The Saga of Icelandic

This paper seeks to answer the question whether the great wealth of Icelandic literature in the sagas and the Eddas of the 12th – 13th c. is accessible to modern Icelanders without special linguistic training and hence whether it is possible for a language to remain almost intact and impervious to changes for more than 7 centuries. The paper provides an ad hoc contrastive analysis of the main nominal and verbal grammatical categories in Modern Icelandic and Old Icelandic, while focusing on their morphological properties, and describes and discusses the similarities and differences ensuing from the analysis.