a translation of—
Gūða . . . þonne hnitan fēðan
Here ‘hnitan fēðan’ refers to the swift clash in battle of two armed hosts, a notion which is ill borne out by the distributive ‘warriors’ and the vague ‘contended.’
At line 2598 we find—
they to wood went
for
hȳ on holt bugon,
which, whatever be the meaning of ‘bugon,’ is surely a misleading translation.
The nature of the verse has been sufficiently illustrated by the quotations from the author’s preface. It would seem from the way in which the measure is used that it was a kind of second thought, incident upon the use of a line-for-line translation. It is hard to read the lines as anything but prose, and, if they appeared in any other form upon the page, it is to be questioned whether any one would have guessed that they were intended to be imitative.