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A kenning (Old English kenning [cʰɛnːiŋɡ], Modern Icelandic [cʰɛnːiŋk]) is a circumlocution, an ambiguous or roundabout figure of speech, used instead of an ordinary noun in Old Norse, Old English, and later Icelandic poetry. This list is not intended to be comprehensive. Kennings for a particular character are listed in that character ...
Skræling (Old Norse and Icelandic: skrælingi, plural skrælingjar) is the name the Norse Greenlanders used for the peoples they encountered in North America (Canada and Greenland). [1] In surviving sources, it is first applied to the Thule people , the proto- Inuit group with whom the Norse coexisted in Greenland after about the 13th century.
The Skáldskaparmál is both a retelling of Norse legend as well as a treatise on poetry. It is unusual among surviving medieval European works as a poetic treatise written both in and about the poetry of a local vernacular language, Old Norse; other Western European works of the era were on Latin language poetry, as Latin was the language of scholars and learning.
Proto-Norse was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic in the first centuries CE. It is the earliest stage of a characteristically North Germanic language, and the language attested in the oldest Scandinavian Elder Futhark inscriptions, spoken from around the 2nd to the 8th centuries CE (corresponding to the late ...
A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/. The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet 's P , [ 4 ] or Q , [ citation needed ] or from the Rhaetic's alphabet 's W . [ 5 ]
The Proto-Norse language developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid- to late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century.
Most of the use of Norn/Norse in modern-day Shetland and Orkney is purely ceremonial, and mostly in Old Norse, for example the Shetland motto, Með lögum skal land byggja 'with law shall land be built', which is the same motto used by the Icelandic police force and inspired by the medieval Norwegian Frostathing Law.
The first of the three lands the Greenland Norse found in North America. According to a footnote in Arthur Middleton Reeves 's The Norse Discovery of America (1906), "the whole of the northern coast of America, west of Greenland, was called by the ancient Icelandic geographers Helluland it Mikla , or "Great Helluland"; and the island of ...