58-569: In early Irish literature, a Bríatharogam ("word ogham", plural Bríatharogaim ) is a two-word kenning which explains the meanings of the names of the letters of the Ogham alphabet. Three variant lists of bríatharogaim or "word-oghams" have been preserved, dating to the Old Irish period. They are as follows: The first two of these are attested from all three surviving copies of the Ogam Tract , while
116-503: A circumlocution for a simpler term; it just means "a very tall building". Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English alliterative 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
174-532: A common parent language . Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate. Cognates are distinguished from loanwords , where a word has been borrowed from another language. The English term cognate derives from Latin cognatus , meaning "blood relative". An example of cognates from
232-425: A base-word (Icelandic stofnorð , German Grundwort ) and a determinant (Icelandic kenniorð , German Bestimmung ) which qualifies, or modifies, the meaning of the base-word. The determinant may be a noun used uninflected as the first element in a compound word, with the base-word constituting the second element of the compound word. Alternatively the determinant may be a noun in the genitive case placed before or after
290-432: A base-word and its genitive determinant, and occasionally between the elements of a compound word ( tmesis ). Kennings, and even whole clauses, can be interwoven. Ambiguity is usually less than it would be if an English text were subjected to the same contortions, thanks to the more elaborate morphology of Old Norse. Another factor aiding comprehension is that Old Norse kennings tend to be highly conventional. Most refer to
348-617: A common origin, but which in fact do not. For example, Latin habēre and German haben both mean 'to have' and are phonetically similar. However, the words evolved from different Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots: haben , like English have , comes from PIE *kh₂pyé- 'to grasp', and has the Latin cognate capere 'to seize, grasp, capture'. Habēre , on the other hand, is from PIE *gʰabʰ 'to give, to receive', and hence cognate with English give and German geben . Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho look similar and have
406-465: A genitive phrase occur too, but rarely: heofones ġim "heaven's gem" = "the sun" (The Phoenix 183). Old English poets often place a series of synonyms in apposition, and these may include kennings (loosely or strictly defined) as well as the literal referent: Hrōðgar maþelode, helm Scyldinga ... " Hrothgar , helm (=protector, lord) of the Scyldings , said ..." (Beowulf 456). Although the word "kenning"
464-511: A horse named Valr, and thus in Old Norse poetry valr is sometimes used to mean "horse". A term may be omitted from a well-known kenning: val-teigs Hildr "hawk-ground's valkyrie /goddess" ( Haraldr Harðráði : Lausavísa 19). The full expression implied here is "goddess of gleam/fire/adornment of ground/land/seat/perch of hawk" = "goddess of gleam of arm" = "goddess of gold" = "lady" (characterised according to convention as wearing golden jewellery,
522-427: A knowledge of specific myths or legends. Thus the sky might be called naturalistically él-ker "squall-vat" (Markús Skeggjason: Eiríksdrápa 3) or described in mythical terms as Ymis haus " Ymir 's skull" ( Arnórr jarlaskáld : Magnúsdrápa 19), referring to the idea that the sky was made out of the skull of the primeval giant Ymir. Still others name mythical entities according to certain conventions without reference to
580-424: A lesser extent, Old English poetry. Snorri's own usage, however, seems to fit the looser sense: "Snorri uses the term 'kenning' to refer to a structural device, whereby a person or object is indicated by a periphrastic description containing two or more terms (which can be a noun with one or more dependent genitives or a compound noun or a combination of these two structures)" (Faulkes (1998 a), p. xxxiv). The term
638-412: A similar meaning, but are not cognates: much is from Proto-Germanic *mikilaz < PIE *meǵ- and mucho is from Latin multum < PIE *mel- . A true cognate of much is the archaic Spanish maño 'big'. Cognates are distinguished from other kinds of relationships. An etymon , or ancestor word, is the ultimate source word from which one or more cognates derive. In other words, it
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#1732869129606696-427: A specific story: rimmu Yggr " Odin of battle" = "warrior" (Arnórr jarlaskáld: Magnúsdrápa 5). Poets in medieval Iceland even treated Christian themes using the traditional repertoire of kennings complete with allusions to heathen myths and aristocratic epithets for saints: Þrúðr falda "goddess of headdresses" = " Saint Catherine " (Kálfr Hallsson: Kátrínardrápa 4). Kennings of the type AB, where B routinely has
754-469: Is cognate with Old English cennan , Old Frisian kenna , kanna , Old Saxon ( ant ) kennian (Middle Dutch and Dutch kennen ), Old High German ( ir- , in- , pi- ) chennan ( Middle High German and German kennen ), Gothic kannjan < Proto-Germanic * kannjanan , originally causative of * kunnanan "to know (how to)", whence Modern English can 'to be able'. The word ultimately derives from *ǵneh₃ ,
812-454: Is íss ('ice, icicle') and the determinant is rǫnd ('rim, shield-rim, shield'). The referent is "sword". In Old Norse poetry, either component of a kenning (base-word, determinant or both) could consist of an ordinary noun or a heiti "poetic synonym". In the above examples, fákr and marr are distinctively poetic lexemes ; the normal word for "horse" in Old Norse prose is hestr . The skalds also employed complex kennings in which
870-467: Is a figure of speech , a figuratively -phrased compound term that is used in place of a simple single-word noun . For instance, the Anglo-Saxon kenning "whale's road" ( hron rade ) means "sea", as does swanrād ("swan's road"). A kenning has two parts: a base-word (also known as a head-word) and a determinant. So in "whale's road", "road" is the base-word, and "whale's" is the determinant. This
928-441: Is a kenning only if it contains an incongruity between the referent and the meaning of the base-word; in the kenning the limiting word is essential to the figure because without it the incongruity would make any identification impossible" (Brodeur (1959) pp. 248–253). Descriptive epithets are a common literary device in many parts of the world, whereas kennings in this restricted sense are a distinctive feature of Old Norse and, to
986-547: Is a kind of redundancy whereby the referent of the whole kenning, or a kenning for it, is embedded: barmi dólg-svölu "brother of hostility-swallow" = "brother of raven" = "raven" (Oddr breiðfirðingr: Illugadrápa 1); blik-meiðendr bauga láðs "gleam-harmers of the land of rings" = "harmers of gleam of arm" = "harmers of ring" = "leaders, nobles, men of social standing (conceived of as generously destroying gold, i.e. giving it away freely)" (Anon.: Líknarbraut 42). While some Old Norse kennings are relatively transparent, many depend on
1044-490: Is a reference to the sport of falconry , where a bird of prey is perched on the arm of the falconer. By convention, "hawk" combined with a term for a geographic feature forms a kenning for "arm." Fýrisvalla fræ , "gold", from " Fýrisvellir ", the plains of the river Fýri, and fræ , "seed." This is an allusion to a legend retold in Skáldskaparmál and Hrólfs saga kraka in which King Hrolf and his men scattered gold on
1102-559: Is an ad hoc usage by a helicopter ambulance pilot: "the Heathrow of hang gliders " for the hills behind Hawes in Yorkshire in England, when he found the air over the emergency site crowded with hang-gliders. Sometimes a name given to one well-known member of a species, is used to mean any member of that species. For example, Old Norse valr means " falcon ", but Old Norse mythology mentions
1160-770: Is certainly applied to non-metaphorical phrases in Skáldskaparmál : En sú kenning er áðr var ritat, at kalla Krist konung manna, þá kenning má eiga hverr konungr. "And that kenning which was written before, calling Christ the king of men, any king can have that kenning. Likewise in Háttatal : Þat er kenning at kalla fleinbrak orrostu [...] "It is a kenning to call battle 'spear-crash' [...]". Snorri's expression kend heiti "qualified terms" appears to be synonymous with kenningar , although Brodeur applies this more specifically to those periphrastic epithets which do not come under his strict definition of kenning. Sverdlov approaches
1218-490: Is embedded in another like this, the whole figure is said to be tvíkent "doubly determined, twice modified". Frequently, where the determinant is itself a kenning, the base-word of the kenning that makes up the determinant is attached uninflected to the front of the base-word of the whole kenning to form a compound word: mög-fellandi mellu "son-slayer of giantess" = "slayer of sons of giantess" = "slayer of giants" = "the god Thor " ( Steinunn Refsdóttir : Lausavísa 2). If
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#17328691296061276-540: Is extending a kenning to the fifth determinant, but it is out of proportion if it is extended further. Even if it can be found in the works of ancient poets, we no longer tolerate it." The longest kenning found in skaldic poetry occurs in Hafgerðingadrápa by Þórðr Sjáreksson and reads nausta blakks hlé-mána gífrs drífu gim-slöngvir "fire-brandisher of blizzard of ogress of protection-moon of steed of boat-shed", which simply means "warrior". Word order in Old Norse
1334-575: Is not often used for non-Germanic languages, a similar form can be found in Biblical poetry in its use of parallelism . Some examples include Genesis 49:11, in which "blood of grapes" is used as a kenning for "wine", and Job 15:14, where "born of woman" is a parallel for "man". Figures of speech similar to kennings occur in Modern English (both in literature and in regular speech), and are often found in combination with other poetic devices. For example,
1392-492: Is regular. Paradigms of conjugations or declensions, the correspondence of which cannot be generally due to chance, have often been used in cognacy assessment. However, beyond paradigms, morphosyntax is often excluded in the assessment of cognacy between words, mainly because structures are usually seen as more subject to borrowing. Still, very complex, non-trivial morphosyntactic structures can rarely take precedence over phonetic shapes to indicate cognates. For instance, Tangut ,
1450-406: Is the same structure as in the modern English term " skyscraper "; the base-word here would be "scraper", and the determinant "sky". In some languages, kennings can recurse , with one element of the kenning being replaced by another kenning. The meaning of the kenning is known as its referent (in the case of "whale's road", "sea" is the referent). Note that "skyscraper" is not a kenning, as it isn't
1508-477: Is the source of related words in different languages. For example, the etymon of both Welsh ceffyl and Irish capall is the Proto-Celtic * kaballos (all meaning horse ). Descendants are words inherited across a language barrier, coming from a particular etymon in an ancestor language. For example, Russian мо́ре and Polish morze are both descendants of Proto-Slavic * moře (meaning sea ). A root
1566-444: Is the source of related words within a single language (no language barrier is crossed). Similar to the distinction between etymon and root , a nuanced distinction can sometimes be made between a descendant and a derivative . A derivative is one of the words which have their source in a root word, and were at some time created from the root word using morphological constructs such as suffixes, prefixes, and slight changes to
1624-822: Is well-intentioned, but it remains idiosyncratic to the point of absurdity. Steinbeck invented compound phrases (similar to the Old English use of kennings), such as 'wife-loss' and 'friend-right' and 'laughter-starving,' that simply seem eccentric." Kennings remain somewhat common in German ( Drahtesel "wire-donkey" for bicycle, Feuerstuhl "fire-chair" for motorcycle, Stubentiger "chamber-tiger" for cat, and so on). The poet Seamus Heaney regularly employed kennings in his work; for example, 'bone-house' for "skeleton". Cognate In historical linguistics , cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in
1682-584: The Madness song " The Sun and the Rain " contains the line "standing up in the falling-down", where "the falling-down" refers to rain and is used in juxtaposition to "standing up". Some recent English writers have attempted to use approximations of kennings in their work. John Steinbeck used kenning-like figures of speech in his 1950 novella Burning Bright , which was adapted into a Broadway play that same year. According to Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini , "The experiment
1740-789: The Paraguayan Guarani panambi , the Eastern Bolivian Guarani panapana , the Cocama and Omagua panama , and the Sirionó ana ana are cognates, derived from the Old Tupi panapana , 'butterfly', maintaining their original meaning in these Tupi languages . Cognates need not have the same meaning, as they may have undergone semantic change as the languages developed independently. For example English starve and Dutch sterven 'to die' or German sterben 'to die' all descend from
1798-545: The jǫtnar . The practice of forming kennings has traditionally been seen as a common Germanic inheritance, but this has been disputed since, among the early Germanic languages, their use is largely restricted to Old Norse and Old English poetry. A possible early kenning for "gold" ( walha-kurna "Roman/Gallic grain") is attested in the Proto-Norse runic inscription on the Tjurkö (I)-C bracteate . Kennings are virtually absent from
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1856-545: The " Cú Chulainn " version is not in the Book of Ballymote and only known from 16th- and 17th-century manuscripts. The Auraicept na n-Éces or 'Scholars' Primer' reports and interprets the Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín . Later Medieval scholars believed that all of the letter names were those of trees, and attempted to explain the bríatharogaim in that light. However, modern scholarship has shown that only eight at most of
1914-706: The Proto-Indo-European *nókʷts 'night'. The Indo-European languages have hundreds of such cognate sets, though few of them are as neat as this. The Arabic سلام salām , the Hebrew שלום shalom , the Assyrian Neo-Aramaic shlama and the Amharic selam 'peace' are cognates, derived from the Proto-Semitic *šalām- 'peace'. The Brazilian Portuguese panapanã , (flock of butterflies in flight),
1972-487: The arm-kenning being a reference to falconry ). The poet relies on listeners' familiarity with such conventions to carry the meaning. Some scholars take the term kenning broadly to include any noun-substitute consisting of two or more elements, including merely descriptive epithets (such as Old Norse grand viðar "bane of wood" = "fire" (Snorri Sturluson: Skáldskaparmál 36)), while others would restrict it to metaphorical instances (such as Old Norse sól húsanna "sun of
2030-434: The base-word, either directly or separated from the base-word by intervening words. Thus the base-words in these examples are fákr "horse" and marr "steed", the determinants báru "waves" and gjálfr "sea". The unstated noun which the kenning refers to is called its referent, in this case: skip "ship". The base-word of the kenning "íss rauðra randa" ('icicle of red shields' [SWORD], Einarr Skúlason : Øxarflokkr 9)
2088-444: The characteristic A and thus this AB is tautological, tend to mean "like B in that it has the characteristic A", e.g. "shield- Njörðr ", tautological because the god Njörðr by nature has his own shield, means "like Njörðr in that he has a shield", i.e. "warrior". A modern English example is " painted Jezebel " as a disapproving expression for a woman too fond of using cosmetics. Kennings may include proper names. A modern example of this
2146-402: The determinant, or sometimes the base-word, is itself made up of a further kenning: grennir gunn-más "feeder of war-gull" = "feeder of raven " = "warrior" ( Þorbjörn Hornklofi : Glymdrápa 6); eyðendr arnar hungrs "destroyers of eagle's hunger" = "feeders of eagle" = "warrior" (Þorbjörn Þakkaskáld: Erlingsdrápa 1) (referring to carrion birds scavenging after a battle). Where one kenning
2204-519: The earth." The kennings are: Ullr ... ímunlauks , "warrior", from Ullr , the name of a god, and ímun-laukr , "sword" (literally "war-leek"). By convention, the name of any god can be associated with another word to produce a kenning for a certain type of man; here "Ullr of the sword" means "warrior." "War-leek" is a kenning for "sword" that likens the shape of the sword to that of a leek. The warrior referred to may be King Harald. Hauka fjöllum , "arms", from hauka "hawk" and fjöll mountain. This
2262-449: The figure comprises more than three elements, it is said to be rekit "extended". Kennings of up to seven elements are recorded in skaldic verse. Snorri himself characterises five-element kennings as an acceptable license but cautions against more extreme constructions: 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 [license]
2320-622: The following dróttkvætt stanza, the Norwegian skald Eyvindr skáldaspillir (d. ca 990) compares the greed of King Harald Greycloak (Old Norse: Haraldr ) to the generosity of his predecessor, Haakon the Good ( Hákon ): Bárum, Ullr, of alla, ímunlauks, á hauka fjöllum Fýrisvalla fræ Hákonar ævi; nú hefr fólkstríðir Fróða fáglýjaðra þýja meldr í móður holdi mellu dolgs of folginn —Eyvindr skáldaspillir, Lausavísa A literal translation reveals several kennings: " Ullr of
2378-420: The hard feet of the hilt (sword blades)" ( Eyvindr Skáldaspillir : Hákonarmál 6); svarraði sárgymir á sverða nesi "wound-sea (=blood) sprayed on headland of swords (=shield)" (Eyvindr Skáldaspillir: Hákonarmál 7). Snorri calls such examples nýgervingar and exemplifies them in verse 6 of his Háttatal. The effect here seems to depend on an interplay of more or less naturalistic imagery and jarring artifice. But
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2436-468: The houses" = "fire" (Snorri Sturluson: Skáldskaparmál 36)), specifically those where "[t]he base-word identifies the referent with something which it is not, except in a specially conceived relation which the poet imagines between it and the sense of the limiting element'" (Brodeur (1959) pp. 248–253). Some even exclude naturalistic metaphors such as Old English forstes bend "bond of frost" = "ice" or winter-ġewǣde "winter-raiment" = "snow": "A metaphor
2494-521: The language of the Xixia Empire, and one Horpa language spoken today in Sichuan , Geshiza, both display a verbal alternation indicating tense, obeying the same morphosyntactic collocational restrictions. Even without regular phonetic correspondences between the stems of the two languages, the cognatic structures indicate secondary cognacy for the stems. False cognates are pairs of words that appear to have
2552-562: The letter names are those of trees, and that the word-oghams or kennings themselves support this. The kennings as edited (in normalized Old Irish) and translated by McManus (1988) are as follows: Of the forfeda , four are glossed by the Auraicept, ebhadh with crithach "aspen", oir with feorus no edind "spindle-tree or ivy", uilleand with edleand "honeysuckle", and iphin with spinan no ispin "gooseberry or thorn". Kenning A kenning ( Icelandic : [cʰɛnːiŋk] )
2610-509: 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 . The corresponding modern verb to ken survives in Scots and English dialects and in general English through the derivative existing in the standard language in
2668-652: The picture of the battle being described" (Faulkes (1997), pp. 8–9). Snorri draws the line at mixed metaphor, which he terms nykrat "made monstrous" (Snorri Sturluson: Háttatal 6), and his nephew called the practice löstr "a fault" ( Óláfr hvítaskáld : Third Grammatical Treatise 80). In spite of this, it seems that "many poets did not object to and some must have preferred baroque juxtapositions of unlike kennings and neutral or incongruous verbs in their verses" (Foote & Wilson (1970), p. 332). E.g. heyr jarl Kvasis dreyra "listen, earl, to Kvasir 's blood (=poetry)" ( Einarr skálaglamm : Vellekla 1). Sometimes there
2726-455: The plains ( vellir ) of the river Fýri south of Gamla Uppsala to delay their pursuers. Fróða fáglýjaðra þýja meldr , "flour of Fróði's hapless slaves", is another kenning for "gold." It alludes to the Grottasöngr legend. Móður hold mellu dolgs , "flesh of the mother of the enemy of the giantess." "earth." Here the earth is personified as the goddess Jörð , mother of Thor , enemy of
2784-527: The question from a morphological standpoint. Noting that the modifying component in Germanic compound words can take the form of a genitive or a bare root, he points to behavioural similarities between genitive determinants and the modifying element in regular Old Norse compound words, such as the fact that neither can be modified by a free-standing (declined) adjective. According to this view, all kennings are formally compounds, notwithstanding widespread tmesis. In
2842-983: The same Indo-European root are: night ( English ), Nacht ( German ), nacht ( Dutch , Frisian ), nag ( Afrikaans ), Naach ( Colognian ), natt ( Swedish , Norwegian ), nat ( Danish ), nátt ( Faroese ), nótt ( Icelandic ), noc ( Czech , Slovak , Polish ), ночь, noch ( Russian ), ноќ, noć ( Macedonian ), нощ, nosht ( Bulgarian ), ніч , nich ( Ukrainian ), ноч , noch / noč ( Belarusian ), noč ( Slovene ), noć ( Serbo-Croatian ), nakts ( Latvian ), naktis ( Lithuanian ), nos ( Welsh/Cymraeg ), νύξ, nyx ( Ancient Greek ), νύχτα / nychta ( Modern Greek ), nakt- ( Sanskrit ), natë ( Albanian ), nox , gen. sg. noctis ( Latin ), nuit ( French ), noche ( Spanish ), nochi ( Extremaduran ), nueche ( Asturian ), noite ( Portuguese and Galician ), notte ( Italian ), nit ( Catalan ), nuet/nit/nueit ( Aragonese ), nuèch / nuèit ( Occitan ) and noapte ( Romanian ). These all mean 'night' and derive from
2900-452: The same Proto-Germanic verb, *sterbaną 'to die'. Cognates also do not need to look or sound similar: English father , French père , and Armenian հայր ( hayr ) all descend directly from Proto-Indo-European *ph₂tḗr . An extreme case is Armenian երկու ( erku ) and English two , which descend from Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁ ; the sound change *dw > erk in Armenian
2958-408: The same Proto-Indo-European root that yields Modern English know , Latin -derived terms such as cognition and ignorant , and Greek gnosis . Old Norse kennings take the form of a genitive phrase ( báru fákr "wave's horse" = "ship" ( Þorbjörn Hornklofi : Glymdrápa 3)) or a compound word ( gjálfr-marr "sea-steed" = "ship" (Anon.: Hervararkviða 27)). The simplest kennings consist of
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#17328691296063016-693: The same small set of topics, and do so using a relatively small set of traditional metaphors. Thus a leader or important man will be characterised as generous, according to one common convention, and called an "enemy of gold", "attacker of treasure", "destroyer of arm-rings ", etc. and a friend of his people. Nevertheless, there are many instances of ambiguity in the corpus, some of which may be intentional, and some evidence that, rather than merely accepting it from expediency, skalds favoured contorted word order for its own sake. Kennings could be developed into extended, and sometimes vivid, metaphors: tröddusk törgur fyr [...] hjalta harðfótum "shields were trodden under
3074-528: The set expression beyond one's ken , "beyond the scope of one's knowledge" and in the phonologically altered forms uncanny , "surreal" or "supernatural", and canny , "shrewd", "prudent". Modern Scots retains (with slight differences between dialects) tae ken "to know", kent "knew" or "known", Afrikaans ken "be acquainted with" and "to know" and kennis "knowledge". Old Norse kenna ( Modern Icelandic kenna , Swedish känna , Danish kende , Norwegian kjenne or kjenna )
3132-452: The simple type, possessing just two elements. Examples for "sea": seġl-rād "sail-road" ( Beowulf 1429 b), swan-rād "swan-road" (Beowulf 200 a), bæð-weġ "bath-way" (Andreas 513 a), hron-rād "whale-road" (Beowulf 10), hwæl-weġ "whale-way" ( The Seafarer 63 a). Most Old English examples take the form of compound words in which the first element is uninflected: "heofon-candel" "sky-candle" = "the sun" (Exodus 115 b). Kennings consisting of
3190-428: The skalds were not averse either to arbitrary, purely decorative, use of kennings: "That is, a ruler will be a distributor of gold even when he is fighting a battle and gold will be called the fire of the sea even when it is in the form of a man's arm-ring on his arm. If the man wearing a gold ring is fighting a battle on land the mention of the sea will have no relevance to his situation at all and does not contribute to
3248-641: The surviving corpus of continental West Germanic verse; the Old Saxon Heliand contains only one example: lîk-hamo "body-raiment" = "body" (Heliand 3453 b), a compound which, in any case, is normal in West Germanic and North Germanic prose ( Old English līchama , Old High German lîchamo , lîchinamo , Dutch lichaam , Old Icelandic líkamr , líkami , Old Swedish līkhamber , Swedish lekamen , Danish and Norwegian Bokmål legeme , Norwegian Nynorsk lekam ). Old English kennings are all of
3306-399: The war- leek ! We carried the seed of Fýrisvellir on our hawk-mountains during all of Haakon's life; now the enemy of the people has hidden the flour of Fróði 's hapless slaves in the flesh of the mother of the enemy of the giantess. " This could be paraphrased as "O warrior, we carried gold on our arms during all of King Haakon's life; now the enemy of the people has hidden gold in
3364-502: Was generally much freer than in Modern English because Old Norse and Old English are synthetic languages , where added prefixes and suffixes to the root word (the core noun, verb, adjective or adverb) carry grammatical meanings, whereas Middle English and Modern English use word order to carry grammatical information, as analytic languages . This freedom is exploited to the full in skaldic verse and taken to extremes far beyond what would be natural in prose. Other words can intervene between
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