Battle of Brunanburh

[CharlesH]

Great! That is one of my favourite pieces in OE. I have considered translating it into Old Norse (minus any attempt at alliteration).

The same battle is in prose form in Egil's saga from the point of view of a couple of Norse mercenaries (Egil and his brother, Thorolf).

What inspired you?

CharlesH

[annis]

First, I moved this post to the composition board.

Second, your poem is large enough that comments from me may trickle in over a few days.

Can you explain your motivations for writing the digamma? It's likely Homer didn't pronounce it even if its memory provided some metrical licenses. Even in your own work, sometimes the digamma is ignored in scansion — ΜέÏ￾κιοι οá½￾κ ἔδÏ￾ιον, -uu-uu-.

I'd accent Ἄθελστᾱν as Ἀθέλστᾱν instead, if the final alpha is to be taken long.

You have quite a few lines ending in a monosyllable — ξÏ￾ν, γῆν, τοῖν. This is pretty rare in homer, and even rarer in later hexameter verse (from 3% down to 1.7%). At the end of a line Homer prefers forms of γαῖα or αἶα for γῆ in particular.

Finally, for something completely different, are you the same Anthony Appleyard who produced a Quenya grammar in the 1990s still floating about all over the web?

[Didymus]

I suspect that the name Orion caused serious problems to hexameter poets: ΩÏ￾á¿￾ων is an important legendary character whose name contains that Homeric-type hexameter poet's dread, a cretic; whence, I suspect, Homer's scansion as ΩÏ￾ῑων and Hesiod's unetymological decontraction to ΩαÏ￾á¿￾ων .

See West's note ad Hes. Op. 598. ὨαÏ￾ίων is introduced into Hesiod only by conjecture (Nauck) -- the manuscripts are uniform in their transmission of ὨÏ￾ίων. The same holds for Homer, Aratus, and all other Greek and Latin hexameter poets. While lyric verse does show ὨαÏ￾ίων with short iota, and this is admittedly an older form, the contraction of ωα (and subsequent metrically-induced lengthening of the iota) is pre-Hesiodic, as is guaranteed by such contractions as αἰδῶ at Op. 324. So the solution to the problem of this particular cretic word was found very early indeed.