In the preface to The Syntax of Old Norse, Jan Terje Faarlund states that this book is intended to be a handbook for historical linguists who might find a detailed description of Old Norse syntax useful in their own theoretical analyses on language change. In the wake of “a revitalization of the old and time-honoured discipline of historical linguistics” and advancements in theoretical syntax over the last several decades, the author aims to fill several gaps in research on Old Norse and Germanic syntax (p. xi). This book is the first comprehensive description of Old Norse syntax since Marius Nygaard's Norrøn Syntax, published in Dano-Norwegian in 1906. Although Nygaard's description is extensive, it lacks the systematic presentation, theoretical sophistication, and more rigorous methodological approach that are part and parcel of more recent descriptive analyses. Therefore, Faarlund attempts to move beyond traditional grammar handbooks on Old Norse syntax, using generative theory as a model of description while presenting a broader and deeper analysis of a greater variety of syntactic patterns than his predecessors. Capitalizing on the extensive corpus of Old Norse prose texts, Faarlund presents hundreds of specific examples from a wide variety of Icelandic and Norwegian sources. As a result, as Faarlund notes, the book may be of relevance not only to historical Germanic linguists and diachronic syntacticians, but also to philologists and others interested in Scandinavian civilization and history (p. xi).

The approach of the book is descriptive and the analysis is synchronic. Faarlund indicates that although his description makes use of generative theoretical terminology the theory is used merely to provide a framework within which the examples can be systematically presented. Readers unfamiliar with basic concepts of generative theory from the Principles and Parameters approach will most likely find the discussion easy to follow because of the generous number of examples. Since the technical details of the theory are not of immediate significance, they are largely left out of the book. Furthermore, the book does not elaborate on syntactic changes prior to the period from which the texts are taken (circa 1200–1400) or changes in later stages of the Scandinavian languages. The book is limited to a synchronic description of standardized Old Norse and does not take into account sources of variation or change within or beyond this period.

The general format of the book lends itself well to a detailed analysis of Norse syntax. The author starts with a general overview of the source material for the book followed by an introductory chapter on the history of the language and some basic theoretical assumptions from the generative perspective. After a short chapter on phonology and a lengthy chapter on inflectional morphology, the book settles into a rhythm in which each chapter describes a major aspect of Old Norse syntax. Thus, chapters 4–8 each deal with particular types of lexical phrases, while chapters 9 and 10 focus on specific types of clauses. The last chapter, on reflexive binding, is a comparatively short analysis of examples with reflexive elements. Each chapter is divided into subsections that relate to the general topic at hand and provide sample sentences from different sources. For each example, the author includes the Old Norse original with standardized orthography, followed by a morpheme-by-morpheme translation, and a third line with an idiomatic English translation and a reference to the source, including the volume number (when applicable), page number, and line number. The book ends with subject and word indexes, and a bibliography of Old Norse syntax with some references from as early as 1850 but with a main focus on syntactic analyses from the 1980s and 1990s.

Chapter 1 provides background on the history of the language, the source material, and the descriptive framework of the book. The discussion of source material is rather brief and the reader is left to wonder why certain texts were chosen from the large Old Norse corpus and not others. In general, however, the author was careful in the text selection process: he used only prose texts and selected a wide variety of text-types, including family and kings' sagas, legal texts, diplomatic letters, and religious homilies. Despite these appropriate restrictions, it remains unclear why particular texts within these genres were chosen over others. At the same time, the author is clear in his discussion that the book deals only with texts written in Iceland or Norway between 1200 and 1400. These chronological and geographical limitations are justifiable, given the general uniformity of syntactic patterns in Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic texts from the 13th and 14th centuries. The chapter ends with an overview of basic concepts in generative grammar, including a description of X-bar theory, movement, and adjunction with tree diagrams. Although the author tries to keep the details to a minimum, it would have been beneficial to readers unfamiliar with these theoretical constructs to have some general references in a footnote to which they could go for further reading.

Chapter 2 is a concise overview of Old Norse phonology. Faarlund justifies the inclusion of a chapter on phonology in a book on syntax by pointing out the role of phonology in shaping the inflectional paradigms, which are so relevant to the syntax of Old Norse. The main portion of this short chapter focuses on morphophonology and is split into one section on productive rules in Old Norse and another on non-productive rules, or those rules for which the conditioning factors have been lost and which reflect an earlier stage of the language. Although the narrow focus of the chapter is commendable, discussion on the differences between Norwegian and Icelandic is missing. For instance, Old Norwegian and Icelandic differ with respect to vowel harmony in unaccented syllables, such as kononge ‘king’ in Old Norwegian vs. konungi in Old Icelandic. The chapter fails to mention some of the geographical variation of Old Norwegian or differentiate Norwegian from Icelandic, despite the fact that the author makes the reader aware that there are phonological differences between the two in the previous chapter (p. 2). Otherwise, the chapter provides enough information on phonology to form a basis for understanding the discussion in later chapters.

Chapter 3 focuses on inflectional morphology and is the last introductory chapter before the main syntax portion of the book. Faarlund is adept at presenting the general patterns of inflection in a logical manner without leaving out details or exceptions. Furthermore, he makes interesting and relevant use of ungrammatical examples, as on page 22 in the discussion of nominative/accusative distinctions in passive sentences. Much like the previous chapter, however, there could have been some discussion in footnotes on Norwegian/Icelandic distinctions, such as the Old Norwegian mit versus Old Icelandic vit first person dual forms, or the definite nominal form with demonstrative pronouns, as in some Norwegian varieties þat hūsit ‘that house’ with a double definite versus þat hūs in Icelandic (Haugen 1976:210). In some instances, only partial paradigms are included, such as the weak a-class masculine nouns, which exhibit syncretism in the oblique cases. It would be more appropriate to label these oblique forms with the all-encompassing abbreviation “Obl,” as they are labeled in the later discussion of weak adjectives in this chapter, rather than the exclusive “A” for accusative. Furthermore, some of the exceptional verbs—for example, reduplicating verbs or verbs with mixed stems, such as heita, frjósa, or kjósa—are relegated to a section called “Irregular Verbs,” instead of being included in the section on strong verbs. Despite these minor problems, this is a useful chapter for anyone who is looking for a helpful overview of inflectional morphology in Old Norse.

Chapters 4 and 5 deal with noun phrases (NPs) and determiner phrases (DPs), respectively. In these two chapters, Faarlund provides relevant examples of each descriptive point while not overwhelming the reader with too much detail. In his discussion of NPs in chapter 4, he includes examples from a variety of the Old Norse sources with NPs introduced by definite articles, as well as genitive phrases, and those NPs with modifiers or complements. Chapter 5 continues the discussion of nominal phrases, although the scope is limited to complex determiner phrases with demonstratives and personal or interrogative pronouns. In both chapters, Faarlund provides useful tree diagrams to depict the relationship between a head noun and its complements and modifiers, including examples with variation in Old Norse NPs and DPs. One minor criticism of the analyses of nominal phrases in chapters 4 and 5, however, is that the author makes use of unconventional terminology when he refers to NPs headed by a definite article as Reference Phrases (RPs), reserving the label “DP” for an even higher projection that contains an RP and is headed by a demonstrative. It is unclear whether he borrows this term from previous analyses or whether he has invented it for his own immediate purposes in these two chapters. The terminology becomes more confusing when he abandons the term “RP” in favor of the more general “NP” in subsequent sections of these two chapters. In addition, one could make the argument that Faarlund is not consistent with the goal of keeping the analysis in the book strictly synchronic in these two chapters. There are instances—on pages 58 and 74, for example—in which he briefly mentions some aspects of language change that are relevant to the variation patterns in Old Norse. Although these points are very interesting, they seem haphazardly added as side notes that are out of place. Furthermore, in the case of some examples, such as those on pages 85 and 86 where non-specific or indefinite readings and ambiguities of interpretation are discussed, the reader could benefit from having more context, including the discourse leading up to the example sentence. All in all, however, these two chapters are remarkable in that they provide the reader with many interesting examples in a thorough, descriptive overview.

Faarlund continues his discussion of various lexical phrases, focusing on Adjective Phrases (APs), Prepositional Phrases (PPs), and Verb Phrases (VPs) in chapters 6, 7, and 8, respectively. There is some repetition in the discussion of adjectives in chapter 6, since adjectives were also discussed in previous chapters with NPs. However, this chapter, along with the subsequent two, continues a positive trend in this book: the reader gets a true sense of the wide variety of possible Old Norse syntactic patterns. Although Faarlund uses vague descriptors like “usual,” “less common,” or “rare” to describe the frequency of different syntactic patterns, readers get an accurate impression of the extent of variation in Old Norse syntax and a clear understanding of which patterns are common and which ones are marked. While chapter 7 on prepositions is quite complete in its discussion of various categories of prepositions, there is relatively little discussion of the interesting patterns of behavior of verb particles (here, called “intransitive prepositions”), which are common in Old Norse and later in Modern Scandinavian. Chapter 8 is the longest chapter in the book, examining VPs of all kinds, including those with reflexive and auxiliary verbs as heads, as well as VPs with various types of complements and adjuncts. In particular, the accusative with infinitive construction is covered from all angles with an impressive amount of interesting detail. In his discussion of word order in the VP, Faarlund sidesteps the previously controversial issue of the relative ordering of the head and complement in the VP, presenting a straightforward analysis of Old Norse with the basic order, Verb–Object. He adequately accounts for residual Object–Verb orders, positing an analysis with movement of verbal complements and left-adjunction to V'. Although tree diagrams are used sparingly in this chapter, they are used enough to highlight the main facts, which are supported well by the impressive number of relevant examples.

Chapters 9 and 10 discuss various types of clauses in Old Norse, namely, finite clauses and subordinate clauses, respectively. In chapter 9, Faarlund again provides numerous examples following the logical structure of the chapter. The reader will find the tree diagrams in this chapter most useful, as they depict the numerous possible movement operations for the wide variety of syntactic structures. One minor criticism of this chapter is the casual description of so-called “verb-initial” sentences that are so common to Old Norse. Faarlund suggests, “for systematic and descriptive reasons,” that these clauses contain an empty position in Spec-CP before the finite verb in C (p. 192). However, he provides no other justification, either theoretical or empirical, and gives no references to other analyses of this word order pattern. Although the analysis makes sense and brings the “verb-initial” sentences in line with regular verb-second (V2) sentences, it would benefit the reader to have more attention paid to this particular point. Chapter 10 provides a detailed, broad analysis of subordinate clauses, including a discussion of clauses with subordinating conjunctions and relative clauses, as well as non-finite clauses, like infinitival clauses and raising. One inconsistency in both of these chapters is that there seems to be more discussion of previous scholars' analyses in the syntax literature, particularly in the footnotes. While these contributions are most welcome, they are lacking in most of the other chapters. In general, however, chapters 9 and 10 provide interesting discussion of Old Norse syntax at the clause level, building on the analysis in previous chapters that was limited to lexical phrases.

Chapter 11, “Reflexive Binding,” is the shortest chapter in the book with only four pages. This is clearly an important topic to include in a book on Old Norse syntax because of the interesting interaction of reflexive elements with case and word order. The chapter could either be expanded to include information on long-distance reflexives or more information on reflexive clitics. The discussion in this chapter certainly piques the interest of the reader, and it is unfortunate that the topics are not explored further.

In sum, despite some minor shortcomings, this book is a valuable asset to the fields of diachronic syntax, Old Norse philology, and historical linguistics in general. Faarlund has amassed an impressive number of examples, which prove his points adequately and support his clear analysis throughout the book. He covers a lot of ground in only 300 pages, yet readers can easily navigate through the material to find the information they are seeking. The morpheme-by-morpheme translations are accurate and the idiomatic translations are stylistically appropriate. The bibliography is comprehensive and provides a much needed list of important, recent references on Old Norse and Scandinavian syntax. The greatest contribution of this book is its general usefulness in providing readers with an overview of the many different possible syntactic patterns attested in Old Norse, while allowing one to get a true sense of which patterns are most common and which are relatively rare. The Syntax of Old Norse will certainly be of use to students learning Old Norse and could be used as a supplement or reference work alongside other grammar handbooks or instructional tools. Most of all, it will be of use to syntacticians and historical linguists, who will undoubtedly be able to use it as they develop their own analyses based on the interesting points raised in this book.