Marcy has a question for Julian but he seems to be concentrating hard on something so she'll ask Theun instead and Julian can jump in if he wants. "These lines and these lines can reinforce in a spell, yes?"

Theun goes through Wendy's list of missing words and fills in most of them. One or two he's uncertain of and makes a guess. "I think I know what that means, but I should look it up. May I borrow the dictionary for a moment?"

After he's confirmed those words, he gets back to Marcy.

"That looks right to me. The parallelism is in a lot of spells. That part should still be visible in translation..."

She tells the dictionary that it's so lovely she just has to show it off to her friends, who will be so impressed, and loans it to Theun.

Oh good a concrete problem, he is saved. 

"This depends, I think? I – I'm sorry, okay, structural parallelism is usually good for reinforcing specific effects, right, so you'd expect to see it in sections that talk about what the spell is supposed to accomplish, instead of as a bridge between two sections like it is here. Not that it couldn't be a spell – " not that he's correcting anyone, heaven forfend – "but I don't think it's very efficient? Of course, not all spells are...." 

"Hm, yeah, good point. Does the assignment say there's definitely a whole spell in here somewhere or just elements that could be used in one?"

"It just says to think if they MIGHT be used in spells. That is how I read it at least..."

"So maybe this parallelism would be inefficient used this way but it's still an element that could be used in a different way in a spell."

Julian would prefer to have a high-level discussion about this which would really be much easier for everyone in English but that means he has to decide if he's more likely to offend Marcy by implying her German isn't good enough or impress her by showing he's thoughtful about the fact that she hasn't been studying it for as long. Julian is a pathetic remora who hates his life. 

Oh dear, Julian looks stressed. "Are you annoyed about us lapsing into English? I can try to switch back to exclusively German if you don't mind me slowing us all down." She cannot wait for language lab on Monday, just her and a disembodied voice and sweet sweet vocab.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah note to strategic Julian: look like you're trying less hard. 

"Oh, no, of course not, English is fine! Especially if we want to have a real discussion." 

"It's a good point," Theun says with a nod to Julian when he mentions the bridge, "If this was part of a spell, the bridge would probably be meant to tie two effects together, one from each section, but that seems unlikely."

His response to Marcy is, "The assignment says 'if any of them might have been used in spells', I don't think that it's suggesting that a spell would have used bits and pieces of it. If it's not useful as-is, it's probably not from a spell at all."

"Oh, thank you, I know I suggested immersion but on second thought we should really get the assignment done and then we can chat in German about whatever we want. So elements we've found so far that might work in a spell are this section of the third passage, and maybe the alliteration here?"

Falk is annoyed at the shift to English, but trying to cover it, he's at least fluent.

Theun finally notices Julian's much tenser than anyone including the mundie, and puts two and two together. He starts looking mostly at the floor so that he doesn't seem angry at anyone.

"Unless the stress patterns changed from this dialect to later, I think the alliterative part would be pretty awkward as an incantation. I think the third passage is more promising. Though the start of the first passage also has some aspects that suggest a spell, or at least that the writer was familiar with spell incantations."

"Oh, I see it. The lines there have some pretty clear internal parallelism, and the end of the first half of line one rhymes with the end of the second half of line two, and so on? That looks structural to me. You'd probably know better –" gestures to Theun – "but I think that comes up a lot in modern German spellcasting, that kind of internal reinforcement." 

Marcy takes detailed notes on all of this and analogizes some patterns to what she's seen in French spells from the same time period.

Julian loves spell theory. This would be so much fun if he wasn't strategic Julian. 

"I'm not an expert in modern German, but I've definitely seen it there and it's common in modern Dutch, so it probably has a history. Falk's the real expert in modern German spells here, probably."

Falk nods, "Julian's right, that's common in German spells. I've also seen it in more formal poetry, though? So we shouldn't read too much into it."

"Clear as mud, then."

"Probably better to list all the possible ones and the considerations for and against. After all, if we miss one that was used in a spell that's definitely wrong and if we talk about one that wasn't it still could have been."

"That makes sense. We might want to do a structural comparison first, that should help get us thinking clearly about the differences and we can work out which are plausible spells from there. I see the intro, the two sections, and how they are bridged - or how they aren't, from the second passage."

Marcy will draw a diagram and annotate it! Look, she has relatively abundant paper and will spend it in a good cause and is good at drawing diagrams. Is Julian still looking bothered? She doesn't want him to be bothered; he's contributing a lot and she wants him to want to come back.

Riley does not get to Boston and Philadelphia's reading room early. He's having a bad morning.

He knocks on the door, hoping it's not about to get worse.

"It's Riley Finn. From Minnesang to Goethe?"

"Hey, Riley, come in. We started without you, we're analyzing the three passages."

"Here's what we have so far," she says, holding out the notes. Hopefully he is better at German poetry analysis than he is at punctuality. Or maybe he had an emergency come up; that happens more than enough in here.

"Oh, hello again Riley!" A fellow nonclaver. She's somewhat cheered. "I will help you write these notes again. Repetition is good for remembering."

"Thank you," he says quietly, though he smiles at Wendy. Riley will need to get all their names again without making it obvious he only remembers Marcy's and Wendy's.

Among his languages, German stands out as one of the stronger ones. He's much better at discussing language change than he is at how to translate the poetic elements. He considers the three passages they have to examine, while taking some time to look at the rest of his study group. Hmm. It looks like Marcy is a hard worker. Hard to read the kid from Philadelphia, but he's got the strongest German skills. Curious, intelligent? He's not sure about Wendy or the Asian kid yet- Wendy is an indie, too, but that doesn't give him much insight into her personality, and the Asian kid seems quiet.

Riley looks up from Marcy's notes, brows furrowed.

"Look at the last lines. There's some kind of pattern, there, they're longer than the first three- if they are spells, the last line of each stanza should tell us what they were for."