Jackson Crawford

Jackson Crawford was born in Houston, Texas. His family moved around a lot during his childhood, ultimately settling in Colorado when Crawford was 10. Despite his field of study, Crawford has no known Scandinavian ancestry and has stated his family ancestry comes from Scotland.

Crawford became interested in history from a young age. In a recent interview, he explained, "Basically, what happened was I was a huge dinosaur kid. That was partly the fault of my father and his side of the family, because my mother and her side of the family were very creationist." As a child, Crawford developed an interest in evolution and originally wanted to become a paleontologist, but when he went to middle school he studied Latin and learned that languages evolve like animals. This led him to become interested in linguistics. Initially interested in learning about the history of English, he studied old English. His studies in old English drew him to study Germanic languages, which ultimately led him to a scholarly interest in Old Norse.[3]

Crawford’s research focuses on the history of the Scandinavian languages, specializing in Old Norse, Modern Icelandic, and Nynorsk. He earned an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Georgia, specializing in Indo-European languages, and a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in Old Norse. The focus of his Ph.D. dissertation, as well as several published and forthcoming articles, were on colors in the languages. He has argued, among other things, that Old Norse blár meant blue (rather than black), and that the language classified warm colors with an intriguing system that distinguished ideal reds with a distinct term, rauðr, but lumped non-ideal reds and other warm colors into a vague category weakly focused on yellow, bleikr.

Crawford is the Instructor of Nordic Studies, and Coordinator of the Nordic Program. Crawford teaches courses in the Old Norse language, Norse mythology, and the history of the Scandinavian languages. He received B.A. in Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics from Texas Tech University; an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Georgia (focusing on Indo-European historical linguistics); and a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (specializing in Old Norse).[4][5]

Crawford has published several books, including The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes, intended for the use of undergraduate students and general readers, published in 2015 by Hackett Publishing Company. This was followed in 2017 by The Saga of the Volsungs: With the Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok, also published by Hackett Publishing Company.[1] In 2019, he published his book The Wanderer's Hávamál, which serves as a dual language edition of the poem Hávamál with his own commentary for each stanza. The appendix of this book features his poem The Cowboy Hávamál. He has also published creative writing in both English and Norwegian.[6]

• "Tattúínárdǿla saga: If Star Wars Were an Icelandic Saga"
• Colorado.edu