Old Norse
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Old Norse was the language spoken in the Nordic countries and in areas settled by the Vikings between c. AD 800 and AD 1300. In its written form, it is remarkably similar to modern Icelandic. The Icelandic sagas, skaldic poems, and Eddas are all written in Old Norse. It survives today in southern areas of Greenland as a ceremonial language and has similar status to that of Latin in the Catholic Church.[1]
It is the ancestor of the modern North Germanic languages such as the West Scandinavian Norwegian Nynorsk, Faroese and Icelandic (plus the now-extinct Greenlandic Norse and Norn), and the East Scandinavian Danish, Elfdalian, Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish.