The Song of the Erils

Tell me what y'all think of this.

I

“Here to the lover of horses! Here to the teller of tales!
I have heard thy song on the mountain in the midst of the blowing gales.
With thee wouldst I run the river, and fight on the glittering plain,
Though the lights go out in the darkness and the wind bears with it the rain.
When the clouds gather gray in the autumn and a fog rolls in off the bay,
Then the horns are blown from the towers, and the fires are lit in the clay.
The men come in from the meadows and from the trees of the wild wood,
And they draw the mead from the flagons, and they drink to the arms of the good.
In the years when the deer in the forest ran through the rushing glens,
The snows were bright in the valleys and loud was the call of the wrens;
In the halls were the songs of the mighty sung with the harp and the flute
And the bright-eyed girl with the tresses took up the dance with a lute.
It was in the days of darkness when the might of Rome had failed,
That the Goths came down the valleys and from the east they sailed.
They came at first in longboats, in bands of five or ten,
But soon they came in hundreds down the wide and wooded glen.
They rode on mighty horses with shirts of mail and plate,
And drove along before them the thralls they'd made of late.
The harvest had been plentiful, and the winter was bright and weak.
The spring brought many flowers below the snow white peak.
Old Tangrid was the farmer, sowing seed in outland fields,
Who saw them first oncoming with swords and well-wrought shields.
He fled before the riders, and Odin was with him then,
And came at last to the great hall bringing tidings to the men.”
....
(Incomplete)

II

...
(Incomplete)
The days pass down into darkness, and the Erils are buried in arms.
Their sons head south for the cities and abandon the mountains and farms.
The sadness comes nigh to a burning in the pit of poet's heart,
For he knows the winds of the mountains will force him soon to depart.
With none left to kindle the fires and none left to bear the shield,
The long halls will lie open to the tall grass of the field,
And to the snows of the winter, and to the rains of May,
And all that has stood with the Swordmen will fall again into clay.
One is the man who remembers, and sings the songs of old;
He sits on the rocks of the harbor and waits for the night and the cold.
It is he is the lover of horses, it is he with the iron chain.
His mail is rusted and broken, and he casts his helm to the main.
The chain was the guard of the great hall; it had bound the doors in the night;
Its iron was the first from the mountain when the men were young in their might.
He had pried it loose from the great rack where it had hung in the hall
And had carried it down to the bay rocks beyond the great sea wall.
In the waning light of the sunset, he kneels in the stones and the sand,
And takes up the song of the Swordmen with the chain of the hall in his hand.
And when the song is over, and the sun is gone in the west,
The poet hurls the great chain to the place of its lasting rest.
The stones are gray in the evening and in the coming twilit gloom,
And the fates of the men of the mountain fall from the silver loom.

Anyway, those are the two parts so far. I'm not sure how they connect or what is going on in the first one, but it will come to me, I'm sure. The Erils were dirven from their homes by the Goths and the flooding of large regions of their homeland, so at least is the story I've heard. How they came to be in the service of Justinian, and how they came to fight at a plce in Persia called "Pharangium", modern "Verangiya", is beyond me. Still, even if I end up just fabricating connections, which I'll have to do at some level, I'd like to make an interesting and consistent whole.