Search This Blog

Thursday 19 March 2009

Bretwalda Round 2: A Saxon Tale

After my poetic (ish...and very heavily..ahem...'influenced' by an actual poem...) efforts, here is a belter of a poem from fellow cub member Carl Fisher. Carl (with his Angles) was fighting my variant of the Mt Agned scenario against Dan Phillips' Romano-British...

Read and enjoy...

The battle of Mount Agned - a fragment in translation:

In this way King Eni royal brother to Rædwald,
Lord of warriors and ring-giver to men,
Won eternal glory in battle with sword edges
The sons of Tytila of Anglia, befitting their noble descent.
Defended their land in battle against each hostile people,horde and home.
The enemy perished,
Christmen and Roman,fated they fell.
The field flowed with blood of warriors,
from sun upin the morning, when the glorious starglided over the earth,
till that noble creation sank to its seat.
There lay many a warrior by spears destroyed; weary, war sated.

The East-Saxons pushed onwardall day;
in troops they pursued the hostile people.
They hewed the fugitive grievously from behind
with swords sharp from the grinding.
The Angles refused not hard hand-play to any warrior
who came fated to fight.

Death came to many, horse and man.
Banners were broken over the whales back.
The hill too small to hold the dead entombed
Covered with the dead.

Running over the grass we sought them, slew them.
Front and rear we hewed then,
Hemmed them in and brought them low.
Death upon death, though arrows fell like rain.

They left behind them, to enjoy the corpses,
the dark coated one, the dark horny-beaked raven
and the dusky-coated one,
the eagle white from behind, to partake of carrion,
greedy war-hawk, and that gray animal
the wolf in the forest.

There spirits join the old ones on their stone road.
Trapped in death, watching the hill from afar.

Never was there more slaughter
on this island, never yet as many
people killed before this
with sword's edge: never according to those who tell us
from books, old wise men.

How cool is that???
Marvellous stuff and indicative of a mighty Angle victory!!

Round 3 will be different: It will be multiplayer games with Round two's protagonists joining forces to fight against another pairing. In this way, each multiplayer force contains a winner and loser from Round 2, thereby attempting some sort of balance to each Round 3 game. I also have an idea for some random events which may occur for Round 3 as well...

Still, I can't reveal too much yet as one Round 2 game is yet to play. That will happen next Monday, after which the draw for Round 3 will occur!

3 comments:

WABit said...

Pics! We want pics!

Cheers,

Darrell.

GuitarheroAndy said...

I intend to take the camera along to Round 3...trouble is, as I'm playing and trying to help the inexperienced WABbers (of whom there are several!) to get through their games, it's not easy to take pics, but I will try.... :-)

WABit said...

It'd be good if you could manage a few Andy. Don't forget to post on the WAB Forum too if you have the time :0)

Darrell.