Old English Coordination, Apposition, and the Syntax of English Poetry

Abstract

Fred Robinson has shown how the Beowulf poet uses variation for thematic as well as ornamental purposes. Yet though apposition is perhaps the defining stylistic characteristic of Old English poetry, not all juxtapositions are the appositional phrases that modern readers expect in this literature. Some juxtapositions enumerate items in a list. In the modern English phrase, banker, his wife, and the mother of his children, the noun phrases can be either appositional variations with the same referent or conjoined items with different referents. I shall argue that the distinction between these two structures is clearer in Old English poetry than in modern English because of the role of the half-line unit in punctuating the syntax. Old English prose does not have the half-line; it makes use of other means to disambiguate the two structures. The most notable of these are the other patterns of conjunction still found in later poetry and prose. To follow most translators of Old English poetry and assume a modern English kind of ambiguity in phrases of the form A, B, and C ultimately weakens the position of appositional variation. Since the Beowulf poet uses variation to clarify poetic words,3 it is unlikely that such a poet would introduce variation where it confusingly increases structural ambiguity. Moreover, Old English prose sharply distinguishes enumeration from variation, even though variation is not nearly so characteristic of prose as it is of verse. It is only in verse that juxtaposition appears to substitute for conjunction so extensively that modern readers despair of distinguishing among the series that enumerate and the series that contain appositives. Solving this puzzle requires seeing that Old English prose takes the prosaic license of adding compensatory conjunctions. The medium of prose leaves its writers bereft of the resources afforded by the metrical line for defining enumerative series in verse. Variation was not the only threat to the poets' goal of simple, unhierarchical enumeration. The grammatical subordination exercised by the Old English conjunction ond posed an equally great problem. The poets countered both forces with a simple prescriptive rule that can be deduced from the poems we have. The rule states, in part, that the line-ending can substitute for a conjunction whenever an immediately subsequent half-line is a conjoined pair. Though juxtaposition alone was ambiguous, the enumerative series could use it without introducing ambiguity as long as the subsequent half-line cued the expressed conjunction. Therefore, though metrical requirements made for potential ambiguity in verse, the verse line itself superimposed a phrasal unit, the half-line, that was more clearly