Version 1.0 — Last updated: 7 September 2026
This is a working overview of Old Norse grammar, not an exhaustive reference — it’s meant to give enough structure to understand why our Translator and Dictionary can’t fully handle sentence-level grammar (they work at the word level; see Methodology), and to orient learners toward what to study next.
Nouns: case, gender, and number
Old Norse nouns are marked for case (four of them — nominative, accusative, dative, genitive), gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter, which is a grammatical category and doesn’t always match real-world sex), and number (singular or plural). A noun’s ending changes depending on its role in the sentence. Below is one example paradigm — a strong masculine noun, hestr (“horse”) — chosen because it follows one of the more common and regular declension patterns; many nouns follow different patterns depending on their gender and stem type.
| Case | Singular | Plural | Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | hestr (sg) | hestar (pl) | the subject of a sentence |
| Accusative | hest (sg) | hesta (pl) | the direct object |
| Dative | hesti (sg) | hestum (pl) | the indirect object, or object of many prepositions |
| Genitive | hests (sg) | hesta (pl) | possession (“of the horse”) |
Adjectives
Adjectives agree with the noun they describe in case, gender, and number, and additionally have two full sets of endings: a strong (indefinite) form and a weak (definite) form, roughly paralleling the difference between “a good horse” and “the good horse” in English, except marked directly on the adjective rather than with a separate word.
Verbs
Old Norse verbs fall into two broad groups: strong verbs, which change their stem vowel to mark tense (similar to English “sing / sang / sung”), and weak verbs, which add a dental suffix (a t or d sound) instead, closer to English “call / called”. Below is the present-tense conjugation of a regular weak verb, kalla (“to call”):
| Person | Form |
|---|---|
| ek (I) | kalla |
| þú (you, sg) | kallar |
| hann/hon/þat (he/she/it) | kallar |
| vér (we) | köllum |
| ér (you, pl) | kallið |
| þeir (they) | kalla |
Verbs also mark mood (indicative for statements of fact, subjunctive for wishes, hypotheticals, and reported speech) and voice (active, and a mediopassive form built with an -sk ending, related to modern Icelandic’s -st verbs).
Word order
Because case endings mark grammatical role directly on the word, Old Norse word order is considerably more flexible than English’s. That said, it’s not random: main clauses are typically verb-second (the finite verb is the second element, whatever comes first), and the default order outside of that constraint is usually subject–verb–object, similar to English.
Where to go from here
This overview intentionally stops short of full declension and conjugation tables for every noun and verb class — that level of detail is better served by a dedicated grammar reference than a single web page. For vocabulary, use our Dictionary; for how these words sound, see our Pronunciation Guide; for the sources this page draws on, see Sources & Corpora. Spotted an error? Use our Corrections Policy.