Kennings

Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse–Icelandic and Old Englishalliterative 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.