[Bards] Poetic Exercise #7

[snorri at houston.rr.com]

One thing I found about creating kennings is that they are essentially analogies.  For example, in "Song of the Shield Wall" the kenning sea-steed is used in place of the word ship.  The analogy there is ship:sea::steed:road (you'd ride upon a ship on the sea just as you would a steed on a road).

When creating a kenning, it's helpful to graph this analogy out:

ship   sea
steed  road

The kenning here is found by crossing your analogy paths:

ship     sea
     \  /
      \/
      /\ 
steed    road

Thus, a ship is a sea-steed just as the sea is a ship-road.  (The sea-steed, in fact, goes over the swan-road in the song, which just serves to show that kennings can be found in any analogous relationship between words.

Now, the obvious question: "Hey Snorri, if you know about how to make these kennings, where the heck are yours?"  Glad you asked.  (Play along, this is improv here.)  Why, I'm at work , and just found this e-mail on break.  Hopefully I'll have some of my own to contribute later this week when I have time to get creative.


Snorri