The Old English Refrain Nobody Can Quite Translate
“Deor,” a forty-two-line poem in the tenth-century Exeter Book, ends each of its six stanzas with the refrain þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg—often translated “that passed over, so may this.” Its grammar resists a simple English equivalent. This essay follows the poem’s legendary sorrows and asks what its ambiguous promise can offer someone still waiting for grief to pass.