The Seafarer

A full translation, faithful to meter and meaning

In previous translations of the Wanderer and Andreas, we noted the apparently widespread habit among Anglo-Saxon poets of reusing traditional epic themes as bases for Christian analogies. Andreas is a relatively simplistic example – saints become heroes, disciples thanes, God a ring-giving king – whereas the Wanderer, as far as I can tell, is a subtler allegory of the incarnate human soul. But nowhere do we find a higher degree of subtlety than in the Seafarer.

Here again we find the exile theme, presented initially in much the same way as in the Wanderer, with the narrator recounting his sufferings on the wintry sea. But similarities can be deceptive. This narrator, unlike that of the Wanderer, is not an unfortunate wretch thrown upon the seas by the course of eventuality. He seems rather to be drawn towards the sea by some inner yearning, or grim necessity, that compels him to turn his back on the land. I would suggest that the exile of the Wanderer is an allegory of earthly life, and that of the Seafarer an allegory of death.

All interpretations are, of course, open to question. This poem is not easy to understand, and has often been misconstrued by scholars and amateurs alike. Rather than deface the translation with footnotes and interludes, I’ve added some notes to defend my own choices and understanding.

Though I am much more amateur than scholar, I can vouch for the fidelity of my version in at least one important respect: that it replicates the Anglo-Saxon meter in which the original poem was written. The majority of lines are to be read with a four-stressed rhythm; hypermetric lines, containing three stresses per half-line instead of two, are distinguished by italics. Attention should be paid to the stave-rhyme or ‘chyme’ that links the two halves of the line (note that this has been loosened to some extent by the equation of h-sounds to vowel-sounds¹). Reading the lines aloud with a normal stress-pattern should suffice to bring most of this out.

May I tell about myself    a true story;
Sing about my travels;    how through toiling-days
A time of hardship    I had to suffer;
How bitter in my breast    has beaten my heart;
What harrowing passes    I have probed at sea;
The terrible churning-waves –    the times I held 
A strait-dire night-watch    at stern of keel,
As she reeled about the rock-crags.    How wracked with cold
Were these feet of mine,   in frost-shackles,
Chained by the cold;    how clamouring anxieties
Seethed about my heart;    how the hunger in me gutted
My sea-sick soul.    Not a spit does he know,
Who on the folds of the earth    has the fairest life,
In what utter wretchedness    on ice-chilled seas
I weathered the winter,    in wandering exile,
Sundered from kinsmen,    [cast upon the waves,]
Hung round with icicles;    by hail-shot scourged.
Nothing could I hear    but the howling sea,
Its icy weltering.    For entertainments
I made do with the swans' songs;    with sounds of curlews
And the jabbering of gannets    for the jests of men;
And the mewling of the gulls    was all the mead I had.
The cliff-crags were clangoured by storms;    oft quipped back the tern
With ice upon its feathers;    oft the osprey shrilled
With wings bewetted –    and not one of my kin there
To offer to a homeless one    his help and solace!

How little he believes –    he whose life is sweet,
Tarrying in towns,    from terror-trips far,
Vain and wine-flushed –    with what weariness
I had to bide and bear    upon the briny ways.

Night-shade hath fallen;    from the north comes snow;
Frost fetters the ground,    and fall of hail,
Coldest of corngrains.    Now clash my thoughts
And toss within my heart:    that I should try, myself,
The steep sea-currents    and salt-wave play;
By wanderlust admonished    every waking moment
To pass upon the way;    that, wending far,
I should seek the homeland    of an alien race.

Yet there's no man upon this earth    in mind so proud,
Nor so bountiful with gifts    nor so bold with youth,
Nor so daring in his deeds,    nor so dear to his lord,
That he has no anxiousness    ever at seafaring,
As to what his Lord    might allot to him.
Yet his heart is not in harping;    nor in having of treasures;
Nor in woman's sweetness;    nor in worldly hopes;
Nor in anything at all    except the heave of waves;
So endless is his longing    as he hies to the sea.

Fruit-trees are flowering;    fair are the towns,
Sheen grow the green-meads;    thus goeth the world on.
All of that admonishes    the heart that chafes
To the voyage, the soul    that sets its thought
Far to depart    upon the flood-tide paths.
The cuckoo so urgeth me    with haunting call;
Summer-herald singing,    sorrow foreboding,
A breast-hoard of bitterness;    but brings no inkling
To the man in softship    of what some endure,
When to long ways of wandering    they lay their course.

So now my thought is turned out    and thrown from my heart-cage:
My mind-spirit    midst the surging main,
O'er the acre of the whale;    widely coursing
The corners of the earth,   and coming again to me;
Ravenous, voracious,    the Raptor screams –
Whetting to the charnel-way    the wight defenceless
O'er the ocean's high waves.    Hotter are thus to me
The Lord's hall-joys    than this life of death,
Loaned us on land.    I believe not a whit
That the wealth of this earth    shall be everlasting.
Three things eternally    turn each one,
Ere the day of reckoning,    to doubtfulness:
Illness, or old age,    or iron blade,
From the fated and awayward ones    shall force the life out.

So to any noble one,    echo-words
Of praise from the living    are the proudest legend.
That he well perform,    ere his way be fared,
Great goods on earth    against the gall of foes;
Deeds of daring    with the devil athwart him;
And be subsequently lauded    by the sons of men,
So that afterwards his glory    with the angels liveth
Always and forever,    in an endless life-blaze –
Host-joy of the doughtiest.    The days are past
Of all the arrogance    of earth-dominions;
Kings are no more,    nor are kaisers now,
Nor such givers of gold   as in the gone-by days –
When the greatest-midst-the-great    did glorious deeds,
And lived in much dignity    and lordly doom.

The old guard hath fallen,    the hall-joys flown;
Weak ones abide now,    the world to hold
And have through their labours.    Louts low the flower:
Worldly nobility    withers with age;
As doth every man    upon this middle-earth.
Eld falls upon him;    palls his face;
The greybeard grizzles;    grieves old friends
Repossessed by the earth –   the sons of highbreds.
Once quitted of his life,    his cloak of flesh
Will feed on no more pleasantness   nor feel no pain,
Stir not a hand,    nor be stirred in thought.
Though the grave in which he lays    be gold-bestrewn
By some blood-kin brother,    who buries midst the dead
What he wishes him to take –    a wealth of treasures –
In no way may his soul,    downweighed by sin,
Be fortified by gold    against the fear of God;
Though long did he squirrel it    while living here.

Awesome the Architect's force;    before Him the earth is turned;
Before the one who stablished    the stark foundations:
The quarters of the earth,    and the heaven's dome.
Dull is who dreads not his Lord;    cometh him death unprepared.
Happy who humbly liveth;    cometh him heavenly grace.
The Maker hath molded his spirit,    for that in His might he doth trust.

One must steer well the strength of the will,    in stead to hold it,
Unfailing be in promises,    and pure in wisdom.
Each and every man    must be moderated
In loathing for his enemies    and love for his own.
Though he may wish that an inferno    his foe should take;
Or else that on a bier    be burned away
The friend he has made,    fate is stronger
And the Maker mightier    than a mere man's thought.

It behooves us to muse    on where our home might stand,
And to think upon the ways    that we might there arrive;
And to toil and to travail,   for to take our place
In everlasting    happiness –
Where from love of the Lord,    life springs forth
And heavenly repose.    Praise Him, thank Him –
The King of Glory –    that he graced us so –
The Everlasting Lord –    for all time – 
                                                                     Amen.

Notes

My views on the translation of the Seafarer are heavily influenced by those of Charles Harrison-Wallace, who wrote an original translation backed up by a formidable number of essays. The thrust of these essays is that almost every translator hitherto, whether scholar or poet or amateur, has seriously misconstrued both the gist and the jot of this poem. Above all he singles out Ezra Pound, who garbled many passages, and sought to purge the poem of its Christian essence.

By no means do I agree with everything CHW has to say (not even on translation issues, to say nothing of his wider opinions); he is not one to be read uncritically. But on his central claims about this poem, I believe him, and it seems clear enough to me that he has invested more effort into and extracted more sense from it than anyone else. His essays also act as a bracing corrective to the default tendency of autodidacts, which is to defer unthinkingly to established scholarship.

It is from CHW that I take the crucial insight that the Seafarer is an allegory of death, which chimes well with my view of the Wanderer as an allegory of earthly life. In this allegory (I propose), the sea corresponds to the boundary between this life and the life to come, and the seafaring exile is none other than the unworldly and self-mortifying Christian monastic. Yet even such a man requires the threat of death to drive him over the open sea and into the harbour of the Lord.

This is not to say that the Seafarer is a rigidly rationalistic allegory, like (say) the Psychomachia of Prudentius. It would be better conceived as a looser analogy between the traditional Germanic exile on the one hand, and the ethos of Christianity on the other. The poem begins from the former, and works its way through several ‘gear-shifts’ of emphasis that bring it at last into the exclusive realm of the latter.

Before this point is reached, echoes of the true message are transmitted through subtly ambiguous turns of phrase, which are likely to evade the unwary reader. Let’s start at the beginning, armed with the original text.

It begins with a passage redolent of the Wanderer, in which the narrator recounts the hardships of a winter sea-voyage. The first difficulty is presented by the hapax word cearseld (line 5) – literally ‘seat of care’, perhaps ‘place of care’ or even ‘hall of care’ (‘care’ being more like ‘anguish’ or ‘sorrow’). With an eye to the word gecunnad (‘probed’, ‘explored’, ‘got to know’), I have rendered it as ‘harrowing passes (probed at sea)’; but with an eye to seld (‘seat’), another possibility might be ‘harrowing anchorage (held in the keel)’. This would entirely change the imaginative picture conjured up by the passage, from one of movement through the seas to one of uneasy stasis on a boat moored overnight. (CHW has the memorable phrase “endless halls of heaving waves”, which I just didn’t have the chutzpah to steal.)

In line 16 we find an on-verse without an off-verse: winemægum bidroren (‘of friend-kinsmen deprived’), which I have rendered as ‘sundered from kinsmen’. Assuming that some scribe working at speed has made an omission that ought to be corrected, the most likely guess from a formulaic point of view would be dreamum bescerwed (‘shorn of joys’, which would work as a stave-rhyme with ‘sundered’ in my loosened modern form of the meter). Bearing in mind that this is post-formulaic literary poetry, and with an eye to the implied symmetries between this line and the one after it, I have preferred to imagine something like (for)drifen ofer yþum (‘[out]cast upon the waves’). Such a phrase works well to ‘bridge’ the mention of exile and kin-separation before it and the description of environmental hardship after it.

After a passage in which the songs of birds are compared to the conventional sounds of the mead-hall, we encounter another possibly-corrupt passage (lines 23-26):

Stormas þær stanclifu beotan / þær him stearn oncwæð

(Storms there the stonecliffs beat; there [to them?] the tern spoke back)

Isigfeþera / ful oft þæt earn bigeal,

(With icy feathers; full oft the eagle cried [or sang],)

urigfeþra / nænig hleomæga

(Wet-feathered; [but] none of protector-kinsmen)

feasceaftig ferð / frefran meahte.

([who] a destitute soul might comfort.)

The main problem is with the third line. As John C. Pope comments (in Eight Old English Poems, p.104):

Urig-feðra does not alliterate and is too much like [isigfeþera] to be right. For the sake of the alliteration, Grein (1857) alters nænig [none] to ne ænig [not one]… But in addition to leaving the problem of the repetition unresolved, this produces a metrical type not to be expected in the off-verse on two counts, since it is a type that contains both a compound bearing secondary stress and an expansion syllable… The emendation is thus not an improvement, sacrificing meter for the sake of the alliteration.

Ne ænig hleomaga seems no weirder than stormas þær stanclifu beotan (in line 23, which I have rendered as hypermetric in the first half-line), but it is true that one would expect the first stress of the off-verse in this line to be hleo (‘shelter’, ‘protection’) and the second to be maga (‘kinsman’). One possible solution is to swap out the suspiciously repetitive urigfeþra for hyrnednebba (‘horny-beaked’), another traditional epithet of the eagle that appears close to urigfeþra in the poem Judith. In that case we might translate the line as follows:

With horn-hard neb. But none of my kinsmen…

Moving on, at this point we shift up a gear from theme to allegory (often indicated in this poem by the telltale word forþon, ‘for that’, ‘so’ or ‘indeed’), as the seafarer complains about the vain wine-sloshed landlubber incapable of comprehending his sufferings. Here we catch an unmistakable echo of the Christian monk, mortified in flesh and exiled from the world, trying vainly to warn the profane about the death-crossing and afterlife to which he himself is constantly oriented.

Hereafter we must watch out for double meanings that signify one thing in the context of the narrative, and quite another according to the logic of the allegory. After some lines describing the onset of winter, a time of year that obviously connotes old age and death, we encounter a passage that merits close attention:

// Forþon cnyssað nu

(Indeed now toss [same word used of waves in line 8])

Heortan geþohtas / þæt ic hean streamas

(The thoughts of my heart; that I the high currents)

Sealtyþa gelac / sylf cunnige

(The salt-wave play; [my]self should [or might, shall, will] attempt)

Monað modes lust / mæla gehwylce

(My soul’s desire urges me, on every occasion,)

Ferð to feran / þæt ic feor heonan

(My spirit to fare [or ferry]; that I, far from here,)

Elþeodigra / eard gesece…

(A foreign people’s land [should] seek…)

At one level, this means that the seafarer is tiring of life on land and wishes to return to the sea; at another, it could mean that he is tiring of life on earth (as a result of ageing) and becoming inclined (by the wavering of his soul in his body) to pass beyond the limits of the world. In the former context, the phrase sylf cunnige (‘myself should try [the waves]’) can be read as ‘should try by myself’; in the latter, it should be ‘should try for myself’ (for as Bosworth-Toller tells us, the word sylf can imply both.)

Ferð to feran is another interesting one. The standard surface-level translation would be ‘my spirit to fare’ or ‘my soul to go forth’; but since feran according to Wiktionary was once the causative form of faran ‘to fare’ (that is to say, the two words were distinguished in much the same way as are the modern English ones to ferry and to fare), it could be that the intended surface-level meaning is ‘my life to carry forth’. CHW insists that fer[h]ð does not mean ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ but ‘journey’, hence ‘course of life’; on this I do not agree with him, because I have seen many uses of this word in other poems that cannot possibly be translated thus. Yet it would seem that the poet intended this verse to ring as a pun on forþfaran (literally ‘to fare forth’, idiomatically ‘to pass away’), which I have replicated as best I can:

My wanderlust admonishes, each waking moment,

To pass upon the way; that, wending far,

I should seek the homeland of an alien race.

Moving on, we encounter a passage on the seafarer’s trepidation before the sea and his waning interest in wine, women and song, all of which can be interpreted as part and parcel of the natural progression from youth to age. This would chime well with the strange air of melancholy and foreboding that hangs around the coming of summer and the cuckoo-call that heralds it; for why should summertime be melancholy, and a forewarning of future suffering, unless it be the summertime of life (middle-age) that heralds the passing of spring (youth) and brings only the promise of autumn and winter (old age and death)? Why too should the ‘ways of exile’ (wræclastas), traditionally wandered by those who had committed a crime or suffered an accident of fortune, be spoken of here as some sort of free choice or long-awaited inevitability?

At this point we come to the central crux of the Seafarer (lines 58-64). This is the part that is subject to most misunderstanding by the majority of translators, and I have hewn closely to CHW’s thesis in order to navigate it aright. Let’s start from a look at the Old English text, with controversial words and their multiple possible translations highlighted in bold text.

Forþon nu min hyge hweorfeð /

(So now my [mind/intention/thought] [turns/roams/wanders])

ofer hreþerlocan //

(beyond my [chest/heart-cage/innard-cage])

min modsefa /

(My [spirit/mind])

mid mereflode //

(on the sea-swell)

ofer hwæles eþel /

(o’er the orca’s country)

hweorfeð wide //

(courses widely)

eorþan sceatas /

(the [corners/regions/folds] of the earth)

cymeð eft to me //

(comes [back/again/anon] to me

gifre ond grædig /

([greedy and ravenous/eager and unsated])

gielleð anfloga //

(screams the [one-flier/on-flier])

hweteð on (h/)wælweg /

([whets/speeds/urges] to the [slaughter-way/orca-way])

hreþer unwearnum //

(the [heart/soul/inwards] [resistless/unwares/defenceless])

ofer holma gelagu /

(over the sea of [waves/islets])

The fount of all errors that pollute the understanding of this poem is a common mistranslation of the hapax word anfloga. At first glance, this looks like one-flier, that is to say ‘lone-flier’ or ‘solitary flier’ (compare angenga, ‘lone-goer’, applied to Grendel in Beowulf). CHW’s most important contention is that it actually means on-flier, that is to say ‘adverse flier’ or ‘attacking flier’. Technically, the true form of the word in this case would be andfloga (and- being the prefix that denotes an adversarial relation), but the dropping of the letter d would have been very likely due to the natural suppression of its sound in pronunciation (compare e.g. andsæc/ansæc); I can only imagine the frustration experienced by CHW when he put his case to text-pedants who failed to grasp this very obvious point.

This rectified understanding of anfloga – which can be rendered in translation as ‘raptor’ – reverberates out to several other key words in the passage. Those blinded by the ‘lone-flier’ misinterpretation can see only one actor in this little psycho-drama²: the hyge (thought, mind, intention), which has already been cast widely over sea and earth, and now seems to have been further transformed into a solitary bird. The formula gifre ond grædig (‘ravenous and greedy’), used in other poems to describe bloodthirsty and monstrous antagonists, must now be applied incongruously to this disembodied soul (resulting in a sanitized version of the formula, ‘eager and unsated’, which as far as I know is attested nowhere else); and the dative adjective unwearnum (‘unwares’, ‘without resistance’), used in Beowulf to describe a man killed in his sleep, must follow suit (thus being twisted into ‘irresistibly’). All of this nonsense flies to the four winds once the ‘on-flier’ appears upon the scene, clearly in the role of a bloodthirsty antagonist that throws the hyge into the role of a defenceless victim.

The anfloga is thus an avatar of death, which ‘whets’ (or ‘urges, ‘speeds’, presumably by pursuing and terrorizing) the defenceless hreþer (the physical and psychical ‘innards’, in this case divested from the body, thus in CHW’s translation the ‘naked soul’) towards its journey beyond the bounds of the world represented by the sea.³ And this further influences our interpretation of the word wælweg (‘slaughter-way’), almost always emended to hwælweg (‘orca-way’) on the basis of metrical pedantries that were subject to exceptions in practice. Even if the emendation must stand, the pun is surely intentional (albeit hard to render in modern English, hence my resort to ‘charnel-way’, intended to riff upon the previous use of ‘churning-waves’⁴).

There are a couple of points on which I dissent from CHW’s recommendations. Having seen the word holm used in other poetry to denote the sea or waves (e.g. Beowulf line 48b, leton holm beran ‘they let the waves take him’), I cannot agree with him that it means ‘islets’⁵ in this case and so have translated it as ‘high waves’. Moreover, I don’t think there is anything wrong with the translation of cymeð eft to me as ‘comes back again to me’, nor with its application to the hyge rather than the anfloga (though I might have accepted CHW’s translation had the anfloga been giellende, ‘screaming’, making the juxtaposition of verbs less awkward). Eft is more likely to mean ‘back again’ than ‘anon’, and this fits well with the rest of the passage, in which the narrator’s mind or thought ‘turns’ or ‘courses’ (hweorfeð) in a circular movement around the ‘corners of the earth’ (eorþan sceatas, presumably in this case the coastal edges) until the intervention of the anfloga finally drives his hreþer beyond the sea.

The allegorical message, I would say, is that only the looming reality of death can drive us beyond worldly limits towards God. This fits well with the lines that follow, in which the poem once again shifts up a gear from allegory to homily, and we are told that forþon me hatran sind Dryhtnes dreamas þonne þis deade lif (‘thus hotter to me are the joys of the Lord than this dead life’).

Early translators hungry for good old pagan fare were not ashamed to disregard, falsify, or outright ignore the remainder of the poem. One metrical translation stops short at this point (with the bizarre statement that the homiletic passages are “untranslatable”), and Ezra Pound’s version does not make it much further. It behooves us to remember that although the first half of the poem may have acted as a ‘hook’ or ‘bait’ for the second, both halves would have seemed equally conventional to a contemporary audience reared on traditional tales as well as church-sermons. Yet this does not mean that either is devoid of interest.

For one thing, this part of the poem continues to succeed admirably in the task of analogizing the Christian ethos to the Germanic warrior-code. The whole-line-formula adl oþþe yldo oþþe ecghete (‘illness or old age or hostile blade’), which highlights the fragility of life, may well have had pre-Christian origins; at least, a variant of it is put into the mouth of King Hroðgar by the relatively traditionalist Beowulf-poet. Lines 72-80 are particularly well-crafted examples of the priest-warrior analogy: not unlike the ideal hero before him, the ideal Christian does deorum dædum (‘deeds of daring’) against feonda niþ (‘the antipathy of enemies/fiends’) and is rewarded with praise after death that renders him immortal (the word used here being herian ‘to praise or glorify’, sometimes used for the glorification of saints, which of course puts us in mind of the postmortum prayers that laud a dead man’s soul ‘to the skies’). Perhaps even Pound’s outrageous translation of lifige mid englum (‘live with the angels’) as “remain amid the English” picked up on an intentional pun.

But the ‘gears’ shift up again and the analogy is left behind. After a passage on the death of a man – which ends with the bluntly untraditional statement that the burial of corrupt souls with physical treasures does them no good at all – the poet launches into ringing praises of the Lord and admonishments to piety. I have taken care to retain the six-beat hypermetric lines in which most of this is rendered, as they are clearly intended to slow down the reader and impart a more stately rhythm to the verses. In my view, the last of the hypermetric half-lines (in line 109) works best if the off-verse is viewed as a reversion to normal meter, though doubtless my admission of such possibilities constitutes an autodidactic heresy.⁶ I have also carefully rendered eorþan sceatas ond uprodor as ‘earth’s quarters and heaven’s dome’, emphasizing the squareness of sceatas and circularity of rodor⁷ (though I opted not to over-egg the battenberg with ‘angles of the earth and upper circle’).

The next passage, on the subject of moderation, seems a bit garbled and is likely missing some words (or even an entire line). As Pope points out in Eight Old English Poems (p.110-11), line 112 should be emended to wiþ leofne lufan ond wið laþne bealo (‘to loved ones love and to loathed ones bale’), and the line after it should perhaps contain an infinitive like habban (‘to have’, as in ‘he wishes that the flames should have him’); in my view, either this line or a hypothetical missing one after it should also contain the word feond (‘foe’) to balance the word wine (‘friend’) in line 115. As Richard Marsden suggests in The Cambridge Old English Reader (p.230), the proper sense of the passage seems to be that it matters not whether a man wishes his foe to be killed by flames or his friend to be burned upon a pyre. Since the one would have implied the sack of a mead-hall, and the other an honourable funeral, these lines can be taken as another forswearance of the traditional code.

Finally, there’s not much to say upon the closing lines, unless it be amen. If you have diligently slogged to the end of these notes, perhaps you would benefit from a second reading of the translation. I won’t go as far as to say that you won’t find a better one, but you may well find a great many worse.

As ever, no credentials are claimed, and all constructive criticism is welcome.

1. Poets in the ‘classical’ Anglo-Saxon period didn’t do this, but their high-medieval ‘revival’ successors did (see e.g. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). It occurs to me that the h-sound may have been pronounced more heavily in Old English than in Middle or Modern English, considering that this sound became attenuated in many words to the point of vanishing entirely (e.g. in hwisprian ‘to whisper’, hwit ‘white’, hlystan ‘to listen’).

2. Unless they follow a minority of scholars savant-idiots in interpreting the word anfloga as a reference to the cuckoo.

3. We can expand on this analogy (even beyond the intentions of the poet, as is possible with all true analogies, which are not made but discovered) by viewing the abysm as hell and the land beyond the open sea as heaven. The mortifications and worldly exile that correspond to ‘seafaring within sight of the coast’ can thus be seen as precious opportunities to learn the art of navigation before being forced on the final voyage (i.e. to know God in this life).

4. The word wæl does not mean simply ‘death’, but specifically ‘slaughter’, that is to say death by wounding. Note in this connection that the Norse word Valhǫll, i.e. ‘Valhalla’, would translate in Old English directly to Wælheall; the OE equivalent of Norse valkyrja ‘valkyrie’ is wælcyrge, ‘slaughter-chooser’, which seems to connote some sort of witch or demoness. Whether this entity was goddess, demoness, both or neither before the coming of Christianity, she has an obvious affinity with the ravens, wolves and eagles that traditionally ‘pick the slain’ on battlefields, and which were still deployed by Anglo-Saxon literary poets as symbolic harbingers of carnage. All of this must have influenced the writing of the 1957 paper in which G.V. Smithers defended the unemended phrase wælweg, and suggested that the word anfloga referred to a valkyrie; the fact that a blind eye and deaf ear was later turned to all of these obvious connotations, despite CHW’s best efforts to draw attention to them, only goes to show that scholarship does not always march onward and upward.

5. This would admittedly seem to be its original meaning; but the practical usages of words cannot always be derived from etymology, don’t you agree?

6. On consideration, I may have opened a can of worms here, as many of the hypermetric lines in this poem could potentially be rescanned as only half-hypermetric (given that words like forþon and cymeð go unstressed in other lines, so off-verses like cymeð him se deað unþinged and forþon he in his meahte gelyfeð could theoretically contain only two stresses). Since there is a degree of leeway for the ‘demotion’ and ‘promotion’ of stressed and unstressed words in this style, there is no easy way to resolve this problem except to to play it by ear.

7. Just as CHW discerns distant echoes of Egyptian lore in the role of the anfloga, I cannot help but notice the chime of sceatas and rodor with the Chinese doctrine of ‘round heaven and square earth’ (天圆地方 tian yuan di fang). Of course there is no question of its having been directly transmitted to Anglo-Saxon England; the only defensible position would be something like that of René Guénon in Symbols of Sacred Science, which asserts the persistence of this and other cosmological doctrines across many different traditions. By no means is this a wild stretch of the imagination in this case, since the earth is commonly divided into four cardinal directions and the sky into the zodiac circle.