Reykjavík Grapevine - aug. 2021, Side 26

Up in the Rocky Mountains of Wyo-
ming, a pickup truck pulls over and
out steps a pair of cowboy boots.
A man saunters toward the cam-
era and, tipping his brimmed hat,
begins to lecture about historical
language change and umlaut mu-
tation.
Far from a graduate school-fu-
elled Lynchian fever dream, this is
the work of Dr. Jackson Crawford,
a man who has quietly become a
minor internet celebrity by teach-
ing Old Norse on YouTube. Inciden-
tally, he also wears a cowboy hat.
From academia to
YouTube
“There just wasn't a lot of good
accessible information about it,”
Jackson explains. While he was
teaching at the University of Cali-
fornia Berkeley, Dr. Crawford had a
revelation: although he was teach-
ing one of the most popular under-
graduate offerings, there was very
little reliable information about it
online. Also, like many graduate
students, he was broke.
“It's like what they say about res-
taurants, you can get it cheap and
fast, but it won't be good. You can
get it fast and good, but it won't
be cheap,” he explains. “And then
the information that was easy to
get was often these gurus online
shouting at you about how Thor
wants you to get buff. So I thought,
well, there's a niche here for some-
one who knows this stuff well, and
isn’t so personally wrapped up in
some narrative about it.”
He began uploading short vid-
eos to YouTube on topics like Old
Norse grammar, pronunciation
and misconceptions surrounding
Norse mythology. He quickly de-
veloped an audience, becoming one
of the most popular online sources
for mythology, language and his-
tory.
A budding interest
Dr. Crawford’s intellectual pur-
suits began, like many children,
with dinosaurs.
When his middle school of-
fered Latin class, he jumped at
the chance to learn, he thought,
about their names. However, Latin
quickly proved to be a gateway to
a broader interest in languages
and their origins. “From studying
Latin, I realized that languages
evolved,” he recalls. “And because
I could see that Spanish was a lat-
er continuation of the same lan-
guage, I thought, well, what did
English come from?”
These early questions led him to
delve deeper and, like many a bud-
ding scholar, Dr. Crawford fondly
remembers digging through piles
of books in his younger years.
“There was this huge bookstore
in Denver called Tattered Cover
and my grandma took me down
there,” he says. “One day, I'm just
picking through stacks of used
books and I found a grammar of
Old English. And because I had
enough grammar from Latin to
understand the grammar, I de-
cided that language evolution was
just the most fascinating thing in
the world.”
From there, he taught himself
Old Norse in college and a lifelong
love of words and the rules that
govern them was born.
Family resemblance
“Something I always think about is
"ú ert,” he says. “Because it looks so
alien on the surface. You learn how
to say ég er, "ú ert, and don't nec-
essarily realize that it’s English:
thou art. These languages are so
closely related that they have the
exact same irregularities in the be
verb. To me, that's just such a tell-
ing piece of deep connection.”
One of Dr. Crawford’s favorite
etymological coincidences con-
cerns the English words do and
gear.
The English verb, do, and Ger-
man tun, surface quite consis-
tently throughout the Germanic
languages, but this root is conspic-
uously absent from Scandinavia,
which instead use derivations of
gera. Through history, this verb
did eventually find a place in Eng-
lish, although as Dr. Crawford de-
scribes it, it is a neglected corner
of our language, the word gear. So
when we gear up and get ready, we
are quite simply “doing.”
Interestingly, the do and tun
words may be responsible for
the past-tense of regular verbs
throughout the Germanic lan-
guages, as one of the leading the-
ories why Germanic languages
end their past tense verbs with -d
and -t is that these early Proto-
Germanic speakers may have had
constructions analogous to “walk-
did,” which eventually shortened
to “walked” with time.
Picking up the sagas
Of course, Dr. Crawford doesn’t
just teach about language. One
subject that most attracts people
to both Iceland and Dr. Crawford’s
channel is the Icelandic family
sagas, a literary genre that is half
history, half artistic invention. For
many people, this medieval litera-
ture can seem inaccessible, and Dr.
Crawford has made it his mission
to open this world to those who
wouldn’t otherwise be able to ac-
cess it.
“One tip that I would give is
don't be afraid to reread. You know,
these stories were made by and for
a culture where people's family
ties were clearly very prominent
in everyone's mind; you could keep
track of these genealogies really
easily. A saga will mention some-
one as an eighth cousin in Chap-
ter 1, and when that person comes
up again in Chapter 44, you're
just supposed to remember this.
There's no guardian angel of sa-
gas who's hovering over you while
you read it, but sometimes we have
weird pride when reading, like I
can't go back and check this.”
Not a Viking, not a
cowboy
Finally, one must ask—what’s with
the hat?
“I wanted people to see that you
don't have to decide to be a Viking
to be interested in this stuff. I'm
really just being myself.”
Dr. Crawford received his PhD in
Old Norse and Historical Linguis-
tics at the University of Wisconsin
and taught at UCLA, UC Berkeley
and University of Colorado. You can
check him out at youtube.com/jack-
soncrawford.
26The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 08— 2021

SÆTA SVÍNI! / Hafnarstræti 1-3 / Tel. 555 2900 / saetasvinid.is
790 1.490
HAPPIEST
HAPPY HOUR
IN REYKJAVÍK
ICELANDIC GASTROPUB
Old Norse, New Audience
Culture
Dr. Jackson Crawford’s Curious Path From
Academia to YouTube
Words: Erik Pomrenke Photo: Provided by Dr. Jackson Crawford
Jackson, wishing you all the best from the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming