The Role of Kenning in IE mythology

An article in two parts explaining the use of metaphor and literary reference instead of proper names in Indo-European legends and poetry. (A contribution to the topic how Gods get their names.)

                                                                              Dublin, December 2012

Part 1:

The Kenning Tradition and Cú Chulainn

Kennings are indirect references to people and things used for poetic or honorific purposes. As such they may be defined as a culturally familiar collocation, based on legendary reference or metaphorical associations or on a combination of both. Using this definition, even what is normally called an epithet can be called a kenning. It is useful, however, to note two different kinds of kenning, as follows:

Typically, a kenning might be based on a reference to a widely known legend and be used instead of the personal name of a hero, an object or place. Thus today reference to a “Giant Killer” would remind us of Jack and the Beanstalk, and could be used instead of the name Jack in a story about Jack's adventures, even if those adventures were thought to take place before he kills the Giant. Interestingly, to a Viking or Icelandic poet “Giant Killer” would have certainly evoked memories of Thor, the thunder god, famed for killing Giants in Nordic sagas. Whether Jack can be said to be a figure connected with, or even derived from Thor is an interesting debate, which we need not go into here, but either way this contrast shows how mythical references require a knowledge of the culture concerned.

Alternatively, a simple kenning might be based on a culturally familiar metaphor, without any need to refer to a legendary story. Typical of this would be the use in Old Irish of Cú (“Hound” or more primitively “Wolf”) to refer to a young warrior, as in the name Cú Chulainn, where the second element, in the genitive case, seems to have referred to a craftsman in woodwork and basket-making, the crafts associated with chariot-making. Thus the combined name would have originally meant “Wolf of the Chariot-maker” = “young chariot-warrior”.

Interestingly, later Gaelic story tellers – who were less familiar with Old Irish naming traditions - felt a need to provide a legendary explanation for the colorful name Cú Chulainn and invented one to suit, replacing the originally familiar metaphor by a reference to a newly-imagined – and later much loved - legend. Reading the name as “The Hound of Culann”, they rationalized a fictive character called Culann, whose “hound” (an actual hunting dog) the young hero accidentally killed and subsequently replaced for a time. Thus a once culturally familiar metaphor of a wolf as a symbol for a young Celtic warrior was changed into a kenning based on a new legend, specially invented for the purpose.

Which came first: the metaphor or the legend?

The case of Cú Chulainn is interesting in that it may be showing us an important cultural change in action, namely the tendency to move from simpler culturally accepted metaphors to more complex legend-based references in early medieval times. Such a transition could follow from, say, the rise of a new order of story-teller or poet, whose job it was to recite exciting legendary deeds. It would also reflect a transition from a society in which wolf-warriors were familiar to one in which they were the stuff of legend.

Thus we may be able to see how kennings evolved from simpler metaphors to more complex literary devices. In the highest development of the art, kennings found in Iceland can be highly complex affairs, combining multiple references and layers of metaphor in a single phrase. The results are often like medieval jewelery, highly ornate and stunning to see.

Allowing for such a complex history, scholars have often differed in how to define a kenning per se. Most would agree that the basic point is that the point of a kenning is that to understand and enjoy it requires knowledge of local culture and its traditions, including mythology and legends. That said, some scholars define kennings in purely linguistic terms as, say, a combination of two or more descriptive elements used in poetry. (See Wikipedia: “Kenning” for a discussion of same.)

Kennings: a north-west Eurpoean tradition or an older Indo-European one?

As said above, the use of complex kennings is associated particularly with Nordic skaldic verse, from which the term comes, and in which the use of kennings became a highly prized stylistic device. More basic kennings are also found in Anglo-Saxon poetry (such as “Heaven's gem” for the sun, or “Swan Road” for the sea!) and in other traditions, but, interestingly, they are not thought to be found – or rarely so at best, in other extant early Germanic verse. Basic kennings are found in the Irish heroic tradition and in Irish bardic verse, and seem to date back to the earliest times.

This geographical contingency has suggested to some academics that there was a north-western regional connection, implying that their development of kennings from metaphorical associations to legendary references and - in the case of Iceland - on to complex literary devices was a localised poetic development, brought about by the often intimate cultural contact between the cultures of the north western islands: Britain, Ireland and Iceland in particular. Celticists naturally suggested that this development started in Old Irish usage, where compound nouns and the use of indirect references were common in literary style from the earliest period, and indeed the modern German penchant for compounding nouns has itself been attributed to the influence of Old Irish lexical patterns on literary German following the Christianisation of the German Tribes, in large measure by Gaelic and British monks.

Whatever the reasons for its local popularity, it is clear from Indo-European studies and from the extensive classical traditions of Greece and India that poetic kennings were widely used in different branches of the Indo-European family of cultures, and experts have reconstructed likely poetic phrases that seem to go back to the earliest level of Indo-European culture. (See the work of Calvert Watkins.) Thus a phrase such as “Earth-ling” (Child of the Earth) or “House of Bone” (the human body, as the dwelling of the human spirit) can be seen as a kenning that has become common cultural stock, surviving across cultures and millennia.

We are thus quite likely faced with an Indo-European poetic tradition that survived – and later flourished - to varying degrees in different daughter cultures, being particularly prevalent in older traditions and in more conservative traditions, such as the peripheral cultures of Ireland, Iceland and India. The decline or later absence of kennings in various traditions can be ascribed to changes in the status and training of poets, resulting from socio-political changes affecting the bardic classes, and/or to changes in the form and style of poetic composition, reflecting changes in the taste, knowledge and expectations of the intended public.

Thus, contemporary poets tend to avoid constructions such as kennings because they are felt to be clichéd and unduly artificial, as much as for the reason that they cannot assume that their public has ready access to a mythic body of tales and stereotyped metaphorical thinking which forms the basis of kenning. Modern kennings could be made, of course, such as “Dolphin of the ethereal Sea” (for web-surfer) but in our open-ended post-traditional culture, it would require considerable talent to use any such constructions in a way that would be considered natural.

It was at heart the closed traditional nature of the Icelandic, Gaelic and Saxon worlds that lent them to the adoption and elevation of these poetic references to create a peculiarly “knotted” art-form, the intellectual equivalent to the glorious decorative traditions of the North-West. When great epic tales were widely told and heroic deeds lauded, the briefest of references could call up a wealth of emotions and proudly proclaim the depth and greatness of the tradition in which one was working. This indeed seems to have been an Indo-European heritage.

                                                                               Part 2 to follow

© Mícheál úa Séaghdha, Dublin 2012