Yeah, this conventional love-relationship of vassal and lord has been completely lost to our culture. Probably won't be long before someone makes a serious effort to gaysplain it.
When using this style, the more you try to preserve the ornamentation the more you are forced to break up the formulas, and vice versa. I tend to lean towards one or the other depending on how close to oral tradition I judge the original poem to be. So in the case of Beowulf (which I see as a literary poem deliberately evocative of oral epic), my preference is to loosen the ornamentation and keep the formulas consistent where I can, whereas with a poem like this one I take the opposite tack.
Interesting how specifically about missing his lord and lords court the loneliness was going to be.
What are your thoughts about translating formulas consistently vs not?
Yeah, this conventional love-relationship of vassal and lord has been completely lost to our culture. Probably won't be long before someone makes a serious effort to gaysplain it.
When using this style, the more you try to preserve the ornamentation the more you are forced to break up the formulas, and vice versa. I tend to lean towards one or the other depending on how close to oral tradition I judge the original poem to be. So in the case of Beowulf (which I see as a literary poem deliberately evocative of oral epic), my preference is to loosen the ornamentation and keep the formulas consistent where I can, whereas with a poem like this one I take the opposite tack.