Viking Kennings: Sources and Corrections

Old Norse court poets seldom gave a thing its plain name. The sea could be "Ymir's blood", after the giant the world was made from; a sword "the fire of the spear-clash"; gold "Sif's hair" or "Freyja's tears". These stand-ins are kennings. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelander writing a handbook for poets in the 1220s, allowed them five layers deep and admitted that the old poets went further. Nearly all of this verse survives only in Icelandic manuscripts written centuries later, but one complete stanza was carved on a runestone on Öland around the year 1000. This page gives the source for every slide, and says plainly what is still uncertain.

Every factual claim in our kennings carousel and in its caption, with its source. Section numbers 01 to 05 match the number at the top of each slide; 07 to 10 are the later slides' places in the carousel. The photograph of the Karlevi stone, on the fifth image, is real. The other pictures are modern illustrations, not finds.

How we cite Snorri. His handbook is the Edda. Its middle part, Skáldskaparmál, "the language of poetry", lists kennings; its last part, Háttatal, "the list of verse-forms", is a long poem with a prose commentary. We read both in Anthony Faulkes's editions for the Viking Society, Skáldskaparmál and Háttatal, and give his chapter and page numbers. The Old Norse text of Skáldskaparmál and Háttatal is also free on heimskringla.no, in an edition that numbers the chapters differently: the sky kennings are its chapter 31 and Faulkes's 23. Unless a published translation is named, the English glosses on this page are ours.

Slide by slide

Cover. Viking poets didn't say "sea". They said "Ymir's blood".

The kenning is the first item in Snorri's own list. Skáldskaparmál ch. 25 (p. 36) asks how the sea should be referred to, and answers: Svá, at kalla hann Ymis blóð, "by calling it Ymir's blood". He then quotes a line by the poet Ormr Barreyjarskáld (verse 123, p. 37): Útan gnýr á eyri Ymis blóð, "Ymir's blood roars in on the gravel bank". Nobody knows when Ormr lived, so the cover rests on Snorri's list, with Ormr's line as an example of it in use.

Why Ymir: in Snorri's account of the creation, Gylfaginning ch. 8, the sons of Borr made the world from the giant's body: af blóði hans sæinn ok vötnin, "from his blood the sea and the lakes", the earth from his flesh, and the sky from his skull. So in Skáldskaparmál ch. 23 (p. 33) the sky is "Ymir's skull", and the eleventh-century poet Arnórr jarlaskáld writes und gömlum ... Ymis hausi, "under Ymir's old skull" (verse 105).

"Didn't say 'sea'" is a headline, not a rule. The poets had plain words for the sea as well, and single poetic words for it, which Snorri calls heiti. What the cover means is that where prose said "sea", a skald could say "Ymir's blood", and some did.

Sources: Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál, ed. A. Faulkes (Viking Society, 1998), ch. 23, p. 33, ch. 25, p. 36, verse 123, p. 37; Snorri, Gylfaginning ch. 8, Old Norse text on heimskringla.no.

01. "The fire of the spear-clash"

The slide's example is Snorri's own. In the commentary to Háttatal (Faulkes 2/10 to 13) he writes: Þat er kenning at kalla fleinbrak orrostu, en þat er tvíkent at kalla fleinbraks fúr sverðit, en þá er rekit ef lengra er. To call battle "spear-clash" is a kenning; to call the sword "fire of the spear-clash" is tvíkent, doubly named; if it goes further, it is rekit, "driven on". A heiti, by contrast, is a single poetic word for the thing itself (Skáldskaparmál ch. 1, p. 5), though Faulkes warns that Snorri does not use his terms with perfect consistency.

The five layers are the ninth of Snorri's poetic licences (Háttatal 8/29 to 31): Níunda er þat at reka til hinnar fimtu kenningar, er ór ættum er ef lengra er rekit; en þótt þat finnisk í fornskálda verka, þá látum vér þat nú ónýtt. The ninth is to drive a kenning on to the fifth element; it is out of proportion if driven further; "and although it is found in the works of the old poets, we no longer allow it". So "admitted the old poets went further" is his own sentence.

"Written in the 1220s": Faulkes dates Háttatal to 1222 to 1223, after Konráð Gíslason; events in it could not have been known in Iceland before the summer of 1222. Snorri was a thirteenth-century Icelander, writing more than a century and a half after the Viking Age. His handbook records the tradition; it is not a Viking Age text.

The record is in Faulkes's note to the same passage: "The longest known kenning in Germanic alliterative poetry is the one with 8 elements in the verse of Þórðr Sjáreksson". The stanza is quoted in Hákonar saga góða ch. 30, from Þórðr's poem about Þórálfr the Strong, who fought beside King Hákon at Fitjar. The kenning, nausta blakks hlé-mána gífrs drífu gim-slöngvir, reads from the inside out: the horse of the boathouses is a ship; the ship's sheltering moon, a shield; the shield's troll-woman, an axe; the axe's snowstorm, battle; the fire of battle, a sword; and the sword's slinger, a warrior. Eight counts hlé-máni as two elements; count it as one and there are seven. The online claim that it comes from Hafgerðingadrápa is wrong.

"Whale-road" is Beowulf, line 10: ofer hron-râde, "over the whale-road", in the Old English text of Harrison and Sharp. The English did it too. Beowulf is an Old English poem, though its story is set among the Danes and the Geats. The Norse built their whale kennings differently: Snorri explains that teigr hvala er sær, "the whales' field is the sea" (p. 63). "Swan-road" (swan-râde, line 200), "bone-house" (bân-hûs, line 2508) and "battle-sweat" (heaðo-swât, line 1460) are Old English too. What sets the skaldic kennings apart is how freely they were varied and stacked.

Sources: Snorri, Háttatal, ed. A. Faulkes, 2nd ed. (Viking Society, 2007), commentary 2/10 to 13 and 8/29 to 31, with the notes and the introduction on dating; Skáldskaparmál ch. 1, p. 5, and p. 63, with Faulkes's introduction, p. xxvi; Heimskringla, Hákonar saga góða ch. 30, Old Norse text on snerpa.is; Beowulf, ed. J.A. Harrison and R. Sharp, ll. 10, 200, 1460, 2508.

02. "The sword of speech"

All four body kennings are in Skáldskaparmál ch. 69 (p. 108), in two sentences: Tennar eru stundum kallaðar grjót eða sker orða, "teeth are sometimes called the gravel or skerries of words", and Tunga er opt kǫlluð sverð máls eða munns, "the tongue is often called the sword of speech, or of the mouth". A skerry is a small rock in the sea. The head is erfiði háls eða byrði, "the toil or burden of the neck"; Snorri adds "Heimdallr's sword", for reasons he does not explain here.

The ship comes with a label: ok ef nýgjǫrvingar eru þá kalla menn munninn skip en varrarnar borðit, tunga rœðit eða stýrit, "and if it is nýgervingar, people call the mouth a ship, the lips its gunwale, and the tongue its oar or rudder". Nýgervingar is an extended metaphor held through a verse, and Snorri praised it (Háttatal 6/20 to 21). What he condemned was switching the picture halfway, a sword first a snake and then a fish: nykrat, a blemish.

This is a thirteenth-century list of what a poet could say. We have not matched each body kenning to a stanza from the Viking Age, which is why the slide says "Snorri's handbook says a poet could call".

Sources: Snorri, Skáldskaparmál ch. 69, p. 108; Háttatal 6/9 to 21, with Faulkes's notes.

03. One night to save his head

The story is in Egils saga, chapters 59 to 61 in the Íslenzk fornrit edition, one number higher in the free text on snerpa.is. Egill is shipwrecked at the mouth of the Humber and learns that his enemy Eirik Bloodaxe rules at York. He rides into the town, finds his friend Arinbjörn, and is brought before the king, who tells him: Áttu engis annars af von en þú munt hér deyja skulu, "you can expect nothing but that you will die here". Queen Gunnhildr wants him killed at once. Arinbjörn answers that náttvíg eru morðvíg, "killings by night are murders", and the king grants Egill the night.

Arinbjörn's plan is a praise poem of twenty stanzas by morning, as his kinsman Bragi once made for a Swedish king "and got his head for it". Around midnight Egill tells him nothing is made, because hefir hér setið svala ein við glugginn og klakað í alla nótt, svo að eg hefi aldregi beðið ró fyrir, "a swallow has sat here at the window and chattered all night, so that I have had no peace for it". Arinbjörn then sits at that window himself, sees a shape-shifter (hamhleypa) go off the other way, and keeps watch there until daylight; once he has taken the bird's place, Egill composes the whole poem. So the swallow twitters at the window until about midnight, and it is Arinbjörn who keeps the window till dawn. The saga gives the bird no motive, so the slide's "to distract him" is our reading of the scene. What the saga implies is sorcery against his composing: the shape-shifter leaves when Arinbjörn sits down at the window, and the saga has already said that Gunnhildr had a spell worked so that Egill would find no rest in Iceland until she saw him. In the morning Egill recites, and the king lets him go. He praises the poem, but says he spares Egill for Arinbjörn's sake and because Egill came into his power of his own will.

The saga was written in Iceland in the thirteenth century, the slide's "1200s", about three hundred years after the events. Its author is unknown; Snorri is often named, but Margaret Cormack argues in Alvíssmál 10 that this "should not be taken for granted". "York, about 950" is our round date for Eirik's years there; the saga gives no year.

The poem is Höfuðlausn, "head-ransom", and it tells a different story. Its first stanza, in Margaret Clunies Ross's edition for the Skaldic Project (archived copy; the live site sits behind a bot check), reads: "I came west over the ocean, and I bear the sea of the mind-beach of Viðrir", that is, of Odin. The mind-beach is the breast, and its sea is poetry, the mead Odin once carried away inside him. "The sea of Odin's breast" is the slide's short form. The stanza goes on: "I launched the oaken ship afloat at the breaking of the ice; I loaded the stern of my merchant ship with a cargo of praise." Stanza 2 adds berk Óðins mjöð á Engla bjöð, "I carry Odin's mead to the land of the English".

Clunies Ross notes that the first stanza "could be understood to indicate that Hfl had already been composed before Egill left Iceland, while the saga has him compose it in one night from scratch at York". The poem sails in spring; the saga's voyage is in autumn and ends in a shipwreck the poem never mentions. Whether the poem is Egill's at all is still argued: Jón Helgason proposed a date around 1160 to 1170, and Clunies Ross leans towards it being genuine. So we call it attributed to Egill. As Faulkes notes, Egill mixes his metaphors in it, in stanzas 8 and 17: the very thing Snorri would later call a blemish.

Sources: Egils saga, Íslenzk fornrit ch. 57 and 59 to 61 (snerpa.is ch. 58 and 60 to 62); M. Clunies Ross (ed.), Egill Skallagrímsson, Höfuðlausn 1, with the introduction, in Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages V (2022), p. 240, read in the Wayback Machine copy; Höfuðlausn, Old Norse text on heimskringla.no, st. 1 and 2; M. Cormack, "Egils saga, Heimskringla, and the Daughter of Eiríkr blóðøx", Alvíssmál 10; Faulkes, Háttatal, note to 6/15 to 16.

04. "The wagon-Odin of Endill's ground"

The stone stands close to the western shore of Öland, near the village of Karlevi, almost certainly where it was first raised. Heather O'Donoghue's study, "The Karlevi runestone" (2023), opens: it "is inscribed with the only known full stanza of Old Norse skaldic verse in Viking Age runes". It "is generally dated to the end of the tenth century, making it the oldest existing record of such verse". The runic record in the Skaldic Project's database (archived copy) dates it "c1000". The stone is grey granite and stands about a metre and a half above the ground.

The kenning is in the second half of the stanza: Munat reið-Viðurr ráða rógstarkr í Danmörku Endils jörmungrundar ørgrandari landi. O'Donoghue's word-for-word version shows how far skaldic word order is from prose: "Will not wagon-Viðurr rule powerful in Denmark Endill's monstrous ground's more unharmful land." She unpacks it: "The name Endill is traditionally included in a list of legendary sea-kings"; his ground is the sea; "Viðurr is a name for Odin, the wagon of the sea is a ship, and the 'Odin' of a ship is the commander of a fleet, or sea warrior". Snorri has the same idea from the other end: a ship may be called the horse or the ski of sea-kings (ch. 51, p. 74).

The prose part of the inscription is damaged; one reading names the dead man as Sibbi the Good, son of Foldarr. The runes are the long-branch Younger Futhark, sometimes called Danish runes, laid out in a Danish style, while the language is "a form of West Scandinavian such as a Norwegian or Icelandic poet might use".

"Almost all other skaldic verse survives only in manuscripts written centuries later" is hers as well: "Skaldic verse has otherwise come down to us in manuscripts written considerably later than the original composition, following a long period of oral transmission." Those manuscripts are Icelandic, and most are two to four hundred years younger than the poems they preserve.

Photo: Peter Rydén, magnificat.se, 25 August 2007, "Karlevistenen.JPG", via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 3.0. Cropped by us, with text added. The caption credits it as "Peter Rydén, magnificat.se, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped".

Sources: H. O'Donoghue, "The Karlevi runestone", Medieval Texts and Contexts 2:1 (2023), CC BY-SA 4.0; Skaldic Project, inscription record Öl 1 (DR 411), Karlevi stone; Snorri, Skáldskaparmál ch. 51, p. 74.

05. "Sif's hair", "Freyja's tears"

Snorri's list of names for gold is Skáldskaparmál ch. 32 (pp. 40 to 41). Among them: Ægir's fire, haddr Sifjar (Sif's hair), Fulla's headband, grátr Freyju (Freyja's weeping), Draupnir's drops, the otter-payment, the seed of Fýrisvellir, and the fire or gleam of the hand. There are more than a dozen, so the slide's "a dozen names" is a round figure on the low side.

Most come with a story, which Snorri goes on to tell. Sif's hair (ch. 35, p. 41): Loki cut off all her hair, and Thor would have broken every bone in him had he not sworn to get the dark elves to make her new hair of gold. Freyja's tears are in Gylfaginning: when her husband Óðr went away, Freyja grætr eftir, en tár hennar er gull rautt, "Freyja weeps for him, and her tears are red gold"; the poet Skúli Þorsteinsson uses Freyju tár (verse 144, p. 43). Ægir's fire, the slide's "fire of the sea" (ch. 33): Ægir, whose name is also a word for the sea, lit his hall for the gods' feast with gleaming gold instead of fire. Fróði's flour (ch. 43): two giantesses ground gold on the mill Grotti for King Fróði, and Egill uses the kenning in Höfuðlausn 17. Kraki's seed (ch. 44, p. 59): chased by the Swedes, King Hrólfr kraki sowed gold along the road across Fýrisvellir, and they jumped from their saddles to pick it up: Af þessi sǫk er gull kallat sáð Kraka eða Fýrisvalla, "for this reason gold is called Kraki's seed or the seed of Fýrisvellir". Not every name has a tale; the gleam of the hand is simply a description, which is why the slide says "most with a story behind them".

Sif's hair is certain as Snorri's kenning. Its use in verse, as "Sif's scalp-ropes", is in the old Bjarkamál, a poem that survives only in fragments and whose date is uncertain.

The ring on the sword is Egils saga ch. 55 (snerpa.is). King Æthelstan tók gullhring af hendi sér, took a large gold ring from his arm, slid it onto his sword blade and reached it across the fire to Egill, who hooked it on his own sword, drew it to him and put it on his arm. It is a thirteenth-century saga's scene, not a record.

Sources: Snorri, Skáldskaparmál ch. 32, pp. 40 to 41; ch. 33, 35, 43 and 44; verse 144, p. 43; Gylfaginning, the list of goddesses (heimskringla.no text); Höfuðlausn st. 17; Egils saga ch. 55 (snerpa.is).

07. Your job as a kenning?

"Shepherd of the Monday storm" for a teacher and "night-warden of the ward" for a nurse are ours, written for the slide; no medieval poet wrote them. They follow the pattern Marold describes for real kennings: a base word ("shepherd") and a determinant that points it at the thing meant ("of the Monday storm"). She counts "about one hundred" things for which such patterns exist in skaldic verse, which helped a trained audience follow them.

Sources: E. Marold, "A modern definition of the kenning", in Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages I (2012), pp. lxx to lxxiii.

08. Your kenning, in runes

"The Younger Futhark had 16 runes": O'Donoghue's Table 1 sets out the sixteen, and calls the Younger Futhark "similar to that found on the Karlevi stone". It is the runic alphabet of Viking Age Scandinavia. The card on the slide writes SKALD, from Old Norse skáld, "poet", in five runes, s k a l t: the Younger Futhark had no rune of its own for d, so the t rune stands in.

Our rune translator writes any word or name in three alphabets; it shows the Elder Futhark first, so choose "Younger" to get the sixteen. It works by sound, letter by letter, but with sixteen runes one rune often stands for several letters, so the result is a transliteration, not the spelling a Viking Age carver would have used. We do not claim that its forms match the runes on the Karlevi stone.

Sources: O'Donoghue 2023, Table 1.

09. "Odin's fires"

The line is Skáldskaparmál ch. 49 (p. 67): Sverð heita Óðins eldar, "swords are called Odin's fires". In the same passage, striking weapons, axes or swords, are called "fires of blood or of wounds". The slide says skalds "rarely" just said "sword", not "never": the poets also had plain and single poetic words for a sword.

The blade is our Raven's Beak seax: a 5.5-inch (140 mm) carbon steel blade, 9.5 inches overall, with a leather-wrapped grip and a cast raven's-head pommel, in a stitched cowhide sheath. ERIKSSON on the slide is only an example. Engraving is optional: you choose the words, and we laser-engrave them to order, letter for letter. In Old Norse the name would be a patronymic, Eiríksson, "son of Eiríkr", not a family surname.

Sources: Snorri, Skáldskaparmál ch. 49, p. 67.

10. "Ring-breaker"

The word is hringbrjótr, in Höfuðlausn 17, the stanza that also has Fróði's flour, where Egill praises the king's open hand. Marold cites it as a kenning for a generous man, and Snorri gives the pattern in prose: Maðr er kallaðr brjótr gullsins, "a man is called the breaker of gold" (ch. 47, p. 62). A lord who "breaks" rings is one who gives them out. The English did it too: Beowulf calls a king beága bryttan, "distributor of rings" (lines 35 and 352).

The piece is our stainless steel wolf arm ring: a twisted bangle of 316L steel with two facing wolf-head ends, adjustable from 18 to 26 cm, so it can be worn on the wrist or higher on the arm. It is a modern piece and copies no particular find. Silver arm rings do turn up in Viking Age hoards: the Terslev hoard in Zealand, buried in the later tenth century, held 6.6 kg of silver, and "The objects are neck and arm rings, chains with toiletry accessories and costume jewellery", in the National Museum of Denmark's words. That is all the slide's "worn on the arm like Norse silver" claims.

Sources: Höfuðlausn st. 17; E. Marold, "Kenning", in Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages I (2012), p. lxx; Snorri, Skáldskaparmál ch. 47, p. 62; Beowulf, ll. 35, 352; National Museum of Denmark, "The silver hoard from Terslev".

Caption. Ymir, the sea, and the whale-road

"In Norse myth the gods built the world from the giant Ymir." Under the cover: Snorri's Gylfaginning ch. 8, where the builders are the sons of Borr, Odin among them. Snorri backs it with a stanza from an older poem: Ór Ymis holdi var jörð of sköpuð, en ór sveita sær, "from Ymir's flesh the earth was made, and the sea from his sweat". Old Norse sveiti could mean blood as well as sweat.

"His listeners knew he meant the sea." Our inference, from how kennings worked. Ormr's line is Snorri's example of "Ymir's blood" in use, and kennings followed fixed patterns, which Marold calls "indispensable to the listener's understanding", so a trained audience could follow them. They were not always easy: in Snorri's own frame story Ægir, hearing the names for poetry, complains: Myrkt þykki mér þat mælt, "I think it obscurely put" (p. 4).

"This was the language of poetry, not of everyday talk." Snorri's own name for the subject, mál skáldskapar, "the language of poetry", and the sagas, where kennings sit inside quoted verses, not in the dialogue. See the first point under "What we do not claim".

"The king whose son he had killed." Earlier in the saga Egill kills Eirik's son Rögnvaldr and his crew at sea off Herdla in Norway (snerpa.is ch. 58). At York, Gunnhildr reminds the king that Egill has killed his friends and kinsmen og þar á ofan son þinn, "and on top of that your son". Eirik's threat, "you will die here", is quoted under 03. The rest of the caption is covered under 01 to 04.

"One complete stanza survives as it was carved." O'Donoghue calls Karlevi "the only known full stanza of Old Norse skaldic verse in Viking Age runes". Hence "complete" in the caption: it does not mean that no other verse was ever carved in runes.

What we do not claim

• That the Vikings spoke in kennings. Snorri frames them as mál skáldskapar, the language of poetry, for young poets and for those who want to understand "what is composed obscurely". In the sagas, kennings sit inside quoted verses, not in the dialogue.
• That every Viking was a poet. Poetry was a named craft, and Snorri speaks of chief poets.
• That "whale-road", "swan-road", "bone-house" or "battle-sweat" are Norse kennings. They are Old English, from Beowulf. Nor that Beowulf has nothing to do with Scandinavia: it is set among Danes and Geats.
• That kennings could have "up to seven" elements, or that the longest is in Hafgerðingadrápa. The longest known has eight, or seven depending on how you count, in Þórðr Sjáreksson's poem about Þórálfr.
• That Snorri was a Viking, or that his handbook is a Viking Age text. He was a thirteenth-century Icelander recording a tradition.
• That the body kennings on 02 are all attested in Viking Age verse. They are Snorri's list of what a poet could say.
• That Egill composed Höfuðlausn in one night. That is the saga's story; the poem itself says he brought it by ship. Nor that the poem is certainly tenth-century: it is attributed to Egill, and a twelfth-century date has been argued.
• That the reading of the Karlevi inscription is certain. The prose part is damaged; the stanza's kennings are interpreted. Nor that Karlevi is the oldest skaldic poem: it is the oldest surviving record of a full stanza, and older poems survive only in later manuscripts.
• That the Karlevi runes are "Swedish runes" carved in a Swedish style. They are the long-branch Younger Futhark, often called Danish runes, laid out in a Danish manner, on a stone that now stands in Sweden.
• That ring-givers broke rings in half to share them. The kenning means a giver of rings; we have not checked the literal story.
• That the job kennings on 07 are medieval. They are ours.
• That the blade, the arm ring or any picture other than the Karlevi photograph copies a Viking find. The engraving is done by laser.

Corrections

None yet. If you find an error, tell us, with a citation.

Frequently asked questions

What is a kenning in Old Norse poetry?

A kenning names a thing through something else, usually in two parts: the sea is "Ymir's blood", a sword "the fire of the spear-clash", gold "Sif's hair". A heiti, by contrast, is a single poetic word for the thing itself. Most of what we know comes from Snorri Sturluson's handbook for poets, written in Iceland in the 1220s.

Is "whale-road" a Viking kenning?

No. "Whale-road" is Old English, from line 10 of Beowulf, and so are "swan-road" and "bone-house". The English did it too. The Norse poets had their own sea kennings, such as "Ymir's blood" and "the whales' field", and they stacked their kennings more freely than the Old English poets.

How long could a kenning be?

Snorri allowed a kenning to run to five elements and admitted that the old poets had gone further. The longest known has eight, or seven depending on how you count, in a verse by Þórðr Sjáreksson: a chain from ship to shield, axe, battle and sword that simply means "warrior".

Did the Vikings speak in kennings?

No. Kennings were the language of poetry, and Snorri wrote his handbook for young poets. In the sagas they appear inside quoted verses, not in everyday dialogue, and even in Snorri's own frame story one listener, Ægir, finds them obscure.