Athelstan and the Anglo-Saxons. The author is unknown. The poem consists of 3,182 lines and exists in a single copy, housed in the British Museum. The events of the poem are set in Scandanavia.

The poem is built up of a series of kennings, a two-word phrase that describes an object in an interesting way. Kennings were first used in Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry. Take another animal that ...