Old Norse: The philological construction and new perspectives.

The project has shown how the Old Norse normalised orthography was developed during the nineteenth century through linguistic research and text editing. It has further investigated the geographical variation in Old Norwegian, and reveals that many dialectal differences known from later times emerged already during the Old Norwegian period. This does not appear in general surveys based on the normalised orthography in grammars and dictionaries, but becomes apparent when the language of runic inscriptions and charters is taken into account; such texts are often written by less skilled scribes than manuscripts.

The historical language called Old Norse is said to be the common language of Norway and Norwegian settlements including Iceland c. 1100--1350. In grammars and text editions it is often presented in a fairly homogeneous form called "normalised Old Norse", which is a philological construction of the 19th century. I claim that this image is artificial and hides variation, being a result of the historical focus of 19th century linguistics. In the first part of this project I will study the central grammars of Old Norse and the language used in text edition to see how this "normalised" language evolved. An interesting part of this is the differences between Norway and Iceland, and how the standard spelling and main forms given in the grammars (i.e. not the " exceptions") came to be based mostly on Icelandic. Most scholars of Old Norse have preferred to work with the prose of the 13th and 14th century manuscript. However, other text types may offer important comparative material, and I will draw attention to two such: runic inscriptions and charters. In the project description I suggest two concrete case studies to be carried out using these sources, which can then be compared with previous studies and the descriptions in the grammars. A main point here is to give a systematic description of the existing variation, whereas the theoretical views of previous scholars was rather to abstract from variation to an idealised language. The importance of variation is a child of modern sociolinguistic. Modern views on language also make it possible to ask questions which were either impossible or irrelevant under previous paradigms. A clearer understanding of the relation between written and spoken language is one of those, and a wider variety of sources may make it p ossible to point to stylistic differences which also correlate to more/less written/spoken language.