Kenning vs Metaphor - What's the difference?
kenning | metaphor |
(obsolete) Sight; view; a distant view at sea.
(obsolete) Range or extent of vision, especially at sea; (by extension) a marine measure of approximately twenty miles.
As little as one can recognise or discriminate; a small portion; a little.
A metaphorical phrase used in Germanic poetry (especially Old English or Old Norse) whereby a simple thing is described in an allusive way, such as ‘whale road’ for ‘sea’, or ‘enemy of the mast’ for ‘wind’.
(uncountable, figure of speech) The use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like'' or ''as , which would imply a simile.
* What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors''', metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are '''metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.'' — Friedrich Nietzsche, ''On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , 1870, translated by Daniel Beazeale, 1979.
(countable, rhetoric) The word or phrase used in this way. An implied comparison.
As nouns the difference between kenning and metaphor
is that kenning is sight; view; a distant view at sea while metaphor is the use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like or as, which would imply a simile.As a verb kenning
is present participle of lang=en.kenning
English
Etymology 1
From (etyl), derivative of (etyl) . More at (l).Noun
(en noun)- put in a kenning of salt