THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

BYSTEFÁN KARLSSON
TRANSLATED BY

RORY MCTURKVIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
2004© 2004 Stefán Karlsson
ISBN: 978 0 903521 61 1

Reprinted with minor corrections 2013

Printed by Short Run Press Limited, Exeter

Preface‘Tungan’, the work translated here, first appeared as a chapter in Íslenskþjóðmenning, vol. VI (Reykjavík: Þjóðsaga, 1989), 1–54, and has since
been republished, with minor alterations and additions (including thenumbering of sections and subsections) in Stafkrókar (2000; see Biblio­
graphy), 19–75. The present translation incorporates the changes made in
the 2000 version, even though my work on it was mainly done in 1997–99.
Stefán Karlsson kindly gave me an offprint of ‘Tungan’ in September
1995. The idea of translating it first occurred to me in the spring of 1997, andI am grateful to Örnólfur Thorsson, who was Visiting Fellow in Ice­landic
Studies at the University of Leeds in 1996–97, for help and advice in theearly stages of my work on the translation. I had completed about half of it(to the end of section 1, ‘The language itself’) by the summer of 1998, andtranslated the remainder during my year as Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, Tennessee, in 1998–99. The translation has since
been read in draft by Richard Perkins, Peter Foote, Desmond Slay, Michael
Barnes, Peter Orton, and finally Stefán himself, to all of whom I am deeply
grateful for their comments and suggestions. I am particularly grateful to
Stefán for his acceptance and support of the idea of publishing this workof his in English, and for the thoroughness with which he read and com­mented on the translation. My thanks are also due to Andrew Wawn, whose
recognition of the value of ‘Tungan’ for ­teaching purposes encouraged me
to bring my work on it to completion, and to ­Anthony Faulkes for the carewith which he has prepared the translation for the press.
In its original form this work was, of course, intended for Icelandic­readers, in whom knowledge of the pronunciation of Modern Icelandic
could easily be assumed. With this in mind I have given in the text a mini­
mal amount of additional information about Icelandic pronunciation, mostespecially in subsection 1.2.1, where Stefán compares the vowel soundsof Old Icelandic with those of Modern Icelandic. I have slightly reduced
and reordered the information given in subsections 1.1.1–3, and haveadded English translations of words and phrases in languages other thanEnglish that are referred to in the text; I have also parsed Icelandic words
where it seemed to me helpful to do so. What is offered here is, however, atranslation rather than an adaptation; I have not otherwise ventured to alter
Stefán’s treatment of his material in any way, and only hope, indeed, that
I have represented it with reasonable accuracy. Any errors of translation
are, of course, entirely my responsibility.
R. McT.
Leeds, April 2004

Abbreviationsacc.
adj., adjs
adv.
comp.
dat.
f.
gen.
indic.
inf.
m.
ModIcel.
n.
nom.
OldIcel.
pers.
pl.
poss.
pp.
pres.
pret.
sg.
subj.

accusative
adjective(s)adverbcomparative
dativefeminine
genitive
indicative
infinitive
masculine
Modern Icelandic
neuternominative
Old Icelandic
personpluralpossessive
past participle
present
preterite
singularsubjunctive

Note: In the numbered extracts printed at the foot of pages 38–63 with facing
translations, and illustrating different stages in the history of Icelandic and its
spelling, the following editorial practices have been adopted: italics indicate
expansion of abbreviations, pointed brackets ‹ › mark off letters that have been
supplied in cases of omission, and the asterisk * marks words in which errors ofother kinds have been emended. The oblique strokes in extracts 10 and 12, on theother hand, correspond to punctuation marks in the original texts.

Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................... 7
1. The language itself ............................................................................. 8
2. Orthography ..................................................................................... 39
3. One language ................................................................................... 64
Bibliography ........................................................................................ 67
General index ....................................................................................... 75
Index of words and phrases ................................................................. 79

Introduction
This book surveys the main developments in the history of the Icelandic
language and the major changes in orthography from one period to another.
The sound system of the earliest Icelandic, developments in the vocalic
system, and numerous combinative changes are outlined. It should be
noted that not all the innovations described have affected the whole country;
some indeed were limited in distribution and did not achieve permanence.
Some major changes in inflexion are also described, with due accounttaken of the fact that inflexional differences between Old and Modern
Icelandic are slight, not least because nineteenth-century purists set theirface against a number of levelling-out developments which were by thenwell advanced.
Vocabulary and lexical changes are discussed, with special reference toforeign influences and native resistance to them. Many words wereintroduced into the language as a result of the conversion to Christianity,
some of them loan-words and some of them neologisms. Loan-words thenand later came by various routes; Low German vocabulary by way of
Norwegian and Danish is a large element, especially evident in religious
writings of the Reformation period and in the language of state officials.
Loan-words had, however, a limited spread among the population at large,
and in some quarters a purist policy was consciously pursued, especiallyfrom the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Since then many neologisms
have been created, mostly on the basis of native stems.
The section on orthography begins with the first attempts to write
Icelandic using the roman alphabet. In the mid-twelfth century the authorof the First Grammatical Treatise devised a remarkably complete set ofrules for spelling the Icelandic of his time and though these were influential
in the centuries that ensued they were never followed to the letter. Practicevaried in denoting individual sounds and no scribe was entirely consistentin his usage. The section ends with a discussion of attempts to find a fixedorthography for the language. These began in earnest in the second halfof the eighteenth century and continued in the nineteenth, when a strongarchaising tendency gradually became more and more dominant.
Finally, it is observed that in general the differences between Old andModern Icelandic are few and small, and that dialectal differences are virtually
non-existent. Explanations of this conservatism are found in the exceptional
literary heritage and practice of the Icelanders, in the fact that communications,and not least the movement of people, between different parts of the country
were constant, and in the self-conscious desire of the Icelanders to preserve
their ancient language and the link it gave them to their past.

8

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

1. The language itself
1.1.1 Related tongues
Icelandic is a Scandinavian or North Germanic language, belonging to
the Indo-European language family.1 As far as we can tell, Iceland wassettled in the late ninth century, and before and after that period Scandinavians carved runes on wood or stone. Although most of the preserved
inscriptions are short, they provide important information about thelanguage of the Scandinavian kinsmen and forebears of present-day native
speakers of Icelandic. Significant information can also be gained fromearly Germanic loan-words in Finnish which still remain, little changed,
in that language.
1.1.2 Proto-Scandinavian changes
The settlement of Iceland was preceded by a period in which great linguisticchanges took place among Scandinavian speakers. The most influentialof these were vowel syncope, i.e., the loss of short vowels in unstressed
positions, and vowel mutation and the diphthongisation called breaking,both of which sometimes took place in association with vowel syncope.
The results of these sound changes are seen in e.g. *latiR > lætr, third pers.
sg. pres. indic. of láta ‘to let’, i.e., ‘to allow’; *briutiR > br‡tr, third pers.
sg. pres. indic. of brjóta ‘to break’; *berga > bjarg ‘boulder’, *bergu >bjƒrg, nom. and acc. pl. of bjarg. Sometimes other changes were also
involved, with outcomes that are still further removed from ancient forms,
e.g. *fanhan > fá ‘to obtain’, *sehwan > séa > sjá ‘to see’. Vowel mutation
and breaking did not follow exactly the same pattern throughout the
Scandinavian speech area. Resulting discrepancies are among the earliest
features which distinguish the Northern languages one from another andlead to the distinction between East and West Scandinavian, the former
comprising Danish and Swedish, the latter Norwegian and the languagesof the colonies settled chiefly from Norway in parts of the British Isles
and the islands of the Atlantic.2
1.1.3 Origins
Icelandic is thus a West Scandinavian language. It contains, however, a
handful of words of Celtic origin: a few personal names, Kjartan and
Njáll, for example, and the occasional place-name like Dímon ‘twin-peak’;1 Hreinn Benediktsson 1964b; Kristján Árnason 1980a, 22–24, and 1980b, 133–38.
2 Bandle 1973, 24–36, 52–56.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

9further a number of words associated with husbandry, once in common
use but now mostly rare, the word sofn ‘kiln for drying lyme-grass seed’,for instance, found in Skaftafellss‡sla and originally meaning ‘fire’ (lymegrass seed was dried over a fire in a sofnhús ‘fire-house’); or slafak ‘watercotton’, first used of edible seaweed. Some of these Celtic words are notknown in medieval texts but only in the later language.3 Nevertheless,they were probably all brought to Iceland by Celts among the first settlers.4
Whatever the precise number of Celtic words so introduced, their meagre
survival strongly suggests that the most influential strand of speech among
the settlers was that of a Scandinavian ruling class.
The earliest preserved written Icelandic sources date from the second
half of the twelfth century. At that time there was very little difference
between Icelandic and Norwegian, particularly West Norwegian, but thedivide between the languages increased in the thirteenth and still more in
the fourteenth century. Certain sound-changes unparalleled in Norwegian
did take place in Icelandic, but it was Norwegian which underwent more
profound alteration, not least in a large simplification of its inflexional
system. In the mid-twelfth century the author of the First GrammaticalTreatise wrote that the English and Icelanders are ‘of one language’, butnevertheless saw it as his task to create ‘an alphabet for us Icelanders’.5(See further § 2.1 below.) In the earliest writings Scandinavian speech asa whole is called ‘dƒnsk tunga’ (‘Danish tongue’), and in the thirteenth
century sometimes ‘norrœn tunga’ (‘Nordic tongue’). Later it was thelatter expression, or its equivalent norrœna ‘(Old) Norse’, which was usedof the language of Norwegians and those people whose ancestors camefrom Norway. Later again the same expressions were used solely to referto Icelandic, a practice which continued well into the seventeenth century.
The word norræna is used, for example, on the title-page of Oddur
Gottskálksson’s translation of the New Testament, published in 1540.6
1.2. Pronunciation and sound changes
It is possible to gain some idea of the pronunciation of early Icelandic andof the changes it underwent. This is particularly true in cases where aphonetic distinction would lead to a semantic distinction (cf. e.g. the vowels
3 Hermann Pálsson 1952 and 1996, 150–207; Helgi Gu›mundsson 1959, 1960,

1969, 1970 and 1997, 121–99; de Vries 1962, xxi–xxii; Jakob Benediktsson 1964,
88–95.
4 Stefán A›alsteinsson 1987.
5 Hreinn Benediktsson 1972, 208.
6 Jóhannes L. L. Jóhannsson 1929; Karker 1977.

10

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGEin mál : mal : mel) (mál, n., = either ‘speech’, etc., or ‘measure’, ‘time’,etc.; mal is acc. sg. of malr, m., ‘knapsack’; mel is acc. sg. of melr, m.,‘lyme-grass’ or ‘gravel-bank’). It is harder to judge the exact pronunciationof individual sounds in the old language but we can reach a close
approximation with some confidence.
The pronunciation of Icelandic before the age of sound-recording canbe deduced from various kinds of evidence. The most important are therhymes and other metrical features of verse composition, the orthographyof written texts, and contemporary descriptions of speech. Amongdescriptions of this last sort the First Grammatical Treatise is by far themost significant.7 Comparison with related languages also plays a part.
Modern Icelandic spelling closely resembles ‘normalised’ Old Icelandic
spelling, but there is no doubt that, in relative terms, there are very large
differences in pronunciation between the early language and that of thepresent day. This is particularly true of the vowel sounds; consonants haveundergone only minor change.8
1.2.1 The oldest-known vowel system
Vowels are commonly divided into front and back vowels according to
the tongue’s position when articulating them; into close, mid and open
vowels according to how far the mouth is open; and into rounded andunrounded vowels according to the way the mouth is shaped in uttering
them. Using these categories nine vowels may be distinguished in thelanguage of the early centuries of the Icelandic settlement:
Front
Unrounded Rounded
Close
i
y
Mid
e
ø
Open
∂

Back
Unrounded RoundeduoaƒThus i was a front, close, unrounded vowel, like í in ModIcel.; e wasfront, mid, and unrounded, much like i in ModIcel.; ∂ was front, open,
and unrounded, like ModIcel. e; y was a front, close, rounded vowel,
pronounced like Danish y—in ModIcel. it is now pronounced like i; ø
was a front, mid (or between mid and close, i.e., half-close), roundedvowel, like ModIcel. ö or u; a was a back, open, unrounded vowel,
pronounced just as it is today; u was a back, close, rounded vowel, like
ModIcel. ú; o was a back, mid, rounded vowel, more open than ModIcel.
7 Hreinn Benediktsson 1972.
8 Hreinn Benediktsson 1962b, 486–91, and 1964c.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

11

ú but closer than ModIcel. o; and ƒ was a back, open, rounded vowel,with a pronunciation like that of ModIcel. o.
Other distinguishing features were length—vowels were long or short—and nasality; depending on their phonological inheritance, pronunciationof long vowels was either through the nose or through the mouth. This
meant that in the earliest stage of development known to us Icelandic had
27 vowels and 3 diphthongs. The diphthongs were au, pronounced like
English ow in ‘how’, with articulation involving a tongue-movement fromthe position of a to that of u; ei, pronounced like English ay in ‘say’, witharticulation involving movement from e or ∂ to i; and finally ey, whose
articulation involved movement from e, ∂ or ø to y.
1.2.2 Changes in the vowel system
As early as the twelfth century, and even earlier in some cases, the numberof distinct vowels decreased: short e and short ∂ fell together very early,9all long vowels came to be pronounced without nasalisation, and long ƒ() fell together with long a (á) if it was articulated orally, with long o (ó)
if it was articulated nasally. By about 1200 the number of vowels was 16,
plus the 3 diphthongs.
In the following centuries the number of distinct vowels decreased still
further. Distinction between short ø and ƒ was becoming blurred around
1200, and in some contexts ø was unrounded (e.g. øxi > exi ‘axe’);unrounding of long ø (normalized as Õ or œ) began about the middle ofthe thirteenth century with the result that it fell together with long ∂(traditionally written æ). Finally short and long y (y and ‡), independently
and in the diphthong ey, were unrounded, so that y, ‡, ey fell together withi, í, ei respectively. This unrounding began in the latter part of the fifteenth
century and was completed in the seventeenth. In a few words, however,
ModIcel. u (a front, half-close rounded vowel) is often heard where y (afront, close rounded vowel) originally occurred, e.g. in spyrja ‘to ask’and kyrr ‘still’ (adj.) (spurja and kjur(r)).10 When these changes had takenplace the monophthongs and diphthongs of Icelandic had been reduced to
14 in all.
Linguistic change is a gradual process. The changes in the Icelandic
vowel system must have taken generations to become established throughout the population.
9 Hreinn Benediktsson 1964a.
10 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1929b, 240–43; Leijström 1934; Sveinn Bergsveinsson
1955; Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 56–73, and 1977; Gu›var›ur Már Gunnlaugsson
1994.

12

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

The vowel system was affected not just by the simplification so far
described. There were also cases in which one or both of two vowels thatoriginally differed from one another in length alone, such as i and í, changed
in such a way that length ceased to be the only feature distinguishingthem. Short vowels became more open in pronunciation, only a retaining
its old value. (A further development is seen in the vowels of unstressed
endings: e and o in the earliest writings give way to i and u in the thirteenth
century.11) The vowels represented by í, ú and ‡ (as long as this last existed)retained their old value, but other long vowels were diphthongised. Longe (é) acquired an articulation which may be expressed as ie, with the tongue
moving from the position of i to that of e. Later the initial i sound became
a palatal glide.12 æ (which had developed from both early ∂ and œ), á, andó also remain in the alphabet but are pronounced as diphthongs, as ai, au,and ou respectively. Of the three early diphthongs, ei is pronounced as it
always was, and au developed a pronunciation øi, probably through anintermediate stage øu; the sound au now has is comparable to the value of
ey before this fell together with ei as a result of unrounding.13
Distinction of vowels had originally been by length alone, but once
these qualitative changes emerged, the vowel-length system underwent
radical change. This development, often known as the quantity shift, mustin the main have run its course in the sixteenth century. Before the shift astressed syllable was short if it contained a short vowel followed by ashort (= single) consonant (e.g. bak ‘back’ (noun)). It was long if itconsisted of a long vowel followed by one or more consonants (e.g. áma‘barrel’; hrædd, nom. f. sg. and nom. and acc. n. pl. of adj. hræddr ‘afraid’;t‡nd, nom. f. sg. and nom. and acc. n. pl. of pp. t‡ndr ‘lost’), or of a shortvowel followed by a long (= double) consonant (e.g. enni ‘forehead’) orby a consonant cluster (e.g. seld, nom. f. sg. and nom. and acc. n. pl. of pp.
seldr ‘sold’). Length could vary in stressed syllables ending in a vowel,
though when such a syllable is followed by a final vowel (as in búa ‘todwell’) it was counted a short syllable in verse. When the quantity shift
had taken place, every vowel, whether monophthong or diphthong, in a
stressed syllable could be short or long, with the variation depending on
the sounds that followed it. Vowels are now long in final position andwhen followed by a short (single) consonant (e.g. reka ‘to drive’), by no
consonant (e.g. búa (see above)), or by the consonants p, t, k, s when
11 Cf. Hreinn Benediktsson 1962a.
12 Jóhannes L. L. Jóhannsson 1924, 11–19; Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1929b, 232–40.
13 Hreinn Benediktsson 1959; Stefán Karlsson 1981, 277–79.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

13

combined with a following j (e.g. lepja ‘to lap up’), v (e.g. uppgötva ‘todiscover’; tvisvar ‘twice’) or r (e.g. dekra ‘to pamper’). They are shortwhen followed by a long consonant (e.g. banna ‘to forbid’; urr ‘dog’s
growl’) or by consonant clusters other than those just specified (e.g. banda‘to wave’; ur› ‘scree’).14 With the quantity shift every stressed syllable
was long but the degree of stress could be amplified by drawing out the
pronunciation of a long vowel or the enunciation of the consonant following
a short vowel.
One further change in the vowels needs mention: the confusion of quality
known as flámæli ‘open-mouthed speech’, for which the wider term
hljó›villa ‘sound-confusion’ is sometimes also used. When this began isuncertain but it was mostly in evidence in the earlier part of the twentiethcentury and especially common in eastern and south-western Iceland.
Speakers affected by flámæli make little or no distinction between i and eor between u and ö, particularly if these vowels are to be pronounced long(u and ö being normally or ‘correctly’ pronounced as front, rounded vowels,
though ö as more open than u). Since these are among the commonest
vowels in the language, it is clear that universal adoption of the pronunciation would have led to a further reduction of the Icelandic vowel set.
The result would have been words distinguished in spelling but not inspeech in greater profusion than any of the older, comparable changes
had brought about.15
1.2.3 Combinative vowel change
As well as the changes affecting the vowel system as a whole, others took
place that can be called combinative, i.e., the affected vowels underwent
change in specific phonetic environments. Some of these changes have notbeen generally accepted, others are restricted to certain parts of the country.
The earliest change of this kind began before the end of the twelfth
century. It involved the lengthening of a back vowel before l when thiswas followed by any consonant other than a dental (e.g. ulfr > úlfr ‘wolf’;
halmr > hálmr ‘straw’; folk > fólk ‘people’), while words like valda ‘tocause’ and holt ‘hillock’ were unaffected. There are, however, cases ofthis lengthening taking place before other clusters with l in them (e.g.
hals > háls ‘neck’; álnir, pl. of alin ‘ell’).16
14 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1929a; Hreinn Benediktsson 1967–68; Kristján Árnason
1980c.
15 Stefán Einarsson 1932, 53–54; Björn Gu›finnsson 1947, 24–27, and 1964, 81–117.
16 Noreen 1923, 109–10; Ásgeir Bl. Magnússon 1981.

14

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

By about 1300 short vowels before ng and nk were in the process ofchange. Close vowels were lengthened (ing > íng, yng > ‡ng, ung > úng);the rest were dipthongised (eng > eing, öng > aung).17 In the Vestfir›ir,
however, the latter are still pronounced as monophthongs.18 (The examples
given here are word-elements rather than words, though ung may be
identified as the nom. sg. f. and nom. and acc. pl. n. of ungr ‘young’, andeng as the noun meaning ‘meadow’.)
A rather similar change took place later, mainly in the fifteenth century,
when a short vowel occurred before g followed by i or j. In this combination
the g became a palatal glide (ModIcel. j) and a preceding close short vowel,i or y, was lengthened (in speech but not in spelling, e.g. stigi ‘ladder’;lygi ‘lie’ (noun)), while other short vowels became diphthongs, withtongue-movement from the vowel’s ordinary position towards that of front,
close i (í in ModIcel.). The change can be heard in e.g. daginn, acc. sg. of
dagurinn ‘the day’; megi, as in the third pers. sg. and pl. pres. subj. ofmega ‘be permitted’; bogi ‘bow (for shooting arrows)’; lögin ‘the law(s)’.19
This change has not been fully effected in south-eastern Iceland.20
Some vowels altered their quality after v. Probably the first such change
was that of vé to væ, which can be found already in the thirteenth century.
Only a few words were affected, particularly those in which the vowel
was followed by l or r;21 thus the pronoun vér ‘we’ had vær as a common
variant for centuries, and vélindi and vælindi (both meaning ‘gullet’) remainvariants to this day. The change of vá to vo (e.g. vá›i > vo›i ‘danger’, svá> svo ‘so’) began in the first half of the fourteenth century. vó may havebeen an intermediate stage in this development but in any case the resultant
rounded vowel consistently remained long until the time of the quantity
shift. The change was a general one and virtually every word with vá inthe modern language is either an analogical form (kvá›u ‘(they) recited’,sváfu ‘(they) slept’) or lifted from the old language (e.g. vá ‘damage’,‘danger’, and compounds with this word as an element).22 The roundingof ve to vö began about 1400, but vö has become established in only a few
17 Noreen 1923, 110; Jóhannnes L. L. Jóhannsson 1924, 19–24; Bandle 1956,

28, 31, 33, 45–46, 78–80; Stefán Karlsson 1981, 258–59, 279–82.
18 Björn Gu›finnsson 1964, 118–33.
19 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xii–xiii, xviii; Bandle 1956, 28–29, 35–36, 46–47;
Kristján Árnason 1980b, 123.
20 Björn Gu›finnsson 1964, 134–43; Ingólfur Pálmason 1983, 37–41; KristjánÁrnason and Höskuldur ﬁráinsson 1983.
21 Kock 1895, 140–41.
22 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xi–xii; Bandle 1956, 41; Hreinn Benediktsson 1979.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

15

words (kvöld ‘evening’, tvöfaldur ‘double’ (adj.)); in exceptional cases
the development was to vo (hvolfa ‘to overturn’, hvolpur ‘puppy’). In thesixteenth century and later vö in words with comparatively little stresscould become vu (hvur, hvurninn, variants respectively of hver ‘who’,‘which’, ‘what’; ‘each’; and hvernig ‘how’).23
From about 1600 unrounding of jö to je becomes perceptible. This wasmuch in evidence in the seventeenth century but in most cases the oldform has been restored (e.g. mjög > mjeg > mjög ‘very’ (adv.), sjö > sje >sjö ‘seven’). There are still a few variant forms (fjögur : fjegur, n. of fjórir‘four’; smjör : smjer ‘butter’ (noun)), and in one or two words je is theestablished form (ófjeti, n., ‘scoundrel’< ófjöt, n. pl., ‘impropriety’; stjel,n., ‘tail (of bird)’ < stjölr, m., ‘rump’).24
When a consonant other than r was followed by r, either in a final position
or before another consonant, an epenthetic u developed before the r (fagr> fagur ‘beautiful’, fegr› > fegur› ‘beauty’). This inserted vowel soundcan be first observed about 1300 and seems to have been universally
established by the middle of the fifteenth century.25
A break in pronunciation between two adjacent vowels that do not makea diphthong is called hiatus. If the first of two such vowels was long andstressed and the second relatively unstressed, then in certain circumstances
they ceased to exist as two syllables and became one, e.g. séa > sjá ‘tosee’, féhús > fjós ‘cowshed’ (with loss of medial h). This development
had taken place before the time of our earliest writings. In certain othercircumstances the vowels remained as two syllables, while in others again
the second vowel was assimilated. Words in which the vowels haveremained as two syllables include the following: fái, as in e.g. the thirdpers. sg. pres. subj. of fá ‘to obtain’; búi ‘inhabitant’; rói, as in the thirdpers. sg. pres. subj. of róa ‘to row’; búa ‘to dwell’; róa ‘to row’. Words inwhich the second vowel has been assimilated, on the other hand, include:
fáa > fá ‘to obtain’ (also acc. pl. m. (in OldIcel.) of fár ‘few’) and fáom >fum (by u-mutation) > fm > fám, first pers. pl. pres. indic. (in OldIcel.)of fá ‘to obtain’ (also dat. pl. all genders (in OldIcel.) of fár ‘few’). In thefifteenth century and later analogy with other words of the same
conjugation or declension led to the restoration of the relatively unstressed
second vowel in forms like those just mentioned. Thus, for instance, the23 Jóhannes L. L. Jóhannsson 1924, 43–44; Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xiii;
Bandle 1956, 42–43, 60–63, 81; Stefán Karlsson 1981, 260–61.
24 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xix–xx; Bandle 1956, 90.
25 Jón ﬁorkelsson 1863; Stefán Karlsson 1982, 59.

16

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

infinitive fá remained; but fá, acc. pl. m. of adj. fár, reacquired its ancient
form, fáa; and fám, first pers. pl. pres. indic. of the verb fá and dat. pl. of
adj. fár, once more became fáum.26
A hiatus change which took place in the fourteenth century and latercan be observed in compound words. If the first element ended in a shortvowel with little stress and the second element began with a vowel (orwith h followed by a vowel), the final vowel of the first element was lost(and sometimes an h introducing the second element). The spelling ofsome words shows this development fully established (e.g. the place-name
Skálholt < Skálaholt, and fasteign ‘real estate’ < fastaeign); in others thevowel is still spelt and may sometimes be heard in speech (e.g. the placenames Blönd(u)ós and Litl(ih)amar). Omission of the last sound or soundsof a word (apocope) often occurs when the next word follows withoutpause and begins with a vowel (inn(i)undir, as in the phrase innundir hjá
einhverjum ‘in favour with someone’; far›(u) ekki ‘don’t go’). The rhythmof verse often requires this kind of elision, and it is natural in unstilted
everyday speech.
1.2.4 The consonant system
While it may be said that the ModIcel. consonant system is much thesame as that of the early language, considerable changes have taken placein the pronunciation of individual consonants in specific phonetic environments. The chief developments are seen in the change of fricatives (continuant consonants produced by forcing air through the mouth along withsome narrowing of the vocal tract) to their corresponding stops; and in theunvoicing of consonants previously voiced (like the l in mjólk ‘milk’ (noun)
as pronounced in northern Iceland).
Consonants may be broadly classified according to the position of theirarticulation in the mouth; thus for Icelandic:27
Fortis stops
Lenis stops
Fricatives
NasalsLateral and trill

LabialpbfmDentaltdﬂ/›, s
n
l, r

Velar
k
g
g
n(+g/k)This table does not include the sounds usually represented by v and j. At
first these had the character of what are called semivowels, each marking
26 Noreen 1923, 115–18; Bandle 1956, 39–40, 69–70.
27 Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 73; Kristján Árnason 1980b, 89–125.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

17

a transition in pronunciation between a vowel and a consonant, and witha value like that of ModIcel. ú and í respectively. v soon acquired more ofa consonantal character, that of voiced f, but in verse initial j continued
for centuries to alliterate with vowels. v is now a voiced labio-dental
fricative (like intervocalic f in hafa ‘to have’), and j a palatal glide. h isalso absent from the table. In Proto-Scandinavian it must have been avoiceless velar fricative, as it still is in initial hv among speakers who
retain this form and have not gone over to kv. Before another consonant hsignifies little more than the unvoicing of the consonant in question (hj,hl, hn, hr). Before a vowel it is a fricative with a narrowing of the middle
or back region of the mouth.28
A velar variant of n has also always existed in words where n is immediately followed by g or k (hanga ‘to hang (about)’; hanka, oblique sg.
cases and acc. and gen. pl. of hanki ‘handle’, ‘loop’ (noun)).
The difference between p, t, k and b, d, g in the oldest language is
uncertain. We do not know, for instance, whether the latter trio were voiced.
All of them are now voiceless. In initial position p, t, k are universally
aspirated (e.g. tala ‘to speak’), and the same pronunciation is heard inother positions from people who have the speech-habit called har›mæli‘hard speech’. These have the aspirated consonant when it occurs finallyor before a vowel and is immediately preceded by another vowel or by avoiced consonant (l, m, n or ›) (e.g. át ‘ate’; vaka ‘to stay awake’; hjálpa‘to help’). When p, t, k are long (written double) or followed by anotherconsonant, they are preaspirated (preceded by an h-like breath); examples
with p are uppi ‘above’ (adv.) and opna ‘to open’.
The velar consonants k and g (the latter whether stop or fricative) werepalatalised before a front vowel already in the oldest language. Whenback and front vowels came to change their point of articulation in the
period from about 1200 onward, however, the velar consonants remained
unaffected. There is thus a distinction still made between kjör (< kør‘choice’), with palatal k, and kör (< kƒr ‘(sick)bed’), with velar k, eventhough ö in kör has long been a front vowel like the ö in kjör. In the sameway velar g is retained in gufa ‘steam’ (noun and verb), for example, eventhough u is now a front vowel, while palatal g is retained in gæfa ‘goodluck’, even though the first element in the æ diphthong is the back vowel a.
Fricative f has always been voiceless in initial position, and the same istrue of ﬂ, though with some exceptions. In medial and final position f andg have been variously voiced and voiceless according to their phonetic
28 Höskuldur ﬁráinsson 1981.

18

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

context (hafa ‘to have’, saga ‘(hi)story’ (voiced) : haft, sagt, nom. andacc. sg. n. of pp. of hafa and segja ‘to say’ respectively (unvoiced)). Voiced
or voiceless pronunciation of › in certain combinations (e.g. in bla›ka‘leaf’ (noun); a›fer› ‘method’) is now a dialect marker.29
Nasal, lateral and trill consonants are both voiced and unvoiced in
ModIcel. Since no distinction between the voiced and unvoiced variants
has ever been made in spelling, we cannot determine the age of thevoiceless kind. Voiced or voiceless pronunciation of m, n and l before p, t
and k (as in stampur ‘tub’; vanta ‘to lack’, ‘to need’; banka, ‘to knock’;
mjólk ‘milk’ (noun)) is another distinguishing dialect feature.30
It is thought that in early Icelandic n and l were each pronounced bothas a dental (as in ModIcel.) and as an alveolar or cacuminal. Probably
dental n soon superseded its alveolar variant everywhere, but the dental
and cacuminal forms of l continued to exist side by side until the seventeenth century.31
1.2.5 Various consonant changes
The written language and the evidence of rhymes in verse in particularshow that at an early stage the labials p, pp and f before t were pronounced
alike, and the same kind of merger before t was experienced by the velarsk, kk, g and gg. Nevertheless, force of analogy often led to a spelling
distinction between p(p)t and ft (e.g. hleypt, slep(p)t, haft, nom. and acc.
sg. n. of pp. of hleypa ‘to cause to move’, sleppa ‘to release’, and hafa ‘tohave’, respectively) and between k(k)t and g(g)t (ríkt, nom. and acc. sg. n.
of ríkr ‘rich’; stök(k)t, lagt, nom. and acc. sg. n. of pp. of stökkva ‘to chaseaway’ and leggja ‘to place’ respectively). Much the same is true of boththese labials and velars when they occurred before s, as is demonstrated
in the case of the latter group by the spelling x for k(k)s and g(g)s. Beforet and s these labials and velars were probably pronounced as voicelessfricatives, as they are today: f as in haft, for example (see above), and g as
in sagt, nom. and acc. sg. n. of pp. of segja ‘to say’.32
The dentals t(t) and d(d), and to some extent ›, also came to bepronounced the same before s at an early period. The combination waspresumably pronounced ts but was most often written z, though the spelling
sometimes included the original dental (broz : brotz, i.e., brots, gen. sg. of
29 Björn Gu›finnsson 1964, 17–43.
30 Björn Gu›finnsson 1964, 17–43.
31 Jakob Benediktsson 1960b.
32 Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 76–77, 79–80.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

19

brot ‘fracture’; broz : broddz, i.e., brodds, gen. sg. of broddr ‘spike’). The
clusters lls and nns developed in the same way as lds, lts and nds, but ls
and ns did not, so that the pronunciation of e.g. kolls (written kol(l)z), gen.
sg. of kollr ‘head’ (noun), differed from that of kols (written kols), gen.
sg. of kol ‘(piece of) coal’).33 Otherwise no distinction was made between
short and long consonants in consonant clusters. In time z lost its
independent value and was (and is) pronounced the same as s whencombined with another consonant or as ss in intervocalic positions (bleza> blessa ‘to bless’). When this happened has been a matter of controversy
but manuscript forms suggest that the change was not much in evidence
before the sixteenth century.
Where a syllable with relatively little stress ended in t or k these stops
became the fricatives › and g respectively (vit > vi› ‘we (two)’, bla›it >bla›i› ‘the leaf’; ek > eg ‘I’, mik > mig ‘me’, mjök > mjög ‘very’ (adv.)).
There is evidence for this change from as early as the thirteenth century.
Initial kn appears as hn in the fourteenth and fifteenth century but we do
not know how far this was a general change. The modern language hasvarious kn- words which are either survivals or revivals. In some cases
variants exist in particular circumstances (hné ‘knee’, for instance, but
kné in the idiom koma einhverjum á kné ‘to bring someone to his knees’,i.e., ‘to defeat someone’) or with different meanings (e.g. hnöttur ‘theglobe’, knöttur ‘ball’).34
The fricatives f, › and g became stops in various other consonant
combinations than those noted above. Some such changes were under
way in the thirteenth century or even earlier but most of them probably
took place in the fourteenth century: before l and n, f became b (efla ‘tostrengthen’, nafn ‘name’, pronounced ebbla, nabbn respectively) and before› too (e.g. haf›i (as in e.g. the third pers. sg. pret. indic. of hafa ‘to have’)pronounced habb›i), though this last change may not have been universal—bb› for f› is still heard today but not in many localities.35
In some parts of the country f also became b after l and r (kálfar ‘calves’(noun) > kálbar; orf ‘scythe-handle’ > orb), and traces of this pronunciation
remained in northern and western Iceland down to the end of the nineteenth
century.36 When preceded by p or k, › (ﬂ) became t (kipp›i > kippti, as in
33 Hoffory 1883, 79–96; Bandle 1956, 166–67, 173–79; Hreinn Benediktsson
1965, 74–76.
34 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xxxii; Halldór Halldórsson 1950, 66.
35 Björn Gu›finnsson 1964, 144–70.
36 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xxvi–xxvii; Jón Helgason 1955b, x.

20

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

the third pers. sg. pret. of kippa ‘to snatch’; spekﬂ > spekt ‘wisdom’), but
preceded by l, n or m it became d (hul›i > huldi; van›i > vandi; sam›i >samdi, as in the third pers. sg. pret. indic. of hylja ‘to hide’, venja ‘toaccustom’, and semja ‘to adapt’ respectively). › also became d after aconsonant pair with l, m, n as the first element, with the intervening element
apparently lost in the process: skelf›i > skel(f)di, heng›i > hen(g)di (withvelar n as in hengja), kemb›i > kem(b)di, as in the third pers. sg. pret. ofskelfa ‘to frighten’, hengja ‘to hang (up)’ and kemba ‘to comb’ respectively.37 In some localities › also became d after f, g or r (hafdi, sagdi,
bardi, as in the third pers. sg. pret. indic. of hafa ‘to have’, segja ‘to say’,and berja ‘to beat’ respectively); traces of this pronunciation are still foundin northern and western Iceland.38
In early Icelandic g is thought to have been a stop only when initial(gata ‘street’), or when long (dögg ‘dew’), or in the combination ng (anga‘to smell sweet’).39 In ModIcel. it is now a stop in several other positions:after f (v), ›, m, l and r (göfga ‘to ennoble’; bló›ga ‘to cause to bleed’;blómgast ‘to bloom’; belg, acc. sg. of belgur ‘hide’ (noun); bjarg‘boulder’). After t, g became k (máttugur ‘powerful’, but acc. sg. m.
máttkan). g also became a stop before n and l as well as—at least in somedialects—before › (ögn ‘small particle’, negla ‘to nail’, sag›i as in thethird pers. sg. pret. indic. of segja ‘to say’; pronounced öggn, neggla,sagg›i respectively). The change before › may indeed have taken place
wherever › did not become d in the same position. But the pronunciationof › as a stop after voiced fricative f and g (havdi, sagdi) and of f and g as
stops before › (habb›i, sagg›i) has been in rapid decline over the last few
generations, both consonants in these clusters being pronounced as
fricatives under the influence of standard spelling and the pronunciation
norms of the capital, Reykjavík.40
As already mentioned, the development of fricatives to stops as outlined
above must have begun in the thirteenth century or earlier and was largely
completed in the fourteenth.
We can assume that the development nnr to ›r took place in the tenthcentury. In the earliest written sources and in still older poetry (to judge
from the evidence of rhyme) we already find forms like a›rir ‘other(s)’,ma›r ‘man’ and su›r ‘southwards’ in words where nn belongs to the stem
37 Noreen 1923, 175–76.
38 Ásgeir Bl. Magnússon 1959; Halldór Ármann Sigur›sson 1982.
39 Noreen 1923, 40–41.
40 Björn Gu›finnsson 1964, 144–70; Höskuldur ﬁráinsson and Kristján Árnason
1986, 53–60.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

21(cf. annarr ‘(an)other’; mann, acc. sg. of ma›r ‘man’; sunnan ‘from thesouth’). Though the change was at first effective, analogy has often restored
older nnr (innri > i›ri > innri ‘inner’; finnr > fi›r > finnr > finnur, thirdpers. sg. pres. indic. of finna ‘to find’).41
In the fourteenth century the pronunciation of the cluster rl began tomerge with that of ll; similarly rn came to be pronounced in the same way
as nn when the latter followed a long vowel or diphthong. We may assume
that the result was dl and dn.42 (It may be noted that in relatively recent
loan-words and in familiar forms of personal names, e.g. ball ‘dance’(noun), Palli (affectionate form of the personal name Páll), ll is notpronounced as dl.) While rl and rn are now pronounced dl and dn, they
are also heard as rdl and rdn, particularly in words of less common
occurrence. Whether this pronunciation is a survival or results from theinfluence of spelling is uncertain. Our understanding of the characteristic
pronunciation of rl and rn, without d, in south-eastern Iceland suffersfrom the same doubt.43
Where r occurred in inflected forms of adjectives with stems ending ina vowel it was lengthened in the course of the fourteenth century (blári >blárri, dat. sg. f. of blár ‘blue’; hæri > hærri, comp. form of hár ‘tall’).
Final rr, on the other hand, was shortened, first in the fourteenth century
in weakly stressed endings or after a long vowel (Einarr > Einar (personalname); stórr > stór ‘large’), and later after a short stressed vowel (knörr >knör ‘ship’ (noun)).44 Final ss underwent a similar simplification (íss,nom. > ís ‘ice’) but it was not shortened if it belonged to the stem (as insess ‘seat’ (noun)) or was a genitive ending (as in íss, gen. sg. of ís ‘ice’).45
At the same time as rr and ss were shortened final nn in a weakly stressedsyllable began to lose its long character, though distinction between final
nn and n can still be observed in some writers down to the beginning of
the eighteenth century.46
hv has come to be pronounced kv in a large part of the country. The
oldest reliable evidence for the change is from the eighteenth century.47
Where it originated is uncertain, either in the north or the west of Iceland.
41 Noreen 1923, 189–90; Halldór Halldórsson 1950, 65.
42 Alexander Jóhannesson 1923–24, 132, 135, 137; Jón Helgason 1927, 91–92;
Stefán Karlsson 1993, 26–27.
43 Björn Gu›finnsson 1964, 69–80.
44 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xxx.
45 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xxxi; Hreinn Benediktsson 1964c, 56.
46 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xxxii; Jón Helgason 1970.
47 Gunnar Karlsson 1965; Stefán Karlsson 1967, 31.

22

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

Pronunciation of p, t and k as b, d and g is called linmæli ‘soft speech’,as opposed to har›mæli ‘hard speech’, mentioned earlier, which treatsthese stops as aspirates. No certain evidence of linmæli occurs before thelatter part of the eighteenth century,48 but it may well be older than that.
Har›mæli is chiefly found among speakers in the east of northern Icelandand the northernmost districts of eastern Iceland.49
Loss of medial and final consonants (syncope and apocope) has occurredin various contexts in the spoken language but can seldom be observed in
the written sources. Spelling convention and analogy with other forms
where such loss did not occur meant that the written word frequently
includes a consonant which would not be heard in normal speech.
Between a long vowel or diphthong and j fricative g was lost already inthe thirteenth century. Later, after 1400, this g also disappeared between
an old short vowel and a following j or i (fleygja ‘to throw (away)’ >fleyja; segir ‘says’ > seiir).50 After á, ó and ú both g and f were lost in a
final position and in a medial position when followed by a or u.51 This
loss probably began in the fifteenth century: in a document from 1447 thedat. of the farm-name Skógar was first written Skofum with the f subsequently corrected to g.52
Consonant loss of this kind is commonest in clusters and it has often
been made an axiom that in a cluster of three the middle consonant issuppressed. This is certainly true in many cases but by no means in all.
Evidence of such loss is found in the earliest written language where, forexample, morgni (dat. sg. of morgunn ‘morning’) is invariably spelt morni,
and vatns (gen. sg. of vatn ‘water’) is written without n (vats, vaz). In
normal speech today the principal rule appears to be that the second
consonant in a cluster tends to be lost unless it can combine with a following
consonant, one or more, to form a fresh cluster. The sequence dst, forexample, is unthinkable as an initial cluster. Consequently, while d is heard(as t) in vindhra›i ‘wind velocity’, it is likely to be inaudible in vindstig‘wind force’; and the pres. indic. sg. of vindast ‘to get twisted’, i.e., vin(d)st,sounds the same as the pres. indic. sg. of vinnast ‘to get done’, i.e., vinnst.
But the influence of the spelling and the transparent sense of a word not
infrequently leads to a conscious effort to pronounce such consonants,
especially when the word in question is a relatively uncommon one.
48 Björn Gu›finnsson 1946, 234.
49 Björn Gu›finnsson 1946, 155–243.
50 Jón Helgason 1927, 93.
51 Halldór Halldórsson 1950, 77; Hreinn Benediktsson 1964c, 56.
52 Islandske originaldiplomer 1963, 382.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

23

1.2.6 Parallels in related languages
Most of the sound changes described above are peculiar to Icelandic, butsome are paralleled in the other Northern languages. The quantity shift,for example, took place in a broadly similar way over all Scandinavia
except Denmark.53 hv has become kv in Norwegian dialects, especiallyalong the west coast, as well as in Faroese.54 In some western Norwegian
dialects, and in Faroese too, rl, ll, rn and nn have developed a ddl and ddn
pronunciation according to rules comparable to those operative in Icelandic.55 The characteristic Icelandic diphthongisation of á is also paralleledin certain western Norwegian dialects.56 All these changes are likely tohave occurred in the neighbouring countries before they were introducedin Icelandic. Indeed, it is not impossible that Norwegian pronunciationinfluenced Icelandic speech when relations between the two countries
were at their closest in the fourteenth century. On the other hand, an obstaclein the way of postulating such influence in the case of the hv > kv change
is the fact that the kv pronunciation is evident in Norway and the Faroes in
the fourteenth century but is not apparent in Icelandic until 400 years
later. Phonological developments shared by these languages are thus more
likely to have been the result of latent tendencies common to all of them.
1.3 Changes of declension and conjugation
Icelandic preserves all the main features of the Old Scandinavian inflexional system. Faroese has it still to a large extent but in the other Northernlanguages it has been greatly simplified. Nevertheless, numerous changesof small significance have occurred in Icelandic, affecting both theinflexions of single words and sometimes whole word-classes. Some ofthe deviations from the ancient system have never universally prevailed,some never made headway, and some others have been suppressed. The
following is no more than a concise selection among changes of this kind.
1.3.1 Nouns
Some strong declension nouns varied between classes already in the earlylanguage; nom. and acc. pl. forms (of smi›r ‘craftsman’), smi›ar, smi›a,existed alongside smi›ir, smi›i, and the nom. and acc. pl. form (of hƒfn‘harbour’), hafnar, alongside hafnir (the latter forms in each case are now
53 Haugen 1976, 258–60; Bandle 1973, 75–76; Kristján Árnason 1980c, 60–94.
54 Haugen 1976, 267.
55 Bandle 1973, 45–46.
56 Chapman 1962, 72–73.

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THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

standard). The genitive singular of some masculine nouns varied, appearing
either in -s or in -ar (e.g. ó›s, ó›ar, gen. sg. of ó›r ‘poetry’). Doublets ofthis kind increased in number, and the genitive ending established in apersonal name, e.g. Gu›mundar, Sigur›ar, may alternate in some patronymics with the other genitive ending in -s, Gu›mundsdóttir, Gu›mundsson; Sigur›ardóttir, Sigur›sson.
A number of strong masculine nouns ended in -ir in the nom. pl. and in-u in the acc. pl. (and then often with a different stem vowel), e.g. synir‘sons’, sonu. These words now have -i in the acc. pl. and the same stem
vowel as the nominative (synir, syni), though in formal language and someidioms the old -u forms are sometimes still used (as in e.g. koma einhverjum
í opna skjöldu ‘to catch someone with his guard down’, where skjöldu
occurs in place of skildi as the acc. pl. of skjöldur ‘shield’). In the Vestfir›ir
and ﬁingeyjars‡sla a nom. pl. with suffixed article, fjör›urnar (as opposed
to fir›irnir ‘the firths’), is used, a derivation, that is, from the old acc. pl.
fjör›u. These plural accusatives in -u were mostly retained until about
1500; the -i ending gained ground in the sixteenth century and became thevirtually dominant form in the eighteenth.57
Many feminine nouns whose nom. sg. ended in -r and acc. sg. in -i in
the old language now have the latter in the nominative as well, e.g. hei›i‘heath’, helgi ‘weekend’ (in Old Icel. ‘holiday’), vei›i ‘catch’ (as in fishingor hunting). This change began in the sixteenth century, but a few still
keep -r, e.g. brú›ur ‘bride’ and æ›ur ‘eider duck’, and it is retained infeminine personal names ending in e.g. -ger›ur, -hildur, -gunnur.58
The most notable change in noun declension occurred in masculines
with -ir as the nom. sg. ending, hellir ‘cave’, mælir ‘measuring device’,and so on. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century it became thenorm for this ending to intrude itself between the stem and the inflexional
ending in all cases except the nom. sg., first in the singular and later in theplural too. Thus the old nom. pl. hellar ‘caves’ became hellirar or hellrar.
These new forms were then dominant until the nineteenth century when
they lost ground as interest in and respect for the old language gatheredstrength and formal schooling became more widespread.59
Various other nouns have undergone declension changes and sometimes
change of grammatical gender. Some new forms were in common use for
57 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 22–23, 84; Bandle 1956, 237–42.
58 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 81–82; Bandle 1956, 224–26.
59 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 13, 79; Bandle 1956, 204–07; Hreinn Benediktsson
1969; Kjartan G. Ottósson 1987, 314–15.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

25

centuries but are no longer in the language, at least not as received standard.
Here we can do no more than illustrate the many developments of thiskind by citing a few examples.
A significant degree of confusion in -ir and -ur endings in nouns offamily relationship, bró›ir ‘brother’, mó›ir ‘mother’, systir ‘sister’, andto some extent in fa›ir ‘father’, is apparent already in the fifteenth century,a time when gen. sg. fö›urs and bró›urs are also attested.60
While comparatively few masculine nouns ended in -ur in the plural,many feminine nouns did. This led to a tendency to treat the plural of such
masculine words as if they were feminines, as indicated by forms with thesuffixed article like veturnar (for veturnir ‘the winters’), bændurnar (forbændurnir ‘the farmers’), eftirkomendurnar (for eftirkomendurnir ‘thesuccessors’). The oldest examples of this, found already in the sixteenth
century, are fingurnar (for fingurnir ‘the fingers’) and fæturnar (for fæturnir‘the feet’) (on the model of f. pl. hendurnar ‘the hands’).61
Mutation and breaking could bring it about that different stem vowels
occurred in different cases of the same noun. In some nouns such variation
has been levelled out. The words dyr ‘doorway’ and lykill ‘key’, forexample, had respectively gen. pl. dura and dat. sg. lukli in the old
language, but now only forms with y are known. This process can beobserved as early as the fourteenth century. From that time onwards Eglialso commonly replaced Agli as the dat. of the personal name Egill, but
this analogical form has now been discarded.62
Various nouns, weak and strong, had stems containing a v which
remained before a and i in inflexional endings but not elsewhere. In somewords in which the v has been retained before these endings it is now also
introduced in cases with u endings (söngvum, örvum, dat. pl. of söngur
‘song’ and ör ‘arrow’ respectively; and völvu, oblique sg. cases of völva‘prophetess’). In other words the v has disappeared throughout thedeclension.63 For example, instead of the old nom. sg. völva ‘prophetess’,
oblique völu, we now have not only völva (or valva), oblique völvu (onwhich the neologism tölva ‘computer’ is modelled), but on the other handvala, oblique völu, in the meaning ‘knuckle-bone (used for prophecy)’,where the v-less forms have given rise to a new nominative.64
60 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 29–30; Bandle 1956, 263–67.
61 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 86–87; Bandle 1956, 257–58.
62 Finnur Jónsson 1901, 59–60; Noreen 1923, 252, 285; Björn K. ﬁórólfsson

1925, 4–6, 27–28; Bandle 1956, 67, 262.
63 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 10–12, 16, 26, 81; Bandle 1956, 211–14, 226.
64 Höskuldur ﬁráinsson 1982; Kjartan G. Ottósson 1983 and 1987, 315–16.

26

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

A similar process is visible in nouns which had a j in the stem and kept
it when it was followed by an a or u ending. The old words vili ‘will’(noun) and ste›i ‘anvil’, for instance, have become vilji and ste›ji under
the influence of the j that appears in their oblique cases. On the other
hand, some other words have shed the j altogether: old bryti ‘steward’,
oblique cases brytja, are now bryti, bryta.65
1.3.2 Adjectives and participles
Some adjectives also had v or j in the stem and these were, broadly
speaking, treated in much the same way as in nouns. It is, however, onlyin very formal language that v-forms survive (fölvan, röskvan, acc. sg. m.
of fölur ‘pale’ and röskur ‘vigorous’ respectively). j has also disappearedin most adjectives where it was once the norm (ríkjan > ríkan, fátœkjan >fátækan, acc. sg. m. of rík(u)r ‘rich’, fátæk(u)r ‘poor’ respectively); an
exception is mi›ur ‘mid(dle)’, with cases like mi›jan (acc. sg. m.) andmi›jir (< mi›ir) (nom. pl. m.). It is also heard in a few words with æ or ‡in the stem and with no consonant intervening before the inflexional ending,but in writing these are usually spelt according to the old rules, with jappearing before a and u but not elsewhere, as e.g. in n‡jan but n‡ir, theacc. sg. m. and nom. pl. m. respectively of n‡r ‘new’.66
Before our oldest sources came to be written, r as an inflexional adjectival
element was assimilated to a preceding s and produced a long consonant,ss. This occurred in the nom. sg. m. (lauss ‘loose’, ‘free’), in the dat. andgen. sg. f. and the gen. pl. of all genders: compare those cases of gó›r
‘good’, i.e., gó›ri, gó›rar, gó›ra, with the corresponding ones of lauss,i.e., laussi, laussar, laussa. In certain circumstances this r was also
assimilated to a preceding l or n, i.e., where an adjective ends in -ll or -nn
in the nom. sg. m.; here the dat. sg. f., for example, also had the same
double consonant (gamall ‘old’, gamalli; beinn ‘straight’, beinni). Analogy
with the forms of most adjectives led to the reintroduction of r in theseendings, already by about 1300 in the adjectives in -s (lausri), and inthese it became the standard form. In the sixteenth century and later r
reappeared in the words in -ll and -nn (gamallri, hreinnri). These forms
were dominant in the eighteenth century but they have since fallen out of
use and for the most part the old forms have been reinstated.67
65 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 24–25; Halldór Halldórsson 1950, 103–04.
66 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 34–35, 89–90; Bandle 1956, 308–11.
67 Noreen 1923, 200; Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 33, 88; Bandle 1956, 297–300;
Kjartan G. Ottósson 1987, 316–17.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

27

In the old language the derivative suffixes, -ag-, -ig- and -ug-, used in
the formation of adjectives, lost their vowel when the following inflexional
ending began with a vowel (e.g. m. sg. gƒfugr ‘noble’, pl. gƒfgir). Around1300 the force of analogy began to bring about a restoration of thesyncopated vowel (göfgir > göfugir), a development which graduallybecame general. On the other hand, the adj. heilagr ‘holy’ was treated insuch a way as to make the uncontracted/contracted alternation (heilagur,
helgan) redundant. It was split between two distinct declensions (heilagur,
heilagir; helgur, helgir).68
The past participle of a strong verb was declined like the adjectival
class represented e.g. by opinn ‘open’; the past participle of a weak verb
followed the commonest adjectival pattern, i.e., with acc. sg. m. in -an(kalla›r, kalla›an, pp. of kalla ‘to call’). Past participle forms haveundergone some change over the centuries, particularly in verbs conjugatedlike berja ‘to beat’, bar›i. These originally had › in all cases of the participle(though in contracted forms the › might appear as d or t in certain clusters,cf. § 1.2.5 above), and i› if the inflexional ending did not begin with avowel: thus m. sg. bari›r ‘beaten’, bar›an, bari›s, bƒr›um. But we findalready in the oldest texts that verbs of this class with a stem ending in adental, and a few other verbs as well, have contracted past participle forms,
e.g. hvattr, kvaddr, spur›r, nom. sg. m. pp. of hvetja ‘to encourage’, kve›ja‘to bid farewell’, and spyrja ‘to inquire of’ respectively. Around 1200
similar contraction becomes apparent in the past participles of more verbs,
especially in the nom. sg. (e.g. bar›r ‘beaten’). This development was,however, confined to a small group of past participles (e.g. lag›r, nom.
sg. m. pp. of leggja ‘to place’) and did not lead to wholesale change. On
the other hand, around 1300 the past participles of strong verbs in -in(n)began to influence the uncontracted forms of their counterparts in the
berja class. We find nom. sg. m. barinn ‘beaten’ replacing bari›r, andlater in use for acc. sg. m. as well, barinn for bar›an. The contracted
forms that lost the i of i› before a vowel ending remained unaffected, andthis gave rise to the characteristic mixed forms of most of these participial
adjectives. The past participle of berja, for example, is now declined in
the m. sg. barinn, barinn, barins, bör›um.69
The forms of positive and superlative adjectives when declined weak
were essentially the same as they are today. An exception is that between
68 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 31–32; Bandle 1956, 300–02.
69 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 62–63, 116–17; Bandle 1956, 408–11; Jón Hilmar
Jónsson 1979.

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the icelandic language

about 1600 and 1800 the dat. pl. ending, originally -um (enum spƒkustummƒnnum ‘(for) the wisest people’), was gradually discarded in favour of ­­‑u(the ending of the other plural cases).70 Comparative adjectives and present
participles underwent the same change in the dat. pl., but were also subject
to a number of further modifications. The oblique m. sg. cases once ended
in a (e.g. acc. spakara mann ‘a wiser person’, spyrjanda lærisvein ‘aninquiring disciple’), but this was replaced by i. In the n. sg. the a-ending
was retained in a comparative adjective (spakara barn ‘a wiser child’) but
it was replaced by i in the n. sg. of a present participle used adjectivally(spyrjanda barn > spyrjandi barn ‘an inquiring child’). This means thatthe present participle now has the -i ending throughout the paradigm.71
1.3.3 Pronouns
The pronominal stock of Modern Icelandic differs most sharply from thatof the old language in that it has abandoned the dual number that existed
in the first and second person pronouns and their concomitant possessive
adjectives. There are now only singular and plural forms, as in other words
distinguished by number. The old dual forms were vit ‘we two’ and ­()it‘you two’ with poss. adjs. okkarr, ykkarr ‘(belonging to the two of us’,‘belonging to the two of you’ respectively). Plural forms, which could
also be used in an honorific sense of a single person, were vér ‘we’ and()ér ‘you’, with poss. adjs. várr ‘our’ (later vor) and y›(v)arr ‘your’.
Occasional deviations from this distinct usage may be observed in earlytexts but for the most part the usage of these forms did not change until
the seventeenth century and in some localities not before the eighteenth.
Since then, however, the old dual forms have been virtually dominant,used in almost any context where more than one person is referred to, theBible being the one exception. The old plural forms also remain but arelargely confined to formal contexts, vér, for example, used by someone inpublic office, and ér as an honorific form of address to a single person.72
The old possessive adjectives, okkarr, ykkarr, y›varr, were replaced by
the gen. of the corresponding personal pronoun. This simplification waslargely completed in the sixteenth century.73
In the early language the demonstrative pronoun, ‘this’, ‘that’, had theform sjá in the nom. sg. m. and f. This lived on until late in the fourteenth
Björn K. órólfsson 1925, 90–91; Bandle 1956, 311–13.
Björn K. órólfsson 1925, 36–37, 91–93; Bandle 1956, 320–23.
72
Björn K. órólfsson 1925, 41–42, 97, 101; Bandle 1956, 347–51; Helgi
Gu›mundsson 1972.
73
Björn K. órólfsson 1925, 45, 99–100; Bandle 1956, 349–51.
70
71

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

29

century when it was generally superseded by ﬂessi. The acc. sg. m. wasﬂenna but in the fifteenth century it was more and more often replaced byﬂennan. At an early stage the stem ﬂess- was augmented by -ar(-) in thegen. and dat. sg. f. and the gen. pl. (ﬂessi, ﬂessar, ﬂessa > ﬂessari, ﬂessarar,
ﬂessara). Such forms were already common in the fourteenth century.74
Various other pronouns have undergone changes from Old to Modern
Icelandic, not least nokkur, nokku› ‘some(one/thing)’, ‘any(one/thing)’.
In the oldest Icelandic this most often appeared as nekkverr or nakkvarr
in the nom. sg. m., with corresponding adjectival endings in the pluraland the oblique cases. By the second half of the thirteenth century these
forms were generally superseded by nökkurr and nokkurr and in thefollowing centuries the latter form in -o- became dominant. The secondsyllable -ur was at first retained in all the inflected forms but the -u- cameto be dropped in the fifteenth century whenever the inflexional ending
began with a vowel (nokkurum > nokkrum).75
1.3.4 Verbs
Verb forms have experienced various changes, particularly some strong
verbs, a few of which have come to be conjugated weak, either completely
or in part. Examples with their old preterites in parenthesis are ríta, now
rita, ‘to write’ (reit), hrinda ‘to push’ (hratt), bjarga ‘to save’ (barg),
hjálpa ‘to help’ (halp), fregna ‘to learn of’ (frá), ﬂvá, later ﬂvo, ‘to wash’(ﬂó). Nevertheless, the past participle ﬂveginn ‘washed’ remains as a relicof the strong conjugation of ﬂvá, as do borginn (as in einhverjum er borgi›‘someone is safe and sound’) and hólpinn (‘safe’, ‘secure’), old past
participles of bjarga and hjálpa. The weak form sé›ur ‘seen’ has replaced
older sénn as the past participle of sjá ‘ to see’. Most of these strong verbs had
adopted their weak forms by about the middle of the sixteenth century.76
Various analogical changes have taken place in verbal endings. About
1300, third person singular forms were replacing first person forms (thisdid not apply, of course, where the two forms were already identical, ek
fór ‘I went’, hann fór ‘he went’). Thus in the preterite indicative, ek sag›a‘I said’, for example, became eg sag›i; in the present subjunctive ek segja‘I (may) say’ became eg segi; in the preterite subjunctive ek seg›a ‘Iwould say’ became eg seg›i. In the following centuries new forms of thiskind made inroads, not all at the same pace, and they may be said to have
74 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 46–47; Bandle 1956, 352–53.
75 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 49–50, 106; Bandle 1956, 368–69; Hreinn

Benediktsson 1961–62a.
76 Bandle 1956, 395–406; Kjartan G. Ottósson 1987, 318–20.

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THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

carried the day in the seventeenth century. Early in the fourteenth century
the same tendency can be observed in the present indicative singular aswell, with eg segir for older ek segi ‘I say’, for example. This usage is
attested down to the sixteenth century, when the old forms were reestablished and were soon in almost universal use. The chief exception
was in the verb ‘to be’, vera, whose old first person singular present
indicative form, em ‘am’, was gradually ousted by er.
Influence of indicative forms also led to changes in those of the
subjunctive plural. This applied to the first person plural of the present
tense, where older subjunctive segim ‘(we) (may) say’ became segjum,
for example, and to all persons of the preterite plural, where older seg›im,
seg›i›, seg›i ‘we, you (pl.), they would say’ became seg›um, seg›u›,
seg›u respectively.
In Old Icelandic the second person singular of the preterite indicativeof a strong verb ended in t (e.g. ﬂú fórt, inf. fara ‘to go’), or (usually) in tt
if the verb stem ended in a vowel (e.g. ﬂú bjótt, inf. búa ‘to dwell’). If,
however, the verbal stem ended in a t the second person ending was st,
more often appearing as zt (ﬂú brauzt, inf. brjóta ‘to break’, ﬂú ba(t)zt,
inf. binda ‘to bind’). st-endings also naturally occurred in the second
singular preterite of verbs ending in s (ﬂú blést, inf. blása ‘to blow’) andin all the singular preterite forms of verbs ending in -st (ek, ﬂú, hannlaust, inf. ljósta ‘to strike’). These pervading forms in -st came to exert awider influence with the result that in the first half of the sixteenth century
we begin to detect -st as the ending of the second person singular preteriteof other strong verbs than those just listed. This -st usage became altogether
regular in the seventeenth century.
When epenthetic u entered the language (see § 1.2.3 above), the second
person singular of the present indicative of most strong verbs came to end
in -ur (ﬂú kemur < ﬂú kemr, inf. koma ‘to come’). If the stem of a strong
verb ended in r or s, on the other hand, the second person singular form
remained monosyllabic (ﬂú ferr > ﬂú fer, inf. fara ‘to go’; ﬂú less > ﬂú les,inf. lesa ‘to read’). In the eighteenth century we can observe the additionof a final › or t to these forms, under the influence of suffixed forms of the
pronoun: ﬂú fer› ‘you (sg.) go’, cf. fer›u < fer ﬂú; ﬂú lest ‘you (sg.) read’,cf. lestu < les ﬂú).77
Some larger changes have affected middle voice endings. Around 1200
the first person singular ended in -umk (ek kƒllumk ‘I am called’), where
77 Jón ﬁorkelsson 1887 and 1888–94; Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 53–66, 108–20;
Bandle 1956, 377–427; Oreßnik 1980.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

31

the mk was derived from the accusative of the first person pronoun, mik‘me’. The other personal forms ended in -sk (< sik) or -zk, and it was thislatter form (irrespective of whether it was preceded by a dental or not)which gradually gained ground. The -sk or -zk ending was introduced into
the first person already about 1200 (ek kƒllumsk), and soon afterwards themutated form of the stem began to be abandoned (ek kallask). In the courseof the thirteenth century the -sk/-zk endings were gradually replaced by -z
alone, which early fourteenth-century manuscripts show to have been thenthe dominant form. This -z ending lived on until after 1400 but met
increasing competition from forms in -zt and -zst that arose later in the
fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century -zt became the dominant form.
Alongside -zt a form in -st sometimes appeared, particularly after l and r(dvelst, third pers. sg. pres. indic. of dveljast ‘to stay’; berst, third pers.
sg. pres. indic. of berast ‘be carried’ or of berjast ‘to fight’), but thisnormal modern ending did not become common before the sixteenth
century, after z had lost its independent phonetic value (cf. p. 19 above).
What that value had been in the early middle voice endings just discussed
has been a matter for debate. The facts given above would suggest thatthe changes in the first person plural from about 1200 to 1400 went along
these lines: berjumsk > berjumzk > berjumz > berjumzt ‘we(’ll) fight’.
After 1400 new forms appear, at first with endings -nzt and -zt and later-nst and -st (berjunst, berjust). These forms were more or less dominant
in the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. After 1600 yet another ending
made its appearance with the addition of -um to the -st ending (berjustum),and this gradually became widespread. But in the eighteenth century
scholars began to revive an older ending in the form -umst. After 1800
this form gained ground and became the standard form in the written
language, but in speech -ustum is still common.78
1.4 Lexicon
The vocabulary of early Icelandic was almost entirely Scandinavian, withjust a few Celtic loan-words brought in by the first settlers, as indicatedabove (§ 1.1.3). In this same early period a number of more exotic loanwords arrived, acquired by Vikings and other adventurers, some of themmembers of the Varangian Guard in Byzantium: torg ‘market’ came from
Slavonic, for example,79 and fíll ‘elephant’ ultimately from Persian.80
78 Noreen 1923, 367–73; Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, 67–71, 120–21; Bandle
1956, 175–77, 393–95; Kjartan G. Ottósson 1987, 315, and 1992.
79 de Vries 1962, xxxiii and 595.
80 Fischer 1909, 44.

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THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

1.4.1 The language of the Church
Christian missions, the conversion to Christianity, and the whole apparatusof the Church naturally augmented the vocabulary of Icelandic in many
spheres and at an early stage. This is amply demonstrated by the oldest
ecclesiastical literature we possess, a good deal of it from the twelfth
century. A number of words of Latin origin (some originally from Greek)
belong here, many of them introduced by way of other Germanic
languages. They include, for example, engill ‘angel’, biskup ‘bishop’,prestr ‘priest’, djákni ‘deacon’, kirkja ‘church’, klaustr ‘cloister’, ‘convent’,
altari ‘altar’ and obláta ‘sacramental wafer’.81 Old Saxon and Old English
were substantial donors: synd ‘sin’ came from the former,82 ﬂolinmó›r,
ﬂolinmœ›i ‘long-suffering’ (adj. and noun respectively) from the latter.83
The word gu›spjall ‘gospel’ itself is from Old English godspell ‘good
tidings’, a translation of Latin evangelium ‘message of joy’.84
In its earliest stages the ecclesiastical language was for the most partbased upon Scandinavian stems. The Icelanders soon showed independence
and resilience in their response to the challenge of finding native expressions for the many novelties of thought and action introduced in their new
Christian world.85 Words already in the language were given a specialised
Christian sense, and further terms were derived from them. As an example
may be taken the verb freista, of whose two main senses, ‘to try’ and ‘totempt’, the former appears to have been the original one. The derivative
noun freistni ‘temptation’, in any case, almost certainly originated in
Church language.86
We cannot always be sure whether such neologisms were first createdin Norway or Iceland, since it is seldom possible to tell in which country
the oldest extant religious literature—homilies and saints’ lives—was firstcomposed or translated. The communities speaking West Scandinavian
maintained so substantial a uniformity of language (cf. § 1.1.3 above)that down to the fourteenth century they constituted a single reading public.
The word samviska ‘conscience’, for instance, is a literal translation of
the Latin compound conscientia, and it was probably invented in thirteenthcentury Norway. Before that, ‘conscience’ was variously rendered by
81 Jakob Benediktsson 1964, 95–96.
82 Halldór Halldórsson 1968 and 1969.
83 Walter 1976b, 82–83.
84 de Vries 1962, 193.
85 Jón Helgason 1958, 16; Stefán Karlsson 1985.
86 Walter 1976b, 92–93.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

33

words meaning, inter alia, ‘thought’, ‘mind’, ‘understanding’: hugr, hugvit,
hugskot; but once in being samviska became the established term.87
1.4.2 Other foreign influences
As Icelanders in time became acquainted with European chivalric culture,
partly through romances translated from French or Anglo-Norman in both
Norway and Iceland, a number of new words entered the language. The
best-known of these are doubtless the key-words, kurteiss ‘courteous’,‘courtly’, and kurteisi ‘courtesy’, ‘chivalry’. New words for new objects
and commodities, terms like silki ‘silk’, skarlat ‘scarlet (cloth)’, klaret‘spiced wine’, pansari ‘coat of mail’, organ ‘(church) organ’, came inboth through this literature and through commerce.88
Trade and the presence of North Germans in Denmark, Sweden and
Norway, especially in the townships, meant that the late Middle Ages saw
a vast influx of Low German words into the Scandinavian languages.
German merchants did not begin to sail to Iceland until the late fourteenth
century, but German loan-words probably came first and largely into
Icelandic by indirect routes. At first both German and Danish vocabularycame by way of Norwegian; later there was direct Danish influence andwith it many Danish loans from German. Documents from the late fifteenth
century and on into the sixteenth show more and more vocabulary fromthese foreign sources. Examples with their modern German and Danish
equivalents in parentheses are blífa ‘to stay’, ‘remain’ (bleiben, blive);ﬂenkja ‘to think’ (denken, tænke); bífala ‘to command’ (befehlen, befale);makt ‘power’ (Macht, magt); selskapur ‘group of people met together’(Gesellschaft, selskab).89 Many of the oldest loan-words of ultimate
German origin were adopted to express concepts for which words alreadyexisted in Icelandic and were thus in competition with synonyms or nearsynonyms of native growth.
1.4.3 The Reformation
Printed books in Low German and Danish were reaching Iceland in theyears around 1500 and were in some cases translated. The influence of
the ideas of the German and Danish divines who were active in seeking
Church reform began to be felt in Iceland in the 1530s and the Reformation
was fully effected there in 1550. The new dispensation encouraged trans87 Widding 1961; Halldór Halldórsson 1964a, 110.
88 Jakob Benediktsson 1964, 96–98.
89 Westergård-Nielsen 1946; Veturli›i Óskarsson 2003.

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THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

lation on a grand scale, almost all from Danish and German, whether thebooks in question were original in these languages or were themselvestranslations, and it was now counted of prime importance to disseminate
the translated works in print. Accustomed as they were to manuscript booksin their native tongue, the Icelandic advocates of the Reformation foundit entirely natural to make these writings available to their countrymen in
their own language. In this they differed from their kinsmen in Norway
and the Faroes whose Bible and other works of religious edification cameto them in Danish. A translation of the New Testament, put into Icelandic
by Oddur Gottskálksson (died 1556), was printed in 1540, and the whole
Bible, edited by Bishop Gu›brandur ﬁorláksson (1542–1627), appearedin 1584. Behind these translations lay the medieval Icelandic tradition of
Christian literature, which often solved the Reformers’ translation problems
for them, but these works and others from foreign sources, hymns andsermons for example, contained many loan-words, some already established in the language, others more recently current or quite new.90 A
good many of these imported words had the prefixes bí- (later more oftenbe-) and for-, e.g. bíhaga ‘to please’, ‘to suit’, bíkvæmilegur ‘pleasant’,‘comfortable’, fordjarfa ‘to spoil’, ‘to damage’, fornema ‘to understand’.
While it is doubtful whether many of the rarer and more abstract loanwords were adopted in popular usage, German and Danish influence on
both the vocabulary and the syntax of writing in the service of the Church
in Iceland remained strong until the nineteenth century. Then a more natural
native idiom was restored, not least by the Icelandic Bible Society’s New
Testament, published in 1827, and its whole Bible, published in 1841.91
1.4.4 Other Danish influences
Since from about the time of the Reformation until well into the nineteenth
century, Iceland’s foreign relations were amost exclusively with Denmark,the influence of Danish in more spheres than that of the Church may well
be expected. Not only was the administration of Icelandic affairs centeredin Copenhagen; the governor of Iceland was usually a high-ranking Daneor Norwegian. Local officials had to conduct all business with theirsuperiors in Danish and all government edicts were promulgated in Danish.
This latter arrangement was modified about 1750 when such announce90 Jón Helgason 1929 and 1931, 36–42; Westergård-Nielsen 1946; Bandle 1956,
269–84, 317–20, 427–30; Árni Bö›varsson 1964, 184–87; Jakob Benediktsson
1964, 100–02; Stefán Karlsson 1984.
91 Jón Helgason 1931, 49; Steingrímur J. ﬁorsteinsson 1950.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

35

ments began to be accompanied by an Icelandic text, but was not abolisheduntil a century or so later. The inevitable result was that the Icelandic
written by civil servants was generally saturated with Danicisms.92
Icelandic commerce long remained a Danish monopoly and this also
exerted a strong influence on the native language. Danish terms for commodities were naturally adopted but in time the advent of Danish merchants
had profounder effects. The small trading stations which were establishedin the eighteenth century grew into communities where the population
was partly Danish. A famous opinion, voiced by the great Danish philologist, Rasmus Rask (1787–1832), shortly after his arrival in Reykjavík
in 1813, was that within a century nobody in the township would understand Icelandic, and that within two hundred years nobody in the country
would understand it unless, as he said, ‘drastic measures are taken’.93
1.4.5 The native inheritance
The language of some social groups, or at least their written language,
thus became very much intermingled with Danish, but everyday speech
and the stories and poems of the people at large kept alive the greater partof the native lexicon. Farming was the principal occupation and its
techniques changed little over the centuries. People went on talking aboutmuch the same things in the course of their daily toil and, although muchprinted matter was affected by Danish, printed matter was by no means
the only resource available for private reading or for reading aloud to agroup. Medieval Icelandic literature maintained its vital hold, even though
little of it was accessible in print before the nineteenth century. The early
saints’ lives were probably not much read after the Reformation, but sagasof Icelanders, kings’ sagas, and not least the sagas of antiquity (fornaldarsögur) and romances (riddarasögur), were read in old manuscripts andinnumerable copies of them made. The old poetic diction lived on in therhymed narrative poems called rímur, some of them medieval in origin
and many others made by later versifiers; and to some extent poetry ofother kinds maintained the same tradition. Snorri Sturluson’s Edda remained a guide for poets. It is extant in many copies, and the version
made by Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás (1573–1636) was especially popular,
even before it was printed in Copenhagen in 1665.94 Neither should weforget Jónsbók, the Icelanders’ law-code introduced in 1281. From about
92 Jón Helgason 1931, 42–44.
93 Jakob Benediktsson 1964, 104.
94 Two Versions of Snorra Edda, 1977–79.

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1300 to 1700 more manuscript copies of this work are known than of any
other Icelandic text—in addition, a printed edition appeared in Iceland in1580 and another in the eighteenth century. The many manuscripts andvarious scrawls found in their margins show that Jónsbók was partly used
as a first reading primer. Boys in better-off homes were evidently made toread it over and over, learning to read but also learning the law in its
ancient wording.
1.4.6 Purism and conscious cultivation of the language
A Latin description of Iceland, written about 1589 and attributed to Bishop
Oddur Einarsson (1559–1630), remarks that the ancient literature of Icelandis written in a language which was once the common language of the
Scandinavian peoples and adds that this native language of the Icelanders
has remained unspoilt down to the present day.95 Arngrímur Jónsson, ‘thelearned’, made much the same observation in a Latin work, Crymogæa,first published in 1609.96 He attributed the preservation of the language tothe existence and circulation of old manuscripts and to his country’s
geographical isolation. He warned his countrymen against German andDanish influence on their Icelandic, whether spoken or written. Texts published or revised by Arngrímur show that he reduced the number of loanwords in them and amended their syntax to more natural Icelandic
patterns.97
Relatively pure Icelandic, with sparing use of loan-words, is found in a
number of other writers of both prose and poetry in the seventeenth andearly eighteenth century. The great poet, Hallgrímur Pétursson (c.1614–1674), and the great preacher, Bishop Jón Vídalín (1666–1720), are primeexamples; but there were others too who prized carefully written Icelandic.
It was only later in the eighteenth century, however, that a purist policy
came to be clearly proclaimed, urging, inter alia, the purposeful coiningof new words on the basis of native stems. In that century Icelandic cameto be employed in the translation and composition of works on a variety
of subjects which had never, or hardly ever, been treated in Icelandic before.
Neologisms were inevitable, many of them loan-translations from otherlanguages. Jón Ólafsson from Grunnavík (1705–1779), secretary to ÁrniMagnússon (died 1730) and later stipendiary of the Arnamagnæan Foun95 Oddur Einarsson 1971, 81, 145.
96 Arngrímur Jónsson 1950–57, II 25–30 and IV 285–86.
97 Jón Helgason 1931, 39, 41; Jakob Benediktsson 1953; Árni Bö›varsson 1964,
187–88.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

37

dation in Copenhagen,98 was typically active in the field but since hardly
any of his translations or his own writings in Icelandic were published,his views and his neologisms were little known to his contemporaries. It
was, however, in his lifetime that the Danes themselves became interested
in purism and the programmatic cultivation of their native language. In
Iceland it was the efforts of Eggert Ólafsson (1726–1768) that made agreater impact than Jón Ólafsson’s work. After Eggert’s death, thepublications of Lærdómslistafélag, the ‘Learned Arts Society’, founded
in 1779, were especially influential. In the spirit of the Enlightenment it
produced a series of publications between 1781 and 1798 with papers
treating a very wide range of subjects.99 Linguistic purity was part of theSociety’s programme, and the novel topics called for the creation of many
new words. Some purists of the time were found to go too far in adopting
archaic diction. Magnús Stephensen (1762–1833) praised the fine Icelandic
of Bishop Jón Vídalín and Bishop Hannes Finnsson (1739–1796), but hewent on to say that their writings must surely strike all good men as ‘more
accessible and expressive than the unattractive archaic doggerel heard
even in prose, and the botched imagery produced by a few poetasters
imitating the obscurity of ancient verse’.100
There was some change in attitudes towards the cultivation of Icelandic
in the first half of the nineteenth century. Those most concerned were
Sveinbjörn Egilsson (1791–1852), headmaster of the Bessasta›ir grammar
school, colleagues of his and later their pupils, Baldvin Einarsson (1801–
1833) and the group associated with the periodical Fjölnir. Of particularnote among them were Konrá› Gíslason (1808–1891), who became professor of Nordic philology in the University of Copenhagen, and the poet
Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–1845).101 These men were affected by the Romantic Movement and it was clear to them that good Icelandic was to befound not only in old books but also on the lips of the people. Even thoughsome of their predecessors in favour of purism had taken pains to use words,
old or new, of native origin, the structure of their sentences often betrayed
the influence of the official or learned style of Danish and German. Writing
in a fresh and relatively supple style, much closer to the spoken language
98 Jón Helgason 1926a, 36–37, 66–67, 74–76, 120.
99 Vilhjálmur ﬁ. Gíslason 1923, 276–94; Jón Helgason 1931, 45–48, and 1954,
98–99; Árni Bö›varsson 1964, 188–96; Halldór Halldórsson 1964b, 137–41; Jakob
Benediktsson 1964, 104–05; Halldór Halldórsson 1971, 222–25.
100 Magnús Stephensen 1806, 523.
101 Bjarni Vilhjálmsson 1944.

38

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

than before, the editors of Fjölnir and their allies took it upon themselvesto lay a new foundation for the written language of the Icelanders.102
It may be said that essentially the same policy has been followed eversince. It is true that many foreign words have entered the language andsome of them have adapted well to the phonetic and inflexional system of
Icelandic, but the main tendency has been to form new words from native
stems. At the same time the many loan-words which were commonplace
two centuries ago have gradually been replaced by native words, bothancient and modern. The language of the most recent generations is notconsidered here in any detail, but the change has undoubtedly been muchgreater in the written language than in the spoken, for many Icelanders
who use foreign words freely in speech try hard to avoid them when writing
matter intended for publication. It is worth noting, however, that a good
many of the thousands of new words that have been invented have beenshort-lived. It has not always been possible for a neologism to replace aloan-word, at least not in the spoken language (bíll ‘car’, from Danish bil,automobil, has not given way to bifrei›, for instance; vindill ‘cigar’ fromvinda ‘to wind, roll’ is a standard word, but the diminutive vindlingur‘cigarette’ belongs only to the official written language, while sígaretta isused in speech). No less frequently, in contrast, more than one neologism
has been proposed for the same thing, with only one emerging victorious
from the competition: ‘concept’ is hugtak, not its older equivalenthugargrip; ‘the present’ is nútí›, not nástund; the ‘divide-sign’ in arithmetic
is deilingarmerki, not deildarnóti.103

102 Vilhjálmur ﬁ. Gíslason 1923, 294–304; Jón Helgason 1931, 48–50; Björn

Gu›finnsson 1941; Nanna Ólafsdóttir 1961, 165–70; Árni Bö›varsson 1964, 197–
99; Halldór Halldórsson 1964b, 141–42; Jakob Benediktsson 1964, 105–06;
Halldór Halldórsson 1971, 225–26.
103 Jón Helgason 1954; Halldór Halldórsson 1971; Baldur Jónsson 1976; Kjartan
G. Ottósson 1990.
(1) From a church dedication day homily, twelfth century. AM 237 a fol., fol. 1ra.
Hurﬂ fyr durum merker scynsama menn. ﬂa es hraústlega standa at móte villomËnnom. oc byrgia ﬂa fyr utan cristne goﬂs í kenningom sínom. Gólf ﬂile kirkio
merker litillata menn. ﬂa es sic lÃgia í allre virﬂíngo. oc veíta ﬂvi meira upp halldËllom lyﬂ. sem ﬂeír verﬂa meirr. under fotom troﬂner. Seto pallar kirkio merker.
varcunnlata menn. ﬂa es heógia meínom o styrcra nnga í var cunnlÃte síno. sua
sem pallar veíta hogynde sitiondom.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

39

2. Orthography
2.1 The first attempts
The homicide section, Vígsló›i, and some other parts of the early Icelandic
laws were recorded in writing in the winter 1117–1118. This would hardly
have been undertaken if writing the vernacular on vellum was not to someextent already practised.
The first writers of Icelandic undoubtedly learnt to read and write from
Latin books. Archaic traces in the oldest manuscripts have led to theconclusion that it was the roman alphabet which from the start was usedas far as possible for giving Icelandic a written form. The sound systemsof Latin and Icelandic were, however, very different. As noted earlier(§ 1.2.1), the earliest Icelandic had nine different vowels (ignoring vowellength and nasality), while there were only five vowel-signs in the romanalphabet, a, e, i, o and u. For want of more symbols, the Icelanders werecompelled to use e for the two sounds, e and é; o for o and ø and probablyfor ƒ; u and its variant, v, for both u and y. The diphthongs ei and au could
be written as they are now, but au/av also served as the symbol for ey.104
There are moreover indications in the oldest manuscripts that Icelandic
diphthongs were written with monophthong symbols, a fact which possiblyshows that the Icelanders were acquainted with North German and East
Scandinavian vernacular writings. The Icelandic Church first belonged tothe archdiocese of Hamburg–Bremen, from 1056 to 1104, and then to thearchdiocese of Lund, from 1104 to 1152/53, and these metropolitan sees
were both in speech-areas where the equivalent old diphthongs had beenmonophthongised.105
The earliest extant manuscripts, probably written about 1150 and later,show that various attempts were made to differentiate regular vowels andtheir mutated forms. Some of the symbols used had foreign models, notleast English. The letter y, for example, most probably came from English,
104 Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 29–30, 56–57.
105 Stefán Karlsson 1977, 129–30.

The door before the portal signifies people of good sense, who stand firm against
heretics and exclude them from the Church of God in their teachings. The wooden
floor of the church signifies the humble, who place themselves low in every kindof estimation, and who give all the more support to everyone, the more they are
trodden underfoot. The church pews signify the merciful, who, in their mercy,
lessen the misfortunes of their weak neighbours, just as pews give comfort tothose sitting in them.

40

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

and it rapidly established itself as the normal sign for this vowel in
Icelandic. Various symbols were adopted for mutated vowels: digraphs(two free-standing characters), ligatures (two characters joined together),and marked characters, i.e., letters marked by a stroke or hook. After shorte and short ∂ fell together, the sound expressed as ∂ (see § 1.2.1 above)
existed only as a long vowel, and for this the digraph ae was used only
exceptionally, while æ and ∂ predominated. For ø the digraph eo wascommon in the oldest manuscripts, though ø is also found. The digraphao for ƒ is rare; ligatured a+o (Ë) and ƒ are the more usual forms.106
The consonant symbols of the roman alphabet were on the wholeadequate for Icelandic purposes. A chief lack was a symbol for ﬂ (or ›).
This sound, unvoiced or voiced, is sometimes, but rarely, represented by
th in the oldest sources, but ﬂ is by far the most usual symbol for it.
Icelanders must have been familiar with ﬂ from the runic alphabet, butthey probably introduced it into their script from Old English. They called
the letter ﬂorn, which is the English name for it (and which means ‘thorn’,both in Old English and in Old Norse); in the Scandinavian runic alphabets
it is called ﬂurs (meaning ‘giant’).107
The author of the First Grammatical Treatise,108 writing about the middleof the twelfth century, set himself the task of bringing order into Icelandic
orthography. His basic aim was to make do with as few different charactersas possible while at the same time retaining enough to ensure that nodisagreement could arise over the way the written word was to be read.
He chose to represent the four mutation vowels by ∂, y, ø and ƒ; and hewished to make clear the distinction between long and short vowels byplacing an accent over the long sounds or a dot if the sound was both longand nasal.
The author of the Treatise added ﬂ to the inventory of the roman alphabet,but he also found some roman letters superfluous. He recommended the
106 Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 24–30, 45, 56–59.
107 Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 21–22.
108 Islands grammatiske litteratur I 1886; Holtsmark 1936; Haugen 1950; Hreinn
Benediktsson 1972.

(2) From Veraldarsaga, c.1200. AM 655 VIII 4to, fol. 2v.
An√ﬂ su es g˛ﬂingar hfﬂo á egípta lande. af pharaó konunge. merker ﬂrældom
.
ﬂan es diofll ﬂrÃlcar allt mankvò í heíﬂnomdome. oc lausn su es gvﬂ leídde ﬂauòdaò anauﬂeòe mérker fr°lse ﬂat es gvﬂ géfr sinom móòom ﬂa es ﬂeir krístnasc.
Siƒr eò rauﬂe sa es ﬂeir gengo igegnom merker skirnar bruòeò. ﬂaò es helgaﬂr es
af bana bloﬂe crists. Pharao oc heÀ hans sa es drucnaﬂi i sioenom rauﬂa. àerker
fiandaò. oc svnﬂer er af hveriom maòe deyia ískirnar vatne.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

41

letter c for short k, dismissing k and q as alternatives. He counted x and z
as unnecessary since they each stood for two sounds (cf. § 1.2.5 above)and could be equally well written cs and ds. He proposed representing
long (double) consonants by small capital letters (i.e., with the form ofroman capitals but of no greater height than ordinary lower-case letters).
His one exception here was long k (kk), for which he advocated a special
form of k, derived from the Greek alphabet. (Cf. extracts 1 and 2.)
2.2 The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
It may as well be said at once that no manuscript is preserved in which thespelling rules of the First Grammatical Treatise are followed with any
sort of consistency. Most thirteenth-century scribes show the influence ofsome of the author’s recommendations, however, and traces of them arestill to be found in the fourteenth century.
Sound changes during this period, c.1200–1400, rendered some of theFirst Grammarian’s rules redundant. There is, for example, no trace ofany distinction made in writing between nasal and oral vowels. (On thispoint see now, however, footnote 165 below.) As mentioned above, theoldest manuscripts vary greatly in their representation of mutated vowels,
and this variety increased when the short vowels ø and ƒ fell together andthe long vowels ° and Õ did the same. In the normalised spelling familiar
to many from the editions of the Íslenzk fornrit series these last-mentioned
sounds are represented by æ and œ (ligatured o+e), and these symbols
will be used in what follows for the vowel sounds in question. ONP uses
the signs Ã and Õ.
The commonest symbols for ø were eo, ø, o and ey; for ƒ they were ƒ,Ë, √ and o. After ø and ƒ fell together, the chief symbols for the resulting
vowel sound were ø, ƒ, o and √, though au/av were also used. Of these øis comparatively rare, and in the fourteenth century the form ƒ was
gradually superseded by π. The vowel sound that resulted from the falling
together of ø and o is here represented by ö, as in Modern Icelandic, but itshould be noted that this diacritic o did not come into use until many
centuries later than the period here under discussion.
The oppression which the Jews suffered in Egypt from Pharaoh signifies the slavery
in which the Devil holds all mankind in heathendom; and the release whereby
God removed them from that oppression signifies the freedom that God grants to
His people when they are baptised. The Red Sea through which they passed signifies
the baptismal font, which is sanctified by the blood shed in the slaying of Christ.
Pharaoh and his army, which drowned in the Red Sea, signify the Devil and thesins which die away from every person in the water of baptism.

42

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

The most frequent symbols for æ were ∂, æ and e; those for œ were eo(which went out of fashion about 1200), ø, o and later π and ¿. When æand œ fell together in pronunciation, symbols for the latter were sometimes
used to express the result, in the early stages ø and ≠, later more often πand ¿, but the variant symbols for æ, among which © made a temporary
appearance, gradually came to be the usual representation of the sound,and by 1400 æ itself was the predominant form.109
Some of the earliest scribes used u and v in more or less the same way
as in Modern Icelandic, which prescribes the use of u as a vowel, v as aconsonant. Others followed the modern rule only when these sounds
occurred initially. Most scribes used the two characters indiscriminately,
whether vocalic or semivocalic, but some adopted one or the otherthroughout their writing. Where f was most commonly written in medial
and intervocalic positions (as in Modern Icelandic), this too may be
represented in some early scripts by u or v, e.g. haua, hava for usual hafa
‘to have’. Many fourteenth-century scribes adopted the custom of writingv (sometimes w) at the beginning of a word and u in the body and at theend of a word, whether the sound denoted was u, ú or v.110
j as a variant of i appears only exceptionally in the oldest manuscripts,
but its use increased, especially in the fourteenth century. The practice ofusing i for the vowel and j for the semivowel or consonant, as in Modern
Icelandic, was never followed. j might stand for i, í and j, but it was far
more often used initially than elsewhere.111
In the very oldest manuscripts the vowels e and o were predominant inendings where i and u are now written. i and u (or v) soon made theirappearance, however, and in time became established as final vowels, iearlier than u. In the thirteenth century some scribes seem to prefer i ando in endings, but by about 1300 u/v was mostly written for older o, and
109 Holtsmark 1936, 10–11, 18–23; Lindblad 1954, 114–52, 308–16; Stefán
Karlsson 1960, 83–93; Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 56–72.
110 Stefán Karlsson 1960, 72–74; Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 25–26, 49–50.
111 Stefán Karlsson 1960, 58; Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 46.

(3) From Heimskringla (Óláfs saga helga, ch. 153), c.1260. Lbs. fragm. 82(Kringla), fol. 1va.
Eò er ﬂeir léco at scaktafli Knutr konungr oc Vlfr Jarl ﬂa léc konungr fingr briotmikiò. ﬁa skækﬂi Jarl af honom riddara. Konungr bar aptr tafl hans oc sag›i athann scyldi aòat leika. Jarl reiddiz oc sc»t ni›r tafl bor›ino. Stó› upp oc gecc
ibrot. Konungr mælti. Reòr ﬂv nv ulfr hinn ragi. Jarl sneri aptr vi› dyÀin. ocmælti. Lengra mundir ﬂu reòa i áòe hælgo ef ﬂv qu∂mir ﬂui vi›. Kallaﬂir ﬂv eigi
ﬂa Vlf hiò raga er ec lag›a til at hialpa ﬂer er sviar bƒrﬂo y›r sem hunda.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

43

fourteenth-century scribes in general use o only sporadically. Although iis the dominant spelling in final syllables, most scribes in this later periodused e as well.112
Few scribes made a regular distinction between long and short vowels
but most made some attempt to do so. In the earliest writing a long vowel
was indicated by an accent over the letter, though this accent-mark wasalso apparently sometimes used to indicate stress. It was also not
uncommon to mark an i with an accent in order to distinguish it from theminims of the characters u, n and m. Again, there were some scribes who
used accents on no discernible pattern, sometimes placing them, forexample, over short unstressed vowels. The use of the accent declined in
the fourteenth century except as an i-marker, and in that period theNorwegian habit of doubling a vowel letter to indicate length (andsometimes in other circumstances) was increasingly adopted (ii is rare;
the preferred form is ij). Long vowels written double sometimes had an
accent-mark added. In the course of the fourteenth century it also became
increasingly common to use ligatured a+a (™), o+o (¢) and w when ascribe was keen to distinguish the long vowels á, ó and ú. As é became
diphthongised, its pronunciation was gradually more and more often
indicated by the spelling ie. Accents, more often a pair than a single mark,were sometimes added over ligatured vowels, and in the second half ofthe fourteenth century double accent-marks came to be used to indicate
length over the letters a, e, o, u/v and æ.113
As mentioned earlier, ﬂ was used in the earliest manuscripts, not only
initially as it is today but also medially and finally, where › is now written.
ﬂ (and later ›) was also used in certain consonant-clusters where thisfricative later changed to d or t (cf. pp. 19–20 above). The character › wasderived from English script but came to Iceland from Norway, where it
112 Lindblad 1954, 157–82, 308–16; Stefán Karlsson 1960, 65–66, 78; Hreinn
Benediktsson 1962a.
113 Lindblad 1952; Stefán Karlsson, 1960, 38–41, 51–53, 66–67, 69–70, 79–80,
85; Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 60–61.

While they were playing chess, King Knútr and Earl Úlfr, the king made a seriously
wrong move, and the earl took a knight from him. The king put his chess-pieceback and said that he was going to make a different move. The earl became angryand dashed the chessboard to the floor. He stood up and walked off. The king said:‘Are you running away, Úlfr the Cowardly?’ The earl turned round at the doorway
and said: ‘You would have run further in the Holy River (Helgeå) if you had beenable to. You did not call me Úlfr the Cowardly when I did all I could to help you
when the Swedes were beating you and your followers like dogs.’

44

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

was an early borrowing. In Icelandic writing it is first found in the firsthalf of the thirteenth century, and it was gradually adopted by more andmore scribes, using it instead of ﬂ or alongside ﬂ in medial and final
positions. It was exceptional to use › at the beginning of a word but its
capital form ‹ could be used as a decorative initial at the start of a chapter.
Soon after 1300 medial and final ﬂ was a rarity and by about 1400 it had
disappeared altogether in these positions. It was replaced, however, notso much by › as by d. The latter had itself begun to replace › as the symbol
for the medial and final fricative in the thirteenth century, and in the
fourteenth it became the dominant spelling. This development also had aprecedent in Norway where the fricative ﬂ/› was fast disappearing fromspeech.114 In the fourteenth century, and even before 1300, › was occasionally written for d, though it might very rarely occur in an initial position.
After 1400 › is seldom found in Icelandic script. The practice of writing ›was thus a short-lived phenomenon in early Icelandic.115
The recommendation of the First Grammatical Treatise that the shortconsonant k should be represented only by c was not followed. The earliest
evidence suggests that a fair number of scribes observed the custom of
writing k before front vowels and c elsewhere. The reason for this wasprobably not that k was regarded as a special symbol for palatal k, butrather the fact that before front vowels c no longer represented a k soundin contemporary Latin pronunciation. This differentiation between use ofk and use of c was gradually dropped in the thirteenth century, thoughsome scribes tended to prefer k in initial positions and c medially andfinally, and in the fourteenth century c was only in restricted use.
In the oldest manuscripts and on into the thirteenth century q was usually
written for k before v (written u or v or indicated by an abbreviation sign
which stood for v and a following vowel). This practice, which accorded witha rule of Latin orthography, was gradually abandoned by Icelandic scribes.
114 Seip 1955, 273–74, 289–91, 294.
115 Lindblad 1954, 185–93, 308–16; Stefán Karlsson 1960, 116–17, Hreinn
Benediktsson 1965, 21–22, 41, 43–44, 73–74.

(4) From Njáls saga (ch. 77), shortly after 1300. AM 468 4to (Reykjabók), fol. 39r.
GvnnaÀ ﬂrifr atgeiÀinn ba›vm hondvm ok snyz at honvà skiott ok rekr ígegnvm
hann ok kastar honvà a vollinn. ﬂa liop vpp asbrandr bro›ir hans. ìvnnaÀ leìr tilhans atgeiÀinvm. ok kom hann skildi fyrir sik. atgeiÀinn rendi ígegnvm skiolldín.
en brotnv›v ba›ir handleìirnir. ok fell hann vt af veìinvm. a›r haf›i ìvnnaÀ s∂rtviij. menn en vegit ﬂa .ij. ﬂa fekk ìvnnaÀ sár .ij. ok s√g‹››v ﬂat allir menn at hannbryg›i ser hvarki vi› sár ne vi› bana. hann m∂llti til hallìer›ar. fa mer leppa tva
ór hári ﬂinv.

the icelandic language45

	In the fourteenth century it became common to write palatal k as ki
before æ and before the ö which had previously been ø, though this spelling never appears before i and rarely before e. In these same positions gcame correspondingly to be written gi (kiπr, giæfa, representing OldIcel.
kør ‘choice’ and gæfa ‘good luck’ respectively).116
	As noted earlier (p. 18), there were two kinds of l. In time it became
more or less the rule that the dental l was written ll before d and t. For example, valldi was written for the dative of the noun vald ‘power’ but val›ifor the preterite of the verb velja ‘to choose’; and this spelling remainedeven though the › of val›i later became d to give modern valdi ‘I, (s)hechose’.117
Mention was made of the use of x and z at the end of the previous subsection (§ 2.1).118 As well as using z in middle voice endings (cf. p. 31
above), fourteenth-century scribes commonly came to write it also in the
superlative endings -ast(-) and -ust(-). When these forms had no inflexional
ending they were sometimes written -az, -uz; otherwise as -azt(-), -uzt(-)
or -azst(-), -uzst(-). The superlative ending st had been written zt when
attached to a stem ending in a dental (bezt ‘best’, min(n)zt ‘least’), but
this spelling was only exceptionally extended to stems without a dental
ending (e.g. fremzt ‘foremost’).119
The First Grammarian’s recommendation of small capitals for long consonants was followed to some extent by most thirteenth-century scribes,
and traces of the practice are visible down to about 1400. Some small
capitals in this function were always rare; those that were in most frequent
Lindblad 1954, 194–99, 308–16; Stefán Karlsson 1960, 127, 137–38; Hreinn
Benediktsson 1965, 30–34, 77–79.
117
Jakob Benediktsson 1960b.
118
Lindblad 1954, 209–13; Stefán Karlsson 1960, 114, 118–19, 132, 142,
148–49, 154–55; Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 74–76, 80.
119
Jón Helgason 1926b, 73–75; Stefán Karlsson 1967, 18, 25, 55, and 1982,
73–75.
116

Gunnarr grabs hold of the thrusting-spear with both hands, turns briskly towards
him, runs him through and throws him down to the ground [from the roof]. ThenÁsbrandr, his [i.e., orbrandr orleiksson’s] brother, leapt up. Gunnarr thrusts at
him with the spear, but he covered himself with his shield. The spear went throughthe shield, and both Ásbrandr’s arms (OR: both his upper and lower arm-bones)
broke; he fell off the side of the building. By then Gunnarr had wounded eight
men and killed those two. Then Gunnarr received two wounds; and everybody
said that he flinched neither at wounds nor at death. He spoke to Hallger›r: ‘Giveme two locks of your hair . . .’

46

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

and longest use were G, N and R. Writing double consonants to indicate
length was also common from the earliest times, and in the early thirteenth
century someone hit on the economic custom of marking a consonant aslong by inserting a dot above its single-letter, lower-case form. This wasparticularly convenient over letters that had no ascenders, and along withthe double writing of consonants it gradually became more or less standardpractice. Long k was, however, an exception: it could be expressed by c ork, doubled or dotted, but from the earliest times it was also represented byck, a spelling which became dominant in the course of the fourteenth
century.120
Changes in pronunciation of individual phonemes were not generally
reflected in spelling changes, though exceptions must be made in the caseof sounds which fell together with sounds already in the language; seee.g. the examples given earlier in this subsection in connection with æand ö. On the other hand, the force of scribal tradition meant that suchmergers were often no more than sporadically represented in spelling. rl
and ll fell together, as did rn and nn, after a long vowel, but the membersof these pairs were generally kept distinct in script. In the fourteenth
century, however, the common spellings rll and rnn are probably a joint
indication of scribal custom and of the current pronunciation of rl and rn.
The falling together is certainly evident in e.g. kall for karl ‘(old) man’and eirn for einn ‘one’, ‘a certain’. In these combinations a d sounddeveloped but it is rarely evident in script and then only in a ‘back spelling’
like Orn‡ for the feminine personal name Oddn‡.121 An exception to thegeneral rule that isolative changes did not cause spelling changes is thecase of é diphthongised to ie and often so spelt, as also shown earlier inthis subsection.
Most combinative sound changes, on the other hand, did result in spellingchanges. This did not always happen in regular fashion: established writing
120 Lindblad 1954, 308–16; Stefán Karlsson 1960, 140–41; Hreinn Benediktsson
1965, 80–85.
121 Jón Helgason 1927, 91–92; Stefán Karlsson 1982, 69, 71.

(5) From Jónsbók, 1363. AM 350 fol. (Skar›sbók), fol. 12ra.
Ef madr heimir edr hysir utlægan mann etr med honum edr dreckr. bondi edr eínnhuerr annaÀa manna. ﬂa er sa sekr mπrk uíd konung fyrir eína natt. en tueímr fyrirí˝. nãtr. Enn ef hann er í˝í. nætr medr honum. ok er hann gπrr iòan ﬂers heradsutlægr. ﬂa er hann sekr ﬂrettan morkum uíd konung. nema honum se v vísa uargr
er hysir. Alldri skal ﬂers sπk meirí er hysír. en híns sok uar ﬂa er hann uar utlægr
gπrr. Enn syslu madr er skylldr at lysa utlegd hans samdægris ™ ﬂíngi er hannueít at hann hefir ut legdar uerk unnít.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

47

habits and sometimes the influence of related word-forms that were
unaffected by change could lead to the retention of an older orthography.
Combinative changes that began to emerge by about 1400 or earlier havebeen touched on in the subsections on vowels and consonants, §§ 1.2.3
and 1.2.5 above. Some of these are evidenced in spelling, e.g. vo (vó, uo,uó) for older vá, eing for older eng (see p. 14 above). Evidence of pronunciation change can also be conveyed by misspellings. The old separate endings-r and -ur fell together with the introduction of epenthetic u, for example,
and resulted both in the correct spelling fagur for older fagr, nom. sg. m.
of the adj. meaning ‘beautiful’, and in the incorrect flugr for flugur, nom.
and acc. pl. of the noun fluga ‘fly’. A parallel development took placewhen t became › at the end of a final unstressed syllable (see p. 19 above).
The old endings -at, -it, -ut were then pronounced in the same way as theendings -a›, -i›, -u›. In consequence the written forms appeared either as› (or d), in accordance with the pronunciation, or as t, in accordance withscribal habit or as a misplaced archaism, seen e.g. in hundrat ‘hundred’.122
A topic that requires some special mention is the influence of Norwegianorthography on that of Icelandic scribes in the thirteenth century and moreparticularly in the fourteenth. It was noted earlier in this subsection that
Icelanders followed Norwegian example in adopting the letter › and later
abandoning it. Expression of g by gh, common in fourteenth-century
Icelandic writing, was also of Norwegian origin. Originally gh stood for
fricative gh (as in sagha, i.e., saga ‘(hi)story’), but most Icelandic scribes,
if they used gh at all, tended to employ it for the stop as well (as in ﬂingh,
i.e., ﬂing ‘assembly’), though very rarely at the beginning of a word.
Another probable loan from Norway was the use of fu medially for f before
a vowel (hafua, erfua, i.e., hafa ‘to have’ and erfa ‘to inherit’), a spellingthat became common in the fourteenth century. Many Icelandic scribes
also followed Norwegian practice in writing æ for e, especially in the
122 Jón Helgason 1926b, 70–71; Stefán Karlsson 1982, 59, 64–65, 72.

If a man—whether he be a householder or any other man—harbours or houses anoutlaw, or eats or drinks with him, he is answerable to the king for a fine of one
mark for one night [of such harbouring], and of two marks for two nights. And if
the outlaw spends three nights with him, and he has been made an outlaw in the
district where the harbourer lives, then the latter is answerable to the king for afine of thirteen marks, unless a sudden misfortune befalls him who does the
harbouring. The harbourer’s liability to a fine shall never be greater than was thatof the outlaw when he was outlawed. Furthermore, the king’s steward is obliged
to give notice of the harbourer’s fine at an assembly on the same day as he learns
that he has committed this offence.

48

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

diphthongs (æi, æy); and after the sounds represented by æ and œ had
fallen together in Icelandic, some Icelandic scribes tried to distinguishthem in spelling as the Norwegians did. u-mutation was less a feature of
Norwegian than of Icelandic, and Icelandic scribes sometimes wrote
unmutated forms (e.g. mannum for mƒnnum, dat. pl. of ma›r ‘man’), mostoften in three-syllable words (e.g. kalla›um for kƒllu›um, first pers. pl.
pret. indic. of kalla ‘to call’). In Norwegian the initial h- in hl, hr was lost,and Icelandic scribes not infrequently wrote l and r in words they
pronounced with hl, hr (e.g. laupa, ross, for hlaupa ‘to run’ and hross‘horse’ respectively). An analogical v was introduced at the beginning ofsome forms in Norwegian, e.g. vóx for óx, first and third pers. sg. pret.
indic. of vaxa ‘to grow’, vur›u for ur›u, third pers. pl. pret. indic. of ver›a‘to become’, and the same spelling is often found in Icelandic manuscripts.
These and other features of Norwegian spelling are especially evident in
the work of scribes who can probably be regarded as professionals. It was
important for them to command an orthography that was acceptablethroughout the realms of the king of Norway. For a time there appears tohave been a lively demand in Norway for reading matter from Iceland,
but after about 1350 it showed a marked decline.123 (Cf. extracts 3–6.)
2.3 From the Black Death to the Reformation
About 1400 something of a hiatus begins in the history of Icelandic
spelling. This is doubtless due in part to the plague years of 1402–1404
when scribes, whatever their status, suffered like the rest of the population.
We can see, however, that the Norwegian features just enumerated
disappeared almost entirely, though fu (which declined in use) and forms
like vur›u (for ur›u ‘(they) became’) remained. Continuing Norwegian
influence on Icelandic orthography was in any case not to be expected
because the written language in Norway was by now far removed fromthat of Iceland. At the same time certain letter-forms and spelling habits
123 Stefán Karlsson 1978 and 1979.

(6) From Bevers saga, c.1400. Holm. Perg. 4to nr. 6, fol. 4r.
Nv er ath tala vm Gvíon Jarll ath fyrsta dag maí˝ manadar arla sem ﬂau lagu jsinní sæng. ﬂa taladi frvínn vid Jarllin ok sagdizst vera miok síuk. Jarll fretti
huern krankleika hon hefdí ok bad hana segía ef hana l‡stí nokkurrar fædu. hon
sagdi. Ef ek fengí nytt villigaltar hold ﬂa væntir mik ath ek fengi skíott heilsu
mína. ﬂat veit gud segir Jarll ath ek skal freista gíarna ef nokkurn kann ek villí
gault ath fÑ. Jarll stigur nu vpp Ñ sín hest med eítt litíth sverd ok skiold. huorkí
hafdí hann brynníu ne hialm.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

49

that were already in decline before 1400 were now almost entirely
abandoned. Some innovations in spelling that resulted from fourteenthcentury sound changes had, however, become common currency and these
became established in the course of the century that followed. But ingeneral it may be said that the changes in spelling that took place between
the Black Death and the Reformation were few and slight.
The old symbols ø and ƒ for ö were discarded, but ö continued to be
expressed by a variety of letters, π, o and au (or √). œ-symbols that might
be used for æ all disappeared, and æ was in general use throughout, thougha few scribes preferred ∂.124
There are no very obvious rules for distinguishing long and short vowels
in this period, though there was a noticeable tendency to indicate long ain some way and ie became the predominant spelling for é. The single
accent as a length mark almost completely disappeared, but it wascustomarily written as a marker over i and j, whatever their context, andthis habit remained until foreign influence introduced a dot to replace theaccent, a gradual process which culminated in the sixteenth century.125
Where long vowels are distinguished in the script of this period it is by
double letters (almost always ligatured except in í˝ for í and maybe further
marked by a pair of accents), by a single letter marked by a pair of accents,and sometimes by a single letter with a superscript dot or a subscript hook.126
Most writers use only u in endings; o is rare. On the other hand, both eand i are common in endings, though many scribes show a preference forone or the other of them.127

124 Stefán Karlsson 1960, 83–98; Ólafur Halldórsson 1968, xviii–xxxii, xliv.
125 Lindblad 1952, 175.
126 Stefán Karlsson 1960, 38–41, 51–53, 66–71, 79–80; Jónas Kristjánsson 1964,
xix–xxiii, xli–xliv; Ólafur Halldórsson 1968, xx, xliv; Holm-Olsen 1910–86, xli–
xliii, lx–lxiii.
127 Hast 1960, 63–66; Stefán Karlsson 1960, 65–66, 78; Jónas Kristjánsson
1964, xxiii–xxiv, xlv; Holm-Olsen 1910–86, xlvii–xlix, lxiv–lxv.

It is now to be said of Earl Guion that, early on the first day of the month of May,
as they lay in their bed, the lady spoke to the earl and said she was very sick. The
earl asked what illness she was suffering from and begged her to say if there wasany food for which she had an appetite. She said: ‘If I had the fresh meat of a wildboar, then I expect that I would quickly recover my health.’ ‘God knows’, says theearl, ‘that I shall gladly see if there is any wild boar I can catch.’ The earl now
mounts his horse, taking one small sword and a shield; he had neither a mail-coatnor a helmet.

50

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

Small capitals indicating long consonants are a thing of the past, though
N very occasionally appears for nn in the work of just a few fifteenthcentury scribes.128

The combinative sound changes that began in the fourteenth century or
earlier had increasing influence on fifteenth-century spelling. In addition,
as time goes on, we find more and more evidence of the vowel changes
that took place before -gi (see p. 14 above). Thus ei appears for e, as inseigir ‘says’ (sometimes spelt seier), and there is confusion between suchwords as agi ‘awe’, ‘terror’, and ægi, acc. sg. of ægir ‘terrifier’; daginn,
acc. sg. of dag(u)rinn ‘the day’, can be written dæginn.129
As noted in the previous subsection, the palatal pronunciation of initial
g and k had often been indicated by writing gi, ki before æ and the productof old ø. This usage increased in the fifteenth century and was extended tothese initial sounds before e as well (giefa, kiemur, i.e., gæfa ‘good luck’and kemur (< kømr), third pers. sg. pres. indic. of koma ‘to come’).130
From about 1500 there are occasional spellings in which confusion of i,í, ei and y, ‡, ey appear, even though the unrounding of y had not yet had
any appreciable influence on the orthography in general.131 (Cf. extracts 7–9.)

128 Seelow 1981, 85, 95.
129 Hast 1960, 60; Ólafur Halldórsson 1968, xviii, xxi; Seelow 1981, 98.
130 Stefán Karlsson 1960, 127, 137–38.
131 Hreinn Benediktsson 1977, 33–34; Gu›var›ur Már Gunnlaugsson 1994,
63–70, 91–98.

(7) From a wife’s letter to her husband, c.1450. AM Dipl. Isl. Fasc. LXIV 17.
uillda eg at ﬂier letut illuga hafa kuíguna ﬂa hína tuæuetru og af entut hana jfardaga siait nu til uínnu mannana at ﬂeir fae klædín nog. uillda eg at jonn gudmundz
son fengi .x. alnar uadmals. ef síra are gelldur ockur nockut uadmal ﬂa skal hannfa nockrra skatta ﬂar af enn profasturínn ﬂat sem meíra er j tiundirnar. síaít nu tilallz sem ﬂier ﬂeínckit at bezt gegní Hier med bífala eg ydr gudí j ualld og hansmodur maríe og sancte petre.
(8) From Víglundar saga (ch. 7), c.1500. AM 551 a 4to, fol. 2r.
ﬂa atti hvn olof og vnnga dottvr er helga het. var hvn vetrí ynngri enn ketilridvr.
lavgdvz ﬂav oll saman med gledi og skemmtan ﬂessirr vngv menn. en at hveriv
gafnni sem ﬂav vorv hlotnadíz sva til jafnnan. at ﬂav vorv ser Uiglvndvr og
Ketilridvr enn ﬂav syskin ser travsti og helga. festi nv hvort ﬂeirra Uiglvndar og
Ketilridar mickla ast til annars. tolvdv ﬂat og margir at ﬂat ﬂætti jafnnrædi fyrir
flestra hlvta sakir. ﬂat var jafnan er ﬂav vorv bædí saman at hvorkí gadi annars
enn horfa vpp ™ annat.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

51

2.4 From the first printed books to the Enlightenment
The first books printed in Icelandic in the middle of the sixteenth century
heralded a new period in the history of Icelandic spelling. Writers ofmanuscripts were undoubtedly influenced by the spelling of the printed
word but their practice continued to be variable in a way that the languageof printed books was not. At least during the long editorial career of BishopGu›brandur ﬁorláksson (1542–1627), the consistency of the printed
language was firmly maintained.
The lettering of a language can pose problems for representation of it inprint, as modern Icelanders have experienced with the advent of computers.
The pioneers in the sixteenth century could not imagine embarking on a
printed alphabet which did not include ﬂ, and a special character had to be
cut for it. Accents on the other hand were not used in the first centuries of
Icelandic printing: the single accent had in fact disappeared as a length
marker in manuscript, as mentioned earlier (p. 49), though a double accentor double dot was often used over the long vowels of Old Icelandic andtheir more recent equivalents. As noted above (p. 49), double letters werealso a common way of indicating length in manuscript writing, and thiscustom was carried over into print, sometimes in ligatured forms, especially™ for á and w for ú, though for í the usual form in both script and print
was ij. As before, spelling often gave no clue as to whether a vowel was
long or short, but distinction between them gradually became commoneras the period advanced.132
132 Jón Helgason 1929, 14; Lindblad 1952, 196–98; Bandle 1956, 25–34.

I would like you to let Illugi have the two-year old heifer and to hand it overduring the moving days; see to it also that the labourers get enough clothes. I
would like Jón Gu›mundsson to receive ten ells of homespun cloth. If the Reverend
Ari pays us for any of this cloth, then he is to receive some tax payments from theproceeds, and the rural dean is to receive the surplus in tithes. Look after everythingas you think best. I commend you herewith to the care of God, His mother Mary,and Saint Peter.
Now Ólof herself had a young daughter whose name was Helga. She was a year
younger than Ketilrí›r. These young people all joined together for amusement
and recreation, and in every game in which they took part it always turned out that
Víglundr and Ketilrí›r formed a separate pair, as did the brother and sister, Traustiand Helga. Víglundr and Ketilrí›r now conceived a great love for one another,and many people said that this seemed a fitting match in most respects. It wasalways the case, when the two of them were together, that neither of them gave
heed to anything apart from gazing at the other.

52

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

In this period, and to some extent before it, there was much irregularity
in the use of single and double consonants, especially in clusters and at
the end of unstressed syllables, where there was no distinction inpronunciation between long and short sounds. It was, for instance, very
common to write and to print ck (= kk) both before and after otherconsonants (e.g. Lycklar, ﬁanckar, i.e., lyklar and ﬂankar, nom. pl. of
lykill ‘key’ and ﬂanki ‘thought’ respectively); and endings in -an in someforms and with -ann in others came to be more and more often
indiscriminately written single or double (e.g. Konann, i.e., konan ‘thewoman’, and Mannen, i.e., manninn, acc. sg. of ma›urinn ‘the man’).133
A separate development was one which doubled letters of slender shape,
f and tall s (˙ ) (haffa, Ara˙˙on, i.e., hafa ‘to have’ and the patronymic
Arason), in cursive writing; doubling of this kind was common in Danish.
Capital letters had previously been rare save at the beginning of aparagraph or chapter but they now appear much more frequently. Some
writers used them especially at the beginning of noun words, but examples
of consistent use are hard to find. It is also often difficult to see thedistinction between capital and lower-case letters in manuscript writing.134

133 Bandle 1956, 91–112; Jón Helgason 1970.
134 Jón Helgason 1929, 13; Bandle 1956, 19–22.

(9) From a deed of gift dating from 1545. AM Dipl. Isl. Fasc. L 21.
ﬁat giorum vid olafur hialltason prestur. og arnnkell Gudvardzson godum monnum
kunnigt med ﬂessu ockru opnu brefe at arum epter gudz burd à.d.xl. og v. J ytra
gardzs horne i suarbadardal a midviku dagin i gagnn dπgum. vorum vid i hia
saaum og heyrdum A. ord og handa band Jons. oddzsonar. af einne alfu. enn ﬂorgils
prestz sonar hans af annare. at so fyrer skildu at hann gaf honum xc. vpp i iordina
ytra huarf i suarbadar dal til fullrar eignar ﬂa strax . . . Og til sanninda hier vm
sette fyr greindur jon oddzson sitt insigli med ockrum innsiglum fyrer ﬂetta bref
giπrt i sama stad deige og are sem fyrr seiger.
(10) From Bishop Gu›brandur ﬁorláksson’s hymnal, Ein ny Psalma Bok, 1589.
pp. aa iiij–v.
Med sama hætte hafa ﬂeir enu Gπmlu Forfedur vorer elskad og idkad/ ﬂa M™lsnilldog ﬂad *Skalldskapar Lag/ sem Norænu M™le hæfer/ allra mest i Kuædum og
Vijsum/ so sem openbert er/ ad ﬂetta Norænu M™l hefur Forprijs fram yfer mπrg
πnnur Tungumal/ ﬂad vier af vitum/ i Skalldskapar M™lsnilld/ og Kuæda hætte/huad sannliga er ein Gudz G™fa/ ﬂessu Norænu M™le veitt og gefen/ huπria enn
ﬂo marger misbrwke/ ﬂa er ﬂad ﬂeirra Synd og Skulld sem ﬂad giπra. Og er hun
ﬂar fyrer ecke lastande/ helldur ættu Menn ad neyta hennar/ so Gude meige til
ﬁocknunar og lofgiπrdar vera.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

53

In the early part of this period u and v continued to be used interchangeably for the sounds represented by these letters, and the earlier custom of
writing v initially and u in other positions was also common. A gradualdevelopment, however, saw the restriction of these characters to their
particular function, with u written for the vowel and v for the consonant,at first in initial positions, subsequently in other positions as well. Muchthe same thing happened with i and j. In the earlier part of the period j wasused initially, irrespective of the sound it stood for (i, í or j), but as time
went on i came to be generally preferred for i and í in that position. As acapital letter, however, J could be used initially for any of the sounds
involved, while in medial and final positions the letter i was most often
exclusively used for the sounds represented by i and j.135
The 1540 print of Oddur Gottskálksson’s New Testament translation
had no symbol for ö; the sound was represented instead by o and sometimes
au. In the second half of the sixteenth century some writers began to useø on the Danish model, and this soon became the standard form in print,
though some fonts had π. In manuscripts π and au were often used, as
they had been earlier, but other letter-forms were also adopted: ø, borrowed
from print, and more commonly π and ó, each written sometimes with atail descending from it. In the seventeenth century a few scribes imitated
old manuscript usage and wrote ƒ for ö.136
135 Jón Helgason 1929, 19, 23–24, 35, 46; Bandle 1956, 53–54, 64–65, 139, 179.
136 Jón Helgason 1929, 27–28; Bandle 1956, 77–78.

We two, Ólafur Hjaltason, priest, and Arnkell Gu›var›sson, make known to peopleof good will with this open letter of ours that, one thousand five hundred andforty-five years after the birth of Christ, in Ytra-Gar›shorn in Svarfa›ardalur, on
the Wednesday before Ascension Day, the two of us being present saw and gave
ear to the words and handshake of Jón Oddsson on the one hand and his son
ﬁorgils, priest, on the other, the effect thereof being that he gave into his fullownership from that moment ten hundreds of the Ytra-Hvarf estate in Svarfa›ardalur . . . And in proof hereof the aforementioned Jón Oddsson placed his seal, withthe seals of us both, on this deed, made in the same place, day and year aforesaid.
In the same manner did those ancient forefathers of ours love and cultivate theeloquence and poetic mode that befits the Norse language, most especially inpoems and verses, clear as it is that this Norse language takes precedence over manyother languages—as far as we can tell—in poetic eloquence and poetic form,
which indeed is a particular gift of God granted and given to this Norse language;
and though many may misuse this gift, that is the sin or fault of those who do so.
The gift itself is in no way to be blamed for this; people should, rather, draw on it,so that it may redound to the pleasing and the praising of God.

54

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGEo might appear in endings but most printed books used only u. On theother hand, e was often more frequent than i in this position. It has beensuggested that this preference for e was due to the influence of Danish
spelling but whether that was the reason is uncertain.137 It is more likelythat the phonetic value of the vowel thus represented in a relatively unstressed position was between those of i and e in a stressed position.
Some sound changes that were under way before this period began are
now reflected in spelling with a fair degree of regularity. Thus, for instance,
ie is commonly written for older é and vo/uo for older vá, and vowelchanges before ng, nk are revealed by spellings such as eing, ijng, äng for
older eng, ing, ang; these last spellings are commonly seen even in workby writers from the Vestfir›ir (cf. pp. 12, 14 above).138 The change of ve
to vö is shown with some regularity (Kuølld, huør, Jnguølldur, i.e., kvöld‘evening’, hver ‘who’, ‘which’, ‘what’, ‘each’, and the feminine personal
137 Jón Helgason 1929, 20–23; Hægstad 1942, 48–49; Bandle 1956, 57–60, 68–69.
138 Bandle 1956, 28, 31, 33, 41, 45–49, 78–79; Jón Helgason 1955a, 22–24.

(11) From Stefán Ólafsson’s poem ‘Um brullaupsrei› Hornfir›inga’ (‘How theyrode from Hornafjör›ur to the wedding in Álftafjör›ur’) as preserved in a holographmanuscript dating from c.1650. Rostg. 121 4to LIIv.
J Alftafirde war Brullauped Best
Borin woru ﬂangad Ølfaungen mest,
ﬂad Spyrst wmm Borg og By
Bwrar fagna ﬂvij,
heyrdest ﬂad lijka hornafiórd i,enn opt verdur hliñtt epter gamaned.
ﬁa Hornfirdijngarner heyrdu ﬂad,huór sijna merina keyrde heim i hlad,mistu mein og swt,
melium kostudu wt,
hneptu i Buxur og wmm hÑlsenn kl≤t.
Enn opt verdur hliñtt epter gamaned.
(12) From the second part (dating from 1720) of the original edition of Jón
ﬁorkelsson Vídalín’s book of sermons, HVSSPOSTilla, p. 202.
Enn ﬂad eg hefe ad framann talad umm Heyrnar Skortenn/ ﬂad sama vil eg umm
M™lhelltena tala/ ad sønnu er hun stoor Vanse Lijkamans/ margur Ohlutvandur
forsm™er ﬂann/ sem er svo M™le farenn/ ﬂeir hœda ad hønum/ herma epter ﬂeim/
og l™ta miklu verr optast/ enn hiner sem ﬂeir epter herma : ﬂetta heiter ad lasta
Skaparann/ ﬂvi hann hefur Mannenum M™led gefed/ og s™ ed fremur ﬂvilijkt
Gudleyse/ hann er nærsta illa talande i hans Eyrum/ sem allt heyrer/ hann giører
M™lsnylle sijna ﬁusundsinnum argare enn Brest hins M™lhallta.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

55

name Yngvöldur (< Yngveldr, variant of Yngvildr)), and after 1600 spellings
such as fjegur, mieg (i.e. fjögur, n. of fjórir ‘four’ and mjög ‘very’ (adv.)),
which reflect the change of jö to je, are relatively frequent. There issufficient evidence to show that at the beginning of the period -r could
still be used for both the old endings -r and -ur, and that -t could be used
for both earlier -t and -› at the end of unstressed final syllables.139
In the oldest printed books the distinction between i and y was more orless correctly maintained, at least throughout the lifetime of BishopGu›brandur ﬁorláksson.140 In most other writings from the period,
evidence for the unrounding of y, ‡, ey to i, í, ei respectively is far morestriking than before, with writers using both i for y and y for i. Even though
the old rounded pronunciation of y no longer existed in speech, the lettery continued to be written, and this scribal practice meant that more often
than not y was bound to appear ‘correctly’ in writing. On the other hand,
Ketill Jörundsson (1603–1670), parson at Hvammur í Dölum, who wrote
many manuscripts, rejected y altogether and consistently wrote i, ï, ej inevery context.141 His grandson, Árni Magnússon (1663–1730), at first
followed his example, but when he became acquainted with medieval
manuscripts he adopted y and for the most part succeeded in using it inaccordance with old forms. His colleagues and most scholars since histime have aimed to do the same.
139 Björn K. ﬁórólfsson 1925, xiii, xix, xxiv; Bandle 1956, 42–43, 156–57,
168–72.
140 Bandle 1956, 71–76; Jakob Benediktsson 1960a, 160.
141 Jón Helgason 1958, 96.

In Álftafjör›ur the best of weddings took place; the greatest supplies of liquor
were brought there. News of it spreads far and wide; people welcome it. It alsocame to be heard of in Hornafjör›ur; but silence often falls after merriment.
When the people of Hornafjör›ur heard about it, each of them whipped hismare in from pasture; they abandoned suffering and sorrow, threw out thesaddlecloths, buttoned up their trousers and put scarves round their necks. But
silence often falls after merriment.
And I wish to say about impeded speech the same as what I have said above about
hardness of hearing: that it is in truth a great bodily affliction. Many a dishonourable
person despises the one whose speech is thus affected; they mock him, imitate
him, and very often behave much worse than those whom they imitate. This
amounts to laying blame on the Creator, for He has given language to man; andthe person who perpetrates such godlessness is very ill-spoken in the ears of Him
who hears all; he makes his eloquence a thousand times worse than any failing on
the part of him whose speech is impeded.

56

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

The phonetic function of z was finally lost during this period, althoughsome sixteenth-century writers still used it as before, that is, after thedentals in ts, ds, ›s, lls, nns and in middle voice and superlative forms.
Gradually, however, it became customary to write s in its place, while atthe same time some writers began to use z merely as a graphic variant ofs, which is especially apparent in genitive endings of words whose stem
did not end in a dental. In the seventeenth century the old rules governing
the use of z were completely forgotten, and most writers abandoned thecharacter except when it occurred in foreign names.142 It did happen,
however, that z was used for st, and we find spellings like faz (fast‘firm(ly’)) and ozr (ostur ‘cheese’).143
Another change that took place gradually in this period and became
apparent in spelling is the loss of the distinction between the two kinds ofl that previously existed before d: lld had been customarily written for
older ld and ld for older l›; now ld normally did service for both.144
There continued to be great irregularity in spelling, not least in handwritten work. It can be seen, however, that a few individuals created amore consistent orthography for their own use, and they also made innovations. Oddur Oddsson, parson at Reynivellir (c.1565–1649),145 and the Rev.
Ketill Jörundsson, mentioned above, are examples. Neither of these menlaid down rules for spelling, and those which Jón Ólafsson from Grunnavík
drafted remained unfinished and without influence.146 One common element in the spelling conventions of these three writers was a consistentdistinction that was made between the long and short vowels of early Icelandic, now separated by quality rather than quantity (cf. pp. 12–13 above).
A great many copies of medieval manuscripts were made in theseventeenth century and later. Some copyists did their best to follow the142 Bandle 1956, 166–67, 173–79.
143 Jón Helgason 1926a, 72.
144 Jakob Benediktsson 1960b.
145 Stefán Karlsson 1981.
146 Jón Helgason 1926a, 71–87.

(13) From an autograph manuscript (dating from 1767) of Eggert Ólafsson’s
Búna›arbálkur (‘Farming poem’). Lbs. 1513 4to, p. 43.
FÌrer mig einn eg ecke bÌgge,afspríng helldur og sveitunginn;
epter mig vil eg verkenn ligge,
vid dœmenn ørvaz seinnre menn;
ieg brúa, gerde, gautu rÌd,graunnunum til ﬂess veite li›.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

57

spelling of their exemplars and indeed adopted orthographical features of
early writing, sometimes using similar archaic forms even when not reproducing an old text. This last tendency could have catastrophic results,
sometimes giving rise to a veritable mishmash of new and old, of contemporary spelling habits and antique manuscript orthography, the latter often
misunderstood. Some scribes, for example, used ﬂ in medial and final positions and made it do duty not only for › but also for d; or they adopted
Norwegian spellings, e.g. initial l and r for hl and hr. Sources showing suchcuriosities include books printed in Skálholt around 1690 containing not
only medieval texts but an Icelandic version of Gronlandia, which Arngrímur
Jónsson wrote in Latin between 1597 and 1602.147 (Cf. extracts 10–12.)
2.5 The emergence of modern spelling
Eggert Ólafsson, who numbered educational reform among his many
interests, produced a set of rules for Icelandic spelling in 1762. In someelements he followed contemporary convention, recommending forexample ck for kk and qv for kv, and also final e (= i), spellings which had
again become common in his century but have not since stood the test oftime. He had become familiar with old manuscripts in Copenhagen andwas much inclined to favour their orthography. He wished to adopt singleaccent forms for the long vowels of Old Icelandic, á, í, ó, ú, ‡, while forold é he recommended either é or e in preference to ie. He also advocatedusing y and i in accordance with the rules of the old language, and at thesame time prescribed two kinds of æ, i.e., æ and œ, though he did nothimself succeed in distinguishing clearly between them. Where pronunciation varied he emphatically recommended the use of older spellings, angrather than áng, for example (cf. § 2.4 above), iø rather than ie (as in fiør,
kiør, now fjör ‘life’ and kjör ‘choice’), and rf, lf, rather than rb, lb (as inarfur ‘inheritance’, álfur ‘elf’). In unstressed final positions he wished adistinction to be made between -n and -nn, as had been done earlier and isdone today. He gave z a place instead of st in middle voice forms but
otherwise restricted its use to foreign names (cf. extract 13).148
147 Jón Helgason 1942, 32–35.
148 Vilhjálmur ﬁ. Gíslason 1926, 147–67; Jón Helgason 1928, 61–65; JónA›alsteinn Jónsson 1959, 76–77.
Not for myself alone do I build, but rather for my offspring and fellow-countryman.
I wish that my deeds should survive me; people of later times will be inspired by
the examples. I build bridges, make fences, clear a path; I grant help to myneighbours to that end.

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THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

Eggert Ólafsson’s spelling guide was not published, but it was circulated
in copies and had a marked influence on the spelling of books printed in
Icelandic in the next decades, and those books in turn had their influenceon spelling habits. Older conventions remained in force at the printingpress at Hólar as long as it continued to exist, that is, down to about 1800.
The first published work to introduce a single accent over the vowels that
had been long in Old Icelandic was the 1768 edition of Konungsskuggsjá
printed at Sorø in Denmark,149 but the influence of Eggert Ólafsson’srules is most clearly evident in books printed on Hrappsey from 1773 onwards,
particularly in the publications of the first ten years or so. There was nothorough adherence to his principles, however, for áng and eing (cf. §2.4) often appear in these prints, as well as ie for é and -st in the middle
voice. Observance of the i/y distinction in a historically correct way was
wavering, and no inclination to adopt œ was ever shown. The use of capitalletters had hitherto been common in printed books but now it dwindled,being chiefly restricted to the start of a sentence and proper names.150
The publications of the Learned Arts Society (Lærdómslistafélag; 1779–
1796) and of the Society for National Education (Landsuppfræ›ingarfélag;1794–1827) brought increased fixity to Icelandic spelling. In 1794 thelatter Society established a printing press at Leirárgar›ar; it was later
located at Beitista›ir and from 1819 to 1844 located on the island of Vi›ey,close to Reykjavík. The influence of Eggert Ólafsson’s spelling rules islargely evident in the works issued by this press, but there are also somenotable departures. Wherever it was typographically possible, a single
accent was regularly placed over the long vowels of the old language, andé was introduced both where it was the old norm and after initial g and k
149 Lindblad 1952, 198–200.
150 Jón Helgason 1928, 64–74.

(14) From Magnús Stephensen’s retrospective address on behalf of Iceland(personified as a woman) to the eighteenth century. Magnús Stephensen 1806,
520–21.
Stæra má eg mig annars af ﬂví, ad eg ein hefi svo fengid mitt málfæri vardveitt
fram yfir flestar ﬂjódir, frá ﬂví eg bygdist, árid 874, til ﬂessa dags, ad ﬂad enn mávyrdast sárlítid umbreytt eda gallad í munni og penna skynugra manna, á hvørjuútlenda jafnvel furdad hefir, ﬂegar t.d. franskt og ﬂ‡dskt túngumál, eptir ﬂví, sem
einhvør en ellstu skjøl í bádum, vardveitt frá byrjun 9du Aldar, s‡na svo ad hafa
umbreyttst til útfarar ﬂinnar, ad ﬂeirra daga Frønsku og ﬁ‡dsku skilja nú ecki
nema rétt vel lærdir menn í ﬂeim túngum. ﬁó eg nú ecki neiti, ad í daglegt tal og
skyndi-rit, lædist opt inn blendin ord eda talshættir hjá sumum, veitir ﬂó mørgum
allhægt, ad bjóda mál mitt hreint og vítalaust fram.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

59(e.g. géck, Kétill, i.e., gekk, first and third pers. pret. sg. of ganga ‘to walk’
and the personal name Ketill, marking in that way the palatalising of gand k before e). Before ng, nk the vowels a and i were most often similarly
accented and au (for older ö) was normally printed, but not usually ei (forolder e) in the same position. In endings it now became the rule to print irather than e, and around 1800 j began to be printed to represent the palatal
glide in medial positions in place of the i that had been used before (sogjøf, now gjöf ‘gift’, and byrja ‘to begin’) (cf. extract 14).
Rasmus Rask, a Danish philologist and a great friend of Iceland, brought
Icelandic spelling closer still to its modern guise both in his writings andin the editions for which he was wholly or partly responsible, chiefly
from 1818 onwards. He set out his spelling rules in a booklet published in
1830.151 Rask’s view was that Icelandic spelling could in essentials serve
equally well for both the old and the modern language. He used single
accents over the old long vowels á, í, ó, ú, ‡, but adopted a grave accent
form è for é (= je). After g, k he found e sufficient (thus gefa ‘to give’,
kenna ‘to teach’). Where old vá changed to vo he wrote vâ (i.e., with acircumflex) in reproducing early Icelandic texts but vo if the text was amodern one (thus vân and von, both meaning ‘hope’). He thought it correct
to distinguish æ and œ in editions of early works but not otherwise. The
character ö had previously long been used, like ñ, to represent the longvowel ó but much less often for the sound usually represented by ö. Rask
now made ö the norm for this sound in roman script but used the customary
ø in Gothic (i.e., black letter) script. Rask wanted to omit epenthetic u (asin tekr ‘takes’), but retained it in some words where he considered the -ur
ending to be of ancient origin (e.g. göltur ‘boar-pig’, fótur ‘foot’). As his
norm for both Old and Modern Icelandic he wrote vowels with single
accents and au and sometimes ei before ng, nk, though he finally came to
151 Rask 1830.

I may indeed take pride in the fact that I alone have been able to keep my speechpreserved more than most nations—from when I was first settled, in the year 874,
to this day—in such a way that it may still seem very little changed or spoilt in themouths and pens of discerning people; a fact at which even foreigners have marvelled, since the German and French languages—to judge from what some of theoldest manuscripts in both, preserved from the beginning of the ninth century,
show—have changed up to the time of your passing [i.e., the eighteenth century,
here addressed as a person] to such an extent that only people who are well andtruly versed in those languages now understand the French and the German ofthose days. Although I do not deny that dubious words or phrases often infiltrate
the daily speech and hastily produced writings of some, there are nevertheless many
who find it reasonably easy to set forth my language in pure and faultless form.

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THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

question the propriety of such spellings in editions of Old Icelandic texts.152
He found c and q superfluous and consequently wrote drekka ‘to drink’,kvíga ‘heifer’ and so on. On the other hand, he wished to reintroduce z fors where a preceding t, d, › had been dropped, as in vizka, vonzka, gæzka,talizt (now viska ‘wisdom’, vonska ‘anger’, gæska ‘goodness’, and talist,
pp. of teljast ‘to be counted’). The greatest change in the overall appearanceof written Icelandic was due to Rask’s adoption of ›. This character had
been used in print long before, in Olavius’s edition of Njáls saga (1772),
but only occasionally thereafter until it now appeared in texts for whose
orthography Rask was ultimately responsible (cf. extract 15).153
Rask’s spelling rapidly gained more or less general currency, chiefly
because it was adopted in most of the publications of the Icelandic LiterarySociety (Hi› íslenska bókmenntafélag), founded in 1816 on Rask’s
initiative, and in other publications prepared by Jón Sigur›sson (1811–
1879) or under his aegis; Jón was president of the Literary Society formany years in the middle of the century. It may be noted that in 1828 theSociety formally voted in favour of › in its publications.154 Nevertheless,down to about 1850 many books were still produced without the use of ›,particularly those printed in black letter. Since black letter was almost
universal in books printed in Iceland down to 1844, and did not disappear
for some decades after that,155 the general public can hardly have come tomake wide use of › until the last years of the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth-century orthography that was most at variance with Rask’ssystem was the one used, with occasional modifications, in the periodical
Fjölnir from 1836 to 1843. It was expounded in two essays by Konrá›
Gíslason.156 He held the view that the sole rule for spelling should be
152 Rask 1832, 9–10.
153 Jóhannes L. L. Jóhannsson 1922, 3–6; Jón A›alsteinn Jónsson 1959, 77–79.
154 [Rask] 1828, 41–44.
155 Klemens Jónsson 1930, 122.
156 [Konrá› Gíslason] 1836 and 1837.

(15) From Rasmus Rask’s presidential address to the Icelandic Literary Society.
Rask 1828, 44–45.
ﬁetta gamla túngumál er ﬂa› eina, sem Íslands ﬂjó› hefir eptir af sínum fyrri
blóma, hennar makt og eigin stjórn er farin, hennar skógarrækt og akryrkja er
eingin, hennar skipagángr og ríkdómr er ekki töluver›r; ekkèrt er eptir henni tilágætis nema sú en forna túnga, sem allar ﬂjó›ir á Nor›rlöndum ﬂurfa a› stunda,
til ﬂess a› útskíra vel sín eigin túngumál. ﬁykir ﬂví vel verdt a› bera sig a› vanda
hana af ‡trasta megni, og láta hana ekki umbreytast í neinu, nè spillast e›r tapast
af hir›u leysi, og a› vaka yfir ﬂví er einmidt ﬂessa fèlags tilgángr og áform.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

61

pronunciation, but that ‘it was hardly worth the risk . . . of initiating suchmassive innovation’ (‘varla eígandi undir . . . a› stofna til so mikillar
níbreítni’) as he thought was justified. It would ‘overtax the eye’ (‘ofbi›iauganu’), for instance, ‘to see aíri› for æri›, aúvalt for ávalt, oúheppi›for óheppi›’, and so on (æri› and óheppi› are the nom. and acc. sg. n.
forms of the adjectives ærinn ‘sufficient’, ‘considerable’ and óheppinn‘unlucky’ respectively; ávalt (now ávallt) = ‘always’). The chief departuresfrom Rask’s system in the practice of the Fjölnir men were as follows:
the letter y was dismissed; eí was written for ei/ey; je was written insteadof è or é; before gi, gj they wrote eí (as in veígi›, seígja, now respectively
vegi›, second pers. pl. pres. of vega ‘to weigh’, and segja, inf., ‘to say’);
they had initial gj, kj where the pronunciation seemed to warrant them (asin Gjísli, kjenna, for the personal name Gísli and kenna ‘to teach’ respectively); they wrote -ur everywhere in endings. They had some additional
pronunciation-based forms, such as hvur for hver ‘who’, ‘each’, etc., andabl for afl ‘(physical) strength’. They kept z, however, not only where
Rask advocated its use but also in genitive forms like Lopz (for Lofts, gen.
sg. of the personal name Loftur), lanz (for lands, gen. sg. of land ‘land’)
and orz (for or›s, gen. sg. of or› ‘word’). Konrá› Gíslason’s spellingsystem met criticism and no very enthusiastic response; the Fjölnir groupabandoned it in 1844.157
Halldór Kr. Fri›riksson (1819–1902) taught Icelandic at the Grammar
School in Reykjavík for nearly half a century (1848–1895). He had been
involved with Fjölnir in the last years of its existence and throughout his
career he taught what was essentially the spelling adopted by the editorsof that periodical in 1844. He gave a detailed account of its principles in abook published in 1859.158 This spelling, often referred to as the ‘school
spelling’, was based on Rask’s recommendations but departed from them
157 [Konrá› Gíslason] 1844; Jóhannes L. L. Jóhannsson 1922, 7–8; Jón A›alsteinn Jónsson 1959, 79–84.
158 Halldór Kr. Fri›riksson 1859.

This ancient language is the one thing that the Icelandic nation has left of its
former flourishing state. Its power and self-government are gone; its forestry andagriculture are non-existent; its shipping and wealth are of no account. Nothingremains that might reflect its merit save that ancient language which all the nationsof Scandinavia need to study in order to account adequately for their own languages.
It therefore seems well worth making the greatest possible effort to treat it withcare, and to prevent it from changing in any respect and from becoming spoilt or
lost through negligence; and to watch over it is precisely the purpose and aim of
this Society.

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on various points. In requiring je rather than è or é and the epenthetic u in-ur(-), the system came closer to contemporary pronunciation than Rask’s
and indeed to that of many of Rask’s predecessors. On the other hand, it
showed more respect for etymology and in some degree for archaism
inasmuch as the old short vowels before ng, nk were not to be written in
any way that showed their new quality in these positions. The ‘school
spelling’ also distinguished not only between i, í, ei and y, ‡, ey respectively,
but also between two forms of æ, i.e., æ and œ; choice between these lasttwo depended on etymology, æ in derivations from words with old á, œ inthose from words with old ó. Rules for the use of z were rather similar to
Rask’s but applied more widely, though not so far as to prescribe z ingenitive forms, which had been the original practice of the Fjölnir group.
It should finally be mentioned that the ‘school spelling’ also relied on
etymology to decide whether a consonant immediately before anotherconsonant should be written single or double, though Old Icelandic
orthography did not lend much support to this principle. Thus ﬂekkt cameto be the correct form for the nom. and acc. sg. n. of the adj. ﬂekkur‘agreeable’, but spakt in the same cases, number and gender of spakur‘wise’; stokknir was similarly the correct form for the nom. pl. m. of the
pp. of stökkva ‘to jump’, but roknir for the same case of the pp. of rjúka‘to emit smoke or steam’ (cf. extract 16).159
A few scholars moved farther towards the archaic than the ‘school
spelling’ promoters, not least by dropping epenthetic u, but most people
found themselves in difficulties if they attempted to follow their example.
Most texts published in Icelandic in the second half of the nineteenth
century essentially followed the ‘school spelling’, though the distinctionof æ and œ never became a general feature, and the spelling of the written
language among the population at large remained relatively diverse and
159 Jóhannes L. L. Jóhannsson 1922, 7–11; Jón A›alsteinn Jónsson 1959, 84–87.

(16) From Halldór Kr. Fri›riksson’s spelling guide. Halldór Kr. Fri›riksson 1859,35–36.
ﬁa› vir›ist ﬂví rjettasta reglan a› rita samkvæmt upprunanum, eptir ﬂeim myndum,
sem or›in fá, er ﬂau ver›a íslenzk e›a norrœn, e›a eru tekin inn í norrœnuna; en
frambur›urinn má ﬂó eigi vera ﬂvert á móti rithættinum; vjer megum eigi rita ﬂá
stafi, sem hvorki heyrast í frambur›inum, nje ver›a látnir heyrast; og ﬂessi vir›istvera a›alundirsta›an fyrir rithætti fornmanna, ﬂótt ví›a út af beri, og ﬂessi vir›ist
undirsta›an enn, eptir ﬂví sem flestir rita, ﬂótt hún í mörgu sje aflögu›; . . . tungan
hefur a› nokkru breytzt á hinum sí›ustu fimm öldum, og ﬂví ver›ur og a› breyta
til um ritháttinn, me› ﬂví a› enginn getur hugsa› til, a› fœra allt aptur til hinna
fornu myndanna, heldur ver›ur a› taka tunguna, eins og hún nú er or›in.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

63

in some degree influenced both by current pronunciation and by older
spelling habits. A few men attempted to introduce reforms which would
bridge the gaps still to be seen between pronunciation and spelling. The
most notable of these was Björn M. Ólsen (1850–1919), the first professorof Icelandic in the University of Iceland, founded in 1911. He sought tosimplify the spelling, partly, as he thought, to make it easier to learn. The
most important change he advocated was the abolition of y and z. Icelandic
orthography was a subject of hot debate around 1890, especially between
Björn M. Ólsen and Halldór Kr. Fri›riksson, who stood by the ‘school
spelling’ for which he had been chiefly responsible.160
Disputes about Icelandic spelling have often erupted since then, andopinions have differed over basic principles: should etymology be thedecisive factor or should pronunciation and ease of acquisition take precedence? In 1898 spelling rules were introduced, the so-called ‘journalists’spelling’, by the newspaper editors, Jón Ólafsson (1850–1916) and Björn
Jónsson (1846–1912). Thereafter many teachers asked for guidance fromthe authorities on what spelling should be taught in schools, but it was not
until 1918 that a set of instructions was issued. More regulations were
issued in 1919 and again in 1974, with minor amendments in 1977.
The changes back and forth in the spelling regulations of the twentiethcentury relate to the same questions as those which gave grounds forargument in the nineteenth century: Is je preferable to é or é to je? Shouldz be used and if so by what rules? When should a consonant before anotherconsonant be written double? Disputes on these and other questions of stillless significance have often been more heated than the occasion warranted.161
160 Björn M. Ólsen 1889; Jóhannes L. L. Jóhannsson 1922, 11–12; Jón A›alsteinn
Jónsson 1959, 88–94.
161 Jóhannes L. L. Jóhannsson 1922, 12–33; Jón A›alsteinn Jónsson 1959, 94–119.

The most strictly correct approach thus seems to be to write with etymology inmind, following those forms which the words acquire when they become Icelandic
or Norse, or are adopted into Norse. But pronunciation should not be directly
contrary to spelling: we should not write those letters which are neither heard, norallowed to be heard, in pronunciation; and this seems to be the main foundation
on which the spelling of the ancients was based, even though it was frequently
departed from; and this still seems to be the foundation, to judge from how mostpeople write, although it is in many respects impaired; . . . the language has changed
to some extent in the past five centuries, and it is therefore necessary to makeadjustments with regard to spelling, for no-one can envisage a wholesale removal
back to the ancient forms; the language should, rather, be taken for what it has
now become.

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3. One language
The sections above on pronunciation and sound changes have shown thegreat changes that have taken place in Icelandic since the country was
first settled. The most radical of these, however, were all for the most partcompleted by the early seventeenth century. Some other sound changes,
not effective in every part of the country, have fluctuated in extent anddistribution in past centuries. Research in this field has been chiefly limited
to study of the distribution of pronunciation features as recorded in recent
decades.162 Still less has been published on the dialect distribution of
inflexional forms and vocabulary, even though we know that in earlier
centuries, no less than in the twentieth, local bounds were set to a good
many words and word-forms.163 Differences in language usage from onepart of Iceland to another are, however, very slight, especially if seen incontrast to the dialectal differences that developed in neighbouring
languages. This may seem surprising at first sight, given the scattered andwidespread pattern of Icelandic settlement.
What is more distinctive of Icelandic than anything else is, on the one
hand, this virtual absence of regional variation and, on the other, theminimal difference between Old and Modern Icelandic in the inflexional
system and lexicon. There are many reasons for this, and none of themtells the whole story. The following are those that may reasonably be
counted the most valid.
From the time when writing was first introduced, the practice of reading
was entrenched among Icelanders. Among the books that were read, heard
and re-told were the greatest works of medieval Icelandic literature, andin this way they undoubtedly played their part in the preservation of thelexicon and inflexions of the ancient language. Iceland’s geographicalsituation and the comparatively few immigrants who arrived there after
the time of the settlement meant that foreign influences were not nearly as
strong in Iceland as in many other countries. Distances within Iceland
were great, but there was an astonishing amount of travel and movement
within the country, notably the annual ride to the Alﬂingi, a prominent
feature of Icelandic life for centuries and one which, in the early period at
162 Björn Gu›finnsson 1946 and 1964; Dahlstedt 1958a and b; Hreinn Benedikts-

son 1961–62b; Jón A›alsteinn Jónsson 1964, 69–80; Kristján Árnason and Höskuldur ﬁráinsson 1983; Höskuldur ﬁráinsson and Kristján Árnason 1984; Gu›var›ur
Már Gunnlaugsson 1987a; Höskuldur ﬁráinsson and Kristján Árnason 1986.
163 Jón A›alsteinn Jónsson 1953; Jón Helgason 1960; Jón A›alsteinn Jónsson
1964, 65–69, 80–85.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

65

least, brought together large numbers of people from all parts. Wealthyfamilies in Iceland often owned estates in many different districts andthey intermarried with families who lived far from their own chiefhomestead. There were few schools in Iceland; for centuries indeed there
were only two, and for much of the nineteenth century only one, whichmeant that pupils foregathered from every corner of the country. Clergy
often worked in parishes remote from their own place of origin and theyoften moved from one rural district to another far away. When fisheries
were developed to serve the export market many people joined in seasonal
fishing work in the south and west of the country, coming to the fishingstations from all parts and returning home for summer haymaking. Vagrants
travelled all over the country; they naturally visited the bishops’ sees,
places to which many other people also had errands, including, in preReformation times, pilgrims to the shrines of the saints lying at rest in thecathedrals. All this traffic, along with the contacts that inevitably existed
between neighbouring districts, certainly contributed to linguistic levelling.
Most of the major sound changes in fact spread over the whole country injust a few generations. On the other hand, there were some innovations
that arose in one or another part of the country and gained some currency
but in the long run were unable to compete with old features which survived
intact elsewhere.164
In the matter of orthography we may recall that early in the history of
writing Icelandic an anonymous author attempted to provide spelling rules
which in fact were remarkably well adapted to the sound system of his
contemporary twelfth-century speech. His rules were, however, nowhere
followed precisely in any of our extant sources, and spelling in thefollowing centuries was characterised by inconsistency and the absenceof observable rules. This irregularity was partly due to conflict between
novel changes in pronunciation and old scribal habits.
From the late eighteenth century onwards, efforts to standardise spelling
had some effect, and although changes and comparatively radical deviations were advocated in a few exceptional cases, it is on the whole true tosay that a generally accepted spelling system was established in the nineteenth century. The outcome is a spelling which is essentially etymologicaland takes account of only a few of the changes in pronunciation that haveoccurred since 1400 and, indeed, makes no concession to some changes
that were already effective before that date. Among other things this meansthat the national spelling is a kind of common denominator for regional
164 Helgi Gu›mundsson 1977.

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variations: in the few cases of different dialectal pronunciation the standard
spelling reflects the old way of saying a word, even though that old way
remains the habit of comparatively few speakers (as in langur ‘long’ (adj.)and daginn, acc. sg. of dagurinn ‘the day’). The archaising tendency which
proposed two symbols for the sounds underlying æ (i.e. æ and œ), which
had merged in the thirteenth century, was abandoned. On the other hand,
it has become established writing practice to distinguish, or to try to
distinguish, between i, í, ei and y, ‡, ey respectively, in accordance withthe old pronunciation of these sounds; and similarly between n and nn infinal unstressed position, despite the fact that both these distinctions inpronunciation disappeared through merger many centuries ago. Modern
Icelandic spelling thus reveals the influence of pronunciation and scribal
habit from different periods of the past, and in some cases it marks areturn to early medieval times.
In the last two centuries there has also been something of a return to
Old Icelandic forms in inflexions and vocabulary; instances have been
noted in §§ 1.3 and 1.4 above. Conscious cultivation of the language has
been largely responsible for this movement. If we disregard the many
neologisms of Modern Icelandic, the present-day written language is inmany respects closer to Old Icelandic than to the Icelandic found in mostprinted books published between 1540 and 1800. This development of
the language would hardly have been as thoroughgoing as it has been
without the progress made in education and school-attendance; but it also
owes much to the interest generally taken by Icelanders in language anduse of language, and to the fact that most of the population have felt it anhonour to possess a language so little changed from its ancient form thatthey have minimal trouble in understanding the literature created by theirforebears centuries ago.165

165 In the second paragraph of § 2.2, above, it is stated that there is no trace ofany distinction made in writing between nasal and oral vowels. This was the conclusion of Hreinn Benediktsson 1965, 60, and 1972, 130–31. On the other hand,de Leeuw van Weenen, 1993, 60–61, has claimed to find in the orthography of the
Icelandic Homily Book, c.1200, indications that, in the exemplar (or exemplars)of that codex, a special symbol was used for nasal ó. Cf. Stafkrókar 75.

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67

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THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE73[Rask, Rasmus], 1828. ‘Félagsins ástand og athafnir’. Skírnir 2, 36–45. Copenhagen.
Rask, Rasmus, ed., 1830. Lestrarkver handa heldri manna börnum me› stuttum
skíríngargreinum um stafrofi› og anna› ﬂartil heyrandi. Copenhagen.
Rask, Rasmus, ed., 1832. Oldnordisk Læsebog indeholdende Prøver af de bedste
Sagaer i den gamle islandske Tekst, gjennemset og rettet efter de bedste Oldbøger,samt forsynet med et Ordregister over de vanskeligste Ord. Copenhagen.
Seelow, Hubert, ed., 1981. Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka. Reykjavík.
Seip, Didrik Arup, 1955. Norsk språkhistorie til omkring 1370. 2nd ed. Oslo.
Stafkrókar. Ritger›ir eftir Stefán Karlsson gefnar út í tilefni af sjötugsafmæli hans
2. desember 1998. 2000 (Stofnun Árna Magnúsonar á Íslandi. Rit 49). Ed.
Gu›var›ur Már Gunnlaugsson. Reykjavík.
Stefán A›alsteinsson 1987. ‘Líffræ›ilegur uppruni Íslendinga’. In Íslensk ﬂjó›menning I. Uppruni og umhverfi, 15–29. Reykjavík.
Stefán Einarsson 1932. ‘Um mál á Fljótsdalshéra›i og Austfjör›um 1930’. Skírnir.
Tímarit Hins íslenzka bókmenntafélags CVI, 33–54. Reykjavík.
Stefán Karlsson 1960. Ortografien i islandske originaldiplomer indtil 1450.
Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Copenhagen.
Stefán Karlsson, ed., 1967. Sagas of Icelandic Bishops. Fragments of Eight
Manuscripts (Early Icelandic Manuscripts in Facsimile VII). Copenhagen.
Stefán Karlsson 1977. ‘Inventio Crucis, cap. 1, og Veraldar saga’. Opuscula II:2
(Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana XXV:2), 116–33. Copenhagen. (Also publishedin Opuscula Septentrionalia: Festskrift til Ole Widding 10.10.1977, 116–33.
Copenhagen.)Stefán Karlsson 1978. ‘Om norvagismer i islandske håndskrifter’. Maal og Minne,
87–101. Oslo. (Reprinted in Stafkrókar, 173–87.)
Stefán Karlsson 1979. ‘Islandsk bogeksport til Norge i middelalderen’. Maal og
Minne, 1–17. Oslo. (Reprinted in Stafkrókar, 188–204.)
Stefán Karlsson 1981. ‘Stafsetning séra Odds á Reynivöllum’. In Afmæliskve›jatil Halldórs Halldórssonar 13. júlí 1981, 248–84. Reykjavík.
Stefán Karlsson 1982. ‘Uppruni og ferill Helgasta›abókar’. In Helgasta›abók.
Nikulás saga. Perg. 4to nr. 16 Konungsbókahlö›u í Stokkhólmi (Íslensk
mi›aldahandrit. Manuscripta Islandica Medii Aevi II). Reykjavík.
Stefán Karlsson 1984. ‘Um Gu›brandsbiblíu’. Saga. Tímarit Sögufélags XXII,
46–55. Reykjavík.
Stefán Karlsson 1985. ‘Samfellan í íslensku biblíumáli’. Bókaormurinn 14, 14–
19. Reykjavík. (Reprinted in Stafkrókar, 405–14.)
Stefán Karlsson 1993. ‘Samanbur›ur á færeysku og íslensku máli’. In Frændafundur: fyrirlestrar frá íslensk–færeyskri rá›stefnu í Reykjavík 20.–21. ágúst
1992. Ed. Magnús Snædal and Turi› Sigur›ardóttir, 20–31. Reykjavík.
Steingrímur J. ﬁorsteinsson 1950. ‘Íslenzkar biblíuﬂ‡›ingar’. Ví›förli. Tímarit um
gu›fræ›i og kirkjumál 4, 48–85. Reykjavík.
Sveinn Bergsveinsson 1955. ‘ﬁróun ö-hljó›a í íslenzku’. In Studia Islandica 14,
5–39. Reykjavík.
Two Versions of Snorra Edda from the 17th Century. 1977–79. Vol. I: Edda
Magnúsar Ólafssonar (Laufás Edda); Vol. II: Edda Islandorum. Völuspá.
Hávamál. P. H. Resen’s editions of 1665. Ed. Anthony Faulkes. Reykjavík.

74

the icelandic language

Veturli›i Óskarsson 2003. Middelnedertyske låneord i islandsk diplomsprog frem
til år 1500 (Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana XLIII). Copenhagen.
Vilhjálmur . Gíslason 1923. Íslensk endurreisn. Tímamótin í menningu 18. og
19. aldarinnar. Reykjavík.
Vilhjálmur . Gíslason 1926. Eggert Ólafsson. Íslensk endurreisn, önnur bók.
Reykjavík.
de Vries, Jan, 1962. Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Leiden.
Walter, Ernst, 1976a. ‘Einige mit sam- präfigierte Komposita in früher altwest­
nordischer Überlieferung’. Nordeuropa. Studien 9. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift
der Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald, 103–14. Greifswald.
Walter, Ernst, 1976b. Lexicalisches Lehngut im Altwestnordischen. Unter­suchungen zum Lehngut im etisch-moralischen Wortschatz der frühen lateinischaltwestnordischen Übersetzungsliteratur. Abhandlungen der sächsischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Philologisch-historische Klasse,Band 66, Heft 2. Berlin.
van Weenen, Andrea de Leeuw. See (de) Leeuw van Weenen, Andrea.
Westergård-Nielsen, Chr., 1946. Låneordene i det 16. århundredes trykte islandske
litteratur (Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana VI). Copenhagen.
Widding, Ole, 1961. ‘Conscientia i norrøne oversættelser’. Opuscula II:1 (Bibliotheca
Arnamagnæana XXV:1), 48–51. Copenhagen.
ættir um íslenzkt mál eftir nokkra íslenzka málfræ›inga. 1964. Ed. Halldór
Halldórsson. Reykjavík.

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

75

General index
NOTE. This index covers proper names and a selection of descriptive terms used in the
text. The alphabetical order is the same as that in the Bibliography. Icelanders are listedby their first names.

Church, the 32, 33, 34, 39; the Icelandic
Alﬂingi 64
analogy, analogical forms, etc. 14, 15, Church 39
combinative change(s) 7, 13, 14, 18–19,
18, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 48
46, 47, 50
Anglo-Norman 33
compound words 16
apocope 16, 22
contraction 27
Ari, fifteenth-century priest 50, 51
conversion (to Christianity), the 7, 32
Arnamagnæan Foundation 36–37
Arngrímur Jónsson ‘the learned’ (1568– Copenhagen 34, 35, 37, 57
Crymogæa, by Arngrímur Jónsson (q.v.)
1648) 36, 57
Arnkell Gu›var›sson (16th century), 36
witness to a deed of gift in Svarfa›ar- Dalir, see Hvammur í Dölum
Danes 37
dalur 52, 53
Danicisms 35
Atlantic, the 8Danish 7, 8, 10, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,Álftafjör›ur 54, 55
53, 54; ‘Danish tongue’ 9Árni Magnússon (1663–1730) 36, 55
Denmark 23, 33, 34, 58
Ásbrandur ﬁorleiksson 44, 45
dialect(s), dialectal differences, etc. 7,
Baldvin Einarsson (1801–33) 37
18, 20, 23–24, 64, 65, 66
Beitista›ir, in Leirársveit 58
digraphs 40
Bessasta›ir, on Álftanes 37
dual number, the 28
Bevers saga 48‘dƒnsk tunga’ (‘Danish tongue’) 9
Bible, the 28, 34
Björn Jónsson (1846–1912), newspaper East Scandinavian 8, 39
eastern Iceland [Austurland] 13, 22
editor and government minister 63
Björn Magnússon Ólsen (1850–1919), Edda, see Snorri Sturluson
Eggert Ólafsson (1726–68), deputy
university professor 63
lawman and poet 37, 56, 57, 58
Black Death, the 48, 49
black letter (script), see Gothic script Egypt 41
Ein ny Psalma Bok, Gu›brandur ﬁorláksbreaking 8, 25
son’s hymnal 52
Bremen, Germany 39
elision 16
British Isles, the 8
Búna›arbálkur, poem by Eggert Ólafs- English, the 9
Enlightenment, the 37, 51
son (q.v.) 56
epenthetic u 15, 30, 47, 59, 62
Byzantium 31
European chivalric culture 33
Celtic 8, 9, 31
Faroes, the 23, 34
Celts 9chivalric culture, see European chivalric Faroese 23
Finnish 8
cultureChristian literature 34; Christian mis- First Grammarian, the 41, 45
First Grammatical Treatise, the 7, 9, 10,
sions 32
40, 41, 44
Christianity 7, 32

76

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

Iceland 8, 33, 34, 36, 64, 65
Fjölnir, periodical 37, 38, 60, 61, 62
Icelanders 9, 32–33, 35–36, 38–40, 47,
flámæli ‘open-mouthed speech’ 13
51, 64, 66
fornaldarsögur, see sagas of antiquity
Icelanders, sagas of [= Íslendinga sögur,French 33, 59
German 33, 34, 36, 37, 59; North Ger- family sagas] 35
Icelandic Bible Society, the [Hi› íslenska
man vernacular writings 39
Biblíufélag] (1815– ) 34
Germanic 8, 32
Icelandic Homily Book, the 66
Germans 33
Gothic (i.e., black letter) script 59, 60 Icelandic Literary Society, the (Hi› ísGrammar School, the [Hinn lær›i skóli], lenska bókmenntafélag, 1816– ) 60, 61
Illugi (15th century), recipient of ain Reykjavík 61
heifer 50, 51
Greek 32; the Greek aphabet 41
Gronlandia, by Arngrímur Jónsson Indo-European language family, the 8isolative changes 46(q.v.) 57
Gu›brandur ﬁorláksson (c.1542–1627), Íslensk fornrit series 41
Jews 41
Bishop of Hólar 34, 51, 52, 55
Gunnarr Hámundarson, of Hlí›arendi ‘journalists’ spelling’, the 63
Jón Gu›mundsson (15th century),
44, 45
Halldór Kr. Fri›riksson (1819–1902), recipient of homespun cloth 50, 51
Jón Oddsson (16th century), of Svarfa›arhead teacher 61–63
Hallger›r langbrók Höskuldsdóttir, of dalur 52, 53
Jón Ólafsson (1705–79) from GrunnaHlí›arendi 44, 45
Hallgrímur Pétursson (c.1614–74), vík, scholar 36, 56
Jón Ólafsson (1850–1916), newspaper
pastor and poet 36
editor 63
Hamburg, Germany 39
Hamburg–Bremen, archdiocese of 39 Jón Sigur›sson (1811–79), president ofHannes Finnsson (1739–96), Bishop of the Icelandic Literary Society (q.v.) 60
Jón ﬁorkelsson Vídalín (1666–1720),
Skálholt 37
Bishop of Skálholt 36, 37, 54
har›mæli ‘hard speech’ 17, 22
Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807–45), poet 37
Heimskringla 42
Helga ﬁorgrímsdóttir from Ingjaldshóll Jónsbók 35–36, 46
Ketill Jörundsson (1603–70), parson at50, 51
Helgeå, river in Skåne (Scania) 42, 43 Hvammur í Dölum 55, 56
Ketilrí›r Hólmkelsdóttir of Foss 50, 51
hiatus 15, 16
Hi› íslenska bókmenntafélag, see Ice- kings’ sagas 35
Knútr [Sveinsson] (= Cnut the Great, d.
landic Literary Society, the1035), king of the Danes 42, 43
hljó›villa ‘sound-confusion’ 13
Konrá› Gíslason (1808–91), university
homilies 32
professor 37, 60, 61
honorific forms 28
Konungsskuggsjá 58
Hornafjör›ur 54, 55
Kringla (= Lbs. fragm. 82) 42
Hólar, in Hjaltadalur 58
Hrappsey, island off Skar›sströnd 58 Landsuppfræ›ingarfélag [= Hi› íslenska
Hússpostilla, book of sermons by Jón landsuppfræ›ingarfélag], see Society
for National Education
ﬁorkelsson Vídalín (q.v.) 54
Hvammur í Dölum, in Hvammssveit 55 Latin 32, 39, 44

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

77

Lærdómslistafélag [= Hi› íslenska Olavius, i.e., Ólafur Ólafsson, c.1741–lærdómslistafélag], see Learned Arts 88, customs officer and editor of Njáls
saga 60
Society
Learned Arts Society, the [Icelandic] [= Old English 32
Hi› íslenska lærdómslistafélag] 37, 58 ‘(Old) Norse’ 9
Old Saxon 32
Leirárgar›ar, in Leirársveit 58
ligatures, ligatured characters 40, 41, Old Scandinavian 23Ólafur Hjaltason (c.1500–690), Bishop
43, 49, 51
of Hólar and witness to a deed of giftlinmæli ‘soft speech’ 22
52, 53loan-translations 36
Ólof geisli ﬁórisdóttir of Ingjaldshóllloan-words 7, 8, 21, 31, 36, 38
50, 51
Low German 7, 33
patronymics 24, 52
Lund, in Skåne (Scania) 39
Magnús Ólafsson (1573–1636), parson Persian 31
personal names 21, 24, 46, 54, 59, 61
at Laufás 35
Magnús Ólafsson Stephensen (1762– Peter, Saint 50, 51
place-names 16; cf. 22
1833), judge 37, 58
Proto-Scandinavian 8, 17
Mary, the Virgin 50, 51
purism, purist policy, purists, etc 7, 36,
Middle Ages 33
37
middle voice 30, 31, 56, 57, 58
mutated forms 31, 39; mutated vowels quantity shift, the 12–13, 14, 23
Rask, Rasmus Christian (1787–1832),
40, 41; mutation 8, 15, 25, 40
philologist 35, 59–62
neologisms 7, 25, 36, 37, 38, 66
Red Sea, the 41
New Testament 9, 34, 53
Reformation, the 7, 33, 34, 35, 49, 65;
Njáls saga 44, 60
Reformers 34
Nordic philology, 37
Reykjabók (AM 468 4to) 44‘Nordic tongue’ 9‘norrœn tunga’ (‘Nordic tongue’), nor- Reykjavík (see also Grammar School,
and University of Iceland) 20, 35, 58,
ræna, norrœna ( ‘(Old) Norse’) 961
Norse 53, 63; see also ‘(Old) Norse’
riddarasögur, see romances
North Germanic 8
North German vernacular writings, see rímur 35
roman alphabet, the 7, 39; roman
Germancapitals 41; roman script 59
North Germans, see Germans
northern Iceland [Nor›urland] 16, 22 romances (riddarasögur) 33, 35
Romantic Movement, the 37
Northern languages 8, 23
Norway 8, 9, 23, 32, 33, 34, 43, 44, 47–48 runes, the runic alphabet 8, 40
Norwegian 7, 8, 9, 23, 33, 43, 47, 48, 57 sagas of antiquity (fornaldarsögur) 35
sagas of Icelanders 35
Norwegians 9, 34, 48
Oddur Einarsson (1559–1630), Bishop saints’ lives 32, 35
Scandinavia 23, 61
of Skálholt 36
Oddur Gottskálksson (d. 1556) of Scandinavian language(s), speech, etc.
8, 9, 23, 31, 33
Reykir in Ölfus, lawman 9, 34, 53
Oddur Oddsson (c.1565–1649), parson Scandinavian peoples 36; Scandinavians 8
at Reynivellir 56

78

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE‘Um brullaupsrei› Hornfir›inga’, poem
‘school spelling’, the 61, 62, 63
by Stefán Ólafsson (q.v.) 54
Skaftafellss‡sla 9
University of Copenhagen 37
Skálholt, in Biskupstungur 57
University of Iceland [Háskóli Íslands],
Slavonic 31
Reykjavík 63
Snorri Sturluson’s Edda 35
Society for National Education, the Úlfr ﬁorgilssson (d. 1027), earl in[Icelandic] [= Hi› íslenska landsupp- Denmark 42, 43
Varangian Guard, the 31fræ›ingarfélag] (1777–96) 58
Veraldarsaga 40
Sorø, in Sjælland, Denmark 58
south-eastern Iceland [Su›austurland] Vestfir›ir 14, 24, 54
Vi›ey, island in Gullbringus‡sla 58
14, 21south-western Iceland [Su›vesturland] Vikings 31
Vídalín, see Jón ﬁorkelsson Vídalín
13
Stefán Ólafsson (c.1619–88), parson at Víglundar saga 50
Víglundr ﬁorgrímsson of Foss 50, 51
Vallanes 54
Svarfa›ardalur, see also Ytra-Hvarf and Vígsló›i, homicide section of the laws 39
West Norwegian 9
Ytra-Gar›shorn 52, 53
Sveinbjörn Egilsson (1791–1852), head- West Scandinavian 8, 32
Ytra-Gar›shorn in Svarfa›ardalur 52,
master 37
53
Sweden 33
Ytra-Hvarf in Svarfa›ardalur 52, 53
Swedish 8
ﬁingeyjars‡sla 24
syncope 8, 22, 27
Trausti ﬁorgrímsson of Ingjaldshóll 50, ﬁorbrandr ﬁorleiksson 45
ﬁorgils Jónsson (16th century), priest
51
52, 53u-mutation 15, 48

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

79

Index of words and phrases
NOTE. This index covers words and phrases used in the text as examples of one aspect oranother of the Icelandic language. It does not include words contained in the illustrative
passages printed and translated below the text of pp. 38–63. Oblique, finite and variant
forms are listed only in cases where their occurrences in the text might give rise to doubt
as to their dictionary entry forms. The alphabetical order is the same as in the Bibliography.

Danishautomobil 38
befale 33
bil 38
blive 33
magt 33
selskab 33
tænke 33

be- 34beinn 26
belgur 20
berast 31
berja 20, 27; bari›r, barinn 27; berjast 31
bezt 45bifrei› 38
binda 30
biskup 32
Germanbí- 34
bífala 33
befehlen 33
bíhaga 34
bleiben 33
bíkvæmilegur 34
denken 33
bíll 38
Gesellschaft 33
bjarg 8, 20
Macht 33
bjarga 29
Icelandic
bla›i›, bla›it (bla› with suffixed definite article) 19a›fer› 18
bla›ka 18
a›rir, see annarr
blár 21
afl 61blása 30
agi 50blessa, bleza 19
alin; álnir 13
blífa 33
altari 32
bló›ga 20
anga 20
blómgast 20
annarr, 20–21; a›rir 20
Blönd(u)ós 16
Arason 52
bogi 14
arfur 57
borginn 29; see also einhver
á (preposition) 19
brjóta 8, 30
álfur 57
broddr 19
áma 12át (third pers. sg. pret. indic. of eta) 17 brot 18–19
bró›ir 25
ával(l)t 61
brú›ur 24
bak 12bryti 26
ball 21búa 12, 15, 30
banda 13búi 15banka 18
byrja 59
banna 13bændurnir, bændurnar (nom. pl. of bóndi,bari›r, barinn, see berjawith suffixed definite article) 25
barn 28

80

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

dag(u)rinn (dag(u)r with suffixed defi- fegr›, fegur› 15
féhús, fjós 15
nite article) 14, 50, 66
fingurnir, fingurnar (nom. pl. of fingur,
deildarnóti 38
with suffixed definite article) 25
deilingarmerki 38
finna 21
dekra 13
fir›irnir, fjör›urnar (nom. pl. of fjör›ur,
Dímon 8with suffixed definite article) 24
djákni 32
fíll 31
drekka 60
fjórir 15, 55
dveljast 31
fjós, see féhús
dyr 25
Fjölnir, see General Index
dögg 20
fjör 57
dƒnsk tunga, see General Indexflámæli, see General Index
Edda, see General Indexfley(g)ja 22
efla 19
eftirkomendurnir, eftirkomendurnar (nom. fluga 47
pl. of eftirkomandi, with suffixed defi- folk, fólk 13
for- 34
nite article) 25
fordjarfa 34
Egill 25
fornaldarsögur, see General Index
Einar(r) 21
einhver: innundir hjá einhverjum 16; fornema 34
koma einhverjum á kné 19; koma ein- fór, see fara
hverjum í opna skjöldu 24; einhverjum fótur 59
fregna 29
er borgi› 29
freista 32
einn 46
freistni 32
eg, ek 19, 29, 30; mig, mik 19, 31
fremzt 45
ekki 16fæturnir, fæturnar (nom. pl. of fótur,em, see vera
with suffixed definite article) 25
eng 14; cf. 47, 54
fölur 26
engill 32
enn (definite article): enum spƒkustum gamall 26
ganga 59mƒnnum 28
gata 20
enni 12
gefa 59
er (= ‘is’), see vera-ger›ur 24
erfa 47
exi, øxi (acc. and dat. forms of øx) 11 Gísli 61
gjöf 59
ér, see (ﬂ)ér
gó›r 26
fa›ir 25Gu›mundar (gen. sg. of Gu›mund(u)r)
fagr, fagur 15, 47
fara 30; fór 29; fórt 30; far›(u) ekki 16; 24Gu›mundsdóttir 24
fer›u, fer ﬂú 30; ﬂú fer› 30
Gu›mundsson 24
fast 56
gu›spjall 32
fastaeign, fasteign 16
gufa 17fá (verb) 8, 15, 16; fáa 15-gunnur 24
fár (adj.)15, 16gæfa 17, 45, 50
fátæk(u)r 26

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

81

hvur, see hvergæska 60
hvurninn, see hvernig
göfga 20hylja 20gƒfugr 27
hærri (comp. of hár), see hár
göltur 59
hƒfn 23
hafa 17, 18, 19, 20, 42, 47, 52
inn(i)undir 16; see also einhver
halmr, hálmr 13
innri, i›ri 21
hals, háls 13
it (pronoun), see (ﬂ)it
hanga 17
í 24
hanki 17ís(s) 21hann 29, 30
Íslenzk fornrit, see General Indexhar›mæli, see General Index
Jónsbók, see General Indexhár; hær(r)i 21
kall, see karlhei›i 24
kalla 27, 48; kallask 30–31
heilagr, heilagur 27
karl, kall 46
helgi 24
kálfar (nom. pl. of kálf(u)r) 19
helgur 27
kemba 20
hellir 24
hendurnar (nom. pl. of hönd, with kenna 59, 61
Ketill 59
suffixed definite article) 25
kippa 19–20
hengja 20
kirkja 32-hildur 24
Kjartan 8
hjá 16kjör, kør (= ‘choice’) 17, 45, 57
hjálpa 17, 29
klaret 33
hlaupa 48
klaustr 32
hleypa 18
kné, hné 19; see also einhver
hljó›villa, see General Indexknör(r) 21
hné, see kné
knöttur 19hnöttur 19
kol 19holt 13kollr 19
hólpinn 29
koma 19, 24, 30, 50
hreinn (= ‘pure’) 26
konan (kona with suffixed definite
hrinda 29
article) 52
hross 48
Konungskuggsjá, see General Indexhræddr 12
kurteisi 33
hugargrip 38
kurteiss 33
hugr 33kve›ja (verb) 27
hugskot 33
kvá›u (third pers. pl. pret. indic. ofhugtak 38
kve›a) 14
hugvit 33
kvíga 60
hundrat 47
kvöld 15, 54
hver, hvur (pronoun) 15, 54, 61
kyrr 11hvernig, hvurninn 15kƒr, kör (= ‘(sick)bed’) 17
hvetja 27
kør (= ‘choice’), see kjör
hvolfa 15
lag›r, see leggja
hvolpur 15

82

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

nútí› 38
land 61n‡r 26
langur 66
nökkurr, see nokkur(r)lauss 26
obláta 32
láta 8Oddn‡ 46
leggja 18, 27; lag›r 27
okkarr 28
lepja 13
opinn 24, 27; see also einhver
lesa 30
opna 17linmæli, see General Indexor› 61
Litl(ih)amar 16
orf 19ljósta 30
organ 33
Loftur 61
ostur 56
lygi 14ó›r 24lykill 25, 52
ófjeti 15lærisveinn 28
lögin (lög with suffixed definite article) ófjöt 15óheppinn 61
14ma›r 20, 21, 28, 48; ma›urinn 52; mann Palli 2128; manninn 52; mƒnnum 28, 48; pansari 33
Páll 21
mannum 48
prestr 32
makt 33
reka 12malr 10riddarasögur, see General Indexmann, manninn, see ma›rrita, ríta 29
mál 10rík(u)r 18, 26
máttugur 20
rímur, see General Index
mega 14
rjúka 62
melr 10róa 15mi›ur 26
röskur 26
mig, mik, see ek, eg
saga 18, 47
min(n)zt 45
sag›i, see segja
mjeg, see mjög
samviska 32–33
mjólk 16, 18
segja 18, 20, 29, 61; segi(r) 29, 30; segirmjög, mjeg 15, 55; mjök 19
22, seigir, seier 50; sag›a 29; sag›i 20,
morgunn 2229
mó›ir 25
seldr (pp. of selja) 12mælir (noun) 24
selskapur 33mƒnnum, see ma›r
semja 20
nafn 19
sess 21
nakkvarr, see nokkur(r)séa, see sjá (verb)
nástund 38
sé›ur, sénn (pp. of sjá) 29
negla 20
Sigur›ar (gen. sg. of Sigur›(u)r) 24
nekkverr, see nokkur(r)Sigur›ardóttir 24
Njáll 8
nokkur(r), nokku›; nakkvarr, nekkverr, Sigur›sson 24
silki 33
nökkurr 29‘norrœn tunga’, norræna, norrœna, see sígaretta 38
sjá (verb) 8, 15, 29; séa 15
General Index

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

83

ulfr, úlfr 13
sjá (pronoun) 28
ungr 14sje, see sjö
uppgötva 13sjö, sje 15
uppi 17skarlat 33
ur› 13
Skálaholt, Skálholt 16
urr 13skelfa 20
vaka 17skjöldur 24; see also einhver
vala 25
Skógar 22
vald 45
slafak 9
valda 13sleppa 18
valdi, val›i, see velja
smi›r 23
valva, see völva
smjer, smjör 15
vanta 18
sofn 9vatn 22sofnhús 9
vaxa 48
sonu, see synirvá (noun) 14; cf. 47, 54, 59
spakur 62; spakari, spakastr 28
vá›i, vo›i 14
spekt, spekﬂ 20
várr, vor 28
spyrja 11, 27
spyrjandi, spyrjanda (present participle vega 61
vei›i 24of spyrja) 28
velja; val›i, valdi 45
stampur 18
venja (verb) 20
ste›i, ste›ji 26
vera 30; em 30; er 29, 30
stigi 14ver›a 48stjel 15
veturnir, veturnar (nom. pl. of vetur,stjölr 15
with suffixed definite article) 25
stór(r) 21
vélindi, vælindi 14
stökkva 18 (weak), 62 (strong)vér, vær 14, 28
su›r 20vi›, vit (pronoun) 19
sunnan 21
vili, vilji 26
synd 32
synir, sonu (nom. and acc. pl. of son(u)r) vinda 38
vindast 22
24vindhra›i 22
systir 25
vindill 38
svá, svo 14
sváfu (third pers. pl. pret. indic. of sofa) vindlingur 38
vindstig 22
14
vinnast 22
söngur 25
viska 60tala (verb) 17
tekr (third pers. sg. pres. indic. of taka) vit (dual pronoun) 19, 28
Vígsló›i, see General Index59
von 59teljast 60
vonska 60
torg 31
vor, see várr
tvisvar 13
völva, valva 25
tvöfaldur 15
y(›)varr 28t‡ndr (pp. of t‡na) 12
ykkarr 28
tölva 25

84

THE ICELANDIC LANGUAGE

Yngvildr, Yngveldr, Yngvöldur 55
ﬂanki 52
ﬂekkur 62
ﬂenkja 33
ﬂessi 29(ﬂ)ér 28
ﬂing 47(ﬂ)it 28
ﬂolinmó›r 32
ﬂolinmœ›i 32
ﬂorn 40
ﬂurs 40ﬂú 30
ﬂvá, ﬂvo 29

ﬂveginn (pp. of ﬂvá, ﬂvo) 29æ›ur 24ægir 50ærinn 61ögn 20ör (noun) 25
øxi, see exi
Latin
conscientia 32
evangelium 32
Old English
godspell 32