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: Words that relate to the relationship of the lord to his men are extremely important in all the Germanic heroic poetry. This importance extends to most religious poetry (and some religous prose) as well, because for the most part the religious poetry expresses Christian ideas in terms of the ethos of the pre-Christian heroic poetry. God is seen as an earthly Lord and his servants such as Moses, Andrew, Michael, etc. are seen as the loyal members of His comitatus. (There are of course exceptions to this, such as "The Phoenix.") : The <i>dryhten</i> is the lord, warlord, or leader of the comitatus, which is the <i>gedryht</i>; the <i>gedryht</i> is composed of the <i>žegnas</i> or thanes (singular = <i>žegn</i>. : The <i>gedryht</i> consists of two categories of <i>žegnas</i>: the <i>geoguš</i> and the <i>duguš</i>. The <i>geoguš</i> are the young men who have not yet achieved renown in service, and the <i>duguš</i> are the seasoned and respected veterans. From the former, we get our word "youth" (remember that the "g" is pronounced "y" before a front vowel); we have lost the nominal derivative of <i>duguš</i>, which would have been "douth" (and a considerable loss that is, in my opinion) but it does survive in the adjective "doughty," which always makes me think of Winston Churchill. : There are many other terms for the <i>dryhten</i> that reflect his numerous and varied aspects: : cyning = king: As patriarch (related to "kin") : ęželing: Expressing his descent form noble ancestors : aldor = elder: Expressing his seniority among the people : frea (cognate to hochdeutsch "fried"): Expressing the function of the lord as keeper of peace : helm (cognate to "helmet"): protector : beag-gyfa, gold-gyfa, sinc-gyfa: Ring-giver, gold-giver, treasure-giver; expresses the function of the lord as distributor of spoils of war and heirlooms as objective correlatives of the heroism of his men. : wine: friend. (pronounced win-eh) : žeoden: ruler of the people (That's exactly where Tolkien got the name of his King Theoden.) : hlaford = lord: Derived from hlaf-weard (lit: loaf-ward), designating the protector of the domestic side of life. But by the Anglo-Saxon period this ociation had been lost and <i>hlaford</i> was the general term for the ruler transcending all subsidiary ociations. : There are several other compounds in the fashion of beag-gyfa: man-dryhten, žeod-cyning, wine-dryhten, etc. Most of these are nonce coinages to suit the alliterative needs of the poetry, but even so retain their literal significations and traditional ociations. : The noun <i>žegn</i> spun off a verb: <i>ženian</i> menaing "to serve." In addition to its literal use, <i>ženian</i> gets some figurative mileage as well: Beowulf says he "served" the niceras with his sword as was fitting.

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