Jules William Press

Viking Language 𐫱 Norse Mythology 𐫱 Icelandic Sagas 𐫱 https://juleswilliampress.com/jwp-series 𐫱

[juleswilliampress]

juleswilliampress.com

[cover-art-showdown]

Round Three, Match LXVIII

Which cover do you prefer?

Saga of the People of Weapon's Fjord

Портрет Дориана Грея

Voting ended onApr 16, 2025

Saga of the People of Weapon’s Fjord / Vápnfirðinga Saga (author unknown, trans. Jesse Byock & Randall Gordon), Jules William Press 2022. Artist unknown.

Портрет Дориана Грея / The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), Манн, Иванов и Фербер 2023. Cover by Selcha Uni.

[juleswilliampress]

for those learning Old Norse:

you might not know this, but what you probably know as Old Norse is language that has been normalized to the end of the 12th/beginning of the 13th century. A decision that was made by one Ludgwig Wimmer.

but we have wayyyy more surviving manuscripts from like. the 14th century.

so in editions that come out of texts, they're usually normalizing the language to be older than it actually was. and for some very late manuscripts like from the 17th century, there's about as much time between them and where we are today and them and the language we're normalizing to.

[tamburnbindery]

I'm working on marginal designs for the runic Poetic Edda. Today we have some Gjallarhorn action from Heimdall.

[juleswilliampress]

my favorite old norse insult is said by Bǫðvarr bjarki in Hrólfs saga kraka:

Skylda ek kreista hann sem annan vesta ok minnsta mýsling

"I would squeeze him like some other vilest and tiniest mousling"

it makes it better that the person he is insulting is Óðinn himself

[juleswilliampress]

If you want to join our good old fashioned mailing list for our newsletter and get sneak peaks at our upcoming releases, send an email to editorial[@]juleswilliampress.com (remove the square brackets)!

[juleswilliampress]

the icelandic word for computer is tölva. it's a feminine noun, and a portmanteau from tala (number) and völva (prophetess). so yes computers are magical girls

[cover-art-showdown]

Round One, Match CCCXXIV

Which cover do you prefer?

Saga of the People of Weapon's Fjord

Как проиграть в войне времен

Voting ended onFeb 22, 2025

Saga of the People of Weapon’s Fjord / Vápnfirðinga Saga (author unknown, trans. Jesse Byock & Randall Gordon), Jules William Press 2022. Artist unknown.

Как проиграть в войне времен / This Is How You Lose The Time War (Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone), ACT 2022.

[juleswilliampress]

Laxdæla saga is a great romance (the drama, the love triangle, the murder) but what Njáll and Bergþóra have in Brennu-Njáls saga makes for a better love story

[juleswilliampress]

Here's a list of the 246 most common words in the Old Norse corpus of family sagas. The ones in bold are the top 70 most frequent.

Looking through the list, most of them are function words, as you might expect... things like prepositions and pronouns. but looking at what verbs, nouns, and adjectives appear most frequently in the lexicon can also tell you about what people thought was important to write about.

I think my favorite on the list is frændi (kinsman), cognate with English friend, both from the proto-Germanic verb *frijōną meaning to love. it just seems like a very human thing to write about, even though these stories are from so long ago.

[juleswilliampress]

Did you know we have free syllabi on our website for Old Norse? They can be used for if you're teaching others or for self-learning. Check them out here.

[juleswilliampress]

We have a quizlet set for our Viking Language Old Norse book if you use that to help you study: https://quizlet.com/user/lee_forester/folders/viking-language-vol-i/sets

[juleswilliampress]

Most languages learning resources are catered to those who have English as their native language. As well as in English, our Viking Language Old Norse series has books in Italian, German, and Spanish.

Let us know if you want to see any of our titles in any other languages. We're a small press, so it's hard to cater to everyone in the same way large publishing houses can (not to mention the time it takes to make a new edition). But if there is demand we will certainly try to meet it!

[juleswilliampress]

The Old Norse verb "to choose" has the principle parts kjósa / kýss / kaus / kuru / kørinn.

You can sort of see that it is cognate with the English word. But you might notice that the "s" sound becomes an "r" sound in the preterite plural and the preterite participle.

The reason that that is there is because of something called Verner's law and it goes back to Proto Indo-European. In Germanic languages, the accent of the word is always on the first syllable, but PIE had a mobile accent and so that wasn't always the case. Where the accent was on the PIE affected the letters that were changed during the Germanic consonant shift. For example, *t within a PIE word could become *θ or *ð depending on where the accent was. In some words, the sound that was *s in PIE developed into Proto-Germanic *z. But in North and West Germanic (yes, that means English!), that *z became *r.

So that's why it is like that.... in the preterite plural and the preterite participle, the PIE accent was in a different place, and also because of rhotacism.

[juleswilliampress]

Lengua Vikinga 1

[juleswilliampress]

I love kennings so much. They're basically metaphorical phrases that replace single words in Old Norse & Old English poetry. A lot of them rely on knowledge mythology and legendary tales too.

And they can stack! Using my favorite one as an example: "the wood-bear of old walls" = a mouse! and then "the dark betrayer of the wood-bear of old walls" = a cat! I was trying to think of kennings of my own for various "modern-day" things, but it's quite tricky... mostly because such objects don't appear in Norse mythology that you can allude to.

"the brine's fruit" could be pickles

and then "the stronghold of the brine's fruit" could be a jar (because pickles come in jars) you could probably make it longer using existing kennings for the sea, but surprisingly I could not find any existing ones for salt (in ON, there might be OE ones, I haven't checked). If anyone has come up with any better ones please share

[broomsick]

A new favorite classic illustration: "A chorus of foxes approve Loki stealing cakes from a nearby farmhouse", C.E. Brock, 1930.

[fjorn-the-skald]

Stealing cakes from the chieftain to feed the starving 👍