English Metre Research Articles

Did Old English Verse Have a “Morphological” Metre?

The revision of the four-position theory of Old English metre by Yakovlev (2008) has had a considerable impact, both for its simplification of Sievers’ (1893) metrical principles, and for its supposed shift to a “morphological” rather than an “accentual” metrical type. I contextualize Yakovlev’s important contribution to metrical theory, highlighting that his main innovations are to eliminate the principle that every verse should have two lifts, and to collapse the metrical notions of “lift” and of “half-lift” into a single type of unit, the “strong position”. These major and thoughtful innovations are unconnected to the supposed “morphological” aspect of Yakovlev’s system, which consists of arbitrary and unmotivated stipulations of certain classes of syllables as inherently strong or weak. Calling the metre “morphological” on this basis is at best misleading, placing too much emphasis on a marginal component of the system. Moreover, the definitions of strong and weak positions are better explained with reference to linguistic stress: elements bearing some degree of stress (primary or secondary) are strong, while those bearing no stress are weak. Such a reframing leads to a slight revision of Yakovlev’s theory to incorporate the “rule of the coda” (Fulk, 1992). The result is a version of Yakovlev’s theory which is both theoretically simpler and more descriptively adequate, but in which the label “morphological” lacks even the limited and inapt validity of the original version. This reintroduction of stress into the system does not, however, make the theory “accentual”, and it remains better characterized as an “alliterative-syllabic” view of the metre (Cable, 1991).

J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur: A Timeless Journey?

J. R. R. Tolkien has not been viewed as an author who found the Arthurian cycle of tales to be particularly pertinent to his wider legendarium. Although he preferred “English” to “British” mythology, his unfinished poem, “The Fall of Arthur”, written in the early 1930s and edited by Christopher Tolkien for publication by HarperCollins in 2013, is inspired by medieval Arthurian sources. At the same time, it is constructed in the Old English metre, which indicates Tolkien’s love of all things “Anglo-Saxon”. This article aims to show how the poem had an influence on Tolkien’s major work The Lord of the Rings, first published in 1954 to 1955. In both texts Tolkien is concerned with the issue of timelessness as a major theme, but there are also parallel ideas in the two works which show that his ideas on Arthurian legend did influence his major work of fiction. In recent years scholars have examined Arthurian themes in Tolkien’s writing, and this article includes an analysis of some of these authors in relation to both The Fall of Arthur and The Lord of the Rings. I conclude by suggesting that Tolkien’s use of themes from The Fall of Arthur in The Lord of the Rings has kept his Arthurian themes in circulation, and I agree with other scholars that even though The Fall of Arthur is an unfinished poem, it is a valuable contribution to the collection of Tolkien’s works.

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable

The Elusive Transformation of Alliterative Meter

ABSTRACT That Old English meter evolved directly into Middle English alliterative meter is a newly won consensus position among metrical specialists. Exactly how it did so remains elusive. The changes, at the level of metrical patterning, are few yet far-reaching, transforming a meter in mirrored half-lines of four metrical positions apiece into a long-line meter with asymmetry between its halves. This essay fills in further details, taking up the challenge to infer from surviving texts how one state of a metrical system slowly became another. Specifically, it is argued that four difficult elements in Old English meter guided metrical evolution. Metrical resolution, the conflicted treatment of verbal prefixes, rare verses of five metrical positions, and a special extended metrical style known as hypermeter pulled against the four-position framework of Old English meter and accelerated and directed metrical change.

About This Issue

We are pleased to present The Elusive Progress of Prosodical Study: Essays in Honor of Thomas Cable, a special issue organized by guest editor Nicholas Myklebust. Taken together, the articles of this issue celebrate Professor Thomas Cable as impactful scholar, teacher, mentor, and friend. For over five decades, Cable’s precise analyses have guided and refined the development of English metrical studies, adding to our knowledge of medieval poetics and authorial practice, particularly as regards historical linguistics and grammar, and the prosodics of alliterative meter from Old English to Middle English.The subjects chosen by the contributors to this issue testify to the energetic scope and influence of Cable’s scholarship. R. D. Fulk analyzes “the aesthetics of metrical usage” in some striking lines of “aural punctuation” (Eduard Sievers’s type A) that show up in Beowulf and other Old English poems. Eric Weiskott pursues four grammatical arguments that could underlie the direct evolution of Old English meter into Middle English alliterative meter; his chief examples are drawn from Exodus and Patience. Nicholas Myklebust examines the afterlife of Chaucer’s decasyllabic meter as it was consciously adapted in John Walton’s fifteenth-century translation of Boethius. Delving into the intricacies of alliterative meter in the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x, and especially in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Noriko Inoue shows how the rules governing an “extra-long” dip in the a-verse can be further elucidated beyond the analysis of Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter. This special issue’s fifth contributor, Ian Cornelius, addresses the metrics of Piers Plowman, widely recognized to be the utmost alliterative outlier; assessing the vocalic quality of syllables and the placement of word divisions in final dips, he concludes that “Langland allows semantic and expository priorities to override prosodic form.”The range of prosodical study inspired here by Thomas Cable is self-evidently expansive, with the collective authors’ explorations roving through the Old English Beowulf and Exodus, as well as through the Middle English canon of Chaucer, the Gawain poet, and Langland. This special issue’s articles exemplify the patient, focused intricacy needed for successful metrical analysis. They also display the incremental steps forward in our understanding of medieval poetical forms and rythymic styles that continue to follow in the wake of Cable’s pioneering work.

Assimilation or Detention

How are the migration of people and of poetry, through literary translation and translational literature, linked or alike? What can the poetry of migration teach about the translation of form in poetry? What is the role of the text in understanding the politics of poetry in politicized contexts? Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 is an important collection and translation of poems etched in the walls of the Angel Island detention center. Though the Angel Island poems were mostly composed after the 1919 vernacular revolution in Chinese literature, they were written in classical Chinese and premodern forms. Island translates them into stiff free-verse academic English, asking English-language readers to imaginatively project poetic beauty onto the originals. Other translations, such as Teow Lim Goh's Islanders (2016) and Jeffrey Thomas Leong's Wild Geese Sorrow (2018), render the poems with more attention to the dominant styles of contemporary American poetry. This article argues for a retranslation of the Angel Island poems—not into free verse but with formalist attention to meter and rhyme in English. Such translations could blur the dichotomy between the former's target-oriented poetics and the latter's source-oriented translations and also offer a stronger migration into English for the poetry of these migrants.

Nominal Compounds in Old English Meter and Prosody

What is the lexicon’s role in licensing the selection of phonologically-marked structures in Old English verse? Specifically, what is its role in the avoidance of certain nominal compounds in verse, even though the same compounds are used apparently freely in prose (Terasawa 1994)? Using a simulation of the Old English lexicon, we offer a statistical analysis of the poetic use of nominal compounds compared to the availability of relevant prosodic structures in the ambient language. In the process, we unify Terasawa’s separate constraints and demonstrate a new way of addressing the complex interplay between Old English prosody and the structure of Old English alliterative meter. Our results endorse Terasawa’s position: We find that the dispreference for nominal compounds of the XX-LX type is a general but noncategorical property of Old English. We attribute their highly restricted usage in verse to the demands of poetic diction and their incompatibility with the metrical templates that scops and scribes replicate. Additionally, while syllable weight factors into metrical organization, it does so less for stress placement, which remains morphologically grounded; this asymmetry in the ranking value of weight between poetry and prose is considered briefly in the context of the Old English monastic scribal training.

:Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics

:<i>Modernism’s Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics</i>

Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott

Reviewed by: Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott Ben Glaser Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. By Eric Weiskott. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2021. xviii+297 pp. £64. ISBN 978–0–8122–5264–4. Eric Weiskott's second monograph continues to reimagine a non-teleological history of English metre. Amid extensive archival research, two major methodological [End Page 478] concerns surface: a running critique of periodization that centres on modernity, and an expansion of historical prosody. Working against a false symmetry between metrical and social history, Weiskott dislodges the attribution to Chaucer of a break between earlier metrical traditions and pentameter. Before the modern 'break' with pentameter there was a retroprojected 'break' into it that left behind a large corpus and above all Langland. Weiskott brings decades of medieval scholarship on prosody into focus to demystify pentameter's prestige. With deep linguistic and archival knowledge, his book writes new plural histories of English verse forms for early periods in which there is little explicit poetics or meta-prosodic reflection. To overemphasize the latter threatens to reproduce a periodization in which the premodern is the untheorized and therefore untheorizable. Weiskott thus successfully historicizes historical prosody, building bridges backward from its 'Victorianist incarnation' (p. 17). His book answers the pressing need for poetics to find rigorous methods for moving between time periods with truly divergent and non-'modern' literary cultures. The first five chapters establish a corpus of prophetic texts which develop their own historiography and serve to 'think the ideal social arrangement' (p. 42). Prophecy dynamically conserves metrical pasts and lets that pastness infuse prophecy. The scholarship is impressive throughout, delineating an unfamiliar genre in full historical breadth. It was not entirely clear, however, which decisions about metre mattered to authors and scribes, why pentameter was unsuited or deselected for prophecy, or how tetrameter creates 'rhythmical dimensionality' so as to constitute a 'program of literary modernization' (pp. 83–84). To Weiskott's credit, he admits elements that might reinforce narratives of modernization, such as the force of the Chaucerian 'metrical avant-garde' or the Faerie Queene's treatment of prophecy as atavistic and alliteration as mere 'prosodic dried spice' (p. 69). Chapters 6–8 surprisingly reconnect blank and alliterative verse through their classicizing 'avoidance of rhyme' (p. 106). The lack of real intersection in composition, however unsatisfying from a technical perspective, is a necessary concession and indeed part of the book's new metrical history. The mid-sixteenth-century Scottish court—hardly the gravitational centre of our nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary historiographies—is the exception that proves the non-intersection. That said, Weiskott's analysis of George Gascoigne's Steele Glas cleverly shows how poetry assessed and valued alliterative verse in ways absent from that author's foundational prosodic treatise Certayne Notes of Instruction. As in his first book (English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)), Weiskott sharply reassesses what he calls the 'language–meter dialectic' and its 'epistemological feedback loops between meter and language' (p. 169). Once we see language and metre as two distinct and internally diverse systems, we can recognize how, for example, Piers Plowman 'devises exceptionally difficult choices between innovative metrical phonology and asystematic metrical patterns' (p. 125). We then achieve a sense of Langland's innovative skill in using macaronic verse to 'bring form to consciousness' by contrasting alliterative metrics with London's rhyming forms (p. 130). The [End Page 479] two central chapters, on Langland (7) and Chaucer (10), achieve the methodological goal of a stylistics without explicit prosody. Each of these chapters is followed by rather melancholic but useful tales of how verse style got misrecognized thanks to prosodic ideologies. Langland's alliterative verse, for example, was taken up in an exaggerated 'accentual paradigm' after the seventeenth-century canonization of blank verse. C. S. Lewis's strenuous periodization gives a fair picture of the 'post-enlightenment literary historiography' as well as the simplified and abstract modern scansions Weiskott wishes to revise (p. 145). A third section productively disarticulates two Chaucers: one the inventor of pentameter as an English outcrop of continental decasyllabics, yet influenced by a...

Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

Form versus Catastrophe in the Old English Christ III

Medieval authors of literature on Doomsday faced a structural challenge of their own making: their audiences knew too much about the coming end of days to be as terror-stricken as they should. This difficulty was compounded by the comic structure of the Christian salvation narrative, which looked forward to Christ's return as—technically speaking—its catastrophe, when all the confusion and unhappiness of the universal plot would be unravelled and total clarity would reign. The author of the Old English Doomsday poem called Christ III, however, devised an ingenious strategy to restore its audience to a state of wholesome uncertainty. By destabilizing the predictable flow of Old English meter with an unusually varied and challenging range of hypermetric verses, the poet of Christ III used metrical form to undermine the confidence of audiences in their powers of prediction—and in so doing, restored suspense to the experience of Doomsday.

Books and Manuscripts 2020

Books and Manuscripts 2020

Nicolay Yakovlev’s Theory of Old English Meter: A Reply

Nicolay Yakovlev’s Theory of Old English Meter: A Reply

The intricacies of counting to four in Old English poetry

The metrical theory devised by Eduard Sievers and refined by A. J. Bliss forms the basis for most current scholarship on Old English meter. A weakness of the Sievers–Bliss theory is that it occupies a middle ground between two levels of analytic description, distinguished by Roman Jakobson in an influential article as ‘verse instance’ and ‘verse design’. Metrists in the Sievers–Bliss tradition employ a concept of metrical position (a key component of verse design), yet the focus of attention usually remains on the contours of stress of individual verses. Important exceptions are the studies of Thomas Cable and Nicolay Yakovlev. The theoretical innovations of Cable and Yakovlev, among others, enable a more concise presentation of verse design than anyone writing on the subject has yet offered. The present essay attempts to show what such a presentation might look like, while also giving due acknowledgment to the complexities of position-count in this meter. We presume no prior knowledge of the Sieversian system. Illustrations are drawn principally from Cædmon’s Hymn and the Seafarer.

The Whole Book of Psalms Collected into English Metre by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and Others: A Critical Edition of the Texts and Tunes ed. by Beth Quitslund and Nicholas Temperley

The Whole Book of Psalms Collected into English Metre by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and Others: A Critical Edition of the Texts and Tunes ed. by Beth Quitslund and Nicholas Temperley

Quitslund, Beth, and Nicholas Temperley, eds. The Whole Book of Psalms: Collected into English Metre by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and Others; A Critical Edition of the Texts and Tunes

Quitslund, Beth, and Nicholas Temperley, eds. The Whole Book of Psalms: Collected into English Metre by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and Others; A Critical Edition of the Texts and Tunes

The whole book of Psalms. Collected into English metre by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins and others. A critical edition of texts and tunes. 2 vols. Edited by Beth Quitslund and Nicholas Temperley. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 387; Renaissance English Text Society Seventh Series, 36 [for 2011]). Pp. xlviii + 504, lvi + 1096 incl. 9 figs, 6 tables

The whole book of Psalms. Collected into English metre by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins and others. A critical edition of texts and tunes. 2 vols. Edited by Beth Quitslund and Nicholas Temperley. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 387; Renaissance English Text Society Seventh Series, 36 [for 2011]). Pp. xlviii + 504, lvi + 1096 incl. 9 figs, 6 tables and 14 music examples. Tempe, Az: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), 2018. $192. 978 0 86698 435 5; 978 0 86698 615 1 - Volume 71 Issue 2

Nicolay Yakovlev’s Theory of Old English Meter: a Reassessment

This article gauges the plausibility of Nicolay Yakovlev’s theory of Old English meter. Although he accepts the four-position principle of Eduard Sievers, Yakovlev dissents from the Sieversian tradition by arguing that morphology determines the invariable metrical behavior of every element, that there are no intermediate levels of ictus, and that alliteration is not a structural feature of Old English versification. Yakovlev’s innovations are intended to simplify the Sieversian tradition, but we demonstrate that they actually result in a metrical system that is excessively complex, theoretically incoherent, and empirically inadequate.

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius Andrew Galloway ian cornelius, Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 219. isbn: 1–10715–410–3. $99. Ian Cornelius offers the ‘pursuit’ of a meter that, he claims, we can no longer properly hear, so completely did its elusive and complicated rules vanish beneath the influence of poetry driven by the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables qua syllables, which had become (and remain) the only familiar building blocks of English meter. By the late sixteenth century, the venerable alliterative tradition had entirely dissolved into impersonations and reinterpretations, as if alliterative verse were merely an ornamentally distinct variety of iambic pentameter or anapests (Spenser’s ‘Some gan to gape for greedie gouernaunce’ or his ‘lovers of lordship and troublers of states’). Such an approach to metrical history may remind us of Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Not Knowing Greek,’ where ‘not knowing’ refers not to Woolf’s personal exile from the privileged world of male scholars but an insistence that neither she nor the scholars can actually capture a lost poetics, whose later echoes and reinterpretations pose as much hindrance as help. ‘We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we now do in English,’ Woolf observes—though she doesn’t hesitate to describe some features she discerns as that poetics’ original elements. Cornelius’ compressed and meticulous pursuit is equally cautious but ultimately extraordinarily ambitious: in finely argued chapters, it seeks to recover comprehensive rules of this terminally medieval meter, whose often dramatically changing phases are patchily preserved through half a millennium. Cornelius’ overarching point is not just that we mishear, but also that the meter itself changed by reinterpretations— mishearings—of its own traditions, some drastic. This adopts and builds on Geoffrey Russom’s important proposals for how late-medieval alliterative meter might be explained as ‘normalizing’ certain exceptional elements in Old English meter, as the language developed into a fundamentally different form; Cornelius manages the contiguous stages of this through the ‘new paradigm’ formulated by Nicolay Yakovlev in his (unpublished) 2008 dissertation, already applied by a few other scholars (notably Cornelius’ own student, Eric Weiskott). For all of his scholarly modesty, Cornelius is more Yakovlevian than Yakovlev: he intently tests and takes further the view that Old English metrics began not from ‘accentual’ principles but ‘morphological’ ones—that is, not syllable counts but classes of words that take or resist stress, with specific options for metrical resolution and stretches of unstressed syllables, a legacy shaping post-Conquest and later alliterative meter as it accommodated, with gradually [End Page 76] expanding consequences, the growing number of small function words required by English’s shift to an analytic language. This grants metrics itself a central role in metrical history, positing underlying poetic continuities in spite of the drastic changes and major gaps in the documented data. Cornelius shows both an unwavering commitment to this assumption and a vigorous interest in the exceptions and variations, while frequently chipping away at the long scholarly history that has led both toward and away from the claims Cornelius endorses. Lawman’s Brut remains, as usual, a hard case. One could choose almost any line from The Brut to retest and debate Cornelius’ multiple explanations for what amounts to that poet’s creative destruction of earlier alliterative verse along with its germination of features that would dominate later. But the alternatives to Cornelius’ view of a continuous ‘tradition’ briefly exposed by The Brut would be either viewing the looser prose rhythms of Ælfrician homily as bridging the general gap in written alliterative verse from 900 to 1350, leaving later alliterative verse a self-created thing (a view Cornelius demolishes), or—Russom’s easier stratagem—setting Lawman and his peculiarities aside, and conjecturing widespread orally sustained poetry marching steadily from the meter of Beowulf to that of William of Palerne. Like Yakovlev and Weiskott, Cornelius goes through not around Lawman, giving even more attention than either of those to the elements in The Brut that violate the norms of both Old and later Middle English alliterative...

Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation ed. by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons

Reviewed by: Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation ed. by Tom Birkett and Kirsty March-Lyons John Kennedy Birkett, Tom, and Kirsty March-Lyons, eds, Translating Early Medieval Poetry: Transformation, Reception, Interpretation (Medievalism, 11), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. 250; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844730. Arising from a conference, ‘From Eald to New: Translating Early Modern Poetry for the 21st Century’, held at University College Cork in June 2014, the essays in this volume deal mainly with translation, very broadly defined, from Old English, Old and Middle Irish, and Old Norse. Sixteen contributors are listed, the majority from Ireland and the United Kingdom. The editors’ introduction strikes an encouragingly positive note, reflected in some of the other essays: they affirm that ‘something of a renaissance has been taking place in the reception and remediation of poetry from the early medieval period’ (p. 2). In a wide-ranging essay discussing relevant scholarship and the studies included in the volume, they indicate that the book’s primary focus is on twenty-first-century responses to the medieval poetry rather than the history of past responses (pp. 6–7). Five essays focus on Old English. Chris Jones raises questions about what should be considered to belong to the corpus of Old English poetry and discusses its use by modern poets, whose approach to the material is often rather free. Hugh Magennis mainly discusses the translations from Old English by Edwin Morgan, who translated into both Standard English and Scots. Inna Matyushina, focusing on ‘The Wanderer’ and the translation into Russian of Vladimir Tikhomirov, suggests that in some ways a better translation of Old English is possible into that language than into Modern English, especially if the English translator tries to imitate Old English metres and vocabulary. M. J. Toswell discusses Jorge Luis Borges’s interest in Old English and his translation work, a subject Toswell considers relatively neglected. The final, somewhat provocative essay in this part of the volume, Rory McTurk’s ‘“Let Beowulf now be a book from Ireland”: What Would Henryson or Tolkien Say?’, takes a somewhat negative view of Seamus Heaney’s bestselling Beowulf translation and, somewhat surprisingly in the present context, his translation of The Testament of Cresseid by the late fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson. Perhaps tongue in cheek, McTurk calls for a translation of Beowulf into Irish. The next three essays deal with translation from medieval Irish. Elizabeth Boyce argues for a need to widen the range of such poetry available in English translation: the translators’ well-established focus on nature and lyric poetry gives a misleading impression of the corpus. Lahney Preston-Matto translates [End Page 196] Aislinge Meic Conglinne, the language of which suggests a date around 1100, into English, discussing the society that produced the work and the challenges facing the translator. She claims to translate for a general audience and American undergraduates. Tadhg Ó Síocháin presents a translation into Modern Irish of the eleventh-century poem known as Find and the Phantoms. Commenting on his translation technique, he argues for the use of some archaic and dialect words as a way of vitalizing Modern Irish. The Middle Irish text is also provided, along with a reprint of an 1886 English translation. Four essays consider translation from the Old Norse. Hannah Burrows lists and discusses reworking and translations of stanzas from Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks often known as The Waking of Angantýr. Many of the works discussed date to the eighteenth century, though the twenty-first century has seen a revival of interest in the text. Carolyne Larrington provides a very lively discussion of her translation of the Poetic Edda, both the first version published in 1996 and the revised edition of 2014. She outlines many changes, some of them stemming from a realization that the likely audience for the 2014 version would be undergraduates studying the poems in translation, rather than general readers. Heather O’Donoghue presents an interesting case that, without explicitly acknowledging it, Thomas Hardy was strongly influenced by the story of Brynhildr in writing The Return of the Native. Turning to television, Gareth Lloyd Evans shows that Michael Hirst’s popular...