Viking Language 1

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.