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Word-Wise (1999)

Lives pass away / but honor lingers long.

The bright words / of the bard's bequest
are greater good than / jewels or gold.
Would you win wealth? / Seek the word-hoard,
learn the cunning art / that captures kings.

He who dares / the deeds of heros
owes to might / to manly mettle.
He that has / the name of hero
owes to art. / Another's making.

When blood burns / and bile rises,
when tears torment / and tear the heart,
when alone we ache / for all that we have lost,
seek the word-hoard. / Wisdom and weal are there.

Who but bards / will bear the fame of men
down the dusty ages / till the doom of time?
Toss the torch / take the flame and pass it
day is waning / the night is dark and deep.

Lives pass away / but honor lingers long.

(February 1999)

This poem is in the oldest style of Germanic long-meter, the mode used in Viking and Anglo-Saxon epic poety and called in Icelandic "malohattar". I wrote it for a live-action role-playing game, in the character of Egil Skallagrimson. Egil was a famous poet and man-slayer of the middle Viking period. He was a tragic, brillant, dangerous man -- a gifted artist, embroiled in quarrels and deperate adventures all his life, eventually killed by a painful and debilitating chronic disease. In this poem I have tried to comment on Egil's view of his art not from a 20th-century point of view but as he himself, an alpha male of a warrior culture, might have.


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Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>