Kennings are found in Old Norse and Old English poetry. The more you look at them, the more elusive their definition becomes. Kennings aren’t just simple metaphors for this and that. They add layers of meaning to words for things that are well-known to people sharing a way of life or culture.
The word ken can mean the extent of your knowledge, or to know. If something is “beyond my ken,” I don’t understand it. The word kenning [cʰɛnːiŋg] in Old Norse means to know or make known. Kenna in Old English is to teach or make known. The word kenning was adopted into 19th century English from The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlson (1179-1241), a medieval historian who wrote about the Icelandic sagas and the use of kennings in skaldic poetry. Skalds were court poets in Scandinavia and Iceland during the age of the Vikings.
Get your own copy of the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturlson at Google Books.
Most kennings are highly evocative two-word compounds. For example, whale-road (hron-ráde, whale-road) or heath-stepper (hæð-stapa, hart or deer). You know one when you see or hear one. So, there’s more to kennings than their meaning – they usually have a recognizable structure. Linguists have studied the structure, or morphology, of kennings, even if they haven’t agreed on a definition yet.
The illustration is a drawing of the ash tree, Yggdrasil, by Oluf Olufsen Bagge for the 1847 edition of the Prose Edda. Yggdrasil is mentioned in the books, Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál. In Gylfaginning, Chapter 15, Yggdrasil is described as the biggest and best of all trees, with branches that extend over all the world and reach out over the sky. Three of the roots of the tree support it, and these roots also extend very, very far.
Learn more
Kenning from Book Rags. An excellent and accessible article on what you need to know about kennings, with links to related information.
Beowulf: Kennings from BeowulfTranslations.net. A very informative collection of excerpts of writings about kennings and wonderfully documented examples.
Kenning Morphology: Towards a Formal Definition of the Skaldic Kenning, or Kennings and Adjectives by Ilya V. Sverdlov. Even if you’re not a linguist, it’s instructive to know how kennings are studied in the discipline of linguistic. This article is dense with jargon, but a good overview of research.
Old Norse Kennings in Context. Some insight into how kennings were constructed and used.
List of Kennings. Examples from Old Norse, Old English, and other sources.
If you are a student of Beowulf, kennings deserve more than cursory attention and simplistic descriptions.
