Codex text
Tremble at the ice-troll Hryngnar, guard your gaze against his wrath,
Dead to dreams as dwarves below us, fools in folly block his path.
Weapons weeping, Avvar warriors struck to seek their legend-mark,
Fed not fortune but the Lady, folly-fallen in the dark,
Dead to Hryngnar's fury freezing.
Came the giants, water-wading, here to hunt and harrow home.
Avvar fear the shapes in shoreline, forced to flee when giants roam.
Hryngnar, ice-troll, sees his brothers, calls the winter winds to shore,
Giants frozen, forged in frostbite, threaten Avvar homes no more.
Fears of giant-battle easing.
Came the warriors of Tevinter, armors shining, shields of gold,
Stole the land of Avvar keeping, stone-carved walls to claim their hold.
Hryngnar, ice-troll, wreaks his raging, lowland warriors weep and shake,
Glacier-strength did Hryngnar conjure, stone Tevinter walls to break,
Lowlands flee, their lands releasing.
Stay unseen from ice-troll Hryngnar, glacier-strength in giant form,
None but fools will fight the winter, battle-bond the icy storm.
Dead to dreams as dwarves below us, wrath of frost and winter's death,
Blades are blunted, battle-broke, on hide whose chill can frost the breath.
Hryngnar ice-troll, winter's seizing.
Trivia
- The metre used in this poem, as well as many other Avvar poems, is catalectic trochaic octameter, meaning it has eight trochees (pairs of syllables where the first is stressed and the second unstressed) but drops the last syllable of each line. In this poem, each stanza is a quintain (five lines) with an AABBC rhyme scheme, composed of two couplets and a final tetrameter (four trochees). Each of the tetrameter lines rhymes with the others (they all end in -ing).