I see no reason why you couldn't write a poem today with custom-made compound words like "whale-road" and "bone-house." I agree with you - I suspect that moder

I see no reason why you couldn't write a poem today with custom-made compound words like "whale-road" and "bone-house." I agree with you - I suspect that modern english has far more in common with its predecessors than we might think at first. I'm pretty sure I have seen poetry and prose that riffs like that - bolting together nouns in a way that would invite inspection for meaning, some of which might become expected (formulaic) in a way that might be an in-joke or a shared experience or perhaps a description that can be considered a shared pseudo experience ("I know what you mean") Maybe it would be a little more jarring these days." We might consider ourselves more sophisticated in some way and yet the term "bone house" does still resonate in some way for me but not in the context of "general term for a body/person". It does work rather well in the context of war/battle/conflict. Kennings - seems to me to be cognate with "ken" (know). They seem to be designed for inventing nouns for context - a bit like the reverse of the effect of some adjectives. You include the adjective(s) within the agglomerate noun in some way, either explicitly or via convention (think of the imagery around: "bone house") I love language.