Note 423 — Chapter V · THE DIFFERENCING ELEMENTS OF COMMUNAL POETRY

A kenning, with many branches in Anglo-Saxon poetry, calls survivors of battle “the leavings of weapons.” This may once have been literal; but in its context it looks as deliberate as Lamb’s phrase for a resuscitated victim of the gallows,—“refuse of the rope, the leavings of the cord” (Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged).