The ‘Wind of the Giantess’: Snorri Sturluson, Rudolf Meissner, and the Interpretation of Mythological Kennings along Taxonomic Lines

A number of kennings in the extant corpus of skaldic poetry collocate a term for wind with a term for a giantess, the resultant referent identified by Snorri Sturluson in Skáldskaparmál as hugr, though that term is itself exemplified by Snorri in three wide-ranging lists of terms denoting desire, passion, and hostility. In his taxonomy of kenning types, Rudolf Meissner gathered together ‘wind of the giantess’ kennings and identified their referent as Sinn. A number of the examples in Meissner’s list, however, are based on Finnur Jónsson’s emended texts, necessitating a close examination of the manuscript evidence in each case. The analysis presented in this article places the ‘wind of the giantess’ kennings in the context of the well-attested kenning type ‘wind of the valkyrie’ in order to explore how the collocation of affect with a supernatural female figure appears to have operated in the skaldic imagination. While some of the examples in Meissner’s group suggest the referent ‘desire’, others seem to refer instead to ‘battle spirit’ and some simply to ‘battle’. There is very little evidence to suggest that the referent can be equated with ‘thought’ in an abstract sense, an identification that has nonetheless become a commonplace in skaldic scholarship.