jo says, "Old Norse saga poetry ... requires the use of ... a kind of imagery whose name has completely escaped me. (damn senior moments!) But one example I can think of is serpent road for sea. Another would be blood ground for battlefield."

Kennings, perhaps? If I have the word right, can you please explain the concept more fully to us? Thank you.

YES! Thank you. I've been pounding my brain on and off all day.

Kennings were/are a poetic device, not unlike a metaphor of sorts. Some of the allusions were quite obscure to anyone outside of the culture. For example, Freyja's Treasure would be gold.

I'm out of practice, but let me try.

Oftimes old men Told tales of travel
On whale road rough and dark dread days.
T'was Freyja's Treasure held hard their hearts.
Many mighty warriors dined late at Thor's trough.

Note, that each line has two distinct groups which have more to do with spoken accent than "real" syllables. And each group must have two alliterative words. They need not be together, and there is a variation where the primary alliteration begins each part, and the secondary ends each. I.E.: Tall men sailed, telling the high seas.

Whale road is of course the ocean.
Freyja's treasure is gold.
Thor's trough refers to death and dining with the gods in Valhalla.

It is interesting to note that even modern scaldic verse alliterates things like "t" and "th".

on a further note... two of the best movies to hear this kind of poetic form are strangely enough: the first Conan movie. The narrator magician speaks in a scaldic sing-song that is nearly perfect. The other is The 13th Warrior, which I personally have nearly memorized.

One of the disappointments for me in the LOTR, and there weren't many, was the loss of the poetic meter of the language. Many years ago, when my mother started to go blind, my late husband recorded the entirety -- all three books-- for her. I discovered a whole new element to the books listening to them read aloud. It was almost a different story hearing the cadence of the language. Especially Tom Bombadil is written in Old English cadence, which is nearly identical to the cadences of Old Norse.

It is interesting to note that even modern scaldic verse alliterates things like "t" and "th".

Well, their place of articulation is the same; both are dentals. Do you ever see voiced and voiceless stops alliterated? e.g., t and d?

A kenning you usually see as an example (from Beowulf, I believe) is whale road for ocean. Kennings fit under the academic rubric of poetic formulas, e.g., epithets like wine-dark sea or rosy-fingered dawn in Homer. The definitve work on the oral-formulaic theory was done by Milman Perry and Albert Lord. (See The Singer of Tales. Fasincating stuff.)

An Icelandic friend of mine pointed me to a very informative page on old Norse poetry.
http://hem.passagen.se/peter9/gram/l_dikt.html

quote:

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Kenningar and heiti

In stead of using an existing word one can make a new one, so if the old skalds needed a word for 'sword' they could call it sáralauk 'wound onion' (in ancient times swords had the shape of a drawn-out onion). Likewise a snake could be called lyngfiskr 'heather fish' (i.e. a "fish" that "swims" in the heather), and a hawk hábrók '(he with) high trousers' (because of the feathers on his legs). A word like this is called a heiti (one heiti, two heiti).

An even more complicated way to say for example 'gold' is to call it dreka beðr 'dragon's bed'. This is explained by the myth about the dragon Fáfnir who rested on his stolen gold. Dreka beðr is an example of a kenning (one kenning, two kenningar).
To make a kenning more complicated, one can compose it out of other kenningar or heiti, and call the gold hvalvegs glóð 'embers of the whale road'. The whale road is of course the water, and what shines like ember in the water is gold.

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P.S. I just stumbled over Wikipedia's List of Kennings.

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The little I know about kennings is from The English Language by David Crystal. Here is a big chunk of his account, somewhat paraphrased. Notice that you can often see the modern word in the old one. When necessary I'm approximating the old letters, and using 'th' for either of the letters so pronounced.

Quote: Old English poetry abounds in remarkable coinages, vivid figurative descriptions known as kennings. Kennings describe things indirectly, allusively and often in compounds. Their meaning is not self-evident; there has been a leap of imagination, and this needs to be interpreted. Sometimes the interpretation is obscure, and a source of critical debate.

Famous kennings include hroncād 'whale road' for the sea; bānhūs 'bone house' for a person's body, and beadolēoma 'battle light' for a sword. Often phrases are used: God, for example, is described as heofonrīces weard 'guardian of heaven's kingdom' and as moncynnes weard 'guardian of mankind'. There are over 100 compounds involving the word mōd ('mood', used in Old English for a wide range of attitudes, such as 'spirit, courage, pride, arrogance'): they include mōdcræft 'intelligence, glædmōdnes 'kindness', mōdcearu 'sorrow of soul', and mādmōd 'folly'.

The many synonyms in Old English make subtle nuances of meaning possible, though difficult for us to distinguish. [Beowulf has some 20 terms for 'man', and terms for 'sea' include sǽ, mere, brim, lagu, wæter, fām ('foam'), and wǽg ('wave').] Compare the literalness of waēgflota 'wave-floater' for a ship with the more metaphorical waēghengest 'wave-steed'. Varying levels of figurativeness can be seen in the following compounds for 'sea' out of the 50 or more known:
seolbæth seal-bath;
ÿthageswing waves-surge;
fiscesthel fish-home;
strēāmgewinn waters-strife;
hwælweg whale-way;
saēwylm sea-welling;
swanrād swan-road;
brimstrēām ocean-stream;
merestrēām lake-stream;
wæterflōd water-flood;
drencflōd drowning-flood;
bæthweg bath-way.

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