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Authors: Adam Roberts
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encounter with Christ. The mystery here (which also, I think, galvanises Tolkien’s own creative imagination) is that the fabulous type of Satan can also function as a type of Christ—that evil and good can be reconciled on the largest, spiritual scale. The dragon of which, despite all its instinct towards destruction, only good ultimately comes. The dragon, we might say, as a manifestation of what Graham Greene, in resonant phrase, once called the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.
Tobroaden the discussion a little: in addition to specific poems set out as riddles, Anglo-Saxon poetry is threaded through with
kennings
: a distinctive, circumlocutionary trope that uses figurative and riddling phrases in place of simple indicatives. The
Beowulf
-poet for instance sometimes refers to the sea as ‘the sea’, and sometimes as ‘the whale-road’ or ‘the gannets’-bath’. A kenning might be easily unriddled, particularly if predicated upon the object’s use—an example would be a sword described as ‘a wound-hoe’. Alternatively it might be more oblique and baffling: in
Beowulf
1032 a sword is
fela lafe
, presumably ‘that which the
file left
behind’ when the smith was sharpening it.
The word kenning is originally Old Norse, and comes from the word
kenna
, which means ‘knowledge’. The Modern English verb
to ken
does survives, although in a marginal and dialectic sense (although the phrase
beyond one’s ken
, ‘beyond the scope of one’s knowledge’, contains the word, like a bug in amber, preserved in its original sense). In other words, ‘kennings’ like full riddles are games of knowledge: they ask, in the first sense, ‘do you know what this is?’ and more broadly they open more puzzling questions about the certainty, ground and transparency of all knowledge. Since the pleasure of a kenning is proportionate to its complexity it does not surprise us that Old Norse texts are replete not only with the
kenning
but the
tvíkenning
—the double-kenning. To unpack ‘
grennir gunn-más
’ from the Norse
Glymdrápa
(the phrase means ‘feeder of the war-gull’) we need first to understand that ‘war-gull’ is itself a kenning for ‘raven’. ‘Feeder of ravens’ is a sardonic way of describing a warrior, somebody destined to end up a corpse on the battlefield and eaten by carrion birds. The modern ‘cannon-fodder’ is a similar kenning, although since it has become a phrasal cliché it is likely that few who hear it are moved to decode it
as
a kenning. How far Anglo-Saxon culture similarly took kennings as mere clichés, and how far they functioned as actually estranging mini-riddles, can only be a matter of conjecture. But at least
some
kennings engage the mind in the process of unriddling. When I first learned to ride a motorcycle a medical student friend of mine noticed my crash-helmet in the hallway of the flat we shared and said to me: ‘I see you have become an organ donor.’ This—although I did not then know the word—
was
a kenning, a distant cousin of the ‘feeder of ravens’ sort; for motorcyclists are much more likely to be involved in fatal accidents, and their corpsestherefore are more likely to supply hospital surgeries with young, healthy organs for transplant.
It is a striking thing that, whilst scholars describe kennings as a characteristically common-Germanic business, only Old Norse and Old English poetry contain actual kennings. For our purposes, since these are the two literary and cultural traditions that most directly fed into Tolkien’s own imaginative work, this is relevant; although it raises questions as to why kennings did not appeal more broadly. More, Old English writers do not seem to have been interested in the Norse
tvíkenning
: all Anglo-Saxon kennings are all of the simple two-term form like ‘file-left’ or ‘whale-road’. But we can say that, on the level of word and form, the simple kenning is the bringing together of two terms that
Tobroaden the discussion a little: in addition to specific poems set out as riddles, Anglo-Saxon poetry is threaded through with
kennings
: a distinctive, circumlocutionary trope that uses figurative and riddling phrases in place of simple indicatives. The
Beowulf
-poet for instance sometimes refers to the sea as ‘the sea’, and sometimes as ‘the whale-road’ or ‘the gannets’-bath’. A kenning might be easily unriddled, particularly if predicated upon the object’s use—an example would be a sword described as ‘a wound-hoe’. Alternatively it might be more oblique and baffling: in
Beowulf
1032 a sword is
fela lafe
, presumably ‘that which the
file left
behind’ when the smith was sharpening it.
The word kenning is originally Old Norse, and comes from the word
kenna
, which means ‘knowledge’. The Modern English verb
to ken
does survives, although in a marginal and dialectic sense (although the phrase
beyond one’s ken
, ‘beyond the scope of one’s knowledge’, contains the word, like a bug in amber, preserved in its original sense). In other words, ‘kennings’ like full riddles are games of knowledge: they ask, in the first sense, ‘do you know what this is?’ and more broadly they open more puzzling questions about the certainty, ground and transparency of all knowledge. Since the pleasure of a kenning is proportionate to its complexity it does not surprise us that Old Norse texts are replete not only with the
kenning
but the
tvíkenning
—the double-kenning. To unpack ‘
grennir gunn-más
’ from the Norse
Glymdrápa
(the phrase means ‘feeder of the war-gull’) we need first to understand that ‘war-gull’ is itself a kenning for ‘raven’. ‘Feeder of ravens’ is a sardonic way of describing a warrior, somebody destined to end up a corpse on the battlefield and eaten by carrion birds. The modern ‘cannon-fodder’ is a similar kenning, although since it has become a phrasal cliché it is likely that few who hear it are moved to decode it
as
a kenning. How far Anglo-Saxon culture similarly took kennings as mere clichés, and how far they functioned as actually estranging mini-riddles, can only be a matter of conjecture. But at least
some
kennings engage the mind in the process of unriddling. When I first learned to ride a motorcycle a medical student friend of mine noticed my crash-helmet in the hallway of the flat we shared and said to me: ‘I see you have become an organ donor.’ This—although I did not then know the word—
was
a kenning, a distant cousin of the ‘feeder of ravens’ sort; for motorcyclists are much more likely to be involved in fatal accidents, and their corpsestherefore are more likely to supply hospital surgeries with young, healthy organs for transplant.
It is a striking thing that, whilst scholars describe kennings as a characteristically common-Germanic business, only Old Norse and Old English poetry contain actual kennings. For our purposes, since these are the two literary and cultural traditions that most directly fed into Tolkien’s own imaginative work, this is relevant; although it raises questions as to why kennings did not appeal more broadly. More, Old English writers do not seem to have been interested in the Norse
tvíkenning
: all Anglo-Saxon kennings are all of the simple two-term form like ‘file-left’ or ‘whale-road’. But we can say that, on the level of word and form, the simple kenning is the bringing together of two terms that
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