Icelandic Kids Can Read 1,000-Year-Old Sagas

Njáls saga was written down around 1280, compiled from events of the 900s. It is the longest of the Icelandic sagas. It is also legible, with almost no gloss, to any literate Icelandic teenager today. A ninth-grader can sit with the text and follow what happens. A Norwegian reading a contemporary Old Norse manuscript would be lost by the second paragraph.

Icelandic has changed less than any other Germanic language over the past thousand years. Pronunciation has drifted, and loanwords have been absorbed. But the grammar — the case system, the verb conjugations, the word order — is almost exactly what the sagas use. An Icelander can approach Völuspá or Egill's Saga the way a modern English reader approaches Chaucer: with effort, but within reach.

Three forces preserved it. Iceland was geographically isolated; Viking settlers arrived in the 870s and received little significant later immigration. It stayed small and literate; manuscript traditions ran continuously for nine centuries, teaching the old orthography. And in the nineteenth century it adopted a conscious purist language policy: new technical vocabulary is coined from native roots rather than borrowed.

'Telephone' in Icelandic is sími, from an Old Norse word for 'long cord.' 'Computer' is tölva, a portmanteau of tala (number) and völva (seeress) coined by the poet Sigurður Nordal in 1964. 'Broadcast' is útvarp, literally 'out-throwing.' Even 'helicopter' is built up from native parts: þyrla, from a root meaning 'to whirl.'

The Árni Magnússon Institute still reviews proposed neologisms before they enter official usage. It is the only European country whose government actively pays linguists to keep a medieval language current.