as small as a world and as large as alone, prokopetz: One of the distinctive features of...

3:05pm July 15, 2015

One of the distinctive features of Old Norse poetry is the use of kenning: a circumlocutory device in which a straightforward noun is replaced with an allusive phrase.
For example, a ship might be referred to as a “wave’s horse”; a sword, a “wound-serpent”; a shield, “the shame of swords”, and so forth. Sometimes, kennings could be embedded in other kennings - thus, one might have “feeder of war-gulls” = “feeder of ravens” = “warrior”; this is known as a doubled or extended kenning
Though many conventions of English literature can be traced back to Old Norse roots, kenning isn’t much encountered these days - at least, not in most genres. There’s one particular genre where the art of kenning is alive and well, though.
I’m speaking, of course, of erotic fanfic.
Whether you’re referring to a penis as a “porn-truncheon” or a vagina as “squish-pocket” (both examples I’ve seen employed in all apparent seriousness, incidentally), that perfectly fits the form and function of a kenning. Indeed, these examples even adhere to the idiosyncratic grammatical structure of many Old Norse kennings, with the base word being modified by an uninfected noun determinant inserted as a compound prefix.
Euphemisms for sex acts, meanwhile, can be even more baroque, forming multi-level allusions in the manner of doubled/extended kennings. “To ride the baloney pony”, for example, employs the act of riding a horse as an allusion to penetrative sexual intercourse - but the contained phrase “baloney pony” is, itself, a kenning of the simple type, with “pony” as the base word and “baloney” as the determinant, making the whole phrase a doubled kenning.
There are practical reasons for this sort of practice, of course; e.g., complex euphemisms can help sexually explicit works sneak through content filters. Still, it’s kind of fascinating that smutty fanfic has managed to preserve - in virtually unaltered state - a poetic form that’s otherwise been largely extinct in English literature for the better part of a thousand years.