Yes, like, “answering you directly is difficult. I can only speak in this one poem.”
And not sure this is noteworthy but in my comment to him I ask for a starting point and he repeats the same stanza he gave as a reply to my first comment. So is that our starting point or will he just say the same thing to me over and over, no matter what I ask.
Exactly! So I wonder why he has difficult communicating through typing directly, but can communicate through lines of a poem? I guess, perhaps, those lines could be copied and pasted from somewhere? But if he can do that, then I would figure he could at least be able to somewhat type!
This just keeps getting better!
Perhaps the same thing that prevents DG from seeing our comments prevents him from communicating with us? Or perhaps he’s speaking to us from the past, or an alternate reality, or a parallel dimension and the poem, or whatever it is, is the only thing that properly bleeds through to us. Hrmm. At least he seems nice. 
He seems nice, and that’s great he responded! I have also noticed he replied with a previously used stanza. Unfortunately it also was the same stanza he replied to you with before.
So either - He is answering your question about which stanza is first, and it just happens to be the one he used previously for you.
Or - He will only answer the same stanza to the same person.
Not sure which.
What concerns me is his name seems to be degrading. From The Last of the Travelers, to The Last Traveler, to this new version. It almost seems like it degrades after he answers our questions? Or maybe as he gives out lines of the poem, his purpose diminishes.
Part of me says ‘everyone spam him with questions’ and we get as much as we can. Part of me worries that’d degrade his connection faster.
Hmmm. I replied to his comment with the following:
“Nothing to forgive. Are all your versus from a single poem? (Y)es of (N)o?
Or “From the third, a mouse with girlish hair
as her mournful tears clad hallowed air” for Yes and
“Ebends unbound Mora’s tether
and Forged the Thorns in drubbin minn’ing” for No.”
If you’re right, and his connection is degrading, then we should be very judicious with our questions.
Sounds like a great test. If he replies to you with the King Capra verse, then we know.
Y’all!!! Traveler responded. Poor thing:
T ey are sam pome, cald ‘Th Min ing o Ojor@d”
To mark the end of their lament
King Capra rose o’er gathered sways
try as lng as 1 c n
I wish I knew how to crack this fragment!
Could the title be “The meaning of ??” …
Last line is “try as long as I cant” i think.
Could be ministering. That’s a lot of missing characters for that space, but it’s better than any guess I can make. Maybe it’s ‘mourning’ but that’s a stretch.
And I suppose the name is Ojorad? Although with his habit of shortening some words phonetically it’s hard to claim that with any certainty.
Also of note: His name changed again after answering the question. It’s now ‘The Las Tr vel r’.
Also he included the same verse a third time for @Johanna . I’m not sure why that is though.
Edit: Actually I’m leaning towards the word as ‘Minning’ which is Icelandic for a memory or recollection. It’s also used in one of the verses
‘Ebends unbound Mora’s tether
and Forged the Thorns in drubbin minn’ing’
Yeah. I figured it was Minning, as well. @Robert, you mention Iceland. I wonder if that will prove useful. Maybe point us towards a way to decipher this poem.
It does feel like he’s stressing the King Capra. What makes this tough is not knowing how this fragment will unfold. With KR, we have a general idea of how his clues roll out and are getting better at deciphering them. For this dirge, though, I have no idea what we’re supposed to do with it.The Frayliliy fragment came from manipulating art from DG’s book and doing an image search. KR fragment is a series of puzzles. But Traveler… I have no idea. Is the poem scrambled and we have to put it together in the right order? Do we need to “translate” it? Is there a message in the versus? Are the versus to lead us to some image or person or place from history?
I feel like we’re supposed to be much farther along on this one. The degradation of his text is troublesome. Do we have everything we need or do we need more information from him? This is tough.
My best guess is once we had the whole poem, and in the correct order we’d find ‘something’.
My thoughts on what ‘something’ could be.
Perhaps the first letter of each line spells out a message (an oldie but a goodie method of obscuring text)
Perhaps which words are capitialized is significant.
Perhaps the entire thing is a riddle, and they’re all lamenting some occurance in history or some concept that’s the fragment word.
Now theoretically, we don’t need the whole poem to solve any of these methods. If we had the enough of it we might be able to work around any holes.
My current guess though is we have a small fraction of the whole poem. The poem talks about ‘The four who stood in mourning …said’. But only 1 is mentioned so far, the third, the ‘mouse with girlish hair’.
If the poem is going to go into each of the fours’s laments, we need a lot more of it.
The Book of Briars clue says the fragment is ‘in the Dirge’. Maybe it’s as simple as just one of the words from the dirge like Nhadastra, or KingCapra or something. We should try them all if we haven’t already (I haven’t.)
Thought it might be helpful to have the bits and responses (so far) all in one place. These are divided by Traveler’s comments on the Instagram and the blog. Within those categories, they are listed in chronological order, from oldest to most recent.
Instagram:
A brave sourl released from jewelled eyes bereft of home, his light soars free.”
The four who stood in mourning voiles with deep respect their tributes said
Blog:
declaim’d the Plaint of Nhadastra “Lo, the stars shine less intently now
From the third, a mouse with girlish hair
as her mournful tears clad hallowed air
He l o J0ha, I
To mark the end of their lament
King Capra rose o’er gathered sways
Ebends unbound Mora’s tether
and Forged the Thorns in drubbin minn’ing
sang a stark yet stirring ode
on the hauce his master rode
R bet forgv m I hav trub wr1tn. onle pom
in the firmament of glory’s crown.
The lustre of our friend moves on.”
Jo ha
To mark the end of their lament
King Capra rose o’er gathered sways
sry ple frgv
T ey are sam pome, cald ‘Th Min ing o Ojor@d”
To mark the end of their lament
King Capra rose o’er gathered sways
try as lng as 1 c n
for she found not the words to mote
So she unfurled her cowl
Adding to the list the newest one today.
for she found not the words to mote
So she unfurled her cowl
Also, name has changed or degraded another ‘step’ from
The Las Trvel r
to
Th3 Las Trvel r
I tried theminningofojorad, kingcapra, and nhadastra in the book and no dice. 
So, we have three, possibly four, of the mourners, right?
Nhadastra, King Capra, ‘a mouse with girlish hair’, and Ebends (maybe?). I’m guessing Mora is an animal of some sort, seeing as they were tethered. Not sure how relevant that is, but it’s a step to understanding the poem, I suppose.
Looks like some lines have rhyme pairs. What if we just need to find all of them?
From the third, a mouse with girlish hair
as her mournful tears clad hallowed air
.
King Capra rose o’er gathered sways
A brave sourl released from jewelled eyes
@piki - Oh, that’s a good idea. :o So then this pair would work as well:
sang a stark yet stirring ode
on the hauce his master rode
Random musings on the poem:
Based in the animal kingdom. Someone important has died and is being mourned.
The four mourners are animals. It’s not a girl who is “mousy.” It’s an actual mouse. And, as others have speculated, their king is a goat.
Is Mora the deceased? her tether unbound by Ebends? (Think Viking funeral - setting the ship of the deceased loose to sail?)
You forge a sword. Are the swords of this animal kingdom referred to as thorns.
Also, the fact that Forged the Thorns is capitalized seems significant.
And did King Rabbit overthrow King Capra?
I believe the following couplets will be related but there is a couplet missing to complete the thought:
From the third, a mouse with girlish hair
as her mournful tears clad hollowed air
for she found not the words to mote
so she unfurled her cowl
NOTE: It seems Traveler can only speak when spoken to, as it were. He only posts once to DG’s blog posts or instagrams, or our comments. And since we cannot control how often she posts, I think we need to post to him. I will post to him in two places today and hope we get more of the poem.
QUESTIONS:
Obviously, there are stanzas missing from the poem. While I certainly think there’s a rhyme scheme to it, it may not be as simple as AB AB CD CD etc.
From what I can gather reading what we have, this “dirge” is about, basically, a funeral. People have gathered to mourn someone’s passing. Whose passing? I don’t know, but I think that will be revealed once we have more stanzas.
As I’ve been reading, there seems to be a rough chronology to what we already have. But I’ve only been able to put together two stanzas so far. The quotation marks are what I believe makes it work. So, here are the two stanzas I think match up:
declaim’d the Plaint of Nhadastra
“Lo, the stars shine less intently now
in the firmament of glory’s crown.
The lustre of our friend moves on.”
The firmament (sky) is certainly where the stars would shine and the beginning quotation marks from the first stanza need a second pair to end the quote. That second pair of quotation marks are at the end of the second stanza. I’m 90% sure these go together but would love to hear others’ thoughts, especially if they disagree.
As for the other stanzas, I’m not sure which order they go in, but I paired up the ones that I think go together. Either because of the pronouns used or the context within the stanzas.
declaim’d the Plaint of Nhadastra
“Lo, the stars shine less intently now
in the firmament of glory’s crown.
The lustre of our friend moves on.”
The four who stood in mourning voiles
with deep respect their tributes said
A brave sourl released from jewelled eyes
bereft of home, his light soars free.”
sang a stark yet stirring ode
on the hauce his master rode
From the third, a mouse with girlish hair
as her mournful tears clad hallowed air
for she found not the words to mote
So she unfurled her cowl
Ebends unbound Mora’s tether
and Forged the Thorns in drubbin minn’ing
To mark the end of their lament
King Capra rose o’er gathered sways
I think the King Capra line goes toward the end since it sounds like the King is ending the funeral.
Anyway, I’m hoping LT will give us some new verses to add so we can start piecing this together and, hopefully, figuring out how to find the next fragment. I’m really curious to know who they’re all mourning.