THE DISTRIBUTION OF INFINITIVES IN -E AND -EN IN SOME MIDDLE ENGLISH ALLITERATIVE POEMS

Abstract

IntroductionThe question of final -e in Middle English verse is of serious importance to metrists, historical linguists, and editors. In the study of metre, the status of final -e is a determining factor in the syllable count: there are few lines in any Middle English poem where -e does not affect scansion. Janet Cowen and George Kane found just nine such lines in the whole of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, though admittedly that number also excludes lines with other scansion uncertainties (such as the possibility of syncope).1 To editors, judgements about the poet's grammar of final -e and his metrical norms and rules can inform choices between textual variants and the decision as to whether or not to emend. Historical linguists have always taken an interest in the fortunes of final -e,2 not least because its mutescence is part of the process that slowly transformed English from a highly inflected language into a predominantly analytical one. Whether the issue is also of interest to literary critics depends a good deal on the nature of their engagement with poetry. To anyone who thinks that the achievement of poets rests on their ability to communicate within, and by virtue of, constraints of rhyme and metre, linguistic questions such as why and whether poets wrote -e or -en will mean rather more than to those whose interests are socio-historical.Thanks to the combined efforts of many scholars (from Kittredge to Kane) we now know a great deal about Chaucer's grammar of final -e, enough to realize that its value depends on many variables such as grammatical context, historical grammar, rhyme position, eliding context, and so on. In the case of alliterative poetry, such clarity is still a distant prospect. Whereas we know, for example, that Chaucer always pronounced inflectional -e in his infinitives at line ending and usually did so mid-line,3 we remain largely ignorant about what major alliterative poets, such as the Gawaift-poet, did. It is a symptom of this uncertainty that the two scholars who have tried hardest to advance learning in this area arrived, at least initially, at radically different conclusions, Thomas Cable arguing, on the one hand, that historically justified -e was invariably pronounced by alliterative poets,4 and Hoyt Duggan arguing, by contrast, that final -e was more or less defunct.5 It is true that a few incontrovertible facts about final -e can be gleaned from the rhymes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which furnish two cases where final -e must be sounded for the sake of rhyme: once in a petrified dative ('to be' ('to you') rhymes with 'forsobe' ('in truth') at lines 413-15) and once in a noun with organic -e ('ta pe' ('you take') rhymes with 'wabe' ('danger') In this article we hope to clear up a small area in the minefield of final -e by examining in detail the use of inflectional -e and -(e)n in infinitives in a selected corpus of alliterative poetry. Our corpus consists of the poems of Cotton Nero A.x,9 Alexander B (also known as Alexander and Dindimus), The Siege of Jerusalem, and William of Palerne.10 In a final concluding section we shall look briefly at some other alliterative poems (Death and Liffe, Saint Erkenwald, Destruction of Troy, Wars of Alexander), in order to frame our findings in a larger context.We restrict our study to infinitives for the following reasons. First, it seemed preferable to us to deal as accurately and comprehensively as possible with a restricted corpus of material rather than to deal impressionistically with a larger corpus. …