#aeide

[ainulindaelynn]

3, 18, 33? (also, hi!!!!!!!)

Hi hi!!! <3

3. 3 films you could watch for the rest of your life and not get bored of?

Oh gosh. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (which we're counting as one *ahem*) I've seen a thousand times and still find little details and still don't hate them a quarter century later, so I might as well keep 'em at this point. Pride & Prejudice, the five hour BBC version too, since that's been the sick day favorite forever.

The last one is much harder. Maybe Gladiator? Dirty Dancing I go back to sometimes. Lost Boys. Fury Road comes to mind. I don't know!! I rarely watch movies lately, so I'd have to really look for that last one xD

18. do you believe in ghosts and/or aliens?

Copying my answer from this post :)

Aliens, most likely. I haven't given it too much thought. It hasn't piqued my interest and I'm very 'worry about things that are helped by worrying and forget the rest' type, so it hasn't been too relevant.

As for ghosts, my logical brain doesn't believe at all. My late night nervous system though... different story. I do also say an occasional word to loved ones, regardless of whether I rationally think they're still around or not and I'm very weird about some physical spaces I know awful things have happened in, so who knows. Bit fluid on that one. Logically though, not so much.

33. any hobbies?

Not many active ones. I cook a ton and enjoy it but not quite at hobby level. I've gotten into propagating plants a little bit, but we live with very little direct sun, so after four years I've finally abandoned the effort temporarily. We're moving back to the city in the next year or two so I'll pick it back up after! Hopefully gardening too.

Tent camping is an actual hobby - obsessed with it. I'm at my happiest covered in dirt.

Aside from that it's gaming and writing!

I have a laundry list of things I'd love to get into someday, but time time, ya know. It's hard to come by, lol

Feel free to ask me a question :)

#ask games #ainulindaelynn #aeide

[leofrith]

💫,☯️,💌?

💫 what is your favourite kind of comment/feedback?

any kind of feedback is good, but i especially love one that points out a bunch of details that you didn't expect people to notice. but they noticed. and then on the other end of the spectrum we have mostly incoherent insults about how horrible i am, which are fun, because i do love when my writing causes emotional distress. 😇

☯️ how do you think engaging with each other through tumblr, twitter, comments, kudos, creates healthy fandom experiences? How do you deal with that if you're not a social person/experience social anxiety?

i mean it depends on what kind of engagement we're talking about obviously, because some kinds of engagement are. not good. but i think it's generally true that even just interacting with the art, fics, etc. that people put out that you like is a great way to motivate them to create more. looking at some of my old catws posts (🤡) last week reminded me just how much more engagement art, fics, etc. used to get, and it definitely made me miss how much more active people used to be on here.

💌 share something with us about an up-and-coming work (WIP) that has you excited!

i wanted to try to share something from chapter two of honor bound, but it's in pieces right now. i very much posted the first chapter and have since let it rot for seven months because life stuff/writer's block/imposter syndrome have all conspired to keep me from finishing the next one, and i really need to stop doing this. 😭 anyway here's an excerpt from chapter three of a different kind of solace, which i also keep trying to finish and i PROMISE it's close i promise—

Eivor draws him out of his thoughts with a soft hum. “Perhaps King Ceolwulf may welcome you back into the fold. You are a steadfast warrior and a man of honor—the exact kind of ally that a fledgling king needs by his side.”  There was a time when Leofrith would have basked in the praise, bent himself into whatever shape necessary to prove himself deserving of it. Eivor’s suggestion is sound—it would be easy enough to don the role of war-thegn once more if it were offered to him. It would be familiar, comfortable, like slipping into a pair of well-worn boots—and the very opposite of what he wants.  The realization startles him. For years, Leofrith has given away pieces of himself, sliver by sliver, cutting and tearing until he was left entirely stripped bare by duty. What he did in Rome was a necessary bloodletting, a purging of what remained of Burgred’s poisonous grip on his life. Eivor has managed to warm him enough that blood pumps anew within his veins, but her presence is only a temporary fire, soon to be extinguished, and he worries what will become of him when he is left alone again. But being freed of his oaths, free to live as he sees fit for the first time since he was a boy is overwhelming, terrifying . . . liberating.  And Leofrith cannot remember a time when his own needs or wants held any weight, any importance. Not before last night.

fic writer asks 💖

#i knew i should have just waited to start posting hb until i had a decent backlog of chapters #and ANY fic i write that's longer than a one shot for that matter #but the need for instant gratification got me 🤡 #i also have realized that i do this thing where i share a piece of writing and if it gets a good response i become convinced #that anything i put out from that point on will just be disappointing which. is obviously not great for my ability to write #trying to answer these after a few glasses of wine so if it doesn't make sense i'm sorryyyyyyyyy #answer #aeide #ask games

[findusinaweek]

HC Ask Game: 😇📓🍫 for Eagle-bearer and Deimos?

Eagle Bearer: A headcanon about their religion/lack thereof: Alexios spends a surprising amount of time visiting temples. Regardless of Isu bullshit, he believes the gods are real. Eagle Bearer Kassandra does not much care for the gods and whether they are real. A headcanon about their hobbies: Alexios's shack on Kephallonia is full of half started projects. He doesn't really do much for hobbies so much as start and fail projects, but over the years he gets pretty good at wood carving and carpentry. Sometimes, when he gets tired of mercenary work, he does that to get by. A headcanon about food: I just answered that I think Alexios is good at fishing, but I think he must be good at also cooking the fish. Very simple but very well done fish. Timotheos would be impressed if he ate this fish. Deimos: A headcanon about their religion/lack thereof: Deimos is impious, but honestly what can be expected? They were treated like a demigod, it is hard to come back from that. A headcanon about their hobbies: I think it's possible for an older, post-cult Deimos to get into blacksmithing. It looks hot and aggressive just like them. They refuse to take work and make themselves weapons that they no longer use and but generally refuse to sell. If they have a partner, their partner is annoyed with their 'collection' of weaponry. A headcanon about food: Deimos (Kass or Alexios) cannot cook. They never learned. They resent the fact their sibling can cook. They would 100% try to pick a fight about this. Stentor laughs and gets punched.

#ask game #aeide #this was tough!

[anosrepasi]

🍓🍄📚🧩?

🍓 ⇢ how did you get into writing fanfiction?  So in like 7th grade my English class had a year long assignment to have a notebook and each quarter of the year we got graded on how much we wrote with it being totally open to what we could write. So I wrote a bunch of fledgling original fiction and uh.... a ton of rare-pair naruto fanfiction that for the most part never saw the light of day. It was probably the best school assignment i ever got in my life, and kicked off my fan fic writing career. 🍄 ⇢ share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings This one is hard cause I've got lots of character headcanons for most fandoms I'm in but.... uhhhhh. Pairing headcanons are a lot harder since a) half of the stuff I ship is not canon and b) I'm a sucker for AUs and love to tilt canon on its side to see what happens so that inherently already changed the lens to mostly being headcanon.

uhhhhhhhh. Fuck it, Yuffie Kisaragi/Shalua Rui of FFVII: Dirge of Cerberus (Yes the PS2 game) infamy are a top-tier pairing that makes so much sense and if you want to cry over some of the best FFVII writing I've ever read you should read everything @nagia-pronounced-neijia has ever written for them as found here: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Yuffie%20KisaragisShalua%20Rui/works

📚 ⇢ what's the last thing you wrote down in your notes app? A poetry scrap! I write a ton of poetry scraps in my notes and hope they one day will make it into a full piece. Frankenstein Palimpsest: what difference is there between monster and monument? Time The answer is time. 🧩 ⇢ what will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately?

Block wall of text. I can't do it, lmao, I'm not strong enough. Otherwise it's a lot of little stuff like first person perspective or characters being filed down to very simplified "cardboard cut-out" versions of themselves. Special mention is the fics that spam tags, I hate those things so so much. I tend to undertag if anything, and fics that tag every single possible tag or unrelated tags garner my undying fury. Thanks for the ask!!!

Send me Writing Truth or Dare questions!

#ano asks #aeide #whats my tag again #writing tag game

[alethiometry]

WIP Game: Departures, please!

'departures' is the working title for my kasseivor/valhalla last chapter fix-it wip! it was borne out of my disdain for how utterly underwhelming the last chapter was, as well as just me using any excuse to shove kassandra into any scenario. my hope is that, although i don't plan on it being a very happy fic, and i still want it to end geographically in the same place as the last chapter, the emotional and narrative payoff feels much more earned.

the premise is that eivor convinces kassandra to join her raiders and come live in ravensthorpe for as long as she wants. kassandra knows she shouldn't stay long (and aletheia is in her head doubling down on this thought) but ultimately as a big fuck-you to aletheia and also because she has the biggest gayest crush on eivor, she does accept the offer.

the fic opens with kass arriving in ravensthorpe, and the general idea is kass and eivor growing closer as in the background other characters come and go. vili returns to snotinghamscire to finally accept his position as jarl. gunnar and brigid have a child. randvi finds her calling in joining the hidden ones (under both kass and hytham's tutelage) and accompanies hytham back east. rollo goes to france. the raven clan kids' trio are growing up. "dreams" by the cranberries is playing in the background despite not debuting for another thousand years and i'm crying my eyes out just thinking about it etc etc.

eventually aelfred comes knocking and eivor and sigurd clash over what to do; sigurd wants to resist aelfred's army by any means necessary (aka all-out war), but eivor (from her own experience fighting in the south, and advised by kass who has already observed the spread of christianity through her travels and feels this is a force that cannot be resisted outright the way sigurd thinks it can) is inclined to follow in her father's footsteps and surrender/come to some kind of compromise in order to spare her people.

and that's kind of where the details end. i've got maybe the first couple thousand words written and everything else vaguely outlined up to this point. i have some ideas/inspiration for how i want certain plot/character beats to go, but a lot of it is heavily influenced by the final season of black sails, so for the sake of @milfeivor who is still watching that for the first time, i will keep my mouth shut for now :)

the main issue is that i feel like in order to do justice to any of the characters i would either have to re-play the game (which is too fucking long and i don't want to do it), watch clips of character interactions and cutscenes on youtube (which i could do but am lazy), or read fics featuring the characters i want to write about (which i don't feel comfortable considering "research" because i don't want to mistake authorial interpretation for canon fact or unintentionally pass off somebody else's ideas as my own). so for all those reasons, this one is on the backburner. i do hope to come back to it one day, but for now i don't feel any real urgency to work on it.

also, havi/odin does not exist in this story or at least isn't narratively present, because i simply do not fucking care <3

#thank you all for asking about this one! #included a lot of info bc i got 3 asks on it lol #anyway ky hmu when you finish black sails because i have THOUGHTS #ask games #aeide #milfeivor #doomcountry

[elucubrare]

Carpathia, 17--

The sun, his servant told him, streamed in through the glass panels of the solar (now converted to a greenhouse). When he touched the soil, it was warm and damp, but not wet, as the books indicated it should be. And yet the little bush did not flourish. Its leaves drooped and yellowed sadly.

"Perhaps you should bring it earth from its home," his nearest neighbor, a Count, suggested.

"Perhaps," he answered. And so, at great expense, he had earth from China brought to his keep high in the mountains. It seemed to help. The bush's leaves grew green and thick, and his servant told him that the light was still good.

At night he knelt next to the tea plant, feeling its roots sink into the soil - growing slowly, the way time passes.

"Tell me when the sun is best to dry the leaves," he instructed his servant. And the man did so. The leaves dried in the sun the glass panes let through, and their cultivator did not see them dry, but waited, patiently. He had all of eternity to wait.

When the leaves were dried, he gathered them - always at night - from their racks. With his own hands he stoked the fire and boiled water and steeped the tea. He could not taste it, of course, so he set the steaming mug in front of his servant.

"How is it?" he asked.

"It's good," he answered. "You know, when my father told me you wanted to grow tea, I didn't believe him."

"How is he? I haven't seen him in a long time, I think."

"Dead, m'lord. We don't live all that long."

It's good, he thought. It could be better. And so he brought water all the way from China, and bought clearer glass, and more tea plants, and bred them together to make the best leaves. "How is it?" he asked generations of servants, who were, to him, less individual than the leaves of his tea bushes. And they told him it was good. He wished he could taste it.

It must be like the difference between the blood of a horse and the blood of a man, he thought, though, consumed by the need to perfect his tea, he hadn't need to feed for centuries. He watched the steam rise from the glass mugs, and admired the translucent golden-brown hue of the liquid they contained. If it is as good as it is beautiful, he thought, and felt a glow like the glow of fire in his cold veins, it must be good indeed.

NYC, 20--

"'Over three hundred years of experience,'" she read, sneeringly, off the side of a box of tea. "Yeah, right."

#tea vampires - for @aeide-thea #story fragments

[proudheron]

first time bleach dyeing and it turned out so good! i did a lot of t-shirt modifying when i was a teenager but never tried this because i thought the orange was ugly. now i have come around on the weird, rusty, moldy look hehehe

this is an acronym of the old girl's generation fan slogan* and it's my concert outfit for seeing hyoyeon tomorrow :) long time readers of this blog know how much i love her. it takes a lot of stage presence to stand out in a 9 member girl group ok

* 지금은 소녀시대, 앞으로도 소녀시대, 영원히 소녀시대**

** right now it's girl's generation, from now on it's girl's generation, forever it's girl's generation***

*** it comes off so clunky in english sadly. a more accurate semantic translation of 소녀시대 is The Era Of The Girl but that would be a wild name for a pop group

#aeide-thea style footnoting let's fucking go #this took about an hour and the ratio of effort to godlike smugness elicited is out of control

[whereforartthoumisthios]

tagged by super cool(TM) @aeide!! You know I'll never say no to a tag game omg

Five Songs I Actually Listen To

"Actually listen to" makes it seem like you're just pretending to listen to the songs. How does one do that? Well, I promise I actually do listen to the following LOL

This is my favorite MJ song and I have no shame putting it at number 1. It is a bop and will always be a bop and I shall never tire of it!!!

2. If you come from a broken family, this one's for you lol nah but for real, this song meant so much to me in 2014 and it still gets me jamming when it comes on, even if life is better lol

3. This song do be tugging at the heartstrings but it's 100% one of my favorite Adele songs. This whole album tugs on your heartstrings what am I SAYING-

4. A more recent love of mine, BUT still a bop every time and I love - thank you

5. This album was the only Alicia Keys album I ever owned, and I basically loved the whole thing lol but this song I still find myself going back to. Sorry to say it again but - it's a bop!

Tagging (with no pressure ever as always!): @ainulindaelynn @solareias @wickedwitchofthewesninski @scottysketches @tashabanes @books-and-glitter @no-barbarians-here @d64d-n0t-sl66p1ng

#thank you aeide #always a pleasure doing a tag game lol #tag game #music tag game #music #spotify music #spotify #michael jackson #ed sheeran #adele #the hunna #alicia keys #it's a bop #bop after bop #i love saying bop apparently lol

[crushcandles]

didn't see that it was yr birthday until just now but i hope you've had a good one!! yr writing is always so elegant & interesting and then on top of it you're so nice also—a thoroughly winning combination in a person, and i hope the year to come is interesting & nice right back!!

This is such a kind thing for you to say! Thank you so much!! What a privilege and joy to have such a generous & wonderful mutual! 💗

#crushcandles answers YOUR asks #aeide-thea #who is always so charming and encouraging!

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Replies to this post!

@necro-divergent:

that post’s got some weird conflation between “writing for marketability” and “thinking about audience interpretation and enjoyment” that i do not understand. not a fan of it either

It's conflating a lot of stuff, frankly. Leaning into one's kinks without apologetic scaffolding in the narration is different from, uh, "two people feeling the biggest craziest feelings of their entire life and they cannot do anything about it except bang it out". There are a lot of different things being clustered together here, and I frankly think it would have been served better by talking about register, rather than author motivation.

But yeah, you're right to point out that considering one's audience on any level is different from aiming to be maximally marketable. Do I "write for myself"? Sure, and one reason I got into writing fanfic was because I was burned out on public fandom interaction and needed to retreat into my own head and interpretations. But if I am putting the effort into writing at all, I am usually thinking on some level about how it will be read, even if it's just on the level of "would this paragraph be comprehensible to someone who doesn't live inside my head and already know what I mean by it?"

@wizardysseus:

i dislike it in a different way? being that: i do not really enjoy reading about fucking, and am made constantly aware in fandom spaces that what is self-indulgent for me may look like holding back the good stuff to someone else. so ultimately the same reason: you're talking about how you don't want writers to give a shit but how do YOU know if a writer gives a shit? based on whether their writing is tailored to YOUR preferences?

I feel this sooo much, if for different reasons. It's actually a point of insecurity I have about my current fic, so, cool post to see at this particular moment in time!

@aeide-thea:

ugh tumblr ate my first reply but. agree, & basically i think that post has the same problem as #ownvoices in that it thinks you can necessarily deduce things abt an author's positionality/attitude/&c from a text. which is just. not in fact true! sometimes your thin-slicing will be right, yes, but sometimes people are operating according to a pattern you don't personally recognize, and your assumptions about them are in fact totally off-base in erasive, dangerous ways!

Yeah, that's a good comparison. And, as I implied in my original tags, it's a little rich to frame an entire post around what you, the poster, personally like to read, but in a way that's supposed to champion personal enjoyment on the part of writers. Like.... what makes you think people who've written stuff that's off-putting to you cared about what you thought, then?

#replies #necro divergent #wizardysseus #aeide thea #fandom natterings

[guard-dogbiscuits]

Relationship status: Does family, friends and their pets count?

Favourite colour: Blues and greens

Song stuck in head:

Last song I listened to: well now I don't remember, because of the song I have stuck in my head!

Three favourite foods: Chile Rellenos (New Mexico style), Navajo Tacos, Green Chile Cheeseburgers

Last thing I googled: Trophonios, because I was curious about that cave in AC Odyssey

Dream trip: Greece and/or Egypt

Anything I want right now: a Green Chile Cheeseburger from the Whataburger my friends and I used to stop at, on the way to and from the student archaeology project I was part of

@aeide

#tagged by: aeide #tagging: whoever wants to do the thing #dash games

[leofrith]

in the mood for violence: 5 and 6?

5. worst discord server and why

in terms of servers i've actually been active in, it's gotta be the acc*ss the an*mus server. i'm sure it's still leagues better than the official ac server, which i daren't enter for anything other than checking what's in reda's item shop for the day. but i've found from personal experience (and that of some friends) that almost every big fan community for this fucking franchise will claim to be Not Like Other Girls (of the bigoted, gatekeepy, gamergate variety) before turning a blind eye to bullying, harassment, and bigotry within their own community. ata was no different, and while i did have some constructive conversations with people in there, the nastiness of some of the server members in there which went entirely unchecked made it not worth it. also, people will complain all day long about the stupid little problems they have with gameplay mechanics, etc. but the second you try to have a constructive discussion about ubisoft's many, many problems as a company, everyone is suddenly a ubisoft shill. 💀

6. which ship fans are the most annoying?

randivor shippers. 🧍🏻‍♀️ i say this as a (now, only occasional, due to exactly this kind of bullshit) randivor shipper myself, and this is only regarding the specific brand of fan that insists randivor is indisputably canon and then jumps down your throat for so much as implying otherwise. if that description doesn't sound like you, then congratulations! this isn't about you! if anything i'm about to say feels like a personal attack, then perhaps you should take a look inward instead of making it my fucking problem. i did already talk about this a bit here for a completely separate question because i got ahead of myself, but i totally understand the desire, especially for lesbians, for spaces that are entirely free of men. i do truly get it! but i'm sure you can also understand why the constant comments implying or just straight up saying that eivor "ending up" in a relationship with a man is the worst thing that could ever happen might make me, a bisexual woman who sees eivor as bisexual, feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. that's not even mentioning the straight up biphobia. there is a not insignificant number of randivor shippers who seem to think they're doing activism by calling anyone who ships eivor with men lesbophobic or misogynistic—eivor, the rpg character who can romance people of any gender for a reason. this behaviour, in my own experience, is enough of a pattern that any content i was working on for the ship is pretty much dead in the water at this point. i personally don't really feel like occupying space in a fandom where i've been blocked by a number of people who i've never directly interacted with, for no apparent reason other than the fact that i sometimes put eivor in "straight" relationships (that is something bisexual people do on occasion, btw. so so sorry about that. i've tried to grow past my manfucker tendencies but it just isn't working 😔) tldr: it's not fucking hard to have your lesbian headcanons while also being normal about bisexual people. take my hand. let me show you the way.

send me a number!

#OKAY THIS ONE GOT REAAAALLY LONG #like damn this really is the 'choose violence' ask game huh #i was getting increasingly pissy as i wrote this and it shows 🧍🏻‍♀️ #answer #aeide #ask games

[findusinaweek]

@aeide​’s ask got eaten by the void when I tried to reply on mobile last night, so here’s a second try! Glad I had the email alert so I could remember which emoji it was. What is your wildest headcanon? As I was talking about in the Discord chat, I think Alexios regularly kidnaps people instead of assassinating them in contract kills. Sends them off to the Adrestia, gets paid from the original poster, gives the victim a bit (since you do pay a bit when equipping lietenants), makes them work onboard for a week to think about what they’ve done, free wine from Barnabas and mandatory karaoke, drops them off (unequip and delete lieutenant from list) somewhere halfway across the map and lets them live their lives without fear of people trying to kill them. This is mostly because I like money and most of these people don’t need to die, they just need a good talking to and the game doesn’t let me do that.

Which character is your favorite to write?

Alexios! Probably the only character I feel genuinely comfortable writing.

If a movie or show were based on your fic, which fic would you choose and who would you fancast?

This was so hard! I don’t really picture real people well if the media isn’t with real life actors. Your fancasts were enlightening! Ok ficwise, Braid, because the other ones don’t feel right to picture with a fancast tbh.

:Michael Antonakos as Alexios:

Because of course! Here he even had longer hair! Yeah! Alexios! Look at those arms!

Also would be happy with Miguel Ángel Silvestre as Alexios:

Kind of glad the original post got eaten because it was just the absolute thirstiest pictures of Miguel. I hate Instagram and phone apps (as you have heard) but his? I’m surprisingly ok with it. I have no idea why. Ok, so Brasidas was very hard to picture. I originally thought Juan Pablo Medina as Brasidas:

 Because I like his beard. But then looking up pictures for Miguel I saw pictures of him with Alfonso Herrera in Sense 8 so....Alfonso Herrera as Brasidas:

UHM. HELLO. I don’t think any of these (except Michael) make any sense but if you take Miguel and Alfonso you get an actual shoulder kiss and that makes me very, very happy. I just picture Alexios and Brasidas kissing each other on the shoulder all the time, it’s just one of my favorite ways to show affection, I think I use it in most fics of them and insert gibberish ranting and crying.

Ok, well thanks for this ask, it was a lot of fun!

#ask game #aeide

[alethiometry]

top 5 tv shows AND/OR top 5 gossip girl characters?

tv shows:

1. black sails

2. parks and recreation

3. leverage

4. american vandal

5. derry girls

gossip girl characters:

1. blair waldorf

2. jenny humphrey

3. lily van der woodsen

4. georgina i forgot her last name

5. it would be chuck if not for the 2 assaults he pulled in the pilot so uhhh idk serena??

#ask games #aeide #thanks for the ask!

[elucubrare]

a little while ago k @aeide-thea said that the only things i knitted were "cables and things that look like a medieval person could wear them" & they are extremely not wrong

#my current thing is somehow both despite not *really* having cables #idk my bff aeide thea

[intermundia]

do you have a favorite translation of the iliad? i want to read it but want an informed opinion on the best translation to read!!

This is actually a very timely question anon, because I got a new translation of the Iliad for Christmas (Emily Wilson's) and have been enjoying the hell out of it haha so it's on my mind.

In general, I think that the best translation depends on what experience you’re looking for! Homer in Greek is both archaic and formal, and also beautifully dynamic and rapid (like the oral delivery had amazing flow). So translations usually have to kind of pick between the two, and you can lean on whichever side feels best.

This is the Greek of the beginning if you want to read it out loud and get a sense of what two lines of the OG dactylic hexameter are like, and what they’re trying to match:

Mēnin aeide thea pēlēiadeō Akhilēos: oulomenēn, he muri’ Akhaiois alge’ ethēke

Lattimore (1951) is probably the most ~acccurate~ line-for-line translation, I would use it in place of a dictionary if I was in a hurry sometimes haha it’s that loyal to the Greek if you want to know that that's like, but it's also a bit of a clunky slog to read, lacking poetry:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,

Wilson (2023) that I just began today so far has been fresh and engaging, it begins like this:

Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles, son of Peleus, which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain

Fagles (1990) has good flow without sacrificing too much accuracy. It was the first translation I read, and look what happened to me lmao. It starts like this:

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,

Fitzgerald (1974) is another popular choice, he has good poetic feel:

Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous,

Or if you want to feel like Keats, you can go hog wild and hit up some Chapman from the 1600′s:

Achilles’ banefull wrath resound, O Goddesse, that imposd Infinite sorrowes on the Greekes, and many brave soules losd

Basically there's no real right answer, but if you came over to my house and asked to borrow a copy, I would hand you Fagles (1990) (pdf here if you want it).

#classics #hopefully useful answer haha #enjoy!!! nothing better than drinking from the ever-fresh source of western lit