 Aware of how the local Fyn dialect of Danish differed from the normative Copenhagen dialect, he also became interested in Norwegian after his school took a field trip to Norway.Having read Bernhard Karlgren’s introductory textbook on Chinese and a grammar of Old Norse, Rischel raised rabbits and sold them to earn the money to purchase a copy of "Danmarks Runeinskrifter", a scholarly three-volume work on Danish runes edited by Lis Jacobsen and Erik Moltke and published during World War II.From 1952 to 1956 he studied Nordic philology at the University of Copenhagen, specializing in West Nordic, obtaining two one-year government scholarships to continue his studies in Reykjavík and Oslo.