tolkien-in-beleriand:

kingofthebark:

tolkien-in-beleriand:

disfunction-junction:

englishable:

Old English just has some wonderful words and kennings. I mean, really:

Their word for sea? It was often swan-rad or “road of the swan.” Spider was gangelwaefre, literally “the walking weaver.” They had the simple and now-obsolete word uht, which describes that time just before sunrise when mist still hangs heavy over all the fields and lakes and the last few stars are still out.

…Also, they didn’t say body. They said ban-cofan, which means “bone-cave,” and if you don’t think that’s some hardcore shit right there then you need to get out of my face before I turn your skull into a mead-cup.

@tolkien-in-beleriand

this is awesome!

In the commentary on his translation of Beowulf, Tolkien argues that translating ‘rád’ as ‘road’ in the context of kennings for the sea is incorrect. On the subject of ‘hronrád’, which is often translated as ‘whale-road’, he says:
“rád is the ancestor of our modern word ‘road’, but it does not mean ‘road’. Etymology is not a safe guide to sense. rád is the noun of action to rídan ‘ride’ and means riding – i.e. ‘riding on horseback; moving as a horse does (or a chariot), or as a ship does at anchor’; and hence ‘a journey in horseback’ (or more seldom by ship), ‘a course (however vagrant)’. It does not mean the actual ‘track’ – still less the hard paved permanent and more or less straight tracks that we associate with the ‘road’…The word as ‘kenning’ therefore means dolphin’s riding, i.e. in full, the watery fields where you can see dolphins and lesser members of the whale-tribe playing, or seeming to gallop like a line of riders on the plains. That is the picture and comparison the kenning was meant to evoke. It is not evoked by ‘whale road’ – which suggests a sort of semi-submarine steam-engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic.”

reblogging again for the comment