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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 ...
The world known to the Norse. The Norse people traveled abroad as Vikings and Varangians. As such, they often named the locations and peoples they visited with Old Norse words unrelated to the local endonyms. Some of these names have been acquired from sagas, runestones or Byzantine chronicles.
Words of Old Norse origin have entered the English language, primarily from the contact between Old Norse and Old English during colonisation of eastern and northern England between the mid 9th to the 11th centuries (see also Danelaw). Many of these words are part of English core vocabulary, such as egg or knife. There are hundreds of such ...
The extant sources for Norse mythology, particularly the Prose and Poetic Eddas, contain many names of jötnar and gýgjar (often glossed as giants and giantesses respectively).
In Old Norse, i/j adjacent to i, e, their u-umlauts, and æ was not possible, nor u/v adjacent to u, o, their i-umlauts, and ǫ. [7] At the beginning of words, this manifested as a dropping of the initial /j/ (which was general, independent of the following vowel) or /v/. Compare ON orð, úlfr, ár with English word, wolf, year. In inflections ...
An illustration from a 17th-century Icelandic manuscript shows a hawk, Veðrfölnir, on top of an eagle on top of a tree, Yggdrasil. In Norse mythology, Veðrfölnir (Old Norse "storm pale", [1] "wind bleached", [2] or "wind-witherer" [3]) is a hawk sitting between the eyes of an unnamed eagle that is perched on top of the world tree Yggdrasil.
10th-century picture stone from the Hunnestad Monument that is believed to depict a gýgr riding on a wolf with vipers as reins, which has been proposed to be Hyrrokkin. A jötunn (also jotun; in the normalised scholarly spelling of Old Norse, jǫtunn / ˈ j ɔː t ʊ n /; [1] or, in Old English, eoten, plural eotenas) is a type of being in Germanic mythology.
In the modern sense, heiti are distinguished from kennings in that a heiti is a simple word, whereas a kenning is a circumlocution in the form of a phrase or compound word; thus mækir is a heiti for "sword" (the usual word in prose is sverð), whereas grand hlífar "bane of shield" and ben-fúrr "wound-fire" are kennings for "sword".