Modern Icelandic is closer to the speech patterns of the Middle Ages than any living European language. Thus, a knowledge of Icelandic is highly relevant to the study of English history. This volume, one of the most complete available, will be indispensable to scholars of medieval Icelandic and English culture and history.

First published in England in 1910 and last printed in 1975, Geir T. Zoega's "A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic" has long been the foremost reference source for the Icelandic language.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

This volume, one of the most complete available, loved by Tolkien and Lewis, will be indispensable to scholars of medieval Icelandic and English culture and history.

Excerpt from A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic While it cannot be said that the study of Icelandic has been neglected in Britain, there can be no doubt that it might with advantage become much more general than it has been. There are several good reasons why it should be so. The Scandinavian influence was the earliest, and one of the strongest, of those outward forces which have gone to the making of modern English, and for the proper investigation and appreciation of this a knowledge of Icelandic is of the first impor tance. Not only does it supply a linguistic basis for such a study; it is also the source of much of the information necessary for the under standing of that period of British history. In itself, too, Old Icelandic literature, both in poetry and prose, presents a wealth of interesting material, which in some respects stands unrivalled among the literatures of mediaeval Europe, and without which our knowledge of the ancient North would be the merest shadow of what it is. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Compared to other areas of medieval literature, the question of masculinity in Old Norse-Icelandic literature has been understudied. This is a neglect which this volume aims to rectify. The essays collected here introduce and analyse a spectrum of masculinities, from the sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas, kings' sagas, legendary sagas, chivalric sagas, bishops' sagas, and eddic and skaldic verse, producing a broad and multifaceted understanding of what it means to be masculine in Old Norse-Icelandic texts. A critical introduction places the essays in their scholarly context, providing the reader with a concise orientation in gender studies and the study of masculinities in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. This book's investigation of how masculinities are constructed and challenged within a unique literature is all the more vital in the current climate, in which Old Norse sources are weaponised to support far-right agendas and racist ideologies are intertwined with images of vikings as hypermasculine. This volume counters these troubling narratives of masculinity through explorations of Old Norse literature that demonstrate how masculinity is formed, how it is linked to violence and vulnerability, how it governs men's relationships, and how toxic models of masculinity may be challenged.

Maríu saga, the Old Norse-Icelandic life of the Virgin Mary, survives in nineteen manuscripts. While the 1871 edition of the saga provides two versions based on multiple manuscripts and prints significant variants in the notes, it does not preserve the literary and social contexts of those manuscripts. In the extant manuscripts Maríu saga rarely exists in the codex by itself. This study restores the saga to its manuscript contexts in order to better understand the meaning of the text within its manuscript matrix, why it was copied in the specific manuscripts it was, and how it was read and used by the different communities that preserved the manuscripts.