.) There are rumours floating around that Jesse Byock has something in the works, and I know that our colleagues at Durham are also working on such a project. But is there anything out there already that I’ve missed? Should I already be using a different text book? What do other people do?
To answer this last question, I’ve prepared a little survey, and I’d be delighted if you took the time to complete it. And then, please use the comments to, well, comment on how you see the state of the pedagogical resources in the field. In particular, I’d be glad if people could let me know of any books that I’ve missed out from the survey. And please leave your comments below!
Quick Survey: Old Norse Text Books
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I actually didn’t have a text book assigned as a student. We used Paul Bibire’s lovingly hand-typed accidence and home-edited texts (from Auðunar þáttr
and Eíriks saga rauða, if I remember rightly). I remember being extremely daunted by the morphology, and if I could make one law about Old Norse text books for beginners, it would be somehow to get rid of (what feels like) abstract accounts of sound-changes, especially near the beginning.
In Bergen we use Odd Einar Haugen’s Grunnbok i norrønt språk as a grammar and text selections from Norrøne tekster i utval. The Handbok i norrøn filologi is for more advanced student and presupposes knowledge of ON grammar. We use most of it in the second term, but save some chapters for later.
I completely agree that we need something like Peter Baker’s Introduction to Old English for ON.
“Handbok i norrøn filologi” isn’t a primer, but more an intermediate study-companion; you might want to change this to “Grunnbok i norrønt språk” which is used a lot in Norway, but unfortunately it isn’t translated to any language.
In German there’s still Ranke/Hofmann’s “Altnordisches Elementarbuch” – way too condensed and old fashioned in my opinion. The book seems to assume, that you’ve already learned other Old-Germanic languages before. We used it back then (together with a script) and I remember it was very difficult to find the information you needed.
And there is van Nahl’s “Einführung in das Altisländische” which is much along the lines of Baker’s book, but I haven’t really used it myself.
I’ve primarily learned from two ON graduate studies–in which we primarily used NION for grammar supplemented with Gordon’s Introduction for more advanced issues and as a reader (first semester), then struck out on our own to read a few shorter pieces from various editions (second semester). While this method worked, there’s not much doubt in my mind that the field of ON studies could benefit from another introductory text (like Baker’s Introduction to OE). It appears that much more time, effort, and money has been put into OE introductions (since they multiply readily, with many to choose from), but there has been little advancement for ON. As a student and a (hopefully) future teacher of ON, I’m hoping that more resources emerge before I have the chance to teach the language.
I take a secret fancy to Valfells and Cathey, because it leads students to a closer understanding of the grammar as well as a productive knowledge of the language as a whole. It relies on a cumulative knowledge of the grammar through memorisation and application, which is a useful approach, the one downside to which is of course the absence of a reference grammar. I’d use a solid reference grammar alongside it, probably Barnes. I haven’t yet taught Old Norse though, and I’d be keen to get some motivated opinions on the grammatical accuracy and pedagogical pitfalls of both these books.
Hi Jonas, Hi Florian. I’ve changed Odd Einar’s Handbok to the Grunnbok — my mistake — and added the German books that you suggested. It will be very interesting to build up a list of the different books in the different languages. What do people use in Denmark and Sweden, I wonder?
B. Hawk: It’s easier to identify a market for OE text books, I guess. It has a secure disciplinary basis and there are a lot of Enlgish departments out there. And we have to take into account that the study of Old Norse is more international and fragmented. But there are something like 38 university departments in North America teaching ON language, several in the UK, and of course to varying degrees the subject remains popular in Scandinavia and Continental Europe. In fact, I think that interest in ON is currently bouyant. Which makes it a surprise that we don’t have more choice in the way of text books — unless everybody is really happy with Barnes et al or whoever they’re using. There’s also an untapped market in the interested amateur/independent study sector. Lots of people want to learn the language on their own, but I don’t think any of the available alternatives in English are very helpful for them at all.
Paul: I can vouch for the accuracy of Barnes, but it is more of a reference grammar than a primer, in my opinion. Which is fine, but it can leave the absolute beginner entirely in the dark. I scarcely ever look at Valfells and Cathey, which does not have a terribly good reputation, although I have used texts from it sometimes.
Of the ones currently in the list, I think Kenneth Chapman’s ‘Graded Readings in Old Icelandic’ is an interesting one. I’ve never used it for teaching — has anybody? — but I think the approach is good. He immerses the student in the texts right from the beginning, so that they learn by doing rather than being expected to internalize all the grammatical information at once. But that came out in 1972, I think — it really is remarkable that we’ve seen so few attempts at this sort of book.
Oh, and I admire Christophe Bord’s book, too. Accessible and engaging and well presented, especially for the basic grammar.
At Háskóli Íslands we use Norron Grammatik, by the Norwegian Rognvald Iversen. The course taught here called Íslenskt mál ap fornu is heavily linguistics-based, and this book suits the course’s purpose pretty well.
We had Gordon, and some of Ursula Dronke’s home-made sheets of morphology, but we never worked through sound-changes in any particularly systematic way. Mostly I read Gordon while trying to translate Hrafnkels saga.
I don’t teach grammar as such in tutorials and mostly Sian or Heather covers the language in classes in the English Faculty, while I point out various grammatical features as we translated. Old English is much better organised to that extent – and you are quite right that NION is a fine reference grammar – I use it a lot myself, but that its only merit for use with students is that it’s not Gordon.
Jesse’s Intro book does exist – I’ve seen the ms. both a long time ago in UCLA, and in an updated version at Uppsala. But he seems to be having trouble in letting go of it – or in finding a publisher. It looks great, from the bits I saw; accessible and interesting. And with pictures.
Chris, thank you for this. Finally a useful web-based quiz!
I learned from Gordon, but, though it met my needs as a student, it does not meet the needs of my own students. I’ve taught from it once with the addition of many handouts of my own devising. It sounds like a lot of us do similar supplementing. I wonder what would happen if we got all that supplementary material in one place?
In Germany we used a combination of van Nahl and Ranke/Hoffmann, while in the United States we used Gordon and Alan Bower’s “Synopsis of Old Icelandic Morphology.”
In Uppsala, we use(d) Iversens Norrøn grammatikk and Wesséns Isländsk grammatik, mostly as reference grammars, but I think we’re moving over to Haugens Grunnbok i norrønt språk – the other two are increasingly difficult for students to find. Apart from reference books and text selections (from Erik Noreens Isländsk läsebok, mostly), we have no text book as such. Studying ON in Uppsala is based on translation, parsing, and Heimir Pálsson… Not a bad combination, mind you.
In Moscow we used an old grammar handbuch by M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij which cataloged the sound changes in excruciating detail but had a good selection of texts, a splendid glossary and a very complete system of cross-references, including in the glossary entries. It is still the only available book in Russian, although I hear that some people, who learn ON on their own, buy Barnes. Steblin-Kamenskij is not a textbook by any means, so our teachers recommended that we use Chapman for self-study. But the whole situation was different from yours because it was not an obligatory class (which also exists; in the Scandinavian group, students take it in their third and fourth semester), and the professor apparently did not care that the course proved too difficult for more than a half of those who came to the first class. At the introductory lesson she briefly explained a couple things about the pronounciation and grammar and suggested that the students analyze a passage from Íslendingabók with a facing translation. At the second class she sent me to the blackboard to translate some very basic phrase from Russian into ON. I am not sure I would ever use such metods myself in teaching, but on the other hand it worked, at least with me and obviously with some dozens of other sometime students whom she taught during the last 40 years.
Thanks very much for all these comments. What strikes me is how little thought seems to have gone into linking these text books to pedagogical methods. Some teachers still favour what we might call the ‘parse or fail’ method, where having a good reference grammar and working through texts is thought to be enough. That approach can certainly work very well, and I can see why it would be appropriate to Icelandic students, or to others who have a strong background in similar language-learning: if any of our students arrive already having done several years of Latin or Ancient Greek they can always manage being sent off to find things out in Barnes for themselves. But in Britain at least, the decline in all language learning in high schools means that this type of student is in a dwindling minority, and we have to cope with some students who barely know what a noun is, never mind a subordinate clause or a supine. While I know that many of us try really hard to come up with innovative and engaging ways to get this sort of student to progress in Old Norse, it seems that the teaching materials that the publishers provide don’t always help us as we like.
The fact that E.V. Gordon is still the most commonly used primer (OK, I know it’s a small sample size) is actually something of a worry for me, especially since we mainly agree that Barnes is only an improvement over it in some ways. Something better geared to teaching must surely be a desideratum.
Merrill: I agree, we should look towards pooling our resources. I’d be more than happy to make my materials available publicly, and I know that others have got stuff too. A long-term goal of mine is to create some kind of properly interactive Old Norse course online, as I think that in general we’re also lagging behind in our use of technology. If anybody fancies collaborating…
Aleksandr: I make my beginning students translate extremely basic sentences from English into Old Norse, too. I hope it’s not just because I’m a sadist. It seems to be a good way to reinforce explanations of basic grammatical concepts, and to gain an active understanding of how the language works.
I think it’s something of a pity that as a discipline we’ve not given much thought to how best to teach Old Norse, since it is the foundation of so much of what we do.
Being Russian, I naturally used Mikhail Steblin-Kamenskij’s handbook – which is, in fact, a distillation of Adolf Noreen’s book with an addtion of Heusler’s chapter on syntax (still unique, no other handbook has a comparable section). It’s very good, I think, as a starter – as Sasha Busygin remarked above, it has a very detailed phonology, rather detailed morphology (enough for starters – of course Noreen holds much more), a good selection of texts – covering most of the principal genres and describing society in nice detail – and a referenced glossary. It’s a standard grammar, so it’s not split into lessons. When I used to teach ON for Russians, I again used Steblin-Kamenskij as the basic book and would supplement material from Noreen (that’s missing from your list, btw
and it’s _the_ best ON book, the only pity’s it’s got nothing on syntax). But if I were teaching ON to non-Russians, I would concoct my own version from Noreen – there’s too much interesting material there to overgloss it by using something else, I believe. I also believe – and I used to do that when teaching OE – that cross-Germanic linguistic ties are of paramount importance and add much fun and depth, so I would always point out parallels between OE and ON, in phonology and morphology (sort of introductory comparative grammar), esp. if my students have got more than one Germanic lang. under the belt (e.g., English and/or German). I’m not aware of any ON or OE handbook that pinpoints these types of ties.
With all due respect to a friend of Prof. Tolkien’s, I would never use Gordon – too many texts and too few chapters on grammar. Not nearly enough.
I must admit, I – thank god – have never had the problem of having uninterested students as a teacher. As a student, I was myself part of a class where ON was obligatory, and people (beside me) weren’t that enthusiastic – but I’m sure that was no fault of Steblin’s grammar they were using, rather the teacher’s (the guy knew so much but had trouble doing getting the stuff across).
Jesse showed me ms of his ON book at Uppsala, and by the looks of it it’s beyond cool (from “fascinate-your-students” point of view, at least) – pictures, maps (do I love Jesse’s maps!), grammar, culture all taken together and split into lessons. I haven’t got a chance to have a very thorough look, though. Jesse’s point, btw, was very much like yours – he used to tell me that he believes the English handbooks on ON aren’t, to put it simply, as good as OE handbooks, so he decided to do one himself. But as Carolyne remarked, Jesse says he hasn’t got much luck so far with finding a publisher.
As for translating into ON – well, there’s good Latin tradition of doing this, and it’s rather feasible with ON, given the breadth of lexicon surviving, but I think the ways of expression in ON are still too idiosyncractic to do much good – first one has to learn to “think the ON way”
As for collaborating – sounds like an interesting idea. I put up two things I would like to throw in in such a project – links to OE from ON and “reviving” (=making “more accessible”) the material stored in Noreen’s.
We used a combination of two books — one being Gordon’s book, and the other being Alan Bower’s ‘A synopsis of Old Icelandic morphology.’ We used Gordon mostly for the vocabulary and text to translate and used Bower for referencing the declensions/conjugations — which is a good combination I think. I absolutely love Bower’s book — very easy to use.
I completely agree with Chris’s original posting. I learned Old Norse from Gordon & Taylor, but I was an unusual student even back in the 1990s and I don’t think the book is at all suitable for today’s undergraduates. In my own teaching I use the Reader and Glossary volumes of NION and optimistically recommend the red Grammar volume, but no student has (to my knowledge) ever consulted the copies of the Grammar in the library. For grammar teaching I provide a series of my own handouts that cover the absolute basics (all I think most undergraduates actually need). Having contributed two of the texts to the NION Reader volume I have to say I think the Reader and Glossary are very good, but they contain far too much material for my purposes: we read only a tiny proportion of the texts during the year. A shorter volume containing a basic grammar, a few texts and a fully user-friendly glossary would be very, very welcome. One book not yet mentioned in the above discussion, I think, is Garmonsway’s, An Early Norse Reader: it was published back in 1928 and is long out-of-print, but is still to my mind in many ways the best Norse textbook I know for beginners (though perhaps the extracts are a bit short? And the glossary could be improved). A modern equivalent would be wonderful.
I learnt from Gordon in the 1960s, and if I recall correctly almost from the beginning the class worked on translating a text: I do not recall much formal teaching of the grammar. One thing I do recall from the very first session is that the lecturer went round the class asking what languages we had studied previously, and it turned out all six of us had done Latin at school. Although Latin is a very different language from Old Norse, it did, I think, greatly simplify his teaching task by allowing him to assume general familiarity with the grammatical terminology traditional used when discussing inflected European languages. Today such a situation would be highly unlikely, and students might need to be introduced to the very concept of gramatical case. Gordon would not be a good choice of text today.
I have taught Modern Icelandic for many years and have tutored students in Old Icelandic(and Old Norse). This coming spring semseter, I will be teaching a special seminar class of no more than 15 students (all freshmen) Old Icelandic. I will be using Valfell’s and Cathey’s textbook along with Barnes’ textbook for the more detailed treatment of grammar. The combination of the two textbooks is, in my opinion, excellent. This view was also expressed up above by one of the other scholars.
I will also recommend the Syntax of Old Norse and Old Icelandic by Davis .
and the Syntax of Old Norse by Farlund
I studied the basics of Old Norse on two Internet sites:
(1) Old Norse for Beginners, by Oskar Gudlaugsson and Haukur Thorgeirsson; the URL is www3.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/
(2) Old Norse Online, by Todd B. Krause and Jonathan Slocum; the URL is http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/norol-TC-X.html
I followed up with Easy Readings in Old Icelandic, which is online at the Northvegr Foundation: http://www.northvegr.org/lore/oldice/index.php.
After these, I bought Gordon’s text. I also downloaded Henry Sweet’s Icelandic Primer with Grammar, Notes and Glossary. Both are occasionally helpful.
Indispensible for me has been the online version of Zoega, which is also at the Northvegr Foundation.
I have a site at fornrit.net, where I have posted Volsunga Saga. It has a “clickable” glossary. From it you can perhaps determine how much Old Norse I have learned. Any of you may also feel free to use it in any way you like, with or without credit. I am not by any means expert in the language, so caveat lector. Corrections to it and comments about it to webmaster@fornrit.net are welcome.
I’ll be participating in the instruction of Old Norse for the first time this term. Not exactly teaching the grammar, vocabulary and so on – that’ll be Dr Ashurst’s exceeding pleasure. Just tutorials on the texts for me. Still, I don’t intend to sit down to the table without both Gordon and Barnes (grammar) handy. Anyway, I’m sorry I don’t have a profound addition to make to this discussion, but I’ll certainly be keeping my eye on it throughout the year as I encounter snags and pitfalls. So thank you, everyone.
It’s the “Syntax of Old English and Old Icelandic”, not “Old Norse and Old Icelandic” listed above. Sorry for the typo.
I just started learning Old Norse on my own a few weeks ago and stumbled onto this site in my quest for more resources. Like Hamilton, I’m using Oskar Gudlaugsson and Haukur Thorgeirsson, and supplementing with the University of Texas and the Zoega sites. So far, the G&T lessons have been incredibly easy to use – although I’ve already had basic instruction in Latin (so the concept of declinsions didn’t startle me) and have a reasonable working knowledge of English grammar. Without those, I think I would’ve had a much harder time.
Dr. Abram, I think it’s great that you have students translate from English to Old Norse. For me, at least, that “thinking backwards” solidifies grammar concepts and vocabulary far more than translating from ON to English.
I would love to have more online resources to learn from, and will continue checking back here as I progress in my studies in hopes of finding them.
I find Gudlaugsson & Thorgeirsson extremely useful. I have just recently begun to satisfy a 4-decade long craving to study this language, in part because I have studied several other languages, so the linguistics are not a problem, but I find their graded pedagogy perfect. Simple sentences with simplified grammar. It is light-hearted, which is helpful. They spice the primer readings with actual texts. If only all language texts were this well crafted pedagogically!
I just started learning Old Norse this summer, and have been using E. V. Gordon’s book. I have a strong background in Latin and learning languages on my own by translation and memorization, so Gordon’s book is fairly simple for me to use. I only wish it had full charts for some of the declensions and conjugations, as this book just assumes that you will be able to figure out patterns on your own and apply them. (Maybe I should, but it does assume a lot.)
The reason I have started my studies with this book is because it was the only one available at my University’s Library. Being a student with limited resources, I settled for this book checked out for free rather than have to pay for something else, especially something I couldn’t see ahead of time. Now I’ve started my studies, I don’t believe I will switch to a different textbook, unless I can find one with an English to Old Norse dictionary in the back as well. (I am part of a Viking Reenactment group and would like to gain a speaking knowledge of Old Norse simply for the sake of educating the public.)
One other advantage to Gordon’s book that I can see is the sheer wealth of actual texts for translation and reading, and the extensive notes that explain hard passages and strange word-order constructions. From the light-hearted “Rune Song” to a passage from Egil’s Saga, if you can work your way through this book, you will have a wonderful introduction to Old Norse literature.
I had some introduction to Modern Icelandic before learning Old Norse properly, but my university ON classes used Valfells & Cathey (which I felt like I quite liked at the time, though I don’t remember why!). Later on, when brushing up and going deeper, I tended to use good ol’ Gordon for self-study and reference — since it was available, convenient, and had a serviceable reference grammar at the back (if you already pretty much knew what was going on). More recently, I’ve picked up Barnes, and like the look of it, but since I already have a serviceable reading knowledge — and have become more interested in historical grammar things — I haven’t used it much!
I remember talk with Jesse Byock about … sheesh, 10 years ago about his plans for a new ON grammar (I remember him not being into the Barnes grammar), but this is the first time I’ve heard about it again since then! It would be cool to know more about it ….
Well I am Danish, so i already speak a nordic language. I started with Old Norse a bit more than two years ago.
I started with the website “old norse for beginners”, which is pretty good if you dont know any grammar at all ;b
I got some icelandic penpals, and i asked them to write to me in icelandic though I hardly knew anyword or any grammar. by concentrating hard, and read the same line like 10 – 17 times, I maneged to get the point (the grammar was not so important, becuase the word order was pretty much like the danish one). Yes Danish is still close enough ^^
I found icelandic disney videos on youtube (the person who made them, became my first penpal:túnfiskur, now: túnfiskurinn), and learned the pronounciation from that.
After a year, I bought A new introduction to Old Norse. and I’ve been learning allot more since. and i found a site which can conjugate all icelandic words ;b (http://bin.arnastofnun.is/)
Now, I have translated my first old norse text, I am reading “Wimmers old nordiske læsebog”, and i can long conversations on msn, where i use old norse to speak with icelanders. I start to understand spoken icelandic pretty good, and I can talk a good part too. I can understand swedish and norwegian without big problems, and read and understand faroese and a bit norn.
I aslo got able to understand old danish and old swedish, and the middle languages. and more and more old english too :b
At christmas it is around 2 and a half year, with self studying :b
I make old norse related videos on youtube, with translation and subtitles ^^
my youtube name is “RavenofDenmark”, feel free to see and comment my videos :b
I’m flattered that people find the ‘Old Norse for Beginners’ site useful. It was intended as a very gentle introduction for people who had a lot of enthusiasm for the subject but little knowledge of grammar and little experience with learning languages. Generally, we thought those would be people interested in Viking reenactment or in heathenry. But going by what Chris Abram writes in a comment above, maybe university students these days don’t necessarily have a strong linguistic background either.
But we wrote this a long time ago and I haven’t thought about it in a long time. If I were to undertake something similar today it would probably be a) more academically rigorous and b) more boring
The beginning Old Norse class I took as an undergrad (at Harvard) used Valfells and Cathey (in photocopy – already in the early 1990s it was out of print) for the first half of the semester and then Gordon for the second half. The professor was a generative syntactician who thought it was wrong to compose sentences in languages for which no native speaker judgements were available, so we did not do translation exercises into Old Icelandic. In retrospect, I don’t see how we can have gotten through all of Valfells and Cathey and still had time to read all of Hrafnkels saga and some other things in the same semester, although that is my memory of the course; perhaps the two of us who completed the course put in more time than my students are able to do, back in the olden days when we walked to school uphill both ways.
Now as a teacher (at UCLA), I generally spend the first quarter (10 weeks, 3-4 hours/week) going through Valfells and Cathey and then use Gordon for the second quarter. Students who have experience with dead languages can (and prefer to) jump directly into Gordon. I use Valfells and Cathey because most others like the comfort of a graded reader, but treat their grammatical explanations mainly as artifacts in the history of linguistics. My own handoutage varies depending on the clientele – I get everything from graduate students in Indo-European to more typical American undergrads who don’t know what a noun is, but as the class is typically of cardinality six or so I can tailor it accordingly. Using textbooks not written in English is not a possibility for American students.
Some Icelandic friends have been shocked that I use Gordon, since “It’s so _old_!” but I like its compactness – an entire language and culture in one small package, as one friend put it. (When I was taking Old Norse I carried the book on my person at all times and could make use of any spare moments to look up words.) When I sat down to list from my head the essential grammar points that a student in the first year of Old Norse really needed to know, the result was essentially identical to the topics in his concise reference grammar section, although there are a few places where his explanations are confusing. I do, however, feel that the current list price of $85 is excessive for a paperback that tends to lose pages and whose authors are not collecting any royalties where they are.
I have ordered Barnes’ grammar as a supplementary reference, but like others who have commented here I find it unusable as a textbook. It feels like 40 years of collected office hour conversations. I am sure I would like Michael’s office hours as much as I have enjoyed conversations with him over beer (well, almost), but pity anyone who would try to teach from my office hours. John Lindow has compared the book to a bicycle magazine that discusses arcane points of bicycle repair but every once in a while runs a feature like “How to change a flat tire” – there are few pointers as to what aspects of the material covered are intended for what audience.
It is similarly difficult to teach from other people’s handouts or lecture notes. I have come to respect the tremendous difficulty entailed in writing a textbook. Jesse’s manuscript has gone through decades of revision and many research assistants, but it may not appear until Garðar Hólm performs. I *love* teaching Old Norse, feel comfortable discussing Icelandic grammar on many levels, and have been teased by my students for compulsive handout-making, but have not yet found the one true note.
Hey wow Kendra, many thanks for the detailed discussion.
As someone who teaches from Valfells and Cathey, how do you rate the work in terms of accuracy (of both grammatical description and applied grammaticality)? I really liked the book when I first took up Old Norse, and I would certainly teach from it if the opportunity arose, but I have never yet sat down to evaluate its reliability. What worries me is that I have worked with Cathey’s volumes on Old Saxon, which are decidedly substandard.
in Zürich we use Nedoma’s Kleine Grammatik des Altisländischen, but only to look up things, we have a small handout from our Professor as well.
Thanks, Paul. I also recall generally liking Valfells-Cathey as a student.
I have not noticed an alarming density of typos or errors. There are a few inconsistencies in normalization, but the same holds for Gordon and other textbooks. The made-up passages in the early chapters sometimes present an interesting conflation of Old and Modern Icelandic perspectives: “Þar er nú hǫfuðstaðr Íslands” (18) referring to Reykjavík, “Landit er fagrt ok frítt” (18) citing Jónas Hallgrímsson in “Old” Icelandic.
The selections from sagas present an interesting juxtaposition of “greatest hit” scenes and studies of the formulaic aspects of certain type scenes (e.g. goading). I find myself explaining the plots of sagas excerpted badly out of order (which is fine) and sometimes apologize for the emphasis on violence, drinking and whales produced by the selection of memorable scenes. There are some rather abrupt shifts in the difficulty of passages, unavoidably, and a few passages that are really difficult, notably the calendric confusion from Íslendingabók (233).
I acknowledge the “vision” of presenting a “structure of” course as part of a primer, and teaching a relatively coherent synchronic analysis of Old Icelandic morphology. What makes the book difficult to use is its SPE-style postulation of underlying forms which are sometimes but not always the same as historical predecessors. Now whole generations have grown up which know nothing but Optimality Theory, and I don’t feel it’s my job as their Old Norse teacher to explain SPE to them. Given the relative lifespans of textbooks for philological languages on the one hand and linguistic paradigms on the other, I would not recommend undertaking to write an Old Norse grammar based on OT. (While European textbooks tend to contain a bewildering amount of historical material, I think that including a moderate amount of language history is good; presenting the historical background to some alternations will go nearly as far as a synchronic analysis in “making sense” of them, and our understanding of Germanic historical grammar may be less volatile than phonological or morphological theories.)
I admire Valfells and Cathey’s boldness in introducting syntactic and discourse factors early on in the pedagogy. These elements may be presented in an oversimplified or overgeneralized form, and the order in which they are introduced is not necessarily decreasing order of centrality. For instance, the dative of material is introduced first I think because it is easy to create examples of it, but its density in the passage is unlike any “natural” passage. In this, of course, the book follows the tradition of textbooks in philological languages. The choice of syntactic topics also reflects the fashions of the time: I have suggested to my students that it may not be a coincidence that stylistic fronting is presented early in the book (58-59) and that Maling’s (1980) seminal article on the phenomenon in Modern Icelandic appeared the year before the textbook.
The textbook captures a particular slice of the history of linguistics. Overall, as a reader it is serviceable if capricious, and as a grammatical presentation it cannot be faulted for being “barn síns tíma.”
I bought Glendennings “Teach yourself Icelandic” in 1976 after his foreword informed me that modern Icelandic speakers can easily read the sagas. Soon after I bought ( for the incredibly high price at the time of A$250 the Linguaphone Institutes Icelandic Course. I bought Gordons Introduction at the same time, a hard cover edition, but lost it in the early 80′s and bought the paperback edition in about 84. The pages started falling out almost immediately but it is still a treasure. Meeting a number of Icelanders over the years has kept my interest ticking over (just, at times). I attended an Old Icelandic course at Sydney Uni which was excellent but discovered that learning Modern Icelandic is not encouraged and that there is a certain looking down the nose at the Icelanders normalizing of the Old Icelandic texts. I must say I cant see the point of normalizing them myself.
I have met a number of people who studied Old Icelandic at Queensland University, the undergrad library of which was ( and I hope still is) a fantastic repository of books on the subject, many dating back over 100 years.
Personally i am still keen to master the living Icelandic. It seems so much easier than trying to memorize huge lists of words and complex grammar.
The grammar of Icelandic has always been a major stumbling block for me, though now in my middle ages(!) I seem less daunted than I was.
It has always been my lack of knowledge of English grammatical terms and concepts that has held me back ( I am lazy I think).
I have two wonderful Icelandic – English / English – Icelandic dictionarys that I think are quite rare, both sent to me by my long time Icelandic penpal Guðrun ö
The main one is by Arngrimúr Sigurdsson and published by Ísafold and the small one is by Sævar Hilvertsson published by Orðabók Aútgáfan.
I intend to finally make the pilgrimage to Iceland soon and spend some time there immersed in the language and culture. Good enough for Tolkein, good enough for me!
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