By THlaird Colyne Stewart, June AS 50 (2015)
For the Barbarians,
upon winning the ten-man tournament at Murder Melee XXXII.
To Melee came a
host of might
A horde to fight upon
the field
As ravens flew and
wolfen fed
All teams of ten all
trained to stand
To face the foe to
fight and bleed
When trumpets call’d the
thunder came
The horde fell to the
happy heri
Bright steel well-swung the
poets sang
As blood fed grass as
beaten fell
‘Til one side stayed the
bar’brous swords
In riches draped the
righteous awed
From beah-gifa’s hand the
heart of Rome
To plunder right to
rich-make home
Written in the style
of Old German versification.
This form is made up
of lines divided into hemistichs by a caesura. Each hemistich had at two
stressed syllables and at least two unstressed syllables. The syllables in each
hemistich almost always followed one of the following metrical patterns:
The A-line: / x / x
(knights in armour)
The B-line: x / x /
(the roaring sea)
The C-line: x / / x
(on high mountains)
The D1-line: / / \ x
(bright archangels)
The D2-line: / / x \
(bold brazenfaced)
The E-line: / \ x /
(highcrested elms)
I used the B-line,
though I broke the pattern in the first hemistich of the last line.
Alliteration must
occur between at least one stressed syllable in each half-line. It should be
noted that all vowels alliterated, and so did any words starting with the
letter G (whether the syllables had assonance or not).
Heri is an old
Germanic term for army, and beah-gifa
means “giver of rings” here referring to the Baron and Baroness of Ben
Dunfirth.
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