Very simple, Robin. Anglo Saxon is an inflected language, like Mod German, or like Greek or Latin. Consequently it takes about 80 percent in English syllables to say the same thing as the original. So the translator has two choices, cut the number of lines, or cut the line length, to avoid padding the text. You see this often in classical translations where hexameters are shaved to our pentameters. But we were determined to recreate as closely as possible the music of alliterative, heroic tetrameter, so we cut the number of lines. Compare our text to Heaney's or anyone else's line for line text, and compare Donaldson's prose crib, and you'll see that ours is never "fleshed out" to fill a line count. We made the decision when we edited the funeral scene, the end of the poem, which was the first text I tackled. I think it shrank from 44 to 38 lines. It adds nothing to the original and lacks nothing that is rightfully there.
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