The Beginnings: Sievers and Some Basic Principles

Since before the time of Eduard Sievers's Altgermanische Metrik (1893)^[91] almost one hundred years ago, the alliterative line of Beowulf has occasioned

[91] See also his earlier article, "Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses I" (1885). A convenient translation of an article containing the major premises of his system is his "Old Germanic Metrics and Old English Metrics" (1968).

a large number of metrical theories, with almost no consensus among their proponents. On the basis of comparative Germanic evidence and versificational features of stress and alliteration, Sievers sought to rationalize the enormously variable unit of the alliterative line into five archetypal patterns. Each of these patterns was to represent and account for certain of the half-lines (or verses ) in the poetry, and collectively they were to comprise the entire metrical foundation for the poetic canon. To say that Sievers's prescriptions were at first accepted is misleading: in fact they were accorded the status of law, and textual emendations, for example, were founded on a supposedly necessary agreement between the metrical abstraction and the received manuscript text. Later years have seen the certainty about these canonical rules fade somewhat, and yet Sievers's basic conceptions are still deeply ingrained in some much more recent influential work on Old English metrics (e.g., Cable 1974). No scholar who proposes to treat Old English prosody can avoid coming to terms with his theory.

Sievers's "Five Types" consist of verse- (or half-line-)length patterns divided into two "feet." The first three have what he calls equal feet:^[92]

and the other two are composed of unequal feet:

Sievers's basic assumptions in assigning prosodic values have become virtually universal among metrists. First, the most fundamental unit of prosody is stress , indicated by an acute accent (s^[*] ) for primary or strongest stress-emphasis and a grave accent (s) for secondary but still major stress; s^[*] marks a syllabic bearing minimal or no ictus. This is the initial point, and it will prove a crucial one: the atom or "prosodeme" of Old English meter is not the syllable or mora of such quantitative meters as the hexameter and deseterac , but rather the stress. Second, Sievers and others reached the hypothesis of the half-line or verse as the most basic metrical unit by observing the other

[92] Line numbers with the notations a and b following the numeral refer, respectively, to the first and second verses in a given line.

[93] Klaeber underdots the o in the second syllable of morporbed to indicate that he considers the syllable syncopated.

indispensable feature of the meter—alliteration. As mentioned in the first part of this chapter, alliteration is not a desideratum but a requirement in the prosody of Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems: unless there exists an agreement of initial stressed sounds between verses, an Old English line simply is not metrical. Alliteration and syntactic units, in fact, furnish the criteria for editing the run-on prose of the Cotton Vitellius A. xv. and other Anglo-Saxon manuscripts into poetic lines and half-lines, yielding a passage such as the following (Bwf 2401-2405):

Gewat pa t welfa sum t orne gebolgen
d ryhten Geata d racan sceawian;
hæfde pa gef runen, hwanan sio f æhð aras,
b ealonið b iorna; him to b earme cwom
m aðpumfæt m ære purh ðæs m eldan hond.

Then a certain one of twelve went, bitterly angered,
Lord of the Geats, to examine the dragon;
He had heard whence the feud arose,
The people's pernicious enmity; to his bosom came
An illustrious treasure-vessel through the informer's hand.

With the alliterating elements (or staves) underlined and space marking half-lines, we can see that the first (a) and second (b) verses alliterate in every case. The a-verse can, optionally, have two staves instead of one, but this property does not extend to the b-verse.

Sievers assigns his stresses systematically to the alliterating elements and other grammatically significant words in the line, such as other nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs.^[94] The phonological criteria are straightforward: if a syllable is long by nature (with a long vowel as its core) or by position (its short vowel followed by two or more consonants), it is stressable. Thus, for example, in the passage above we observe a number of stressable words with initial syllables long by nature: Geata, sceawian, , cwom, , maðpumfæt ; and others in the same category but with prefixes (ge - and a -): Gewat, gefrunen, aras . We also notice words long by position: twelfa, torne, dryhten, hæfde, biorna, bearme, meldan, bond , and a prefixed counterpart, gebolgen , all of which are equally eligible phonologically and grammatically to bear stress on their root syllables. Such are the lexical items of primary importance in the Old English poetic line.

Of course, not all of the half-lines in Beowulf or any other Anglo-Saxon poem maintain a one-to-one correspondence between metrical position and syllable. In the unemended text of Beowulf a verse may consist of from two to ten syllables and a whole line of from seven to sixteen. Thus it is that Sievers and all metrists after him have had to admit to their prosodic descriptions twin.

[94] Rarely a word of lesser grammatical importance, such as a possessive pronoun, will serve as a stave.

rules which we may label resolution and ramification . Resolution entails the distribution of stress over two syllables if the first one is short by nature and position and therefore cannot itself bear ictus. For example, dracan in line 2402b of the passage quoted above cannot answer the metrical description of a trochee, or s^[*] s^[*] , because its first syllable is short and cannot by itself bear stress. Since, however, the word occupies the stave position in the b-verse, alliterating with dryhten in the opening verse, it must as a significant prosodic item in the line somehow shoulder a major stress. Resolution allows the word to take the prosodic shape , with the stress distributed over both syllables rather than localized over the first one, as in dryhten^[*] , for instance. The second and complementary rule of ramification accounts for the proliferation of short or unstressed syllables in the various minimally stressed positions among the Five Types. The infinitive sceawian^[*] , with its two unstressed syllables, provides an example of how ramification—like its fellow principle, resolution—can extend a single abstract pattern to a group of related line-occurrences; the syllable count may vary, but the basic type prevails.