Limping along with UTF-8

I'm hoping to make a go of using the UTF functionality which currently exists in XEmacs. I hope it will support what I'm attempting without too much difficulty. I'm working mostly with English, German, Old Norse, and API. I've discovered when I open a file which I created with Old Norse (Modern Icelandic) characters, XEmacs treats it as Chinese. This can be a real problem. Is there a way I can work around this? I'm looking at the available functions, and trying to determine what to put in my ~/.xemacs/init.el so that XEmacs guesses correctly when I open files. I also want all my files to be opened and saved as UTF-8. I don't know the significance of this, but there is at least one character which is UFT-32 which I would like to be able to use. Does that mess up everything? I'm back to working on my treaties entitled _A Critique of Pure XEmacs. It's something I started some months ago, but never had much time to dedicate to it. I now have a bit of time for the project. There isn't much here yet. Item 8 is kind of scratch draft of where I'm trying to go with UTF-8: http://66.92.149.152/open-source/org/xemacs/cpx/ch04.html Any pointers would be helpful. -- TIA, STH