The North Germanic language of the Viking Age — ancestor of Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish — and the language of the Eddas and sagas.
Where it was spoken
From roughly the 8th to the 14th century, Old Norse was spoken across Scandinavia and in Viking-settled regions: Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Normandy, and as far east as Russia (Kievan Rus). It split into Old West Norse (Norway, Iceland) and Old East Norse (Sweden, Denmark) by the 13th century.
What it sounded like
A four-case inflected language with three genders, strong and weak nouns, and a productive umlaut system that fronted vowels under conditions later lost. Modern Icelandic preserves most of its grammar almost unchanged.
How it’s written
First in Younger Futhark runes — a 16-character script chiselled on stones and wood — then increasingly in the Latin alphabet after Christianisation. Most surviving Old Norse literature was written down in Iceland in the 13th century.
Find more languages by letter
Old Norse starts with O and ends with E. Browse other languages along the same letter.
Languages that contain a letter from "Old Norse":