Kennings Worksheets

by Fran Allfrey, Beth Whalley, and Carl Kears

We created these kenning worksheets as templates to make it easy to bring Old English poetry into the classroom.

The sheets can be used alongside the Word Hoard worksheet, or they can be used for a stand-alone creative exercise.

Old English poetry is sometimes called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ poetry on the UK curriculum.

Old English poetry does not rhyme. Instead, kennings are a key feature that tell you what you are reading is poetry.

Kennings are compound words (two words joined together to make a single word, often joined with a hyphen). They describe something or someone by combining two characteristics, to create a metaphor.

For example, take ‘the sea’. We can create a kenning for the sea by first listing words that come to mind: wet, water, bath, place, fish, whales, seal, seagull. Then we can join some of these words to create kennings, for instance: ‘seal-bath’, ‘whale-place’.