These days I'm studying Old English, Old Norse, and Latin. And yeah, that's a little much for my brain, but it's amazing how well a few old pasttimes have been helping out with the Germanic stuff:
1) As a teenager I read every cheesy fantasy book I could get my hands on. That brought me in contact with a lot of weird archaic word order and words from British dialects. (Dialectical words being how some authors make, e.g., their gnomes sound gnomey.)
2) Child ballads. Again, archaic word order and missing words: "There were two sisters loved one man / the youngest of them did he love best." I don't even hear it as weird.
3) I used to play a poetry game in which I'd take verses from some language I didn't know (Italian is good for this) and make up a translation based on what the general shape of the words suggested. The point was to get it wrong, and to let the Italian words scaffold you into your own English poem. What's wild is that if you know a little Old English, this same joke of a process often _works_ for Old Norse. Not enough to get a translation out of it, but enough to guess (as I did the other day) that a sentence is about a cow.
It's easier to show you what I mean by that mistranslation poetry game than it is to explain it. I made it up but I never made up a name for it; I'd be unsurprised if someone else invented it independently and came up with a name. (If you know a name for this, let me know.)
Back in the day, for instance, I started with:
—
Negli estremi confini d’Egea
Dell’Arabia nell’arse contrade
Come gigli in amena vallea
Vostra vita a la luce spuntò;
E quai stelle la diva pietade
In quell’ora ai mortal vi donò.
Non per voi ma per l’alma viveste
Dei fratelli, da Cristo redenti:
Or gli spiriti alla fede traeste,
Or dei corpi leniste il dolor;
Non periglio vi tenne: era ardente
E perenne la fiamma d’amor.
—
...and what I wrung out of that was...