New Republic cultural critic Josephine Livingstone: “Kennings are essentially portmanteaus, Old English words made of two nouns that have been mashed together to create a new one. … For example, hron means ‘whale.’ Rad means ‘a road,’ or ‘a path.’ Put them together … and you get hronrad, or ‘whale-road,’ which means ‘the sea.’ The ocean is not an empty space, hronrad says — it belongs to the whale.” — The New York Times