Jackson Crawford


Jackson W. Crawford is an American scholar and poet who specializes in Old Norse. As of August 2017, he teaches at University of Colorado, Boulder. He has a YouTube channel with over 100,000 subscribers, where he posts videos twice per week.

Biography

Crawford’s research focuses on the history of the Scandinavian languages, specializing in Old Norse, Modern Icelandic, and Nynorsk. 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, 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; and a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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. 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.