I want talk about Gold Mining in Lapland.
Nordic languages Bernd reporting in on this kc. Any questions or related topics you want to talk about?
Did you know that Britain was christianized from two directions: Ireland and France?
Did you know that Irish was the first european vernacular language to be written in the Latin alphabet?
Did you know that many Christian missionaries in Germany came from Britain?
Did you know that Bremen and Hamburg in northern Germany were important centers for the project of christianizing Scandinavia? For example Þangbrandr, the most famous christian missionary to Iceland, was German (though sources are uncertain if he was from Saxony or Bremen).
For people interested in such things, I recommend visiting and getting a guided tour at Glaumbær in Northern Iceland, where a large turf house is preserved as a museum. I can also recommend reading relevant passages of Grettis saga Ásmundarssonar (The saga of Grettir the strong). He had a pretty ebin fight with an undead entity in such a turf house about 700 years ago.
Here is also my hot take if you want to learn Old Norse: Learn modern Icelandic!
You're much more likely to find classes and learning material for modern Icelandic and you're much more likely to stick to learning and be successfull at learning. And when you're somewhat competent in modern Icelandic, understanding Old Norse is just like figuring out a different dialect. Like having learned American English and reading Shakespeare or talking to an Australian. Also: A lot of important secondary literature, for example the most detailed edda commentaries, are in modern icelandic.
Yes.
Benefits: Being able to navigate Iceland in a very different way from tourists, access to corpus of untranslated literature, appreciation for a literary tradition in the original. Other than that: Not a lot. I hope to maybe earn money as a translator in the future, but unless you have specific reasons I'd recommend learning French or Spanish instead.
Actually, there are plenty of theories about Germans in space. The idea that the Nazis developed UFOs and escaped to the moon at the end of WWII being among the more popular. There is also some crackpot called Erhard Landmann, I'm not sure if he is still alive, who had a way of translating every single language and script system as actually German and seemed to believe in some type of German ancient aliens that came to earth in prehistory.
