This is the first account of Old Norse syntax for a hundred years, and the first ever in a non-Scandinavian language. It presents a full analysis of the syntax of the language, and succinct descriptions of its phonology and inflectional morphology. Old Norse is the language used from the early ninth century till the late fourteenth century in Norway, Iceland, and the Faroes, and in the Norse settlements in the British Isles and Greenland. It was the language of the Vikings and of the Old Icelandic sagas, and it is the best-documented medieval Germanic language. The syntactic analyses in the bo ... More

This is the first account of Old Norse syntax for a hundred years, and the first ever in a non-Scandinavian language. It presents a full analysis of the syntax of the language, and succinct descriptions of its phonology and inflectional morphology. Old Norse is the language used from the early ninth century till the late fourteenth century in Norway, Iceland, and the Faroes, and in the Norse settlements in the British Isles and Greenland. It was the language of the Vikings and of the Old Icelandic sagas, and it is the best-documented medieval Germanic language. The syntactic analyses in the book are supported by numerous prose examples taken from the most reliable Norwegian and Icelandic manuscript editions. The descriptive framework is generative grammar, but the description is informal enough to be understandable to any linguist, grammarian or philologist regardless of theoretical background.