The Old English Alliterative Line

As with the hexameter and deseterac , the search for prosodic structure in the Old English line is primarily an investigation into what, in Parry's famous definition, the "same metrical conditions" might mean in the diachronic development and synchronic morphology of the verbal formula. Toward that end I shah once again concentrate on those compositional parameters most influential in the shape of phraseology, seeking where appropriate to distinguish this prosody from each of the others and to ascertain its tradition-dependent nature.

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

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

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.

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.

The Idiosyncratic Nature of Old English Meter

With only these few broad generalizations about the shape of the meter, it becomes clear that the Old English line is very different from the hexameter and deseterac . For one thing, we observe an extremely large variation in syllable count, with no apparent restriction on when a certain length is to be used; this allows the poet to juxtapose such lines as Beowulf 51-54:

secgan to soðe, selerædend e,
hæleð under heofenum, hwa pæm hlæste onfeng.
        Ða wæs on burgum Beowulf Scyldinga,
leof leodcyning longe prage

To say in truth, hall-counselors,
Heroes under the heavens, who received the burden.
        Then was in the strongholds Beowulf of the Scyldings,
Beloved nation-king for a long time

This sequence includes in succession lines of ten, thirteen, ten, and eight syllables. As for the half-line subdivisions (indicated in the quoted passages by spaces), these verses, like the lines they compose, have little or no syllabic definition. Nor are the half-line units necessarily symmetrical in length or structure; they seem rather to have a semi-independent metrical life of their own.^[95] As indicated above, the prosodeme on which the meter is founded proves to be the stress-position rather than the syllable or mora, and the rather

loose paratactic relationship of the two verses is formalized by required alliteration.

Unlike the hexameter and deseterac , then, the alliterative line obeys no rule of syllabicity; indeed, the expansion rules of resolution and ramification work directly against syllabic consistency. And since the half-line division is correspondingly variable, we can speak neither of a caesura, which would have to occur in a regular spot in the line, nor of the cola demarcated by a caesura. Obviously, under such conditions the notions of anceps and right justification are totally without meaning. Moreover, this synchronic portrait also indicates that, diachronically, the alliterative line has developed much farther away from a possible Indo-European precursor than have the ancient Greek and Serbo-Croatian verse forms. What intervened in this development was the shift of prosodeme from syllable to stress during the Common Germanic period, the various results of which are described by Winfred Lehmann ([1956] 1971, esp. 23-63). The birth of Germanic alliterative verse, he reminds us, was coincident with the shift of stress from a variable position to the initial syllable of a word. Under these circumstances, the Indo-European characteristics imbedded in a syllabically regular line-type would be lost. The general conclusion to be drawn is that the line of Beowulf is a verse form tellingly different from those employed by Homer and the guslar , and that the difference manifests itself both synchronically in the evidence of the text and diachronically in the history of versification.

Where does this catalog of idiosyncrasies leave us as we enter on a description of the alliterative line, which we aim to make sufficient both to allow comparison with the hexameter and deseterac and later to provide a basis for understanding formulaic structure in Beowulf ? The approach from Indo-European features is blocked by the linguistic reality of the stress shift and its foregrounding as the functional kernel of Germanic prosody. Indeed, it cannot be overemphasized that this is a stress rather than a quantitative meter, a prosody that depends on the stressed position rather than a sequence of syllables for its identity. It is obviously illegitimate to impose a Greco-Roman podic model; outer metric has already proven a treacherous because finally external and superficial concept, and it surely has no possible application here. Nor does the distinction of inner metric—the foundation of formulaic structure in the other two traditions—succeed in addressing the metrical issues of the Beowulf line; without consistent syllabicity and a regular caesura- or diaresis-system and its assortment of cola, there can be no inner metric. And yet, if we are to examine Old English traditional phraseology we must confront the prosodic nature of the formulaic structure on its own terms, just as was done above for the Greek and Serbo-Croatian traditions.

The Metrical Foundation

If the history of the alliterative line precludes an approach similar to that employed in studying the hexameter and deseterac , we would do better to shift

focus and attempt to determine what it is about the line that does remain constant from instance to instance. Besides the alliteration mentioned above, most scholars agree that the verse form requires four heaviest or primary stresses per line, and two per half-line:

s s | s s

where s is a syllable or syllables bearing primary stress (s) and the rest of the line consists of a varying number of secondary (s^[*] ) and minimal stresses (s^[*] ). In many cases, this much information allows complete and unambiguous scansion, as in this example from the earlier passage:

All four primary stresses arc assigned, two to the alliterating elements and the remaining two to the phonologically stressable core syllables of grammatically significant words; resolution and ramification arc active in the second verse, yet the line takes a relatively simple shape with a fundamentally trochaic pattern.

But the issue of line- and verse-types rapidly becomes more complicated. As we pass beyond the recurrence of the four "stress maxima" (or SMs), we must deal with what has proven a bewildering variety of permutations. Not only are the most basic features of the line wholly different from those of the quantitative, colonic Greek and Serbo-Croatian prosodies, but the ways in which these different features—SMs, the variable number of secondary stresses and unstressed syllables, resolution, and ramification—combine and recombine to produce the lines of Beowulf are also idiosyncratic. To begin to appreciate this aspect of tradition-dependence, consider that

and

are, from a metrical point of view, equivalent phrases. Both answer to the requirements of Sievers categories A plus B, even though their syllabic distribution and secondarily stressed positions are unequal:

Basic Pattern / x / x | x / x /

It becomes clear that any attempt to catalog line structure, to seek its systematic and recurrent sequence, must resort to a series of generative patterns. Sievers recognized this necessity for an expansible system from the start and made it a feature of the Five Types, and all later metrists have in various ways responded to the same obvious need.

Patterns and Systems

Among these scholars, John C. Pope offered in 1942 a sweeping and significant revision of the Five-Type catalog. Claiming four isochronous

measures to a line (and two to a half-line), Pope discovered that by beating a regular cadence there emerged an unvocalized stress at the head of the metrically acephalic B and C verses.^[96] In other words, he substituted a rest for the "missing" initial stress and thus brought both parts of the line into accord by supplying initial ictus where there was no lexical item to bear it. To use his own example ([1942] 1966, 39) alongside the Sievers reading, consider:

Sievers B: Basic Pattern xx/|x/
Pope B: Basic Pattern (/)xx|/x\

He proceeded to apply the initial stress-rest, marked ('), or stress taken in vocal silence, to all types of B and C verses, using as a leveling device the theory of isochrony among the four measures of a line. In experimenting with various lines in the poem, Pope ([1942] 1966, 247-409) argued that this realignment of stresses expressed the natural rhythm of the alliterative line more faithfully than the Sievers system.

From the hypothesis of initial rests in Types B and C and general isochrony, Pope derived another and more daring theory—that of the use of a harp^[97] to accompany the performance and specifically to mark time. Although instrumental accompaniment had certainly been considered before,^[98] no one had proposed that the lyre actually bore one of the major stresses in the line during a vocal rest. Whether the Old English scop really used an instrument in his performance, and what the musical aspect of his narrative might have been like, are problems probably beyond our ability to solve given the present state of knowledge. And although most metrists now resist the harp hypothesis in an effort to fashion theories with as few ambiguous or uncertain features as possible, it is interesting that Pope was able to suggest the use of the lyre purely on metrical grounds. Once the isochrony and initial rest are accepted, the way is left open to the possible participation of a device to mark rhythm.

It is not difficult to see that Pope's theories consist, from our comparative vantage point, of attempts to supply another kind of regularity to a poetic line ungoverned by the more familiar parameters of syllable count, caesura, and the like. The principle of four isochronous measures provided this consistency and rationalized the apparent near-chaos of syllabic count, stress distribution, resolution, and ramification. In place of six metra or four cola, or of five feet or two hemistichs, one had four recurrent rhythmic units; some may have been different, some may have begun with a stress taken on the

harp, but all were rhythmically equivalent in extent. In positing isochrony and in thus changing the internal divisions in the Five Types (for example, Sievers B or x / | x / becomes (/) x | / x \ and Sievers C or x / | / x becomes (/) x | / \ x), Pope did more than modify "feet" to "measures." More importantly, he attempted to formulate not just a description that suited the observable facts, but a metrical theory that would explain them. However we judge the value of his innovations, we must admire his sense of an underlying order and of the importance of reaching beyond the metrist's catalog to the aural reality of the poetry.

Some sixteen years after Pope's work first appeared, A.J. Bliss argued for a return to Sievers's major principles in The Metre of Beowulf (1967). Having undertaken a thorough re-examination of the poem, he explicitly dismisses the hypothesis of isochrony and derives Types B through D from the various displacements of stress in Type A, the core pattern which he considers the "norm of Old English verse" (p. 108). He also groups half-lines into light, normal, and heavy categories, depending on whether they contain one, two, or three stresses. Apart from his philologically indefensible discussion of the so-called caesura, which as we have seen cannot by definition exist in the Old English poetic line, Bliss succeeds in recataloging the lines of Beowulf into the Sieversian scheme; but of course this exercise cannot fail, because the Five Types had already proven themselves an adequate descriptive metaphor, if not an explanatory system.

More successful in evaluating the systematic nature of Old English meter was Robert P. Creed's "A New Approach to the Rhythm of Beowulf " (1966). Agreeing with Pope on the issues of isochrony and initial rests, Creed goes a step further in elevating the measure to a metrical unit. This is an important rationalization: while Pope posited measures of equal temporal duration, he still based his morphology of metrical types on the half-line or verse. Creed, in contrast, sees the measure as the kernel of prosody from a functional as well as descriptive point of view. With a few modifications made since the original article was published,^[99] he proposes seven basic measure-types:

One can see the roots of this system of units in Pope's catalog of half-line types: the a represents one element of Sievers-Pope A; a + is an augmented version of a ; and g and b consist of the second element of Pope's D1 and D2 respectively. It may not be so obvious, but even Creed's is equivalent to the first part of Pope's B or C. The d measure, which includes a vocal rest and minimal harp stroke, allows Creed to scan single-syllable measures and maintain a basically trochaic rhythm, while the h is a logical development from the initial-stress hypothesis intended to handle unstressed syllables at the head of a verse:

In this last measure-type, the two syllables in the prefix ofer- are themselves unstressed but coincide temporally with the stress taken on the lyre. Thus the necessity for anacrusis, the assigning of such unimportant syllables to the foregoing metrical unit (in this case to the end of the second verse of the preceding line), is avoided and the prosodic wholeness of the line maintained.^[100]

One of the more recent thorough treatments of Old English meter is that by Thomas Cable (1974), who presents a strong argument for a rigorous and systematic scansion of Beowulf that harmonizes with and builds on the original work of Sievers.^[101] Cable, however, goes far beyond a mere reworking of the Five Types, even proposing a few changes at the level of categorization; his concern (p. 85) is to establish "that Beowulf can be scanned with four metrical positions to the verse."^[102] If one accepts his revisions, the result, as shown in table 14, is a group of five contours that correspond to Sievers's Five Types, each contour denoting either rising (/) or falling (\) stress between successive positions (p. 88). Cable's most telling point is that the four positions inexorably generate the Five Types or contours, with the meter being fundamentally the

underlying four-unit pattern. Instead of wrestling with what I earlier called the descriptive level of the Types, he understands the A through E verses as the inevitable product of the four-position system. With the single qualification that the second of two "clashing stresses" cannot be the heavier,^[103] he is able to predict contours and Types from positions: of the eight possible configurations, the only three that are not observed in Beowulf are those three in which the clashing stress rule is broken. Cable's system of explanation is satisfying because self-contained and inherently logical, and it deserves serious consideration by any scholar in search of the regularities of Old English prosody.

Prosody and Composition

From the metrical foundations of the alliterative line, on which all scholars agree, and from these various accounts of the systemic structure of Old English meter, we can derive a workable model for comparison with the hexameter and deseterac . To begin, we have learned that the quantitative, colonic verse form of the ancient Greek and Serbo-Croatian epic poetries contrasts sharply with the stress-based alliterative line, not only in the synchronic evidence of the Beowulf text but also in the diachronic reality of the history and development of Germanic verification. Indo-European features are not to be found in the Old English line because they could not suave the Common Germanic shift of lexical stress to the initial root syllable and consequent generation of a stress-based rather than syllabic meter. Synchronically, this shift of prosodeme from syllable to ictus means a line without syllabic constraint, without a caesura, and so on.

But we have seen that the verse form did evolve its own set of metrical regularities, and if we are to heed the caveat of tradition-dependence, we must follow out three regularities on their own terms. Fortunately, all metrists

agree on the crucial recurrence of stress and alliteration—the two major characteristics of the Old English line—and also on the consistent half-line dimension of the prosody. Verses, in other words, stand together and they stand alone: they are bound into a whole line by the alliterative constraint, and yet they complementarily maintain—like so many subunits in oral epic tradition—an independent, integral aspect as well. Not unlike the Greek hemistich, the half-line retains a full prosodic and a normative syntactic unity; we need only think of the typical Germanic device of poetic variation to appreciate this unitary character.^[104] Of course, each half-line can vary tremendously in count and texture, and so we cannot summon the comparative notion of colon. What can be said is that a tradition-dependent subunit does exist and recurs consistently. We may add to these standard qualities the four major stresses (or SMs) in each line, occurring as they do according to regularly observed phonological rules of placement and extent.

As noted above, with these regularities—a stress-based meter, alliteration between verses, half-line units, and four stress maxima per line—we reach the limit of general consensus among metrists. From this point on, all seem to go their own way, whether to isochrony, reconstruing of Sievers's rules, the measure, or stress contours. Their catalogs reflect the nature of their individual procedures: Sievers's Five Types descriptively rationalize all lines but offer no real explanation; Pope's innovations add the regularity of isochrony (modifying Sievers's B and C verses), show attention to aural characteristics, and move toward explanation; Bliss refines Sievers's system to deal with the variability of types; Greed employs the rationalizing power of the measure to fashion a generative seven-item scansion system; and Gable shifts Sievers's D2 verses to the E category, posits a sequence rule for clashing stress, and explains the five contours as the inevitable development of four metrical positions per verse. All of these methods also represent responses to the twin principles of resolution—by which a stress may be borne by two syllables if the first one is metrically short—and ramification—by which the number of syllables in an unstressed position can increase markedly, to as many as five or six in some verse-initial configurations and very frequently to two or three in almost any position. With these two avenues of variation so open to syllabic traffic, the only possibility for systemic simplicity is through a generative series of patterns. Each metrist fashions his own, and, bearing the stamp of their makers, the resultant patterns seem mutually contradictory, or at least exclusive.

But even though their premises and explicative power may differ, the metrical theories we have summarized do "translate" from one to the next, and some basic correspondences among the ostensibly dissimilar descriptive

systems can be discerned (table 15). These, then, are the allowed half-line patterns, presented in each of the four major theoretical forms.^[105] They may be rationalized into measures, redivided into isochronous units with initial lyre strokes, or derived from a four-position series, but they all prescribe roughly the same permitted sequences of stresses for verse-types in Beowulf . Compositionally, this collection of verse-types will constitute the metrical foundation for our discussion of formulaic structure in Old English, with, synchronically speaking, the wide variety of actual lines developing from these patterns via the generative rules of resolution and ramification.

If these patterns constitute the prosody of Beowulf at the level of the half-line, what of the whole-line unit? On the basis of computer studies undertaken to analyze the meter of a machine-readable text of the poem,^[106] I have been able to prescribe three favored line patterns that, taken together, account for over 90 percent of the metrically recoverable lines of the poem.^[107] These line-types are the most commonly used combinations of the verse-types listed above, and represent the Beowulf poet's "choice" of patterns from among all possible combinations of verses. Table 16 indicates the make-up of each of the three paradigms in terms of all four metrical systems.

Paradigm 1, which accounts for 54.7 percent of the metrical text of Beowulf , consists essentially of an A verse followed by either a B or a C verse, the equivalent notation in Creed's system being aa followed by or .^[108] Like

all verse-types and line paradigms, this abstract pattern can be filled out with a variety of syllabic complements, such as

or

—lines which would of course be scanned slightly differently in the Pope and Creed systems, with the B and C verses beginning with a stress taken on the instrument during a vocal rest and the fourth primary stress lowered to a secondary. Also, because the Old English alliterative line demonstrates a half-line as well as a stichic prosody, the paradigms may be reversed; even with the possibility of reversal, however, the prescriptive nature of the paradigms remains exacting. For paradigm 1, verse metathesis simply means B or C followed by A, or followed by a a :

The possibility of inversion argues implicitly for an associative relationship between the two verse-types; although the first and second verses arc not interchangeable at the level of phraseology, since the second half-line cannot tolerate double alliteration, at the level of prosody the half-lines or verses do seem to be interchangeable parts of the larger whole which combine according to paradigmatic rules.

The second of these line patterns, paradigm 2, combines a D or E verse with either half of paradigm 1, that is, either with an A type or with a B/C type:

Once again, the order of half-lines may be reversed, as in

Together these two versions of paradigm 2 cover another 24.7 percent of Beowulf . The third paradigm is also a recombinant form of the first line-pattern, consisting of either verse-type from paradigm 1 taken twice, that is, either AA or two successive B/C half-lines. Examples include

and

Half-line reversal naturally does not enter the picture here; paradigm 3 is the pattern on which 14.9 percent of Beowulf is founded, for a three-paradigm total of 94.3 percent.

The combination of and interrelationships among the verses comprising these line-patterns or paradigms indicate the specific prosodic texture of the Beowulf text that has survived to us.^[109] In conducting our investigation of phraseological structure in Old English epic, we shall be able to proceed directly to the metrical underlay by referring to the compositional habits of the Beowulf poet in precise and rational terms. But the most significant findings to have emerged from this analysis may well be the most general. First, what we have in Paradigms 1, 2, and 3 is a group of metrical formulas ;^[110] the Old English alliterative line as we have it in Beowulf consists not of a colon-based, quantitative meter with tradition-dependent features arising from the particular tradition's expression of right justification, but rather a verse-based, stress meter which figures itself forth in a set of multiforms. Second, the nature of these multiforms—in particular, their quality of reversibility—reveals that the poet composes in whole lines with verse substitution, that, in short, his making of the poem is a two-level process.