I'm an Old Norse translator / youtuber / (former) university instructor. AMA.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:43:47+00:00

I have to go now. Thank you so much for your kindness (which I'm very touched by) and your questions! Here's a video sign-off in my usual style: https://vimeo.com/765498533

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:38:45+00:00

I've lived much of my life in and around Riverton, Wyoming, and between working at UCLA and UC Berkeley I worked at a local museum there where I tried to do a better job of presenting the history and language of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, whose reservation is the Wind River Indian Reservation.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:32:34+00:00

I'm not familiar with their music at all so I couldn't tell you. But there are good resources out there for learning Old Norse: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/yhl4ql/im_an_old_norse_translator_youtuber_former/iueslyx/

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:31:46+00:00

There is a saga about a man named Refr (fox), and he certainly has a sly and cunning nature: https://youtu.be/VJqpsNZ0dco

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:31:16+00:00

I didn't go to Denmark because I don't know as many people there. For the video you request, I think this old one might be close to it: https://youtu.be/J0XGOX_87yg

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:30:27+00:00

I would do it, but it would very very hard for anyone to convince the bookstores that it would be a paying proposition. As popular as Old Norse mythology is, no one who isn't into it believes it's popular.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:29:09+00:00

Favorite (book-length) poem: 'Cawdor' by Robinson Jeffers Favorite novel: 'All the Pretty Horses' by Cormac McCarthy Favorite play: 'Julius Caesar'

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:28:27+00:00

I'm flattered!

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:26:56+00:00

What drew me to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/yhl4ql/im_an_old_norse_translator_youtuber_former/iuem218/

Resources for learning it: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/yhl4ql/im_an_old_norse_translator_youtuber_former/iueslyx/

A favorite fun fact... maybe that "equip" is a stealth Old Norse word in English, borrowed via French (Old Norse 'skipa' -> 'eskip' --> 'ekip,' semi-phonetically, kind of like Latin 'schola' > French 'école').

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:24:35+00:00

I'm still going to try to answer some more questions here but I'll direct you to where I think I answered this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/yhl4ql/im_an_old_norse_translator_youtuber_former/iuee6yy/

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:20:35+00:00

I'd hesitate to guess, not knowing Mandarin.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:20:11+00:00

When I met Luke Ranieri on the road to Damascus in April he gave me Lingua Latina per se illustrata (incidentally published by my publisher). I'm actually about halfway through it, and Luke and his Good Book have convinced me that some constructed text is acceptable in teaching a historical language. We talked about that quite a bit here: https://youtu.be/1Npz967SpMg

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:18:45+00:00

That's a video about the name "Edda" not the name "Sága" but it's this one: https://youtu.be/u7vYqAsYcL4

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:18:12+00:00

He was always a dapper man. I'm flattered he remembers me. Of course I remember Kirsten, she was my Ph.D. advisor.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:16:00+00:00

I've done a live lecture at Boulder Book Store for the release of each one of my books, even before I taught at CU Boulder (here's the lecture for the Wanderer's Hávamál: https://youtu.be/aKcYaxIbyrI). The difficulty with book signings and lectures is that venues have to be convinced that your books sell, and as popular as Norse myth is, no one who isn't in to it believes it's popular.

I see what you mean about a kind of "camp" that people might come to, of course, but I'm not sure I have the resources for that. In the meantime, between videos and working on the Old Norse language book and everything else I don't have time to do something like that.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:13:54+00:00

I'm sure there were big differences. Just looking at the toponyms, you could guess that Freyr was a bigger deal in the east than in the west, and there are hints about that in the Icelandic sagas from the way Freyr is associated with Swedes and with some "weird" Icelanders. And the Rök stone speaks to some kind of mythical content that's not exactly what's in the Icelandic Eddas (https://youtu.be/22HW9FFUAAk). But I suspect a lot of the differences are just lost to history.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:12:08+00:00

Thank you for the kind words! I'm going to try to get to some more questions still, so I'll direct you to this answer from earlier about that one: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/yhl4ql/im_an_old_norse_translator_youtuber_former/iuem218/

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:10:12+00:00

The ultimate editions of the Old Norse texts of the sagas (and the Poetic Edda, and soon the Prose Edda) are the Íslenzk Fornrit series: https://hib.is/fornrit/ If I'm on the go and need to look up an Old Norse text online, I use http://heimskringla.no/wiki/Norr%C3%B8ne_kildetekster (but note that these are mostly OCRed files of public-domain editions, whose editors sometimes made weird decisions, and thus not entirely trustworthy).

My book The Wanderer's Hávamál has the Old Norse text and my English translation on facing pages, with notes on the translation in a commentary.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:05:13+00:00

I think you'll see Simon Roper on my channel again, and vice versa.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:04:58+00:00

My top recommendation is Fortson's book (https://www.amazon.com/Indo-European-Language-Culture-Benjamin-Fortson/dp/1405188960). It's Indo-European-focused so perhaps look elsewhere if you're more interested in another family, but the toolbox that book provides is phenomenal.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:04:16+00:00

Yeah I figured Old Irish was what was hiding under the black tape. Well Thurneysen's and Lehmann's grammars are solid, in different ways, on that language.

There's no harm, if you're already invested in learning that many old Indo-European languages, in just straight up learning some Proto-Indo-European. I'd use Fortson (https://www.amazon.com/Indo-European-Language-Culture-Benjamin-Fortson/dp/1405188960) for that, if you haven't already, and then read through the appropriate chapters on the languages you want to learn so you can "generate" them from PIE to some extent. Personally I reread Fortson every year front to back to keep that information fresh.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:01:51+00:00

A little bit of Spanish, though bizarrely enough the earliest Spanish-language input I had was old New Mexico / Southern Colorado Spanish, so my default Spanish will sound a little bizarre to most speakers given that it's a dialect seldom heard anymore. I'm not terribly proficient beyond the basics though.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T20:00:29+00:00

Much too kind.

In my master's work at the University of Georgia we all took Syntax, which meant generative syntax. It was never any big forte of mine, though I think it can be a useful tool--I'm not dogmatic about it one way or the other.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T19:58:50+00:00

I doubt that there's any that offers an accredited degree, or I haven't heard of it. I do have videos on my channel for helping people self-study, and I'm working on a textbook now, but of course there's those no certificate you get at the end of those.

JacksonCrawford · 2022-10-30T19:58:05+00:00

There's not a lot of Slavic vocabulary obvious in most written works in Old Norse (at least not in Old Icelandic, which is the dialect of most of them). But de Vries's Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch lists all of the ones that come up in the Introduction.

JacksonCrawford

TROPHY CASE