> In the 12th century, there are believed to have been two phonemically
> distinct sounds, which in the normalised "Old Norse" spelling used by
> Norse Course are written 'oe' and 'æ'. The first of these, as you
> know, is written as a ligature by Gordon and Zoega and other printed
> books, but as two separate letters in the Norse course lessons to make
> them easier to tell apart (the two letters can look almost identical
> in italics on a computer screen).

Actually we used 'oe' because the oe-ligature is not a Latin-1 character
and Latin-1 was overwhelmingly used for Icelandic texts back then. If I
were to start something like this now I'd use Unicode and probably go with
the ligature.

But your point is valid, they *are* difficult to tell apart, especially
when italicized.

Regards,
Haukur