Kenning

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. So in whale's road, road is the base-word, and whale's is the determinant. This is the same structure as in the modern English term skyscraper; the base-word here would be scraper, and the determinant sky. In some languages, kennings can recurse, with one element of the kenning being replaced by another kenning.

Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English alliterative verse. They continued to be a feature of Icelandic poetry (including rímur) for centuries, together with the closely related heiti. Although kennings are sometimes hyphenated in English translation, Old Norse poetry did not require kennings to be in normal word order, nor do the parts of the kenning need to be side-by-side. The lack of grammatical cases in modern English makes this aspect of kennings difficult to translate. Kennings are now rarely used in English, but are still used in the Germanic language family.

The corresponding modern verb to ken survives in Scots and English dialects and in general English through the derivative existing in the standard language in the set expression beyond one's ken, "beyond the scope of one's knowledge" and in the phonologically altered forms uncanny, 'surreal, supernatural', and canny, 'shrewd, prudent'. Modern Scots retains (with slight differences between dialects) tae ken 'to know', kent 'knew' or 'known', Afrikaans ken 'be acquainted with' and 'to know' and kennis 'knowledge'. Old Norse kenna (Modern Icelandic kenna, Swedish känna, Danish kende, Norwegian kjenne or kjenna) is cognate with Old English cennan, Old Frisian kenna, kanna, Old Saxon (ant)kennian (Middle Dutch and Dutch kennen), Old High German (ir-, in-, pi-) chennan (Middle High German and German kennen), Gothic kannjan < Proto-Germanic *kannjanan, originally causative of *kunnanan 'to know (how to)', whence Modern English can 'to be able'. The word ultimately derives from *ǵneh₃, the same Proto-Indo-European root that yields Modern English know, Latin-derived terms such as cognition and ignorant, and Greek gnosis.

Old Norse kennings take the form of a genitive phrase (báru fákr 'wave's horse' = 'ship' (Þorbjörn Hornklofi: Glymdrápa 3)) or a compound word (gjálfr-marr 'sea-steed' = 'ship' (Anon.: Hervararkviða 27)). The simplest kennings consist of a base-word (Icelandic stofnorð, German Grundwort) and a determinant (Icelandic kenniorð, German Bestimmung) which qualifies, or modifies, the meaning of the base-word. The determinant may be a noun used uninflected as the first element in a compound word, with the base-word constituting the second element of the compound word. Alternatively the determinant may be a noun in the genitive case placed before or after the base-word, either directly or separated from the base-word by intervening words.

Thus the base-words in these examples are fákr 'horse' and marr 'steed', the determinants báru 'waves' and gjálfr 'sea'. The unstated noun which the kenning refers to is called its referent, in this case: skip 'ship'.

The base-word of the kenning íss rauðra randa ('icicle of red shields' [SWORD], Einarr Skúlason: Øxarflokkr 9) is íss ('ice, icicle') and the determinant is rǫnd ('rim, shield-rim, shield'). The referent is 'sword'.

In Old Norse poetry, either component of a kenning (base-word, determinant or both) could consist of an ordinary noun or a heiti "poetic synonym". In the above examples, fákr and marr are distinctively poetic lexemes; the normal word for 'horse' in Old Norse prose is hestr.