poetry.^25 Stephanie West in her note on the Homeric passage says that ‘here
πποι is almost equivalent to “chariots” (Homeric heroes do not ride)’, and
she cites later classical poets who liken ships metaphorically to chariots. The
Phaeacians’ ship breasting the waves is likened to a chariot at Od. 13. 81–5.
But perhaps the phrase goes back to a phase of Indo-European culture when
the horse was men’s normal means of travelling about, as it remained in
many parts of Europe. For travel by water, the ship then appeared as a
replacement for the horse, and poets might easily arrive at ‘horse of the sea’ as
a decorative appositional phrase or kenning for a ship.
Another kenning shared by classical and Germanic verse is the ‘iron
shower’, meaning the rain of spears or arrows in battle. It first appears in just
this form in Ennius, Annals 266 Skutsch, hastati spargunt hastas: fit ferreus
imber; the phrase was later borrowed by Virgil (Aen. 12. 284). Perhaps Ennius
followed a lost Greek model, as σιδ ρεο or χα ́ λκεο Zμβρο would sit
very neatly in a hexameter. Pindar (Isth. 5. 49) has $ν πολυφθο ́ ρωι ... ∆ι:
Zμβρωι (... χαλαζα ́ εντι φο ́ νωι) in referring to the battle of Salamis, and a
bombardment of stones is compared in a Homeric simile to a snowstorm
(Il. 12. 278–87). The Ennian phrase has an exact counterpart in Beowulf
3115 ̄sernscuı ̄re, and a less exact one in Guthlac 1116 hildescu ̄r‘battle-shower’.
The skald Torf-Einar (quoted in Snorri’sHáttatal, st. 55) used stála skúrar ...
Gautr‘the Geat of the steel shower’ as a compound kenning for ‘warrior’.
Other skalds offerálmskúr‘elm-shower’ (sc. of missiles from bows), skotskúr
‘shot-shower’,mélskúr‘biting shower’,naddskúr‘shield(-battering)-shower’,
nadd-regn‘shield-rain’, while the Eddic Grípisspá (23. 7) has nadd-él‘shield-
snowstorm’. Hiltibrant and Hadubrant discharge their spears at each other
scarpen scurim, probably ‘in sharp showers’, a not very apt use of the formula
(Hildebrandslied 64). If an Indo-European prototype lies behind all this, it
could not, of course, have contained a reference to iron, but it might have
referred to bronze, or at an earlier stage to wood or stone; the material would
naturally be updated by later poets.
Epitheta ornantiaA recurring feature of the various poetic traditions is the use of noun–epithet
phrases in which the epithet adds nothing essential to the sense or especially
relevant to the context, but expresses a permanent or ideal characteristic of
(^25) Faroþ-hengestas... sæ ̄ ̄-me ̄aras,Elene 226/8; wæg-hengest, 236; sæ ̄ ̄-mearh,Andreas 267;
sæ ̄ ̄-hengest , 488; brim-hengest, 513, Rune Poem 47, 66; vágmarar, Reginsmál 16. 7; giálfrmarar,
Waking of Angantyr 26. 2 (Edd. min. 19); Skáldsk. 51; expressions collected in CPB ii. 458. Cf.
Schmitt (1967), 282.
- Phrase and Figure 83