“The Order of the World”: an odd lyric from the Exeter Book, it seems to unite poetic composition, offering to initiate a neophyte into its mysteries, and in doing so, explores the creation principles of the universe. Its vision of creation is more spiritual than religious, missing many things these sorts of accounts often feature (the days of creation for instance, as you can see in Genesis A).

My translation identifies an enabling pun: a common epithet for God in OE poetry is “Meotud.” Usually this is just rendered as “God” and no one ever thinks twice about it. Occasionally you will come across something a bit better, like Bradley’s “Ordaining Lord.” That’s a start: the word seems to be related to the OE verb “metan” and would suggest a connection to measuring (and Bosworth see a connection to pre-Christian terms for deity). I always used “Measurer.” A synonym for “to measure” is “to mete” as in “mete out justice”. Next step: a “meter” as in “poetic meter” is a count that measures the space of speech and its organization. So why not make it the name for the divine in a poem about the godly nature of poetry? The “Meter”. The “Maker”. Poetry is a pulse of nature, uniting all its creatures, and so forth…