Typing Old Norse (Patreon)

Over the years, I've had to figure out how to type all the various characters I need in Old Norse, and I thought I'd share some of my solutions and ask viewers to share their own.

The easiest solution, and one that works for most of the special characters you need (like æ, ð, þ, and long vowels), is to activate an Icelandic keyboard on your laptop or phone. 

If you have a PC, you can go to control panel --> region and language settings --> add a language, and add Icelandic. Then you should get a small indicator on your screen that gives you the option to toggle between languages, choosing for example EN for English and IS for Icelandic.

Similarly on a Mac, you can go to system preferences --> language and region --> keyboard preferences --> input sources, and then add what languages you want. This creates a small flag at the top of your screen that you click to toggle between languages.

On an iphone, go to settings --> general --> keyboards --> add new keyboard. This creates a small globe to the left of your space bar that you click to toggle between languages.

Again, an Icelandic keyboard gives you a lot of the most obvious letters you need, but it leaves out letters that are no longer present in Icelandic (ǫ, and ǿ or œ). To type those normally, the only keyboard that I am aware of is the "Norwegian Extended" keyboard on a Mac, which is my default keyboard because it allows me to type all of those plus the letters of Icelandic. Otherwise, if I'm using my phone, I just type with the Icelandic keyboard and I have a pages file I copy and paste ǫ and ǿ from.

In my translation of The Saga of the Volsungs, responding to interest both from academics and people outside the university system who overwhelmingly expressed a wish to see the Old Norse names in a less anglicized form than they appear in within my Poetic Edda translation, I replace "ð" with a straight-backed "d" with a slash through it: đ. This is to help people who have never seen "ð," because they usually assume it is a form of "o" (and you can never count on anyone to read the Introduction). This straight-backed "đ" is uncommon in Scandinavian writing but not unknown, and it's used today in writing Northern Sami, which is the keyboard I use on my Mac to type it (it's also available on the Vietnamese keyboard).

If you have other tips and tricks, especially for other devices, let us know.