shield wall

English

Etymology

See Old English sċieldweall, with the same meaning.

Noun

shield wall (plural shield walls)

  1. A "wall" of overlapping shields formed by medieval soldiers standing side-by-side.
  2. (figurative) An impenetrable barrier.
    • 1999, Seamus Heaney, “Introduction”, in Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page xii:
      Still, in spite of the sensation of being caught between a ‘shield-wall’ of opaque references and a ‘word-hoard’ that is old and strange, such readers are also bound to feel a certain ‘shock of the new’.

Translations

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.