Old Norse Translator

What Is Old Norse — the Language of the Vikings?

Old Norse is the North Germanic language spoken across Scandinavia and the wider Viking world from roughly 800 to 1350 AD — the tongue of the raiders of Lindisfarne, the settlers of Iceland, and the traders who reached Constantinople. It is the language of the Eddas, the sagas and the runestones, and the ancestor of modern Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Faroese. English absorbed hundreds of its words during the Viking Age: sky, knife, window, husband, law, berserk and even they all arrived with the Norse. When people ask what language the Vikings spoke, the answer is Old Norse — mostly its western dialect (Old West Norse), which is what dictionaries like Zoëga's record and what this translator gives you.

How This English to Old Norse Translator Works

Type an English word and the tool returns the real Old Norse word — looked up, not generated. Our curated core list was machine-verified against Geir Zoëga's A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910), the standard beginner's reference for saga-era Norse: every headword must exist in the dictionary and carry the meaning we claim, or it doesn't ship. Beyond the core list, the tool searches a reverse index built from all 29,951 dictionary headwords. Each result shows the noun's gender (masculine, feminine or neuter), usage notes, and the word written in Younger Futhark — the runic alphabet actually used in the Viking Age.

What this tool deliberately does not do is pretend to translate whole sentences. Old Norse is a heavily inflected language: nouns decline through four cases, verbs conjugate by person and number, and word endings change with every sentence. Automatic "sentence translators" guess those endings and routinely produce grammatical nonsense — which matters if the result is headed for a tattoo or an engraving. We give you honest word-for-word matches, and for full sentences we give you phrases that are actually attested in Hávamál and the sagas, with the source named on every card.

Old Norse to English Dictionary

Flip the toggle to Old Norse → English and the tool becomes a full dictionary search across all 29,951 entries of Zoëga — type drengr, orðstírr or any word you met in a saga, with or without accents (ulfr finds úlfr). It's the fastest way to check what an Old Norse word really meant before you trust something you saw on social media.

Old Norse Names and Their Meanings

Norse names were built from meaningful elements — gods, battle, protection, beauty — and most survive in Scandinavia today. These are attested Viking-Age names with the usual scholarly reading of their elements:

Male names — 12

Name	Meaning
Bjǫrn (Björn)	“bear”
Leifr (Leif)	“heir, descendant” — as in Leifr Eiríksson
Eiríkr (Erik)	usually read as “ever-ruler, sole ruler”
Ragnarr (Ragnar)	from regin “the (divine) powers, counsel” + herr “army”
Sigurðr (Sigurd)	sigr “victory” + vǫrðr “guardian”
Haraldr (Harald)	“army-ruler”
Gunnarr (Gunnar)	from gunnr “battle” — the hero of Njáls saga
Óláfr (Olaf)	usually read as “ancestor's descendant”
Þorsteinn (Thorstein)	“Thor's stone”
Ívarr (Ivar)	often read as “yew-bow warrior”
Sveinn (Sven)	“young man, lad”
Úlfr (Ulf)	“wolf”

Female names — 12

Name	Meaning
Ástríðr (Astrid)	áss “god” + fríðr “beautiful, beloved”
Sigríðr (Sigrid)	“victory” + “beautiful”
Þóra (Thora)	feminine form of Þórr (Thor)
Freydís (Freydis)	the goddess Freyja + dís “lady, goddess” — Freydís Eiríksdóttir sailed to Vinland
Gunnhildr (Gunnhild)	both elements mean “battle” — twice the war
Helga	“holy, blessed”
Ingibjǫrg (Ingeborg)	the god Ing + bjǫrg “help, protection”
Ragnhildr (Ragnhild)	“counsel of the powers” + “battle”
Unnr (Unn)	“wave”; linked by saga writers to unna “to love” — Unnr the Deep-Minded settled Iceland
Þórdís (Thordis)	Thor + dís “lady, goddess”
Hallgerðr (Hallgerd)	hallr “stone” + gerðr “protection, enclosure”
Áslaug (Aslaug)	áss “god” + a second element often read as “consecrated woman”

Want to see your own name the way a carver would have cut it? Put it through our Rune Translator — names transliterate to runes even when they have no Old Norse dictionary form.

Old Norse Quotes That Are Actually Real

Most "Viking quotes" online are modern inventions. These are not — each comes from a named medieval source:

• Deyr fé, deyja frændr, deyr sjálfr it sama; en orðstírr deyr aldregi hveim er sér góðan getr. — “Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself die the same; but word-fame never dies for the one who wins a good name.” (Hávamál, st. 76)
• Ek veit einn at aldri deyr: dómr um dauðan hvern. — “I know one thing that never dies: the judgment on each of the dead.” (Hávamál, st. 77)
• Með lögum skal land byggja. — “With law shall the land be built.” (Njáls saga, ch. 70; also the Frostathing Law — still the motto of the Icelandic police)
• Óðinn á yðr alla! — “Odin owns you all!” (Styrbjarnar þáttr Svíakappa — Eiríkr the Victorious dedicating his enemies to Odin before battle)
• Betra er lifðum en sé ólifðum. — “Better to be alive than lifeless.” (Hávamál, st. 70)
• Glaðr ok reifr skyli gumna hverr, unz sinn bíðr bana. — “Glad and cheerful should every man be, until his death arrives.” (Hávamál, st. 15)

Copy any of them (with runes) from the phrasebook above.

Old Norse and the Runes

Old Norse was written in the Younger Futhark — just 16 runes for a language with far more sounds, which is why runic spelling looks compressed (konungr, “king,” was carved kunukʀ). This tool shows each word in a simplified Viking-Age runic spelling; real carvers varied by region and century. To write anything in runes — including modern names — or to read runes back, use the Rune Translator, and to see where the runestones actually stand, from Jelling to the Hagia Sophia graffiti, explore the interactive Viking World Map.

Is Old Norse Still Spoken?

No living community speaks Viking-Age Old Norse, but it never fully died: modern Icelandic is so conservative that Icelanders can still read the medieval sagas in the original with modest effort. Spelling shifted (úlfr became úlfur), pronunciation changed a lot, but the grammar survived nearly intact. If you want to go beyond single words, the standard beginner's path is Jesse Byock's Viking Language course, E.V. Gordon's An Introduction to Old Norse, and Zoëga's dictionary — the same one behind this tool, free at the Internet Archive.

Carry the Old Tongue

Once you've found your word — úlfr, orðstírr, the name of someone you'd cross a sea for — you can wear it the way the Norse did: carved. Many of our pieces feature runic inscriptions and several can be personalised with your own text. Explore Viking rings, Viking necklaces and the 925 sterling silver collection, and ask us about custom rune engraving.

Old Norse Translator FAQ

What language did the Vikings speak?

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a North Germanic language, roughly from 800 to 1350 AD. Its western dialect (Old West Norse) is the language of the Icelandic sagas and the Poetic Edda, and the direct ancestor of Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Faroese.

How do you say wolf in Old Norse?

The Old Norse word for wolf is úlfr (masculine noun). A second word, vargr, meant both “wolf” and “outlaw” — the beast of the wild and the man cast out to live like one.

How do you say “I love you” in Old Norse?

The idiomatic way is Ek ann þér, using the verb unna (“to love, to hold dear”). A more literal modern phrasing is Ek elska þik, with the verb elska. Both are grammatical Old Norse; unna is the older, more saga-flavoured choice.

Can you translate a whole English sentence into Old Norse?

Not automatically — and you should distrust any tool that claims to. Old Norse nouns decline through four cases and verbs conjugate by person and number, so machine word-gluing produces broken grammar. This tool gives verified word-for-word matches plus real attested phrases with named sources — the honest options short of a human translator.

Is Old Norse the same as Icelandic?

Almost — Icelandic is its closest living descendant, close enough that Icelanders still read the sagas in the original. Old Norse dictionaries like Zoëga's are technically dictionaries of Old Icelandic, which is why the two terms are often used interchangeably.

What alphabet did Old Norse use?

In the Viking Age, Old Norse was carved in the Younger Futhark, a 16-rune alphabet; after Christianisation it was increasingly written in Latin letters, which is how the sagas survive. You can convert any text to runes with our Rune Translator.

Where do this translator's words come from?

From Geir Zoëga's A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910), the standard learner's dictionary of saga-era Norse, now in the public domain. Our curated list is machine-verified against it, the full 29,951-entry dictionary powers the Old Norse → English search, and the curated dataset is free to download under CC BY 4.0 above.