At 1:19:44 PM on Wednesday, February 15, 2012, Amerie Helton
wrote:

> I'm actually not interested in learning Old Norse right
> now, I'm just trying to translate the word "maker" into
> Old Norse. I've found "to make" as gøra "to make, build,
> compose, or write" and that's the form I'd like. I just
> don't know how to form a gerund.

You don't want a gerund: you want a nomen agentis, an agent
noun. This is a difficult question, because Old Norse forms
agent nouns in a variety of ways, and the idiomatic way for
a given word depends on the word.

Three come readily to mind. First, the substantivized
present participle in <-andi> is often used as an agent
noun, as in <gefandi> 'giver', from <gefa> 'to give'. Next,
there is a suffix <-ir> that is added to a number of verbs
to make agent nouns, e.g., <gætir> 'keeper, warder', from
<gæta> 'to watch, take care of, guard'. A third
construction is with the suffix <-ari>, as in <skapari>
'creator, maker' (literally 'shaper'), from <skapa> 'to
shape, form, make'.

<Skapari> is not from <gøra>, but it has the virtue of being
an attested Old Norse word; unfortunately, I believe that in
Old Norse it is attested only in the Biblical sense, and I
really don't know whether it would have been used more
generally.

Cleasby & Vigfusson have <görandi>, but as 'doer' rather
than as 'maker'. In the older form <görvandi> it is found
in at least one kenning in the sense 'practiser, causer';
the corresponding <-ir> construct, <görvir> 'practiser,
causer', is found in a couple of kennings.

I can't really recommend any of these alternatives without a
better notion of the precise sense intended, or at least the
intended context, and it may be that none of them is really
suitable.

Brian