The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English by Hana Videen. Princeton University Press, 2022, $19.95 (cloth).
WHEN MY brother was a toddler, he coined three phrases that have lodged themselves into my family’s private vocabulary where, more than twenty years on, they are still in use: “scooperdumper” for a backhoe, “bird-bee” for the hummingbird moth, and “group-fruit” for the kind of single-serving mixed fruit jam that bears an illustrated cluster of fruits on its foil lid. Children name objects largely based on what that thing performs, how it looks, where it comes from. Two words, when yoked together with a hyphen, form compounds much like kennings, which are an art form in Old English poetry. “Kenning” relates to the Old English verb “cennan”—to cause to know— and so a kenning expands our understanding through what is essentially a game of cleverly reductive paraphrase. In Old English, the sun could be referred to as a “day-candle” (dægcandel), or the ocean a “whale-road” (hronrad). These are metaphorical ways of referring to very physical phenomena, means of scaling the inexplicable to everyday dimensions.
Given that many readers’ knowledge of Old English comes from an early encounter with , kennings are thought of as befitting
