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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.
A kenning (Icelandic: [cʰɛnːiŋk]) is a figure of speech, a figuratively-phrased compound term that is used in place of a simple single-word noun. For instance, the Old English kenning "whale's road" (hron rade) means "sea", as does swanrād ("swan's road"). A kenning has two parts: a base-word (also known as a head-word) and a determinant.
Beowulf (/ ˈ b eɪ ə w ʊ l f /; [1] [2 ... proposed that the name Bēowulf literally means in Old English "bee-wolf" or "bee-hunter" and that it is a kenning for ...
Beowulf (/ ˈ b eɪ ə w ʊ l f /; [1] Old English: Bēowulf [ˈbeːowuɫf]) is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often translated works of Old English literature.
Kennings are a key feature of Old English poetry. A kenning is an often formulaic metaphorical phrase that describes one thing in terms of another: for instance, in Beowulf, the sea is called the whale road. Another example of a kenning in The Wanderer is a reference to battle as a "storm of spears". [22]
The difficulty of translating Beowulf from its compact, metrical, alliterative form in a single surviving but damaged Old English manuscript into any modern language is considerable, [1] matched by the large number of attempts to make the poem approachable, [2] and the scholarly attention given to the problem.
The kennings earmum þehton (line 514, þeccean "to cover, conceal") and mundum brugdon (line 515a, bregdan "to pull, move quickly, swing, draw"), used by Unferth to describe Beowulf's match against Breca, are applicable to both swimming and rowing. [10]
Alliterative poets drew on a specialized vocabulary of poetic synonyms rarely used in prose texts [49] [15] and used standard images and metaphors called kennings. [ 50 ] [ 51 ] [ 52 ] Old Saxon and medieval English attest to the word fitt with the sense of 'a section in a longer poem', and this term is sometimes used today by scholars to refer ...