It is no understatement when Schulte notes “[t]he position of [Old Gutnish] within the ON family of languages and dialects is somewhat difficult to determine” (2002:878). Within 20th- and 21st-century scholarship Gutnish has been labelled as everything from “ett särskilt nordiskt språk” (Gustavson 1977:7) to “keineswegs so isoliert [...] wie oft behauptet wird” (Bandle 1973:109); even the placement within the East-West dichotomy of Norse is no simple matter (cf. Williams 2007). 
Yet these varied opinions of Gutnish speech is by no means limited to recent scholarship. In 1633 Hans Nielssøn Strelow equates it with Crimean Gothic as described by Busbecq (Strelow 1633:46). Five decades later, Haquin Spegel labels it Göthiska, stemming from Götaland and originally akin to Hebrew (Wennersten 1901:52). Contemporary scholarly manuscripts show similar variety: While Petter Salan considers a copy of Guta Saga to be “på Islandska” (UBB Ms 58), Árni Magnússon thought the younger manuscript of Guta Lag to be “pura lingua Norvegicâ” (AM 54 4to), essentially ‘translating’ a few statutes into Icelandic. Meanwhile Otto Sperling’s copy of the same manuscript (GKS 3363 4to) shows a difficulty of understanding the language, as seen in basic copy errors (haun for haan ‘she’) and numerous corrections in the Latin translation of the first seven folios. 
This paper presents these and other early modern scholars’ description and understanding of Gutnish, placing each within his historical, geographical, and scholarly context, with special consideration placed on the scholarly manuscripts from this period.