[Bards] Poetic Exercise #7

[Ulf Gunnarsson]

My apologies for the delays here.  These exercises were meant to run
about a week apart.  If anyone is wonder "Will he EVER stop!?", I plan
on finishing this run with Exercise #10.  So hang in there another month
or so.  On to Exercise #7.


A kenning is an expression made of multiple words used in place of a
single noun.  Kennings are well known mechanisms from Old English and
Norse poetry, though we see them used to a smaller extent in almost all
poetry.  A couple examples would be "horse of the sea" for ship and
"bone house" for body.

As you see, a ship is not a horse, and a body is not a house.  But you
ride both ships and horses, and a body houses bones.  Kennings are a fun
way to call something by a name it is not.

The "whale road" and the "swan road" are fairly obvious kennings for the
sea.  Some kennings, though, take special knowledge.  To refer to mead
as "Kvaesir's blood" would leave the average non-Scandinavian audience
clueless.

Your assignment in this exercise is to come up with kennings for the
following list of 25 words, or as many as you can.

sword
rapier
arrow
Lady
king
queen
crown
battle
blood
warrior
tourney
armor
shield
honor
knight
don
herald
music
bard
beer
wolf
raven
Ansteorra
SCA event
internet

Just to get you started, I'll do a few myself:

arrow - winged snake of battle
shield - the wooden anvil of the sword
don - the sword of the queen
bard - tapster of Odin's gift
wolf - Sigmund's bread and water
internet - time's black hole.

Ulf Gunnarsson