Most Old English poetry, which is where kennings are found, is nothing like the Medieval Times version of the Middle Ages, with knights and ladies and jousting. Instead, Old English poems like “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer” or “Beowulf” are terribly sad. It always seems cold. Snow (snaw) falls on a story about a lonely person (perhaps an anstapa, a lone-stepper), while social discord ripples beneath the poem’s surface. “Beowulf” is probably the most famous surviving Old English poem we have (there’s no knowing how much has been lost). The sole manuscript sits in the British Library, where anybody can go and look at it housed in bulletproof glass. In it, the anonymous poet describes war and death with kennings like “battle-sweat” for blood (heaþuswate), “mind-worth” for honor (weorðmyndum), “bonehouse” for body (banhus). In the scene describing Beowulf’s funeral, the poet refers to his body as a bonehouse that has broken open (ða banhus gebrocen hæfde). The smoke rises from his funeral pyre, interweaving with the sound of weeping (wudurec astah . . . wope bewunden). I love the winding together of smoke and sound: bewunden.

By describing Beowulf’s body as a bonehouse, cracked open by flames and surrounded by weeping, the poet communicates the body’s brittleness (how easily it breaks!) and the way that Beowulf had come to represent a whole institution in his society in a single word. When his body goes on the pyre, it’s like a house burning to the ground. None of that is explained, exactly — it’s just there in the kenning. Banhus is made of two disparate nouns, left to reconcile with each another in your head. A kenning is like a Rothko painting. It doesn’t make sense at first, but then it unfurls a beauty born of texture and contrast.

I’ve got no interest in establishing any personal connection between their culture and mine. That’s for the historians and the fantasists. I’m just interested in the words. There are ways of expressing feeling in the Old English kennings that do not exist in the formal English of today. Even if I were to dream up some delicious new portmanteau here — some melding of “history,” “poignant” and “solitude,” say — I still would not be creating a true kenning. That’s because, in our tongue, words get their meaning from the order we put them in: “Poignant” would end up modifying “solitude,” instead of the words just hovering next to each other in figurative space. We who speak contemporary English are so reliant on word order that we are no longer as able as our forebears to create lyrical, associative, figurative meaning in poetry. We just can’t do the same things with our vocabulary. Old English speakers can treat metaphor as an occasion to innovate; Modern English simply tries to describe. Their poetry can turn skeletons into exploding nation-states; we have to focus on keeping our adjectives in the right places. But to our immense good fortune, Old English poetry has survived, and we know how to read it. The kennings are out there waiting for you — so beautiful, so different and so very, very old.