Old Norse alphabet
Norrœnt stafróf
Old Norse — the language of Iceland's sagas, the Eddas, and the Vikings — was written from roughly 1100 to 1500 CE in a Latin alphabet extended with thorn (þ), eth (ð), ash (æ), o-ogonek (ǫ), and accented long vowels (á é í ó ú ý). It is the direct ancestor of modern Icelandic, which still uses most of the same letters today.
All 32 letters
History
When Iceland and Scandinavia adopted Christianity around 1000 CE, the Latin alphabet replaced the Younger Futhark runes for parchment writing. Icelandic scribes — who preserved the bulk of Old Norse literature — settled on a 32-letter alphabet that kept thorn and eth from the runic and Anglo-Saxon traditions, added an o-ogonek (ǫ) for a back vowel, and used acutes to mark long vowels. Modern Icelandic dropped only ǫ and a few obsolete letters.
Things you might not know
- Modern Icelandic is the closest living language to Old Norse — Icelanders can still read 13th-century sagas without translation.
- The letter ǫ (o-ogonek) wrote a nasal back vowel that merged into ö in modern Icelandic.
- Acute accents (á é í ó ú ý) didn't mark stress — they marked length, just like Old English macrons.
- Eth (ð) survives in modern Icelandic but was replaced by "th" in modern English; thorn (þ) survives in Icelandic but only as the relic "y" in English "ye olde".