[amyjess]

> The appeal for me is the ability to understand one of the least changed old European languages, much akin to our Old English.

From what I understand, written Icelandic is mutually intelligible with Old Norse, so if you learned Icelandic you could actually read the sagas. The pronunciation has diverged enough that the spoken languages aren't mutually intelligible, but nobody really speaks Old Norse anymore so it doesn't matter.

I guess it's kinda like the relationship between Middle English and Modern English. The written forms are similar enough that Chaucer is usually presented in the original Middle English alongside a gloss for whatever words have disappeared from the language since.

[legulere]

I can't say the opposite is true. I learned a bit of old norse in university reading sagas and looking at modern Icelandic the problem really is the vocabulary, which seems completely different from what you find in the sagas.