All poetry written in Old Germanic languages uses
a system of alliterative verse, the best examples of
which can be found in the OLD ENGLISH poetic corpus. This form of meter doubtlessly originates
among oral poets or SCOPS, who would have recited
or sung the verse with the accompaniment of a
harp. In Old English poetry, each line is divided by
a strong caesura into two half-lines or hemistichs.
Each hemistich contains two stressed words or syllables and a varying number of unstressed syllables. Thus each line of Anglo-Saxon poetry
contains four stressed syllables. The two half-lines
are united by alliteration, the repetition of initial
sounds.
The key to the alliteration in each line is the first
accented syllable of the second hemistich. The second stressed syllable of the second hemistich never
alliterated with the first. But at least one and sometimes both of the stressed syllables in the first halfline always alliterated with that initial sound of the
second half line. Thus there were three chief types
of line in Old English poetry, which might be illustrated by these lines from Beowulf:
geongum ond ealdum, swylc him God sealde
(his God-given goods
to young and old)
(Heaney 2000, 6–7; l. 72)
Here the first stressed syllable (of geongum) alliterates with the first stressed syllable of the second
hemistich (God)—a line that might be diagrammed as ab:ac. Two lines later in Beowulf occurs the line
wuldres Wealdend, worold-¯ are forgeaf
(the glorious Almighty,
made this man
renowned)
(Heaney 2000, 2–3; l. 17)
This time, both accented syllables in the first halfline alliterate, so that the line could be diagrammed aa:ac. The third common type of line
can be seen in another line from Beowulf:
Ne hyrde ic cyml¯ ıcorc¯ eol gegyrwan
(I never heard before
of a ship so well
furbished)
(Heaney 2000, 4–5; l. 38)
Here the line follows a ba:ac pattern, where only
the second stressed syllable of the first hemistich
alliterates.
Poetic lines could use vowels for alliterative purposes as well as consonants, and when that occurred, any vowel could alliterate with any other
vowel. Old English verse was virtually never
rhymed, nor were poems arranged into stanzas. The
accents in Old English lines were grammatical—
that is, there were no artificially stressed syllables
used for the sake of alliteration; rather, the stresses
fell on the syllables that would naturally be accented
in a word or phrase.
There are significantly more complex rules for
classical Old English poetry, but there is a good
deal of scholarly controversy about them. The
strict rules of Anglo-Saxon poetry seem to have remained relatively unchanged from the earliest
written poetry until the Norman Conquest. Very
late in the Old English period, however, there
seems to have been a relaxing of the rules with
some poets, so that in a very late composition like
The BATTLE OF MALDON, some of the strict rules are
broken—for example, on some occasions the final
stressed syllable of the second hemistich alliterates.
The alliterative tradition disappeared in written
verse after 1066, but the tradition was revived—
though with much looser rules—in some late
14th-century MIDDLE ENGLISH poetry during a
movement called the ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL.
Bibliography
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Seamus Heaney. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2000.
Cable, Thomas. The Meter and Melody of Beowulf. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974.
Fulk, Robert Dennis. A History of Old English Meter.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1992.
Hoover, David L. A New Theory of Old English Meter.
New York: P. Lang, 1985.
Pope, John Collins. The Rhythm of Beowulf: An Interpretation of the Normal and Hypermetric VerseForms in Old English Poetry. Rev. ed. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966.
Russom, Geoffrey. Old English Meter and Linguistic
Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987.