Is the Old Norse document translator free?

You can try it free, with no account needed, and signing in gives you a larger daily allowance. Pro and Scholar are there for longer documents and regular use.

Can it read a scanned edition or a manuscript facsimile?

Yes: scanned PDFs and photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC) get text recognition first. Clean printed editions with þ, ð, æ and accents usually read well. Watch ǫ and œ, which older fonts handle badly and which text recognition may turn into o or oe, and watch ø against ö. Manuscript facsimiles, with abbreviations, insular letterforms and faded ink, are unreliable from an image; work from a printed or diplomatic edition where you can.

How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?

Fast is for gist: finding a passage in a long saga or checking what a chapter is about. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the tier for verse, law and anything you will cite: it reads the case endings, the suffixed article and the middle voice (-sk, -st), keeps at as infinitive marker apart from at meaning that, resolves er as who, which or when, and works through kennings from context. It is not a substitute for a critical edition or a published translation, so for citation compare it with one.

Will the translation keep my document's layout?

The translator produces a translated PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel or EPUB file that aims to preserve the original layout, including tables, columns and headers. Text size, fonts and line breaks may change, so review the result against the original. For a saga with a facing translation or a poem with stanza numbers, check that the translated text still sits beside the right original.

Which spelling does it handle: normalised, Íslenzk fornrit, modernised Icelandic, or diplomatic?

All of them are Old Norse, and the translation follows your file, but the further the spelling is from standard normalised orthography, the more there is to check. Normalised text and Íslenzk fornrit spelling are the most predictable. Modern-spelling editions sit closest to a living language and are the easiest case. Diplomatic editions with unexpanded abbreviations and manuscript spelling, and Old Norwegian, Old Swedish or Old Danish texts, sit further from the textbook language and deserve Advanced and a careful read.

Is Old Norse the same as Icelandic, and can I use this for a tattoo or a name?

Old Norse is the ancestor of modern Icelandic and Faroese, and Icelanders can read the sagas with some effort, but spelling, part of the vocabulary and much of the grammar have changed, so do not use a modern Icelandic phrase as if it were Old Norse or the reverse. For a tattoo, a ring or a name, the direction is English into Old Norse: it is composition, short texts work better than long ones, and a mistake is hard to undo, so have a reader of Old Norse check the result, and the rune conversion if there is one, before you commit.

What file types can I upload?

PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX, XLSX and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned pages as JPG, PNG or HEIC. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters. A whole saga in an annotated edition can exceed the Free and Pro limit, so upload the chapters you need or use Scholar.

Old Norse PDF & Document Translator — English ↔ Old Norse

Translate English to Old Norse or Old Norse to English while preserving your document’s layout. Upload your file, choose the target language, and get a natural translation that keeps the meaning of the original.

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See “Keep formatting” in action

Real examples of the “Keep formatting” option: original on the left, translated document on the right. Click either page to enlarge.

1 / 6

A civil complaint filed in Mexico City, Spanish to English. Caption block, numbered pleadings, the evidence table and the signature block all keep their places. — Original — A civil complaint filed in Mexico City, Spanish to English. Caption block, numbered pleadings, the evidence table and the signature block all keep their places.

An Italian birth certificate, photographed rather than scanned. The framed masthead, the field grid, the marginal annotations and the round seal all hold their positions. — Original — An Italian birth certificate, photographed rather than scanned. The framed masthead, the field grid, the marginal annotations and the round seal all hold their positions.

A handwritten archaeological field notebook from 1974. The engine reads the hand and keeps the ruled inventory table intact. — Original — A handwritten archaeological field notebook from 1974. The engine reads the hand and keeps the ruled inventory table intact.

A handwritten archaeological field notebook from 1974. The engine reads the hand and keeps the ruled inventory table intact. — Translation — A handwritten archaeological field notebook from 1974. The engine reads the hand and keeps the ruled inventory table intact.

A German hospital discharge summary. Diagnoses with ICD codes, lab values and the medication table survive the translation unchanged. — Original — A German hospital discharge summary. Diagnoses with ICD codes, lab values and the medication table survive the translation unchanged.

A German hospital discharge summary. Diagnoses with ICD codes, lab values and the medication table survive the translation unchanged. — Translation — A German hospital discharge summary. Diagnoses with ICD codes, lab values and the medication table survive the translation unchanged.

A 1747 parish baptism register in Latin. Ruled columns, godparents and marginal notes stay aligned, so the genealogy still reads as a register. — Original — A 1747 parish baptism register in Latin. Ruled columns, godparents and marginal notes stay aligned, so the genealogy still reads as a register.

A 1747 parish baptism register in Latin. Ruled columns, godparents and marginal notes stay aligned, so the genealogy still reads as a register. — Translation — A 1747 parish baptism register in Latin. Ruled columns, godparents and marginal notes stay aligned, so the genealogy still reads as a register.

A scanned 17th-century Italian index of sermons. Two columns of dense small print, translated in place. — Original — A scanned 17th-century Italian index of sermons. Two columns of dense small print, translated in place.

A scanned 17th-century Italian index of sermons. Two columns of dense small print, translated in place. — Translation — A scanned 17th-century Italian index of sermons. Two columns of dense small print, translated in place.

How Old Norse documents come out

Upload an Old Norse PDF, Word file or scanned page and read it in English: a saga chapter in Íslenzk fornrit, a poem from the Poetic Edda, Snorri's Gylfaginning, a skaldic stanza with its kennings, a law text from Grágás, or a charter from the Diplomatarium Norvegicum. The translated file keeps the edition's layout, with chapter numbers, stanza numbers, notes and apparatus in place. The reverse direction, English into Old Norse, works for short texts and is discussed below; runic inscriptions have their own page.

Old Norse, in practice mostly Old Icelandic, is printed in a Latin alphabet with thorn (þ), eth (ð), æ, œ, ø and o-ogonek (ǫ), plus acute accents on long vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú, ý). What you see depends on the edition. Standard normalised orthography, the spelling of Zoëga's dictionary and of textbooks such as Gordon, Barnes and Byock, uses all of those letters; Íslenzk fornrit, the main Icelandic scholarly series, normalises to a slightly later stage and prints ö where the textbooks print ǫ; popular Icelandic editions of the sagas go further and use modern Icelandic spelling (maður for maðr, og for ok, að for at), which brings the text close to the modern language. Diplomatic editions and manuscript facsimiles (the Codex Regius of the Eddic poems, Möðruvallabók, Flateyjarbók) keep scribal abbreviations, the Tironian sign for ok, insular letterforms and the r rotunda, and are far less reliable to read from an image. Two typographic points affect scans and PDFs: ǫ and œ are often missing from the fonts used in older PDFs, so they arrive as boxes or stray characters after text extraction, and older grammars and German editions use ę and other marks that later normalisation dropped. Skaldic verse in an edition usually comes with a rearranged prose word order and a commentary on the kennings; decide whether you want those translated too.

Translate your document and keep its structure

The translator keeps your file’s structure while translating the text in context. The downloaded format depends on the source file.

PDFs and scanned pages: The translated PDF follows the page visually, with translated pages rendered as images. Selectable PDF text and identical fonts are not guaranteed.
Word documents and PowerPoint presentations: Start with DOCX or PPTX when you have it. Native paragraphs, table text and slide text can stay editable in the corresponding file format. Translated text inside pictures remains image content; review text wrapping and font changes in your editor.
Excel workbooks and EPUB books: Use the original XLSX or unprotected EPUB for a translated workbook or ebook. Review formulas, numbers and text cells in a workbook; check chapter order, navigation and text flow in your ebook reader.

What people translate to and from Old Norse

Sagas of Icelanders and kings' sagas

Njáls saga, Egils saga, Laxdæla saga, Grettis saga, Gísla saga and the rest of the Íslendingasögur, plus Heimskringla and the other kings' sagas, are what most people bring here: a chapter assigned in class, a passage to check against a published translation, or a saga with no English version yet. Saga prose is comparatively plain, which helps, but it is dense with names (patronymics, bynames such as inn digri, farm names), with the legal procedure of the Alþingi and the district assemblies, and with understatement that a literal rendering flattens. Advanced is the tier for keeping names and genealogies straight across a long chapter; Fast is enough for skimming.

The Eddas and skaldic verse

The Poetic Edda in the Codex Regius (Vǫluspá, Hávamál, Grímnismál, Þrymskviða and the heroic lays), Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (Gylfaginning, Skáldskaparmál, Háttatal) and the skaldic corpus are the mythological and poetic side. Eddic verse in fornyrðislag and ljóðaháttr is direct enough to read stanza by stanza. Skaldic dróttkvætt is another matter: interlaced clauses, internal rhyme and stacked kennings (sea's fire for gold, storm of swords for battle) mean a stanza is often solved rather than read, and editions supply a prose word order for a reason. Treat a translation of skaldic verse as a first reading and check it against the commentary in your edition or the Skaldic Project.

Laws, charters and annals

Grágás, the law of the Icelandic Commonwealth, the Norwegian provincial laws and Magnus Lagabøte's Landslov of 1274, the Icelandic annals, Landnámabók and Íslendingabók, and the charters and letters printed in the Diplomatarium Islandicum and Diplomatarium Norvegicum are read by historians, legal historians and genealogists tracing Icelandic and Norwegian lines. These texts are formulaic and full of technical terms (goði, þingmaðr, óðal, leysingi) that are usually retained with a gloss rather than replaced. Later Norwegian documents drift into Middle Norwegian and Danish-influenced spelling, and Old Swedish and Old Danish are separate East Norse languages, so results are less predictable there.

English into Old Norse, and runes

Many visitors want the other direction: a motto, a name, a wedding line, a passage for a game or a novel, or a text to carve. Documents can be translated into Old Norse here, but it is composition in a language with no words for most modern things, so expect period vocabulary and calques, and have someone who reads Old Norse check it before it becomes permanent. Old Norse is not modern Icelandic, though the two are close; for a living reader in Reykjavík use the Icelandic translator. For inscriptions in Younger or Elder Futhark, and for reading runestones, use the runes page, which explains what transliteration into runes does and does not mean.

What to watch for in Old Norse document translation

Old Norse grammar hides in its endings and particles. Case does the work of word order, so hann sá konung and konung sá hann can mean the same thing; the definite article is a suffix (maðrinn, konan); the middle voice in -sk or -st turns kalla (call) into kallask (be called); and poetry adds a suffixed negation (-a, -at) that a reader can miss entirely. Three tiny words cause most of the trouble: at is both the infinitive marker and the conjunction that, er is a relative particle meaning who, which or when, and ok means both and and also. Names are the next trap. Nominative endings (Óláfr, Haraldr, Sigurðr) are dropped by most English translators but kept by some, patronymics in -son and -dóttir are not surnames, bynames (inn digri, hárfagri, blátǫnn) are usually translated, and place names in Norse form (Miklagarðr, Jórvík, Dyflinn) need identifying rather than transliterating. False friends with English and the modern Scandinavian languages are everywhere: drengr is a brave young man, fé is livestock or wealth, kona is a woman, ríkr is powerful rather than rich, bóndi is a farmer or householder, sekr is outlawed, and sæll is happy. Add u-umlaut alternations (saga, sǫgur) and the ǫ/ö/ø spelling differences between editions, and the reasons to read carefully, and to use Advanced for anything that matters, are clear.

Old Norse document translation FAQ

Is the Old Norse document translator free?: You can try it free, with no account needed, and signing in gives you a larger daily allowance. Pro and Scholar are there for longer documents and regular use.
Can it read a scanned edition or a manuscript facsimile?: Yes: scanned PDFs and photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC) get text recognition first. Clean printed editions with þ, ð, æ and accents usually read well. Watch ǫ and œ, which older fonts handle badly and which text recognition may turn into o or oe, and watch ø against ö. Manuscript facsimiles, with abbreviations, insular letterforms and faded ink, are unreliable from an image; work from a printed or diplomatic edition where you can.
How accurate is it? What is the difference between Fast and Advanced?: Fast is for gist: finding a passage in a long saga or checking what a chapter is about. Advanced runs a frontier model and is the tier for verse, law and anything you will cite: it reads the case endings, the suffixed article and the middle voice (-sk, -st), keeps at as infinitive marker apart from at meaning that, resolves er as who, which or when, and works through kennings from context. It is not a substitute for a critical edition or a published translation, so for citation compare it with one.
Will the translation keep my document's layout?: The translator produces a translated PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel or EPUB file that aims to preserve the original layout, including tables, columns and headers. Text size, fonts and line breaks may change, so review the result against the original. For a saga with a facing translation or a poem with stanza numbers, check that the translated text still sits beside the right original.
Which spelling does it handle: normalised, Íslenzk fornrit, modernised Icelandic, or diplomatic?: All of them are Old Norse, and the translation follows your file, but the further the spelling is from standard normalised orthography, the more there is to check. Normalised text and Íslenzk fornrit spelling are the most predictable. Modern-spelling editions sit closest to a living language and are the easiest case. Diplomatic editions with unexpanded abbreviations and manuscript spelling, and Old Norwegian, Old Swedish or Old Danish texts, sit further from the textbook language and deserve Advanced and a careful read.
Is Old Norse the same as Icelandic, and can I use this for a tattoo or a name?: Old Norse is the ancestor of modern Icelandic and Faroese, and Icelanders can read the sagas with some effort, but spelling, part of the vocabulary and much of the grammar have changed, so do not use a modern Icelandic phrase as if it were Old Norse or the reverse. For a tattoo, a ring or a name, the direction is English into Old Norse: it is composition, short texts work better than long ones, and a mistake is hard to undo, so have a reader of Old Norse check the result, and the rune conversion if there is one, before you commit.
What file types can I upload?: PDF, DOCX (Word), PPTX, XLSX and EPUB, plus photographed or scanned pages as JPG, PNG or HEIC. Free and Pro accept up to 20MB and 100,000 extracted characters per file; Scholar accepts up to 50MB and 1,000,000 characters. A whole saga in an annotated edition can exceed the Free and Pro limit, so upload the chapters you need or use Scholar.

See “Keep formatting” in action

Real examples of the “Keep formatting” option: original on the left, translated document on the right. Click either page to enlarge.

1 / 6

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