An old glossary of Old Norse I made (Patreon)

This came up yesterday during our live Patreon "office hours" for people learning Old Norse. When I set out to teach a year-long course in Old Norse for the first time at UCLA in 2011-12, I made a glossary of the most frequently-seen words in Old Norse texts, based on a frequency list that was then available somewhere on Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons by a user going under the name LokiClock (this frequency list is apparently no longer there). Because reading any language involves encountering the same ~1000 words over and over again more than it involves encountering any less-frequent words, I thought it would be a useful alternative, most of the time, to cutting through the considerably more "crowded" entries of e.g. the Cleasby-Vigfusson dictionary.

Now I present it to you--warts and all. I made this before I even completed my dissertation (one of the weird parts of my timeline is I was still writing my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin while I was full-time faculty at UCLA), and so I still glossed blár as "black" because it was simply the conventional wisdom. My dissertation research over the next couple years would lead me to conclude that blár absolutely means "blue." There are probably some other entries and perhaps formatting things I would do differently in 2022 than I did in 2011, but as the present-day equivalent of my "students," I wanted to offer you this tool even with what I now regard as a little bit of out-of-date information (for me--eleven years later I've convinced just about no one except William Ian Miller that blár really meant "blue").

For now, thank you for your continued support, and all the best,

Jackson Crawford

P.S. My Patreon messages don't work. I don't get notifications for them, and there's nothing on my home page to show me when there is or isn't a message. I can't even always see them when I check for them manually, and you won't see it if I reply! The best ways to get in touch are: a) just to comment on posts like this, b) to post in the  Community page, or c) to email my assistant Stella at [admin AT JacksonWCrawford.com]--remember the 'W' between my first and last names in that domain name.