[tei-council] Kennings

[M. J. Driscoll]

Since I brought up the subject perhaps I should explain a bit more about what I 
mean concerning kennings.

Kennings are metaphorical compounds extensively used in early Germanic poetry, 
like hronrade, lit. "whale-road", meaning "sea", in line 10 of Beowulf.

Like so many other things, kennings really came into their own in Icelandic 
literature, first in skaldic poetry, subsequently in rímur or metrical 
romances.

Take a simple kenning for a woman, seima-Gná, consisting of the the genitive 
plural of seimur ("gold") plus the name of the goddess Gná. I've been marking 
this up using <seg>, as in the following example:

<seg type="kenning">
<seg function="determinant">seima</seg>
<seg function="base">Gn&aacute;</seg>
</seg>

The Sydney-based skaldic poetry project has, I know, introduced specialised 
elements for these things, so their markup of this same kenning would be:

<kenning referent="woman">
<det>seima</det>
<bw>Gn&aacute;</bw>
</kenning>

A better (and more general) solution could certainly be found, however. And 
besides, this only really works if the parts of the kenning are next to each 
other and don't overlap with other kennings (as they frequently do in skaldic 
poetry).

Any ideas?

Matthew