Old Norse Translator

What is Old Norse?

Old Norse is the North Germanic language of the Viking Age (about AD 800–1100) and medieval Scandinavia. It is the language of the Icelandic sagas, the Poetic Edda and thousands of runestones, and the ancestor of Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. Vikings carried it to Iceland, Greenland, the British Isles and Normandy.

This translator writes Old Norse in normalised Old Icelandic spelling, the form used in dictionaries and textbooks, and translates Old Norse back into English.

How to use the Old Norse translator

1. Type or paste English. Up to 500 characters per translation on the free credits: a name, a motto, a message or a short passage.
2. Pick the direction. English → Old Norse is the default. Press ⇄ to read Old Norse words back into English.
3. Press Translate (or Ctrl + Enter). The result appears at once, with a reading line where the script needs one.
4. Listen. Press 🔊 Listen to hear it. Where your device has no voice for this language, it reads the transliteration with the closest voice and says “approximate”.
5. Copy it and read the notes under the result: they name any word we kept in English.

How the Old Norse translator works

This translator runs on our own server from a Old Norse dictionary and a set of grammar rules written for this language. It does not send your text to an outside service or an AI model, so results are instant and the same every time. The dictionary holds 6,020 words, 69 set phrases and 975 conjugated verbs. Its everyday vocabulary is drawn from Cleasby and Vigfusson, An Icelandic–English Dictionary (1874), matched to the English words people use most, and checked against our own hand-written core dictionary, which always takes priority.

For each sentence it first looks for the longest known phrase, then translates word by word and applies the rules below:

• normalised Old Icelandic spelling with þ, ð, ǫ and accents
• verbs conjugated for person and number (ek elska, þú elskar…)
• nouns in the accusative, dative or genitive after verbs and prepositions
• every result also written in Younger Futhark runes

Examples: real Old Norse output

These results come straight from the tool, unedited:

Names, and any word the dictionary does not have, are kept as you wrote them and listed in the notes, so you never get an invented word.

Is this the best Old Norse translator?

Google Translate and DeepL do not offer Old Norse. General AI chatbots can produce text that looks right but contains invented words. This tool takes the opposite approach: every word comes from a checked dictionary entry, every ending from a written rule, and anything unknown is flagged instead of guessed. Short phrases, names, mottos and greetings come out best. For long passages, poetry or anything permanent such as a tattoo, use the result as a solid first draft and have it checked by someone who reads the language.

Common Old Norse words and phrases

Attested words and lines, several from the Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”).

History and origins

Old Norse grew out of Proto-Norse, recorded in Elder Futhark inscriptions, around the 8th century. During the Viking Age it was spoken from Greenland to the Volga with only dialect differences: West Norse in Norway and the Atlantic colonies, East Norse in Denmark and Sweden. Iceland preserved the language so well that modern Icelandic is still close to it, while the mainland languages changed much more.

Writing system

Viking-age Scandinavians wrote with the 16-rune Younger Futhark, carved on stone, wood and bone. After Christianisation, Icelanders adopted the Latin alphabet, and the sagas were written down in the 12th to 14th centuries. Modern editions use a standard “normalised” spelling with letters such as þ, ð, æ, ø and ǫ, which is what this translator outputs.

How Old Norse sounded

Long vowels were held longer and marked with an accent: á as in “father”. þ sounded like “th” in “thin”, ð like “th” in “this”, and r was rolled. The stress fell on the first syllable, which suits the alliterative verse of the Eddas.

Famous texts

• The Poetic Edda, including the Vǫluspá and the Hávamál.
• Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda and Heimskringla (13th century).
• The Icelandic family sagas: Njáls saga, Egils saga, Laxdæla saga.
• Runestones such as the Jelling stones and the Rök stone.

Is Old Norse still used today?

Old Norse is no longer spoken, but Icelanders can read the sagas with modest effort. English took hundreds of words from it, including they, take, sky, egg and window. Read more in our guide to Viking words in English.

How to learn Old Norse

Jesse Byock’s Viking Language 1 teaches Old Norse through saga passages and runes. E.V. Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse is the classic reader. Learn the noun cases and the suffixed article first.

Before you use a translation for a tattoo, motto or gift

• Use the right runes. Vikings used the Younger Futhark, not the Elder Futhark often seen in tattoos.
• Check gender and case. “My son” and “my daughter” take different forms of “my” (minn sonr, mín dóttir).
• Prefer sayings that exist. Lines from the Hávamál are authentic and meaningful.

Sources

Geir T. Zoëga, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910); Cleasby and Vigfusson, An Icelandic–English Dictionary (1874); Jesse L. Byock, Viking Language 1 (2013).