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: Shattered (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #7)
  
  By Kevin Hearne
  
  PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
  
  I think it’s cool if you read the unusual names in my books however you want.
  There won’t be a test afterward and I’m not going to withhold a Twinkie from
  you if you pronounce any of them incorrectly. You’re supposed to have fun
  here, after all, and it’s usually not fun if someone tells you that you’re
  doing it wrong. But I like to provide these in case you want to master those
  names and enjoy the Druids’ globetrotting. So here we go; caps-lock bits
  indicate stressed syllables.…
  
  OLD NORSE
  
  Erlendr = EHR len dur (Not quite AIR lend ur, but close. A bit more like a
  short e on that first syllable.)
  
  Freydís = FRAY deece
  
  Hildr = HILL dur (Female name still used today in Iceland and Norway, but in
  modern spelling they go ahead and indicate the last vowel, like Hildur.)
  
  Ísólfr = EES ol vur (The first syllable should rhyme with fleece, not ease.
  The o is a long oh, you know. And an f in the middle is kinda sof