Your frustration is understandable, and a case could certainly be made for reform of traditional teaching methods, but I personally wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath-water by abandoning reliance on the thematic vowel and other elements that are no longer visible. If you don’t know about front mutation and labial mutation, for one, both processes that were active in a prehistoric stage of the language and the causes for which have often disappeared, you won’t be able to recognise why there are three realisations of the stem vowel in völlr (vallar, vellir), let alone predict what happens if you should decline the word. Moreover, if Wheelock (a fine textbook for learning purposes) hadn’t done away with thematic vowels itself, you would have been able to recognise that the Germanic a-stems are like class 2 Latin nouns, the ō-stems like class 1, and the i- and u-stems like classes 3 and 4. But if you are looking for an approach to Old Norse that is more like Wheelock, you’ll want to give Barnes a try (A New Introduction to Old Norse, available online at the website of the Viking Society). Unfortunately, you’ll find that this textbook leaves space for improvement in a different way, as it doesn’t number or distinguish between declensions at all but instead says “here are the most typical examples of masculine declension, and here are a few less typical ones.”

Now that I’m actually teaching Old Norse for the first time (if outside the regular channels), I’ve come to some new insights regarding the value of the various textbooks for teaching. I still think Valfells and Cathey is a rare treasure in terms of the theory it contains, but its presentation makes me very hesitant indeed to make my students use it. Most of my students already have Old English, but they’re English Department (read: literature) undergraduates who are probably not ready for Valfell’s full-on linguistic approach, and the order of the elements in Valfells and Cathey is just not something I find I can apply in class. I don’t really want to use Barnes because of its move away from traditional grammar, yet it does more explaining than any other textbook, and it uses great examples. In some areas it is unrivalled, e.g. in its presentation of the prepositions. Personally I prefer to work with Noreen or Iversen, but I currently teach in an environment where students just can’t be expected to read Norwegian or German. At the end of the day what I end up doing is give my own presentation of the grammar in class, then send my students home to read the same subject matter in Gordon. I also keep written versions of my grammar lectures on the course website to help fill in the gaps in Gordon that I think are bothering Brandon. Have a look, but be advised that these are essentially first drafts, so I’m sure there’s a lot wrong with them.

Cheap ambien cr. Ambien cr. Ambien. Ambien and hormones….

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!

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.”

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.

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.