title: Viking Language 1: Learn Old Norse, Runes, and Icelandic Sagas (Viking Language Series)
author:  Jesse L. Byock 
description: Even the many academics who have done their best to learn Old Norse old-style, and then to teach it, will benefit from working through the course. As for students coming to the language without prior experience, they have it all: a very thorough grammar, but carefully spaced-out, explained without short cuts, and reinforced by exercises graded from absolute no-knowledge upward; well-selected and well-varied texts, with considerable use not only of the sagas but also of runestone-inscriptions, eddic poems and even notoriously difficult skaldic poems; and cultural background which takes in strange reports like that of the Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan (which gave rise to the movie The Thirteenth Warrior), maps, explanations and reconstructions...There is no-one better-qualified than Professor Byock to link up sagas with archaeology. (<i>Tom Shippey</i>)
zlib_text: Hammered (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #3)
  
  By Kevin Hearne
  
  Pronunciation Guide
  
  One of the problems you run into when using Norse mythology is that you’re
  messing with the languages of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland—plus Old
  Norse. Old Norse hasn’t been spoken aloud by the hoi polloi in seven centuries
  or so, but scholarly folks like to think they have a decent clue about how
  things might have sounded. I’ve used Anglicized spellings for Odin and Thor so
  that English speakers will have a pretty decent shot at saying them correctly
  by getting hooked on phonics. And though I use the Icelandic spelling and
  pronunciation for most things, it’s not universal. Sometimes I use what the
  Old Norse pronunciation would be, and here and there I mess with the vowel
  sounds merely because I want to. You’re free to do the same; this guide is not
  intended to be prescriptive but rather descriptive of the way the author would
  say things, and you are welcome to adopt them or to make fun of me on langu