In order to understand traditional Old Norse poetry, those who heard it had to have an understanding of what we might call the conceptual world that lay behind it, that is, all the assumed knowledge of how the world in which humans lived came about and was organised. In the previous chapter the reasons why it was necessary to come to Old Norse poetry with a good deal of cultural knowledge became clear. This was a poetics that was not transparent and did not yield up its meaning easily. Wherever kenningar and heiti and other rhetorical figures were used, the audience needed to be aware of certain fundamental ways of thinking that were necessary both for the formation of these figures of poetic speech and for their interpretation. They needed to be able to think in terms of certain kinds of contrastive parallelisms, to oppose certain categories of terms with certain others. If they heard a kenning for the sea which took the form ‘land of the ship’, ‘plain of the fish’, ‘hall of the whale’ and so forth, they needed to realise – and they probably did this subconsciously – that at the base of all these kennings was a way of thinking that contrasted things of the land with those of the sea and then deliberately mixed them up in the kenning, so that the base-word of a sea-kenning was likely to be a noun that referred to something belonging to the semantic field ‘land or object pertaining to the land’, while the determinant probably referred to something from the semantic field of nouns pertaining to the sea (see Meissner 1921: 93–8). There are many other habitual kinds of connection, a good number requiring metaphorical associations, that are fundamental to the operation of the Old Norse kenning system: between humans and trees, as we have seen in Chapter 5, or between battle and storms or other bad-weather phenomena. Evidently, such riddle-like exercises in detection, which operated within conventional boundaries, gave people pleasure and intellectual stimulation, but they also required them to think in quite specific, predetermined ways.