Subjunctive Remnants and Optatives

If you have learned German, French or Spanish, you arrive in Norwegian expecting a subjunctive mood — a special verb form for wishes, doubts, hypotheticals and indirect commands. It is not there. Modern Norwegian, like modern English, has essentially lost its productive subjunctive. What remains is a scatter of fossilised forms frozen inside fixed expressions: blessings (Gud bevare deg), royal acclamations (leve kongen!), curses (fanden steike!), and a handful of legal and literary set phrases (det være seg …, koste hva det koste vil). These look like a living mood but are linguistic fossils — bones of a grammar that died.

The single most important thing for an advanced learner is therefore a negative lesson: recognise these phrases, but do not generalise them. You cannot coin new subjunctives by analogy, the way you can in German. When you want to express a genuine wish or hypothetical productively, Norwegian uses entirely different machinery — the preterite for counterfactuals, and the skulle ønske / håpe / måtte periphrasis covered on complex/wishes-optatives. This page catalogues the relics and draws the line between what is still alive and what is purely archaic or liturgical.

What the relic forms look like

The old subjunctive in the relevant fixed phrases takes the bare verb stem with an -e ending — leve, bevare, velsigne, være. For an English speaker this is a trap, because that form is identical to the infinitive and overlaps with the imperative of many verbs. Leve looks like the infinitive "to live"; bevare looks like the infinitive "to preserve". But inside these phrases it is functioning as an old optative/jussive — a third-person wish, "may X happen" — not an infinitive and not a command directed at the listener.

Compare:

• Infinitive: å leve = "to live" (citation form)
• Imperative: Lev! = "Live!" (order to you) — note the stem lev, no -e
• Optative relic: Leve kongen! = "Long live the king!" — a wish about the king, third person, with the -e

That third-person, -e-ending optative is the diagnostic shape of the relic. English does exactly the same thing with its own fossils — long live the king, God save the queen, be that as it may, come what may — using a bare base form where you would otherwise expect lives, saves, is, comes. So the concept transfers cleanly; only the specific frozen phrases must be learned.

Acclamations and toasts: leve …!

The best-known relic is the leve-optative, used in cheers, toasts and acclamations. It is fronted (verb first), with the subject following.

These are fully alive in the narrow ritual contexts of toasts, weddings, the 17th of May and the like — you will hear leve brudeparet! at any Norwegian wedding. But they are frozen: you cannot say leve naboen! about your neighbour as a spontaneous wish without sounding like you are making a deliberate, slightly theatrical toast. The form is alive only where the ritual is.

Blessings and pious wishes: Gud …

A cluster of relics survives in religious and quasi-religious blessings, where Gud ("God") is the subject and the verb stands in the old optative -e form.

These range from liturgical/formal (Gud velsigne deg in a church or a heartfelt farewell) to fully colloquial fossils (Gud bedre! is everyday spoken Norwegian, an interjection most speakers no longer parse as a subjunctive at all). Gud nåde … survives mainly as an ironic threat. None of them can be extended: Gud bevare is fixed; you cannot freely swap in Gud beskytte and have it feel idiomatic in the same ritual way.

Concessive relics: be it … / come what may

A small set of concessive fossils uses the optative of være ("to be") and a few other verbs to mean "be it …", "whatever it may be", "come what may". These are the most literary and legalistic of the survivors and the ones an advanced reader meets in formal prose.

The X hva X vil frame (koste hva det koste vil, komme hva komme vil) is a beautiful fossil: the verb appears twice, once in the optative (koste, komme) and once with the modal vil, mirroring English "cost what it may cost", "come what may". It is formal/literary and instantly raises the register of a sentence; you would not use it in a text message. Det være seg … ("be it …") is similarly formal, common in legal, administrative and academic writing where English uses "be it" or "whether … or".

Curses and exclamations

At the colloquial end, several relics survive as curses and oaths, where an optative verb invokes the devil or fate. These are marked (vulgar) to (informal) and survive precisely because emotional, formulaic language preserves old grammar long after it dies elsewhere.

Here too the verb (steike, ta) is the bare optative form, and here too you cannot innovate: fanden steike is fixed, and substituting a different verb produces nonsense, not a new curse.

The takk skje / -e relics

A few more -e optatives lurk in set phrases that most speakers no longer analyse:

Gud skje lov ("God be praised") is heard, somewhat old-fashioned and pious; takk skje / skje lov preserves the optative skje ("happen/be done"). Fred være med deg is liturgical, the Norwegian "peace be with you".

Which are alive, which are archaic?

The crucial advanced skill is sorting the relics by vitality, because using a purely liturgical fossil in casual speech is as jarring as quoting the King James Bible at a barbecue.

How modern Norwegian expresses wishes instead

Because the productive subjunctive is gone, real wishes and hypotheticals use other machinery. This is the positive counterpart of the negative lesson above, and is treated fully on complex/wishes-optatives and complex/conditionals-counterfactual; the short version:

• Counterfactual "if I were": just the preterite, no special form — hvis jeg var rik "if I were rich". There is no were-subjunctive to calque.
• "I wish …": skulle ønske
  • backshifted tense — Jeg skulle ønske jeg kunne "I wish I could".
• "may you …" (the one productive optative left): måtte
  • subject + infinitive — Måtte du leve lenge! "May you live long!" This måtte-optative is the closest thing to a still-living wish form, but note it is the modal måtte, not an old subjunctive (see verbs/modal-verbs).

Common Mistakes

These are the errors English (and German/Romance) speakers make when they expect a living subjunctive.

Key takeaways

• Norwegian has no living subjunctive. Every "subjunctive" is a fixed phrase to be learned as vocabulary, never extended by analogy.
• The relic shape is a third-person optative in -e (leve, bevare, være), which looks identical to the infinitive — that overlap is the main trap.
• Sort the relics by vitality: Gud bedre! and leve brudeparet! are alive in their niches; det være seg … is alive in formal prose; Fred være med deg is archaic/liturgical.
• For real wishes use the preterite (counterfactuals), skulle ønske ("I wish"), or the måtte-optative ("may you …") — see complex/wishes-optatives.
• Do not calque the German/Romance subjunctive after verbs like foreslå at, kreve at; Norwegian uses the indicative there.