Anyone reading Old Norse praise poetry for the first time runs into phrases like “steed of the wave”, “ice of red shield-rims” or “feeder of the war-gull”. They mean a ship, a sword and a warrior. Such roundabout names are called kennings (Old Norse plural kenningar), and they are the most striking tool of the skalds, the court poets of Scandinavia and Iceland between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. This article explains how a kenning is built, what Snorri Sturluson wrote about them in the thirteenth century, which myths lie behind the best-known images and how to decode a stanza step by step. Along the way there are a dozen examples to guess, a look at the plain counterpart, the heiti, and at Old English poetry, which is where the famous “whale-road” really belongs.
A kenning replaces an ordinary word with a descriptive phrase of at least two parts. The first part, the base word, names something other than what is meant: a tree, a horse, a fire. The second part, the determinant, puts the listener back on the right track. “Tree” on its own is a tree. “Tree of weapons” is a man, more precisely a warrior, standing upright among spears and swords like a trunk in a forest. Likewise “horse of the wave” is a ship, because it carries its rider across the water.
The appeal lies in the tension between the parts. The base word does not fit; the determinant makes it fit. The answer almost always comes from the warrior’s hall: ship, sword, shield, gold, battle, blood, warrior, ruler, poetry, sky, sea and the gods themselves.
The word comes from the Old Norse verb kenna, “to mark, to recognise, to name”, related to English “ken”. In 1921 the German scholar Rudolf Meissner published “Die Kenningar der Skalden”, the catalogue that is still the standard reference, with thousands of examples arranged by meaning.
A kenning is not a free metaphor invented afresh by each poet. It follows patterns. There were dozens of base words for the sea and just as many for gold. The court metre dróttkvætt demands six syllables per line, alliteration and internal rhyme, and a poet with twenty ways to say “gold” found the word with the right initial sound more easily. Kennings also lent splendour, challenged the audience and carried knowledge: anyone who understood “Sif’s hair” knew the story behind it.
Our most important guide is an Icelander who was a skald himself: Snorri Sturluson (1178/79–1241). His so-called Prose Edda, written around 1220 to 1230, is at heart a textbook for young poets. Its second part, Skáldskaparmál (“the language of poetry”), is framed as a conversation between the sea giant Ægir and the god of poetry Bragi. Between Bragi’s answers stand hundreds of quotations from older skalds that would otherwise be lost.
Snorri arranges the material under questions such as “How shall the sky be referred to?” and then gives lists. For the sky he offers “Ymir’s skull”, “burden of the dwarfs” and “helmet of Vestri, Austri, Suðri and Norðri”, the four dwarfs who hold up the sky at its corners. Anthony Faulkes, editor of the standard edition, points out that Snorri traces almost every kenning back to a narrative. That is Snorri’s method, not proof that every kenning arose from a myth.
At the very start of the conversation Bragi divides poetry into two areas, mál ok hættir, “language and metres”. Language in turn has three kinds. This passage is the starting point of all later teaching about kennings:
“The third kind of poetic language is the one that is called kenning, and this kind is arranged like this: we name Odin or Thor or Týr or one of the Æsir or elves, and to each of them that I name I add a term for something belonging to another of the Æsir, or I mention some of his deeds. Then the latter receives the name, and not the one who was named. Just as we say Victory-Týr or Týr of the Hanged or Týr of Cargoes: that is then a name of Odin, and we call that a qualified name. Likewise if one says Týr of the Wagon.”
Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál, section “Einkenni skáldskapar” (Old Norse text as on heimskringla.no, ch. 7 there); my own translation from Old Norse
Before this Snorri names the other two kinds: “to name each thing as it is called”, and fornǫfn, literally “fore-names”, substitute names. He also speaks of kent heiti, “qualified terms”, as opposed to ókend heiti, plain single words. Faulkes stresses that Snorri’s technical terms overlap and do not form a tidy system.
In the third part of his Edda, Háttatal (“list of verse forms”), Snorri gives a brief ladder. Kennings, he says, are distinguished in three ways: “first they are called kennings, second tvíkennt, third rekit”. His example: it is a kenning to call battle fleinbrak, “spear-clash”. It is tvíkennt, “doubly determined”, to call the sword fleinbraks fúr, “fire of the spear-clash”. And it is rekit, “extended”, “if it is longer”.
The principle is simple: every part of a kenning can itself be replaced by a kenning. “Fire of battle” (sword) becomes “fire of the spear-clash” because “spear-clash” stands for battle. An example appears in the refrain of the Ragnarsdrápa by Bragi Boddason, the oldest skald whose verses survive. He gives thanks for Ræs reiðar máni, the “moon of Rær’s chariot”. Rær is a sea-king, his chariot is the ship, and the moon of the ship is the round shield on its side. What is meant is a painted shield that a lord named Ragnarr had given the poet.
According to the usual account, Snorri still accepted up to five elements; beyond that, the image falls apart. The longest known chain, a seven-part kenning for a warrior, is ascribed to Þórðr Sjáreksson. The great majority of kennings have two or three parts.
The following examples are attested in Snorri’s textbook, in surviving skaldic stanzas or in the scholarly literature. Read the phrase first and think before looking at the solution. The trick is always the same: ask what resembles the base word but belongs to the determinant.
No object has as many kennings as gold. A ruler was praised above all for giving gold away, and the poet constantly needed new words for it. Snorri lists, among others, “Ægir’s fire”, “foliage of Glasir”, “Sif’s hair”, “Fulla’s headband”, “Freyja’s weeping”, “seed of Fýrisvellir” and “otter-payment”.
Snorri explains “Ægir’s fire” with a feast: when the gods were guests of the sea giant Ægir, he had shining gold brought into the hall, and it gave light instead of a fire. Since Ægir embodies the sea, gold can also be “fire of the waves”. “Sif’s hair” goes back to the tale in which Loki cut off the hair of the goddess Sif and dwarfs forged her new hair of gold; Faulkes notes that this story has no surviving parallel outside Snorri. “Freyja’s weeping” alludes to the golden tears Freyja shed for her husband Óðr. The “seed of Fýrisvellir” comes from the legend of King Hrólfr kraki, who scattered gold over the plain near Uppsala while fleeing, so that his pursuers would stop to pick it up.
Then there is “Fróði’s meal”: in the poem Grottasǫngr the giant maids Fenja and Menja grind gold for King Fróði on a magic mill. Eyvindr skáldaspillir combines two of these images in a well-known stanza, the “seed of Fýrisvellir” and the “meal of Fróði’s maids”, to complain that in a time of famine no gold is to be seen.
A second large group of kennings comes from the creation myth. According to Gylfaginning, the first part of Snorri’s Edda, Odin and his brothers killed the primeval giant Ymir and built the world from his body: the earth from his flesh, the sea from his blood, the mountains from his bones, the sky from his skull.
This produces kennings that only make sense if you know the myth. “Ymir’s skull” is the sky, “Ymir’s blood” the sea. For the earth there is also a detour via Thor, whose mother is called Jǫrð, “Earth”. In the same famine stanza Eyvindr calls the ground “flesh of the mother of the giantess’s enemy”: the giantess’s enemy is Thor, his mother is Jǫrð, her flesh is the earth.
For the sea Snorri also lists “husband of Rán”, “father of Ægir’s daughters” and “land of Rán and of Ægir’s daughters”. The nine daughters bear names for waves, among them Bylgja (“billow”), Bára (“wave”) and Hrǫnn (“breaker”).
The skalds liked nothing better than talking about their own craft, and in kennings poetry is almost always a drink. Snorri tells the story at length. From the spittle of the Æsir and Vanir the wise Kvasir is created. Two dwarfs kill him, mix his blood with honey and brew a mead that turns anyone who drinks it into a poet. Odin later steals it from the giant Suttungr in the shape of an eagle.
From this follows a whole series of phrases that Snorri lists: “Kvasir’s blood”, “ship of the dwarfs”, “mead of the dwarfs”, “mead of the giants”, “Suttungr’s mead”, “Odin’s mead”, “mead of the Æsir”. The “ship of the dwarfs” looks odd at first. Faulkes explains it through a pun: Old Norse líð can mean both “drink” and “ship”, and Snorri himself points out the double sense.
Skalds liked to put these images at the start of a poem. Egill Skallagrímsson opens his Hǫfuðlausn (“Head-ransom”) with the image of carrying “Odin’s mead” across the sea to England. Einarr skálaglamm begins his Vellekla by asking the earl to listen to “Kvasir’s blood”. Scholars like to cite this line because the idea of “hearing” blood does not quite fit. The kenning was evidently so fixed that nobody saw the picture behind it any more.
The vocabulary of war is the second big block. Battle appears as the noise, storm or weather of weapons: “spear-clash”, “spear-storm”, “Odin’s storm”. The sword is “fire of battle” or, by way of blood, “wound-fire” (ben-fúrr), because it gleams in the wound like a flame. It is “ice of shield-rims”, because it is cold and bright.
The raven, companion of every battlefield, is called the “war-gull” or the “swallow of strife”, and that produces one of the most common warrior kennings: the “feeder of the raven”. Hence the raven in the North and its remarkable career in poetry.
For the man himself there are two basic patterns. The first is the tree: Snorri says explicitly that skalds named a man after trees, such as “ash”, “maple” or “grove”, and combined this base word with weapons, gold or ships. A “tree of the sword” is a warrior, a “tree of gold” a wealthy man. The second pattern is the god: a god’s name serves as base word and a determinant is added. “Odin of battle” is a warrior, and so is “Njǫrðr of the shield”. Women are described in the same way as goddesses with words for jewellery or clothing.
Snorri starts his lists with the gods. Thor should be called “son of Odin and Jǫrð, husband of Sif, stepfather of Ullr, wielder and owner of Mjǫllnir, defender of Ásgarðr and Miðgarðr, slayer of giants and troll-women, killer of Hrungnir, enemy of the Midgard Serpent” and so on. Each of these phrases is a kenning for Thor, and most point to a known story. The Thor’s hammer is therefore not only an amulet but also a marker in language.
With Loki things get nastier: he is “father of the Fenris Wolf and the Midgard Serpent” and “thief of the giants”. For Odin the principle from the quotation above applies: “Týr of the Hanged” means Odin, Týr being used here almost as a common noun for “god”. The god of the hanged is the lord of the gallows, the one who himself hung on the tree.
An early example is Haustlǫng by Þjóðólfr of Hvinir, who around 900 described a painted shield given to him by a man named Þorleifr. It showed the abduction of Iðunn by the giant Þjazi and Thor’s duel with Hrungnir. There Thor is called “Meili’s brother” and “Ullr’s stepfather”, Loki “the wolf’s father”, among other names. Without knowing these family ties, the stanzas remain obscure.
Because kennings stored knowledge, the pagan images survived the conversion. Christian skalds kept “Ymir’s skull” and “Odin’s mead” and even gave saints goddess names: Saint Catherine became “Þrúðr of headdresses”. Snorri wrote expressly for young poets who wanted to understand the old poems.
A stanza from Egils saga (chapter 55) shows how laborious, and how rewarding, the reading can be. After a battle in which his brother has fallen, Egill sits grimly in the hall of the English king Aðalsteinn (Æthelstan). The king holds out a gold arm-ring to him across the fire on the point of his sword. Egill takes it with his own sword, slips it onto his arm and speaks a stanza. Its first half reads:
Hrammtangar lætr hanga / hrynvirgil mér brynju / Hǫðr á hauki troðnum / heiðis vingameiði.
The first step is to undo the word order that the metre has scrambled: Hǫðr brynju lætr hrynvirgil hrammtangar hanga mér á hauki troðnum heiðis vingameiði. The second step is to solve the kennings one by one. “Hǫðr of the mail-coat” is a god plus a word for armour, so a warrior, here the king. “Jingling rope of the paw-tongs” is a ring: the paw-tongs are the grasping hand, and what winds jingling around it is the arm-ring. “Hawk-trodden swinging tree of the falcon” is the arm on which the hunting bird perches. The third step is the plain text: “The warrior lets the ring hang on my arm.”
The second half of the stanza adds another warrior kenning (“feeder of the battle-hawk”) and further phrases whose resolution differs between editions. Whether Egill really spoke the verse in this way cannot be proved. The saga was written about three centuries later, and the authenticity of his stanzas is disputed.
Alongside kennings there is a second group of poetic words, the heiti (singular and plural alike, “name, term”). A heiti is a single word used in poetry in place of the everyday word, without paraphrase and without a puzzle. In prose a horse was hestr; in verse it was often jór. The everyday sword was sverð; in a poem it could be mækir or hjǫrr. For the sea a poet could say salt, for men fírar or gotnar, originally the name of the Goths.
Heiti are often old words that had died out in everyday speech, sometimes loanwords such as sinjór, “lord”, from Latin senior. The by-names of the gods form a special group. Odin bears dozens: Grímnir (“the masked one”), Fjǫlnir, Viðrir, Yggr and many more. Such a name is a heiti, but it can serve as the base word of a kenning.
Snorri collected these words. At the end of Skáldskaparmál stand the þulur, mnemonic verses that do nothing but list names: for giants, swords, ships, horses, waves. Further Old Norse terms are explained in the glossary of terms.
The best-known textbook example is not Norse at all: the “whale-road” for the sea is Old English. Line 10 of Beowulf says that the peoples “over the whale-road” (ofer hronrāde) had to obey King Scyld. In line 200 the hero sails over the “swan-road” (swanrād), and line 1429 speaks of the “sail-road” (seglrād). The form hwælweg, literally “whale-way”, occurs in the Old English poem The Seafarer (line 63). I am not aware of an Old Norse equivalent “hvalvegr” as an established kenning.
Other well-known examples from Beowulf are bānhūs, “bone-house”, for the body (line 2508) and beadolēoma, “battle-light”, for the flashing sword (line 1523). The Beowulf glossary compares the latter with Old Norse gunnlogi, “battle-flame”. The difference is still clear: Old English kennings are almost always simple compounds of two parts. Nested chains like “moon of Rær’s chariot” do not occur in Old English poetry, and myths play a far smaller part.
Is the plural kennings or kenningar? Both. Kenningar is the Old Norse plural, kennings the usual English one. The word goes back to the verb kenna, “to mark, to recognise”.
What is the difference between a kenning and a heiti? A kenning is a paraphrase of at least two parts (“steed of the wave” for ship). A heiti is a single poetic word used instead of the everyday word (jór instead of hestr for horse).
What does “Ymir’s skull” mean? The sky. According to the creation myth, the gods made the vault of heaven from the skull of the primeval giant Ymir. “Ymir’s blood” accordingly is the sea.
Why is gold called “Ægir’s fire”? Snorri relates that the sea giant Ægir lit his hall with shining gold instead of fire at a feast for the gods. Since Ægir stands for the sea, gold can also be “fire of the waves”.
Where can I look up kennings? In Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál, available in English in Anthony Faulkes’s translation, and in Rudolf Meissner’s catalogue (1921). For individual stanzas the international project “Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages” offers texts with resolved kennings.
Egill Skallagrímsson · Bragi – god of poetry · Snorri Sturluson · Skål! Meaning, Origin and the Myth of the Viking Skull Cup · Old Norse Terms.
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