The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf: Displacement

Abstract

There is in Old English poetry a word order which is of special interest to grammarians and prosodists. It involves certain classes of words such as verbs. A verb which is moved from its normal position in the clause is said to be displaced, and the movement may be described as the mechanism of displacement. Displacement puts an additional degree of stress on the displaced word. The implications of displacement for our understanding of the poetry have yet to be fully grasped, perhaps because meter tends to be mentally isolated from grammar. Stress is a point of juncture between the two, a reminder that meter is a function of the grammar of poetry, or what I will call metrical grammar. My purpose here is to investigate the mechanism of displacement in the metrical grammar of Beowulf I A proper understanding of displacement enables us to explain how those rules of metrical grammar which affect word order and stress within the clause are embedded in the half-lines with which the poet worked. And it makes possible a simplified description of the metrical typology of the poem which reveals a strict correlation between meter and clausal syntax. The metrical grammar of Old English poetry was stable and ancient in origin, as its close affinities with the metrical grammars of the alliterative poetry of the various Germanic languages on the Continent attest.2 Yet there are sufficient differences in detail from poem to poem within the corpus of Old English poetry to make it useful to distinguish the special metrical