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.