Icelandic has changed so little that modern readers can still make out 800-year-old sagas

Iceland's geographic isolation and deliberate language conservation mean written Icelandic has shifted comparatively little since the medieval period. With modernised spelling and light glossing, today's Icelandic speakers can read the 13th-century sagas with far less difficulty than an English speaker faces with equally old English texts, even though pronunciation has changed considerably.

— Standard historical linguistics accounts, Icelandic language — History of Icelandic