 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (June 2024) |
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 Anglo-Saxon 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.
The meaning of the kenning is known as its referent (in the case of "whale's road", "sea" is the referent). Note that "skyscraper" is not a kenning, as it isn't a circumlocution for a simpler term; it just means "a very tall building".
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.