A Historically Adjacent “Adaptation”

As I’ve mentioned a few times recently, I’ve been thoroughly appreciating all Stroud’s excellent work in his podcast series on the history of the English language, which is far more a history through the lens of language than it is a study of linguistics, though it does plenty of that, too.  In one episode to which I recently listened, he includes several riddles from the Exeter book, their translations from Old English, and some of the possible solutions to the riddles.  One in particular caught my ear.  In the original Old English, it is

Stroud uses the Paul F Baum translation, which gives the riddle as

The possible solutions scholars consider for this riddle are the Moon, a travelling minstrel, and a riddle.  The last is interesting from the perspective of having a fairly elaborate riddle about riddles, but I was most intrigued by the second possible solution, the minstrel, especially given the role of such travelling minstrels in Angle-Saxon society of the time, and how that role was evolving.  It might be interesting to write a short story about a wandering minstrel who’s lost his patron lord and who, because of the changing of the times, no longer commands the respect he once did.  Perhaps he might grouch about the monasteries’ spread of literacy, or wander to foreign lands in search of new purpose.  I might write such a story one day, but I was also intrigued by how well the riddle’s tone and contents, read through the lens of referring to a travelling minstrel increasingly unneeded by his society, could map into the world of Impressions, and especially the druids’ fate.

I may also write a short story exploring this concept, further exploring the druidic lore and history which the main novel never really gets to plumb in great detail, save through what they left behind for Raven to find.  If I do, it would begin with this poem I adapted as an epigraph.  In most respects it retains the contents of the Baum translation, but I reworked the structure, some of the tenses, and the punctuation to tell a different story and frame the poem differently (for one, to frame it as a poem instead of a riddle).  So yes, this is a highly derivative work, but considering the Exeter book’s riddles probably began life as “folk knowledge” or part of an oral tradition passed around between such minstrels before being written down some eleven hundred years ago, I don’t feel too guilty about it.  One day, there may be a story to go with this, but for now, I hope you find this interesting on its own.

~Druid’s Lament, dated c. 85 post-Purge.  Poem discovered in a Vigothic burial mound, written in the common script.  Given the poem’s content, one infers a bitter irony in the poet’s choice of medium.