The incredibly doubtful and weird “Husband’s Message” has been. In most cases I simply read around the many ellisions in the beginning, but in one case, in line 6 [in the original] I adopted a suggested reading: Trautmann’s “hrcyge haeletha hamas gosohte” even though Krapp and Dobbie find it doubtful. I tried to just let the extant text speak for itself, without a lot of emendation, even if it seemed strange to follow.

Michael Schmidt’s translation, in the Word Exchange, reads quite differently, but then he seems to fill in the gaps with text of his own, and allow the poem to take him to a coherent location.

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