At 2:02:48 PM on Monday, September 5, 2011, mincetatties
wrote:

> Hi everyone. I've just joined up today. I'd like to get
> hold of a good dictionary of old icelandic as I would like
> to learn about this for a writing project I am working on.
> I saw one on amazon from the University of Toronto - can
> anyone tell me if its good. I am just looking for a
> starting point.

That would be Geir T. Zoëga, _A Concise Dictionary of Old
Icelandic_; it's pretty much the standard Old Norse
dictionary for English-speaking students, and it's well
worth the price if you want a physical copy. However, it's
available on-line for free. A complete PDF (3493 KB) is
available in the Files section of this group, as is a small
file of errata, and a very nicely done HTML version can be
consulted at <http://norse.ulver.com/dct/zoega/index.html>.
It is also available in TIFF and PNG page images at
<http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_zoega_about.html> and in
PHP and GIF formats at
<http://www.alfaleith.org/reading/zoega/index.php>.

Zoëga's dictionary is essentially an abridgement of Richard
Cleasby & Gudbrand Vigfusson's _An Icelandic-English
Dictionary of Old Icelandic_, though he did update some of
the definitions. One does occasionally run into words that
can be found in Cleasby-Vigfusson (CV) and not in Zoëga, but
it's hard to find copies of CV, and they tend to be
expensive. Fortunately, it's available on-line, in JPG
images at
<http://www.alfaleith.org/reading/vigfusson/index.php> and
in TIFF, PNG, and HTML at
<http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_cleasbyvigfusson_about.html>.
You can also download it as a large PDF at
<http://books.google.com/books?id=B08JAAAAQAAJ>.

If you can read Danish, Johan Fritzner's three-volume
_Ordbog over det gamle norske Sprog_ is even more
comprehensive than CV; all three volumes are available at
<http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Johan+Fritzner%22>.
It's also available via a search interface at
<http://www.edd.uio.no/perl/search/search.cgi?appid=86&tabid=1275>.
(Note that the conversion to electronic format was
imperfect: some of the blank spaces between words have been
lost, so that two words are sometimes run together as one.)

Once in a while modern Icelandic usage turns out to be
helpful; the University of Wisconsin - Madison has a
searchable modern Icelandic dictionary at
<http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/IcelOnline/Search.TEId.html>.

Extra help is often needed for words used in poetry; there
are several Lexica Poetica available at
<http://www.septentrionalia.net/lex/index.php>, of which I
generally use the one from 1931. (Septentrionalia is a
useful site, by the way: at
<http://www.septentrionalia.net/etexts/index.php> you'll
find a large number of Old Norse texts in PDF form.)

For grammar I cannot recommend too highly Michael Barnes, _A
New Introduction to Old Norse_, published by the Viking
Society for Northern Research. It's available in a pretty
sturdy paperback for under $20:

<http://www.amazon.com/New-Introduction-Norse-Michael-Barnes/dp/0903521741/ref=pd_sim_b_4>

Better yet, it together with the companion reader and
glossary are available in PDF form from the VSNR; go to
<http://vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/> and look for A NEW
INTRODUCTION TO OLD NORSE. (You'll find other good things
there as well.) The glossary is small, but it occasionally
shows a shade of meaning that you might not pick up from
Zoëga or CV.

Brian