Dearness, scarcity and this year

Meaning

Tewer suggests dearness or scarcity in a verse asking where upright, unboastful practitioners can be found. Hewer means ‘this year’; the accompanying gerathen presents them as something that has not turned out well, with the flavour of a disappointing crop. The joke qualifies the advice to seek good guides by admitting how hard they are to find.

The English ‘they are dear’ preserves some ambiguity between value and rarity. It should not be converted into a literal market price for instruction or an externally dated report of famine. The following contrast of a tiny weight with a hundredweight continues the valuation of quality against mere numbers.