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Phantom Syllables in the English Alliterative Tradition
ERIC WEISKOTT
Yale University
In 1732, Richard Bentley made a surprising discovery concerning the scansion of Homeric verse. Students of epic meter had noticed that some
phrases violated the rules of elision, as for example a recurrent epithet for
Agamemnon:
Tὸn d’ ἠmeίbet’ ἔpeita ἄnaj ἀndrῶn Ἀgamέmnvn.1
The short final vowel of ἔpeita should elide with the short initial vowel of
ἄnaj, but elision leaves the verse wanting a syllable. As it is, the two vowels
form a hiatus, a type of metrical stutter that Homer typically avoids.2 In the
process of preparing notes for a new edition of Homer’s poetry, Bentley
found that most of the irregularities resolved themselves if one assumed
the metrical significance of the digamma (ϝ), an archaic letter representing
[w].3 Others had overlooked digamma because, according to all historicallinguistic accounts, the sound it represents disappeared from Ionic Greek
I am grateful to Roberta Frank and Ian Cornelius for commenting on earlier drafts of this
article, and to the two anonymous readers of Modern Philology for offering a wealth of suggestions for its improvement.
1. ‘‘Then Agamemnon, ruler of men, responded’’ (Iliad 1.172, in Iliad: Books I–XII, ed. D. B.
Monro, 5th ed. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1971]). All translations are my own unless otherwise
noted.
2. For a general introduction to Homeric scansion, see Joint Association of Classical
Teachers, Reading Greek: Grammar and Exercises, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2007),
362–68 and 370; and Deborah Steiner, ed., Homer: Odyssey, Books XVII and XVIII (Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 37–43.
3. Richard Bentley’s thoughts on digamma first appeared in Homeri Ilias, vol. 2, ed. Samuel
Clarke (London, 1740), 146n. Having annotated his copy of Poetae Graeci principes, ed. Henricus Stephanus, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1566), Bentley lent it to Christian Gottlob Heyne, who scattered some of Bentley’s musings on digamma throughout his Homeri carmina (Leipzig, 1802).
See also R. C. Jebb, Bentley (London, 1882), 149–53; and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff,
Geschichte der Philologie, Nachwort and index by Albert Henrichs (1921; Stuttgart: Teubner,
1998), 36–37.
Ó 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2013/11004-0001$10.00
441
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MODERN PHILOLOGY
before Homer’s time. Bentley found that most of the words that failed to
contract or elide had etymological forms beginning with [w].4 Iliad 1.172
scans if ἄnaj takes its etymological form ϝάnaj, the ghostly digamma blocking elision and preventing hiatus:
Tὸn d’ ἠmeίbet’ ἔpeita ϝάnaj ἀndrῶn Ἀgamέmnvn.
The implications of Bentley’s discovery took centuries to unravel. At its
heart, the debate over digamma concerned the meaning of metrical evidence. Bentley had established beyond doubt that, in certain contexts,
Homeric meter went about its business as though digamma had never disappeared. It was left to scholars and editors to determine the literary import
of this metrical curiosity. Bentley himself advocated restoring the digamma
to Homer’s text, in the belief that the standard grammars of Ionian Greek
were mistaken: the metrical significance of digamma proved that the sound
had survived up to Homer’s day. Although scholars sometimes expressed
‘‘doubts as to the propriety of printing Homer’s text with the insertion of
the digamma, while the rest of the orthography remains as in the common
copies,’’ the century and a half following the publication of Bentley’s discovery witnessed widespread efforts to touch up Homer’s text on the basis of
pre-Homeric phonology.5 But the craze for an archaic Homer soon faded.
Advances in historical linguistics increasingly undermined the assumptions
on which printed digamma depended. It became difficult to wish away the
growing scholarly consensus that digamma ‘‘had disappeared some considerable time before the composition of the extant epics,’’ the naked fact that
‘‘there was never a text of Homer in which it was written.’’6
Homeric studies found itself on the horns of a dilemma. By the turn of
the twentieth century, it was no longer possible to deny that The Iliad and
The Odyssey had been composed well after digamma disappeared from
Ionic Greek. Yet, somehow, digamma still mattered for the meter. In 1934,
Milman Parry, architect of the epoch-making oral-formulaic hypothesis,
offered a new explanation for the phenomena that Bentley had brought to
light.7 In Parry’s view, the metrical significance of digamma did not depend
on the putative survival of [w] in speech. Nor did it suggest a wildly archaic
pronunciation. Drawing on his research on formulae in oral poetry, Parry
4. Digamma also dropped out word-medially, which explains why certain short vowels scan
long in Homer; see Martin West, ‘‘Homer’s Meter,’’ in A New Companion to Homer, ed. Ian Morris and Barry Powell (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 227. For a list of words in Homer that scan on the
basis of etymological forms containing digamma, see R. C. Jebb, Homer: An Introduction to the
Iliad and the Odyssey (Glasgow, 1887), 189–91.
5. James Henry Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, vol. 2 (London, 1833), 366.
6. West, ‘‘Homer’s Meter,’’ 227.
7. Milman Parry, ‘‘The Traces of the Digamma in Ionic and Lesbian Greek,’’ Language 10
(1934): 130–44.
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Eric Weiskott
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443
argued that the digamma remained metrically significant as a convenience
to the poet ensconced in an oral tradition, who would otherwise have had to
reinvent many epithets coined when [w] was still a part of Greek phonology.
Citing analogues from Old English, Old Norse, and other early poetries,
Parry held that the formulae with digamma indicate not a phonological
reality but the conservatism of Homer’s formal inheritance.8 When in front
of an audience familiar with a traditional system of versification that came
equipped with fixed epithets, it was apparently acceptable to go on declaiming ἄnaj ἀndrῶn as though one had said ϝάnaj ἀndrῶn. The phrase
remained metrical because it had once been metrical. Parry’s hypothesis
did not require that the poets or their listeners be unusually well informed
about the history of their own language, for the epithet itself encoded this
information. The poet in such a case ‘‘committed a fault, which was scarcely
a fault, since he and his hearers had been used to it from their earliest
days.’’9 Under Parry’s analysis, the digamma hovered by its old haunts like a
phantom, invisible but significant, extinct and yet peculiarly expressive of a
communal history.
I
In recent years, scholars of Old and Middle English alliterative meter have
produced convincing proofs that similar phantom syllables account for
what had seemed like metrical irregularities—even if they do not always
recognize that this is what they have done. In 1992, R. D. Fulk revamped
Max Kaluza’s 1896 comments on a link between etymology and metrical
resolution in Old English verse, marshaling ‘‘Kaluza’s law’’ as proof of an
early date for Beowulf.10 More recently, Thomas Cable, Nicolay Yakovlev,
and a group of scholars from the University of Bristol have independently
8. Ibid., 131. For similar vestiges in Finnish and Estonian poetries, see Kaarle Krohn, Kalevalastudien (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1924), 44 and 56–57. To this list may be
added the metrical archaisms in Old English and Old Norse treated in Geoffrey Russom, ‘‘Beowulf’’ and Old Germanic Metre (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60–63.
9. Parry, ‘‘Traces,’’ 134.
10. Max Kaluza, ‘‘Zur Betonungs- und Verslehre des Altenglischen,’’ in Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage Oskar Schade (Königsberg, 1896), 101–34, and Englische Metrik in historischer
Entwicklung dargestellt (Berlin: Felber, 1909), 57–59; highlighted by Alan J. Bliss, The Metre of
‘‘Beowulf,’’ rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 31 n. 1; then picked up by R. D. Fulk, A History of
Old English Meter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 153–68 and 348–51.
Kaluza’s work, like Bliss’s, was based on the metrical theory of Eduard Sievers, Altgermanische
Metrik (Halle, 1893), 127–28, ‘‘Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses,’’ Beiträge
zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 10 (1885): 209–314 and 451–545, and ‘‘Old Germanic Metrics and Old English Metrics,’’ trans. Gawaina D. Luster, in Essential Articles for the
Study of Old English Poetry, ed. J. B. Bessinger Jr. and S. J. Kahrl (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1968),
267–88.
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MODERN PHILOLOGY
come to congruent conclusions about the structure of the b-verse in Middle
English alliterative poetry.11 In developing a coherent metrical model, each
of the scholars found it expedient to assume the significance of final -e,
even as the most authoritative grammars place the disappearance of final
-e in the relevant dialects a century or so before the so-called Alliterative
Revival began.12 The two subfields have thus reached different stages of
argumentation on essentially the same topic. Whereas the Middle English
scholars have only recently nailed down the metrical significance of final -e,
Kaluza’s observations on resolution spent a century in a dusty corner of
Anglo-Saxon studies, only to be broadcast anew, and in the form of a law,
the centerpiece of a controversial argument for an eighth-century Beowulf.
Although the Middle English metrists have hazarded hypotheses about the
relationship between metrical and phonological final -e, the full implications of their consensus have yet to be determined. Conversely, Fulk’s work
on Beowulf, even as it brings Kaluza’s findings to light, seems to have foreclosed speculation on their significance.
Carried out with the help of electronic concordances and graphing software, these often perspicacious metrical analyses tend toward notational
abstraction. But medievalists interested in the entwined fates of poetry and
language ignore meter at their peril. Tucked away in Fulk’s compendious
11. The conversation began with Hoyt Duggan, ‘‘The Shape of the B-Verse in Middle
English Alliterative Poetry,’’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 8 (1986): 73–105, ‘‘Notes toward a Theory of Langland’s Meter,’’ Yearbook of Langland Studies 1 (1987): 41–70, ‘‘Final -e and the Rhythmic Structure of the B-Verse in Middle English Alliterative Poetry,’’ Modern Philology 86 (1988):
119–45, ‘‘Langland’s Dialect and Final -e,’’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 157–91, and
‘‘The Role and Distribution of -ly Adverbs in Middle English Alliterative Verse,’’ in Loyal Letters:
Studies on Mediaeval Alliterative Poetry and Prose, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald
(Groningen: Forsten, 1994), 131–54; Thomas Cable, ‘‘Middle English Meter and Its Theoretical Implications,’’ Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988): 47–69, ‘‘Standards from the Past: The
Conservative Syllable Structure of the Alliterative Revival,’’ Tennessee Studies in Literature 31
(1989): 42–56, and The English Alliterative Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1991), 66–84. The more recent discoveries appear in Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter,
‘‘The Distribution of Infinitives in -e and -en in Some Middle English Alliterative Poems,’’
Medium Ævum 74 (2005): 221–47; Ad Putter, Judith Jefferson, and Myra Stokes, Studies in the
Metre of Alliterative Verse (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures,
2007), 19–118; and Nicolay Yakovlev, ‘‘The Development of Alliterative Metre from Old to
Middle English’’ (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2008), ‘‘On Final -e in the B-Verses of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight,’’ in Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse, ed. Judith Jefferson
and Ad Putter (University of Leeds Press, 2009), 135–57, and ‘‘Prosodic Restrictions on the
Short Dip in Late Middle English Alliterative Verse,’’ Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009):
217–42. Overviews are Thomas Cable, ‘‘Progress in Middle English Alliterative Metrics,’’ Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 243–64; and Kristin Lynn Cole, ‘‘The Destruction of Troy’s Different Rules: The Alliterative Revival and the Alliterative Tradition,’’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109 (2010): 162–64.
12. Duggan, ‘‘Final -e,’’ 119–20; and Donka Minkova, The History of Final Vowels in English:
The Sound of Muting (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991).
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History of Old English Meter (1992), implicit in the conclusions drawn therein,
is the premise that poetic meter is a reliable criterion for establishing absolute chronologies, that developments in verse form follow straightforwardly
from developments in the spoken language. A metrical history of comparable scope and polemical density has yet to be written for the Middle English
poems, but the seeds have been sown or, rather, the lines of battle have
been drawn. It is a battle that must be fought on metrical grounds, for
whatever one might like to say about the revivals, survivals, or deaths of
poetic traditions, one must in any case confront a burgeoning cache of hard
data excavated from the very stuff of metrical language and therefore not
directly beholden to the standard accounts of linguistic change or dialectal
variation.
At the outset, one must take care to separate meter from conjecture.13
Fulk’s demonstration of an early date for Beowulf proceeds with the certitude of one in possession of an arsenal of self-evident facts: ‘‘And so the Beowulf poet’s observance of Kaluza’s law establishes a terminus ad quem for the
composition of the poem because it depends on the preservation of original quantities in final vowels with Indo-European and Germanic broken
intonation: after these vowels were shortened, it was no longer possible to
observe Kaluza’s law in many words.’’14 Beowulf scholars have called into
question nearly every aspect of Fulk’s analysis.15 Nevertheless, the data that
form the basis of his argument, while requiring some qualification, deserve
the attention of Anglo-Saxonists. As Kaluza first suggested, in some metrical
contexts, some Old English poems sometimes uphold a distinction between
historically short and historically circumflex final syllables.16 Whether any
poem may be said to recognize the distinction with regularity, or whether
one poem’s rate of adherence to the ‘‘law’’ can be meaningfully compared
13. On fact and theory in the Fünftypensystem, see Thomas Cable, ‘‘Metrical Style as Evidence for the Date of Beowulf,’’ in The Dating of ‘‘Beowulf,’’ ed. Colin Chase (University of
Toronto Press, 1981), 77–78. On the problems attendant upon linguistic-metrical testing, see
Ashley Crandell Amos, Linguistic Means of Determining the Dates of Old English Literary Texts (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1980).
14. Fulk, History, 389.
15. Metrists disagree about the causes, extent, and duration of Kaluza’s law. See Roberta
Frank, ‘‘A Scandal in Toronto: The Dating of ‘Beowulf ’ a Quarter Century on,’’ Speculum 82
(2007): 850–56. I characterize the law as a morphological-semantic distinction with no bearing
on the date of Beowulf in ‘‘A Semantic Replacement for Kaluza’s Law in Beowulf,’’ English Studies
93 (2012): 891–96.
16. Fulk, History, 419–25. In another article, Fulk mentions in passing what should be considered a significant stumbling block to using Kaluza’s law as a dating criterion: ‘‘It is by no
means impossible that certain of the etymologically circumflected vowels retained length into
the eleventh century, notably the low vowel -a’’ (‘‘Old English Meter and Oral Tradition: Three
Issues Bearing on Poetic Chronology,’’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 [2007]:
324).
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with another’s, depends on the calibration of an astounding array of technical criteria. It is enough for now to remark that Kaluza’s insight explains too
many apparent exceptions to be ignored. Without recourse to historical
phonology, it is difficult to explain the distribution of some short and circumflex endings in Beowulf, for example:
1. 136a morðbeala mare
3149a modceare mændon
2. 288a scearp scyldwiga
2476a frome fyrdhwate
The term ‘‘resolution’’ refers to the metrical principle, first described by
Eduard Sievers, whereby a short stressed syllable plus the next syllable
equals a long stressed syllable.17 In (1), historically short endings (-a in
accusative singular morðbeala, -e in accusative singular modceare) undergo resolution, yielding the common metrical contour SsSx; in (2), historically circumflex endings (-a in nominative singular scyldwiga, -e in nominative plural fyrdhwate) block resolution, maintaining the requisite minimum four
metrical positions (‘‘suspension of resolution’’). If the distinction between
short and circumflex had no bearing on the meter of Beowulf, one would
expect that circumflex endings could appear in verses with resolution like
those in (1) and that short endings could appear in verses with suspended
resolution like those in (2). But in fact, the distribution of short and circumflex endings in some Old English poems is far from random.
Kaluza’s law appeals to scholars because it calls on a linguistic fact to
reinforce a favorite metrical thesis, Sievers’s Fünftypensystem. Yet though it is
delivered with the matter-of-factness of a lab report, one crucial component of Fulk’s argument has little to do with linguistic data. Fulk takes for
granted that after the shortening of circumflex endings, it was ‘‘no longer
possible to observe Kaluza’s law in many words.’’18 For those familiar with
17. Sievers, Altgermanische Metrik, 127–28. See also Bliss, Metre, 27–53; Benjamin H. Carroll
Jr., ‘‘Metrical Resolution in Old English,’’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 92 (1993):
167–78; and Robert P. Stockwell and Donka Minkova, ‘‘Old English Metrics and the Phonology of Resolution,’’ in Germanic Studies in Honor of Anatoly Liberman, ed. Kurt Gustav Goblirsch,
Martha Berryman Mayou, and Marvin Taylor (Odense University Press, 1997), 389–406. A dissenting view is Wolfgang Obst, Der Rhythmus des Beowulf: Eine Akzent- und Takttheorie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1987), 19–24.
18. In a later article, Fulk revises his position, acknowledging the conservative nature of
poetic language. Yet he claims to be able to distinguish between a ‘‘late’’ poet such as Cynewulf,
who ‘‘has lost the key to understanding [poetic formulas’] structure’’ (Fulk, ‘‘Old English
Meter,’’ 312), and an ‘‘early’’ poet such as the Beowulf poet, who was ‘‘far more knowledgeable
about archaisms in the language of verse’’ (311). The decisive criterion is whether the archaic
material is restricted to ‘‘formulaic diction’’ (309, 311, and 322). The present article raises two
general objections to this kind of claim about poetic chronology. First, at any given point in
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447
the diachronic/synchronic dichotomy foundational to historical linguistics, the proposition has the smack of logic.19 Since speakers normally know
very little about past states of their own language, when a phonological distinction disappears, one might expect a metrical rule based on it to disappear straightaway. Yet, poetry being mysterious stuff, it is not at all clear that
this is how things work in practice. Early composition is not the only plausible explanation for Kaluza verses.20 The argument for Kaluza’s law as a dating criterion concerns developments in poetic form, not language alone,
and therefore it ought to be tested against what we know about poetic form.
It is worth noting that Kaluza himself preferred to leave the question open,
explaining that his hypothesis applied to a historically heavy ending that
‘‘perhaps still retained something of its original intonation.’’21 The stakes
for Old English studies could not be higher. To specify the relationship
between meter and language is necessarily to say a great deal about the
character of the poetry. On this count, the metrical formalists have made
their allegiances clear. Faith in the synchronicity of metrical and linguistic
developments undergirds the entire History, so that, in spite of the title,
Fulk frames his task in overwhelmingly phonological terms. He ultimately
has the same aim as did Bentley so long ago: to reconcile the linguistic facts
encoded in verse form with the standard phonological history, to discipline
the two sets of data until they converge.
As for meter itself, Fulk accepts, with minimal modification, Alan Bliss’s
elaboration of Sievers’s system. Reliance on Sievers entails a second major
assumption about the development of the Old English poetic tradition. As
Thomas Bredehoft observes, ‘‘rather than discussing changes to the metri-
the development of alliterative poetry, a range of metrical styles must have been possible, from
the conservative to the experimental, so that even if one could demonstrate a series of metrical
differences between, say, Beowulf and Juliana—and even if those differences could be mapped
cleanly onto datable linguistic changes—it still would not establish a relative chronology of the
two poems. Second, final -e in Middle English poetry shows that the preservation of archaic
sounds need not be restricted to traditional formulae, but may apply wholesale to certain metrical contexts.
19. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).
20. Roberta Frank wonders if perhaps ‘‘the verse type morðorbealo maga acted . . . as a generic
signal, a ‘ye olde’ sign advertising the shard, the ruin, the blurred hieroglyph, an embodiment
of the classical high style’’ (‘‘Scandal,’’ 859). Compare B. R. Hutcheson, Old English Poetic Metre
(Cambridge: Brewer, 1995), 89–94, and ‘‘Kaluza’s Law, the Dating of Beowulf, and the Old
English Poetic Tradition,’’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103 (2004): 318–22. Fulk
himself cites a conservative poetic tradition as a possible explanation for Kaluza verses in some
Old English poems; see Fulk, History, 165, and ‘‘Old English Meter,’’ 317–23.
21. ‘‘Vielleicht noch etwas von ihrem alten Eigenton bewahrt hatte’’ (Kaluza, Englische
Metrik, 58). Kaluza did count Beowulf ‘‘in der älteren Dichtung’’ (in the older poetry) (58), but
not, evidently, for Fulk’s reasons.
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MODERN PHILOLOGY
cal system itself, Fulk’s History is largely concerned with describing phonological changes in the words which fill out Sievers-Bliss verses.’’22 If readers
come to the work expecting a history of meter, they will leave with the sense
that the deck has been stacked. The rigidity of the Sieversian framework
ensures that Beowulf and a handful of other poems will typify ‘‘classical’’ Old
English verse. Other Old English poems are cast as the ill-starred progeny
of a tradition in rapid descent, guaranteed to look ‘‘late,’’ to be rife with
unseemly ‘‘late developments.’’ The circularity of the approach should be
evident. It is as though one wrote a general theory of harmony based on
one’s favorite bits of Bach and then concluded that Mozart was a hack
because he preferred different chords. Perhaps there is some measure of
truth to Sievers’s implicit chronology of verse form. But there is no justice in
its arrogance toward metrical developments.23 Inasmuch as the Sievers typology has done more than any other theory to set the terms of the study of
Old English poetry, a reevaluation of the current interpretation of Kaluza’s
law will ipso facto constitute a reevaluation of the Old English canon and
the shape of early English verse history.
Whereas Old English metrists have made it their business to shuffle Beowulf ever further into the Mercian (or is it Northumbrian?) yesteryear, Middle English metrists have sought to describe the verse form of an Alliterative Revival, the conscious resuscitation of a long-dead poetic tradition.
They are accordingly discomfited when their results suggest otherwise.
Having demonstrated the metrical significance of final -e in the Middle
English alliterative long line, Hoyt Duggan notes, with some surprise, that
his findings contradict Thorlac Turville-Petre’s influential thesis.24 Over
the past few years, Cable, Yakovlev, and the Bristolians have each confirmed
the ‘‘surprising fact’’ that Middle English alliterative verse requires final -e
in certain metrical positions.25 One of the positions is the last syllable of the
22. Thomas Bredehoft, Early English Metre (University of Toronto Press, 2005), 7.
23. ‘‘The assertion that the later poetry can be effectively compared to the earlier, or that
later poets were, in fact, trying to compose verse under the same rules as earlier poets is deeply
problematic. The reality is not that the poetic tradition was rigid, but rather that Sievers-Bliss
formalism is rigid’’ (ibid., 7).
24. ‘‘It is very difficult to account for the metrical evidence discussed above without reference to a very long tradition of composition in essentially this form’’ (Duggan, ‘‘Final -e,’’ 145).
Contrast Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: Brewer, 1977).
25. Cable titled the section of his book that treats final -e ‘‘Surprising Facts’’ (English Alliterative Tradition, 66), an allusion (noted on 168) to Charles Peirce’s description of logical abduction. Hoyt Duggan remains the lone voice of dissent on the issue. In a recent article, Duggan
makes the final dip optional: see ‘‘The End of the Line,’’ in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in
Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed. John A. Burrow and Hoyt Duggan (Dublin: Four Courts,
2010), 69. In consideration of the metrical evidence adduced by Cable, Yakovlev, and the Bristolians, respectively, Duggan’s view is untenable.
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line. The rule may be illustrated by a survey of the closing words of the first
ten lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1390):
1. Troye
2. askez
3. wroȝt
4. erthe
5. kynde
6. bicome
7. iles
8. swyþe
9. fyrst
10. hat
Each word has an etymon ending in an unstressed syllable that was reduced
to schwa in Early Middle English (L Troia, OE æscas, OE wrohte, OE eorðe,
OE gecynde, OE becuman, OF isles, OE swyþe, OE fyrst with petrified dative -e,
OE hatte). If final -e did not count in the meter, one would expect to find
historically monosyllabic forms like watz (<OE wæs), borȝ (<OE burh and/
or ON borg), tulk (<ON túlkr), and þat (<OE þæt), and words with secondary stress, like tresoun, mixed in with forms in final -e at line end. By careful
tabulation, Cable, Yakovlev, and the Bristolians have shown that, on the
contrary, the schwa of historical -e is the only vowel permitted at line end.26
Thus, a major problem in fourteenth-century literary history emerges.
Because most of the texts in question can be assigned relatively firm dates
on nonmetrical grounds, Middle English scholars cannot sidestep the final
-e dilemma in the manner of Fulk and the formalists. Like a petulant sibling, metrical history refuses to be reconciled to linguistic history. On the
one hand, the Revival poems cannot be referred to the period preceding
the disappearance of final -e from the Northern and Western dialects in
which they were composed; on the other, it is unbelievable that any fourteenth-century poet, let alone a gaggle of them, could have researched the
history of the language thoroughly enough to fabricate a meter that distinguishes between skinne (counts as monosyllabic, <ON skinn þ OE scinn)
and sunne (counts as disyllabic, <OE sunne); tulk (monosyllabic, <ON
túlkr) and kirk (disyllabic, <ON kirkja); and so on. The aspiring forger
would have had to familiarize himself with thousands of Early Middle
English lemmata. Geoffrey Russom, for one, pronounces such a feat of antiquarianism impossible.27 Where we know poets to have attempted imita26. There are few exceptions: Cable, English Alliterative Tradition, 70–73. The other context
in which the restriction applies is a ‘‘short medial dip,’’ i.e., a single unstressed syllable that
comes between the two lifts of the b-verse. See Yakovlev, ‘‘Prosodic Restrictions.’’
27. ‘‘Learning [alliterative meter] would have posed two major problems, since the verse
patterns had remained quite diverse while becoming more artificial. It is difficult to imagine
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tions of earlier meters, the results are stilted and boring by turns, nothing
like the mellifluous assonance of a Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the
machine-gun intensity of a Piers Plowman (ca. 1360–87).28
Quite accidentally, then, Middle English metrists have discovered a lag
between verse history and linguistic history on the order of one hundred
years. Along with Homer’s digamma and the other vestiges cited by Parry,
final -e in alliterative verse shows that poetic meter does not always and
everywhere mirror its contemporary linguistic landscape, as Sieversian
formalists assume that it does.29 One tiny syllable has single-handedly invalidated the strong version of the Revival hypothesis. The dogma that ‘‘the
fourteenth-century alliterative long line . . . does not develop in any traceable way from the Anglo-Saxon long line’’ has been debunked once and for
all.30 In a recent review article, Cable confidently declares that ‘‘there had
to have been some kind of evolutionary process’’ leading from classical Old
English verse to the Revival poems.31 Suddenly, the history of alliterative
poetry looks less like an embarrassing series of deaths and suppressions, a
trough between two fleeting golden ages, and more like a single trajectory
of serious verse craft. If twelfth- and thirteenth-century final -e can appear
how anything like this meter could have been invented or learned independently of tradition’’
(Geoffrey Russom, ‘‘The Evolution of Middle English Alliterative Meter,’’ in Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations, ed. Anne Curzan and Kimberly Emmons
[Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004], 299). Compare Yakovlev, ‘‘Development,’’ 285–87 and 293–95.
28. Under this head should be grouped the doddering verses of Hoccleve and Lydgate,
wrought in imitation of Chaucer, as well as the many forgettable poets treated in Derek
Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge University Press,
1974), esp. 129–35. Though it conforms in large part to the new metrical theories, Piers Plowman is sometimes excluded from the core of Revival poems due to apparent idiosyncrasies; see
Turville-Petre, Alliterative Revival, 58–59; Hoyt Duggan, ‘‘Notes on the Metre of Piers Plowman:
Twenty Years on,’’ in Jefferson and Putter, Approaches, 159–86, esp. 169; Yakovlev, ‘‘Development,’’ 25; and Macklin Smith, ‘‘Langland’s Unruly Caesura,’’ Yearbook of Langland Studies 22
(2008): 57–101, and ‘‘Langland’s Alliterative Line(s),’’ Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009):
163–216. But see Duggan, ‘‘Notes toward’’ (contra his later opinions); Kristin Lynn Cole,
‘‘Rum, Ram, Ruf, and Rym: Middle English Alliterative Meters’’ (PhD diss., University of Texas
at Austin, 2007), 29–73; and John A. Burrow, ‘‘The Endings of Lines in ‘Piers Plowman’ B,’’
Notes and Queries 59 (2012): 316–20.
29. Donka Minkova makes the same point from the perspective of the linguist: ‘‘The blanket acceptance of metrical distributional facts as realistic and incontrovertible testimony of
prosodic relations is problematic’’ (‘‘The Credibility of Pseudo-Alfred: Prosodic Insights into
Post-Conquest Mongrel Meter,’’ Modern Philology 94 [1997]: 441).
30. Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002), 16. Ralph Hanna III likewise speaks of ‘‘repeated showings that the ME verse displays
no continuity with OE poetry’’ (‘‘Defining Middle English Alliterative Poetry,’’ in The Endless
Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina and
R. F. Yeager [Cambridge: Brewer, 1995], 43).
31. Cable, ‘‘Progress,’’ 264. Yakovlev traces this evolutionary process in fascinating detail
(‘‘Development’’).
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vestigially in fourteenth-century poetry, one might inquire what English
verse history would look like if Kaluza’s law turned out to be a similar conservatism.
II
The work of Cable, Yakovlev, and the Bristolians suggests a continuous alliterative tradition stretching from the earliest Old English poetry through
Lawman and on through the fourteenth century.32 The new metrical results cut against the grain of decades of skepticism about the fate of Old
English verse and the origins of the Revival poems, skepticism formed
in response to the romantic nationalism of earlier critics.33 With the suddenness of a scientific breakthrough, metrics has established what literary
criticism was unwilling or unable to notice. The persistence of final -e in
fourteenth-century alliterative meter contradicts Turville-Petre’s Revival hypothesis, which depends on his terse (and unsubstantiated) claim that
‘‘‘classical’ Old English verse died quickly after the Conquest.’’34 That it has
taken so long for scholars to recognize the continuity of the alliterative tradition testifies to the gravitational pull of the two major spheres of power
(Old and Middle) in the modern English department. So long as alliterative verse was defined in terms of its earliest and latest incarnations, it could
not avoid seeming at odds with itself. Proponents of discontinuity tend to
pose the issue in extreme terms. Absent a workable formal model, it is easy
to doubt that any regular development could have led directly from Beowulf
to Gawain. Scholars on both sides of the Conquest have been content to
consign Lawman and other Early Middle English poets to a three-century
swathe of ruined poetry—poetry whose main characteristic seemed to be
its stubborn insistence on breaking all of Sievers’s rules. The idea of a foolishly archaistic Lawman indirectly valorizes the study of Beowulf and
32. Another important contribution in the same vein is Donka Minkova, ‘‘Diagnostics of
Metricality in Middle English Alliterative Verse,’’ in Jefferson and Putter, Approaches, 77–113.
Unrhymed alliterative poems continued to be written into the sixteenth century. The latest
alliterative poem known to me appears in the Whole Prophesie of Scotland . . . (London[?], 1603)
as The Prophesie of Gildas, including probable references to the Acts of Supremacy (1534).
33. Israel Gollancz, ‘‘The Middle Ages in the Lineage of English Poetry,’’ in Mediæval Contributions to Modern Civilisation: A Series of Lectures Delivered at King’s College, University of London, ed.
F. J. C. Hearnshaw (London: Harrap, 1921), 174–89; J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle
English: The Dialectal and Metrical Survey (Manchester University Press, 1930), 131–52; R. W.
Chambers, On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and His School, EETS, o.s., 191A
(London: Oxford University Press, 1937); R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England
(London: Methuen, 1952); and C. L. Wrenn, ‘‘On the Continuity of English Poetry,’’ Anglia 76
(1958): 41–59. Contrast Turville-Petre, Alliterative Revival, 15–16 and 22. For an overview of the
Revival debate, see Chism, Alliterative Revivals, 16–40.
34. Turville-Petre, Alliterative Revival, 9 and 17.
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Gawain, whose authors at least had the decency to stick to ‘‘Old’’ or ‘‘Middle’’ English. The conception of Lawman as the overambitious poet of a
language in crisis provides a suitably uninspiring backdrop for medieval
England’s literary masterpieces.
The metrists’ discoveries offer an occasion to reimagine the scene from
the ground up. If metrical final -e in the fourteenth century is in itself a powerful enough datum to topple a disjunctive history of alliterative verse, and
if it is convincing enough to be found thrice when no one was looking for it,
then there is no need to interpret Kaluza’s law as an injunction to slide Beowulf further away from the bulk of Old English poetry. Like The Battle of Maldon (ca. 991), which adheres to Kaluza’s law without fail, Beowulf may well
retain a metrical distinction that no longer had any phonological reality
for poet or audience. Of course, even vestiges have a shelf life. The phenomena described by Kaluza’s law gradually disappeared from the poetry, not as
part of the disintegration of some monolithic tradition, but in the course of
healthy, if irregular, evolution. Eleventh- and twelfth-century alliterative
poetry is characterized by less reliance on resolution and greater divergence
of a-verse from b-verse.35 Then comes Lawman, who pushed the boundaries
of literary form in his own day—a circumstance that has ironically led to his
dismissal at the hands of scholars accustomed to the more familiar rhythms
of Old or Middle English alliterative poetry. Next come one hundred years
of silence, much pondered and much mourned. Then the alliterative tradition springs to life again, looking for all the world as though it had never
died. Metrical final -e proves that, in fact, it had never died.
There are at least two good reasons not to resort to a lost oral tradition,
that bugbear of Revival theories, to explain the survival of alliterative verse
from the Middle English Physiologus (ca. 1250) to William of Palerne (ca.
1350).36 On the one hand, from Cædmon’s Hymn (ca. 685) onward, alliterative poetry has always been oral and literary at once, a ‘‘visible song,’’ so that
the proposition that it retreated from the page to the air founders on its
own false binary.37 On the other hand, it is not hard to multiply reasons for
35. Cable, English Alliterative Tradition, 85–113.
36. The ten alliterating lines quoted in Richard Rolle’s Ego dormio (ca. 1340), beginning
‘‘Alle perisches and passes’’ (Digital Index of Middle English Verse, http://www.dimev.net,
no. 357), scan as alliterative verse and predate William of Palerne. The Conflict of Wit and Will
dates from before ‘‘the middle or the second quarter of the fourteenth century,’’ when its
unique manuscript fragments were copied (A. I. Doyle, ‘‘The Manuscripts,’’ in Middle English
Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David Lawton [Cambridge: Brewer,
1982], 91), and so may predate William of Palerne as well. The alliterative epitaph beginning
‘‘Her lis arfaxat’’ may date near the time it was copied (1274–91), further shrinking the apparent gap. See Oliver S. Pickering, ‘‘An Early Middle English Verse Inscription from Shrewsbury,’’ Anglia 106 (1988): 411–14.
37. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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the neglect or even suppression of writing in English during the first three
centuries of the Norman overlordship. Metrical final -e suggests that the
gap in the manuscript record bears witness to a rupture in social history,
not verse history. A literary tradition is no less literary for failing to make it
through the years and the fires, not to mention the political turmoil of its
own time. The Revival poems can certainly lay claim to thematic and rhetorical innovation, but metrically speaking they consist of the same old
English stuff. While the resurgence of English poetry in the mid-fourteenth
century no doubt signals the start of a new chapter in the social history of
England, it is now difficult to deny that Langland and the Gawain poet
inherited some 750 years’ worth of uninterrupted developments in verse
form—upward of a millennium, perhaps, for Cædmon’s Hymn itself did not
come from nowhere. In comparison, the pentameter tradition, inaugurated by Chaucer in the last quarter of the fourteenth century and more or
less passé by the mid-twentieth, almost seems like a fad.
Inasmuch as it checks both the overexuberance of Middle English scholars, who are justifiably proud of their poems, and the formalist myopia of
the Sieversian scheme, the version of alliterative verse history outlined above
ought to be considered on its own merits. But the persistence of phonological vestiges throughout the tradition offers an especially apt metaphor for
the nature of the developments and the character of the poetry. There is
every indication that the preservation of archaic sounds was an integral part
of the evolution of alliterative poetry. Like a language riddled with archaisms, at each stage of its development, alliterative meter contained a part of
its own history, preserving outmoded forms for the rather sensible reason
that there existed no suitable substitutes. Alliterative meter has an elasticity,
a kind of passive memory. By scoring language into metrical form over and
over again, it remembers the difference between short and circumflex, final
-e and [!], long after speakers have forgotten. While a reanalysis of the transition from Old to Middle English alliterative meter has the salutary result of
recuperating an avant-garde Lawman and a dynamic Early Middle English
poetic corpus, final -e and Kaluza’s law point to a far more conservative tradition than anyone has supposed.38
As the metrists discovered in the course of their inquiries, the key to
uncovering vestiges lies in the language, not the orthography.39 Whether a
38. Thomas Cable did gesture toward this conclusion: ‘‘The alliterative line did not evolve
in lock step with changes in the language. Middle English meter, in following closely the Old
English categories of inflectional syllables and grammatical stress, is more conservative than is
usually recognized’’ (‘‘Old and Middle English Prosody: Transformations of the Model,’’ in
Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico [Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1989], 209).
39. To take but two examples, discussing exceptions to the rules for final -e at line end,
Cable concludes, ‘‘The scribal -e that appears on some of these words is not justified by my pres-
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scribe writes skinn or skinne is of no consequence to the metrical line, which
was composed in words, not in spellings. So meter is important in a second
sense: it is often the only reliable way to choose among variant readings. Old
English editors already emend metri causa, and now Middle English scholars
can, too.40 From Cædmon to Gawain, orthography tells one story and meter
quite another. In light of the massive changes that English underwent from
650 to 1550 CE, it is remarkable that alliterative poetry should have been
able to preserve such particulars as the medial caesura, stress on the final
word of the line, and a general system of mapping prosodic stress onto metrical stress.41 The ‘‘metrical developments’’ described in different ways by
Duggan, Cable, Fulk, Yakovlev, and the Bristolians are better understood as
changes in the way a free-flowing linguistic history is fitted to a conservative
ent formulation of principles’’ (English Alliterative Tradition, 73), while Yakovlev muses, ‘‘What
cannot be determined from the written page may be recovered by metrical analysis’’ (‘‘Development,’’ 96). There is a risk of circularity here, for much linguistic information is of course
mined from poetry, messy orthography and all. Conversely, scribes may have smoothed out
some lines. Where their efforts extend beyond mere orthographical dress-up, these interventions pose a problem for metrical analysis; see Duggan, ‘‘Final -e,’’ 121–22, and ‘‘The Evidential
Basis for Old English Metrics,’’ Studies in Philology 85 (1988): 145–63. Nevertheless, critics of socalled optimist corpus analysis risk overstating the case. The regularity uncovered by the new
metrical results indicates that scribes’ impact on verse form was either minimal or so congruent with poets’ own practice as to be irrelevant. ‘‘Certain gross scribal changes can be identified
[sc. in a given MS of Piers Plowman], but many are forever unassignable between scribe and
author. We can assume that some of these changes would have been unassignable by Langland
himself after his text grew cold, because the part of the scribal grammar that produced them
overlaps with part of Langland’s grammar. With this realization the urgent first question of the
textual editor (What did the author write?) suddenly becomes less urgent’’ (Cable, ‘‘Middle
English Meter,’’ 67).
40. It was the desire for principles of emendation that spurred Hoyt Duggan to heroic feats
of compilation and collation (‘‘Shape of the B-Verse,’’ 564–65). Working before Nicolay Yakovlev’s and the Bristolians’ work, and loath to formulate the metrical significance of final -e as a
rule, Duggan implemented his ideas about the b-verse to uncertain results in The Wars of Alexander, ed. Duggan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, EETS, s.s., 10 (Oxford University Press, 1989).
Duggan’s discoveries also informed editorial decisions in The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. Ralph
Hanna and David Lawton, EETS, o.s., 320 (Oxford University Press, 2003). On metrical considerations in editing Middle English alliterative poetry, see esp. Donka Minkova, Alliteration
and Sound Change in Early English (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 87–90; Myra Stokes,
‘‘Metre and Emendation: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 660b and 815a,’’ in Jefferson and Putter, Approaches, 255–67; Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter, ‘‘Alliterative Metre and Editorial Practice: The Case of Death and Liffe,’’ in Jefferson and Putter, Approaches, 269–92; and Thorlac
Turville-Petre’s review of the Jefferson and Putter volume in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 109 (2010): 240–42.
41. For the similarity in stress assignment, compare the hierarchy of prosodic stress for Old
English verse outlined in Calvin B. Kendall, The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Haruko Momma, The Composition of Old English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1997), to Hoyt Duggan, ‘‘Stress Assignment in Middle English Alliterative Poetry,’’
Journal of English and Germanic Philology 89 (1990): 309–29, and Cable, English Alliterative Tradition, 80.
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metrical establishment.42 It is not that the meter changes to accommodate
the language—on the contrary. If the rule requiring a schwa at the end of
the alliterative long line had disappeared along with historical -e, one would
expect to find monosyllables like watz and borȝ at line end. As it happens,
they almost never appear there. Similarly, in the case of digamma in Homer,
it is more logical to assume a conservative phonology than to posit a host of
new rules for elision and hiatus that apply only to words that had lost a
digamma. While the words that fill out the metrical positions are in constant
flux, the meter rarely pauses to adjust its formal requirements, giving rise to
‘‘a fault, which was scarcely a fault,’’ a metrical exception that is tolerated
because it results from a change in language, not verse form. Meter is constantly falling behind the spoken language, harkening back to a (possibly
fabricated) originary moment of natural meter, when linguistic and metrical forms were entirely commensurate. Taking Kaluza’s law as an example,
the process might be schematized as follows:
1. Before sound change: rules for metrical resolution obtain, and apply to
all words, which have either short or circumflex endings. Verses like Beowulf 2563a god guðcyning (long ending: suspension of resolution, four
positions) are metrical, while verses like *god guðwine (short ending: resolution occurs, four-position minimum not met) are unmetrical.
2. After sound change: the distinction between short and circumflex endings disappears, but the rules for metrical resolution persist. Words scan
on the basis of their original values. Verses like god guðcyning are still
metrical, while verses like *god guðwine are still unmetrical.
3. Long after sound change: the vestigial metrical patterns from the second
stage are themselves reinterpreted as a new norm. The distinction
between short and circumflex endings ceases to be metrically significant.
Verses like god guðcyning and verses like *god guðwine are both metrical.
42. The alternative view, that metrical rules are constantly reformulated on the basis of linguistic change, causes more problems than it solves. Duggan readily concedes that ‘‘at some
point in the tradition of composing long line poetry, a metrical rule required a single
unstressed syllable at the end of every b-verse’’ (‘‘End of the Line,’’ 69–70). Yet he scans words
ending in historical -e on the basis of their post-sound-change forms. Duggan is thus forced to
accept as metrical the rhythm (x)/x/, a pattern declared unmetrical in the b-verse by every
Middle English metrist, including Duggan himself. See Duggan, ‘‘Final -e,’’ 122 and 126; Cable,
English Alliterative Tradition, 92; Angus McIntosh, ‘‘Early Middle English Alliterative Verse,’’ in
Lawton, Middle English Alliterative Poetry, 20–33; Hanna, ‘‘Defining,’’ 45–46; Russom, ‘‘Evolution,’’ 279; and Yakovlev, ‘‘Development,’’ 92. Duggan has confused meter and prosody, as distinguished, e.g., by Obst: ‘‘Es ist eine Sache, eine Textstruktur metrisch zu beschreiben, wie sie
ist, und eine andere, zu beschreiben, wie sie entstanden ist’’ (It is one thing to describe a textual structure metrically as it is, and another to describe how it arose) (Rhythmus, 106); and by
Momma, Composition, 15–17.
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The tradition reaches the third stage only after some undetermined span
of time, and no doubt at different moments in different regions.
Under such a scheme, genuine metrical developments would take centuries to crystallize, and this is exactly what the evidence of the extant poems
suggests.43 Alliterative meter was built to last. It was founded on certain phonological distinctions, and it did not let their disappearance impede its
survival. It is true in point of fact, but somewhat misleading, to say as Yakovlev does that metrical change can be explained by reference to language
change.44 While Yakovlev shows that metrical developments in the alliterative tradition recapitulate developments in phonology and grammar to a
greater extent than has been recognized, meter follows phonology only
after a long flex period, represented above by the second stage. The point
matters little to a retrospective reconstruction, but it must have mattered a
great deal to poets and audiences. For the purposes of meter, and within
the bounds of the flex period, the stability of metrical rules trumps the exigency of molding linguistic matter into metered verse. This explains why
the Old and Middle English alliterative poems seem so much more dissimilar than they really are. At any given moment in its development, alliterative
meter was reacting to an archaic phonology, itself likely a mishmash of past
forms, which remained invisible both to historical linguistics and in the
orthography. The key to reading the hidden history of the metrical establishment lies in the archaic sounds that lend it staying power. Who knows
how many dead old sounds in the poetry still escape notice? While awaiting
further discoveries, one is free to speculate that vestiges may have been the
very essence of alliterative meter, that invisible -e’s and silent circumflexes,
in their quiet way, bound together a cherished tradition.
Without a native informant, it is difficult to determine the extent to
which the difference between guðcyning and guðwine, or between skinne and
sunne, was explicit in the minds of poets, readers, or listeners. Within the
context of a verse history, the question of performance does not arise.45
One can only glean the shape of a verse form, not of composition or recita-
43. It took centuries following the disappearance of final -e in spoken English for the
requirement of an unstressed syllable at the end of the b-verse to disappear. B-verses with no
final -e at line end appear in William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo
(ca. 1500) and most other post-1450 alliterative poems. See Duggan, ‘‘End of the Line,’’ 78.
44. ‘‘The thesis deals with the history of the alliterative long line from Old English to both
early and late Middle English, and demonstrates that the differences between the metrical systems of those periods are explicable in their entirety by the historical changes in the linguistic
prosody rather than a discontinuity of the alliterative tradition’’ (Yakovlev, ‘‘Development,’’ ii).
45. Metrists’ occasional reversion to the language of performance and speech only muddies the waters, e.g., ‘‘metre shows that [vowels between a consonant and an ‘r’] were indeed
pronounced [in Lawman]’’ (ibid., 197) and ‘‘instances of final <-e> in alliterative long-line
poetry were . . . sounded’’ (Duggan, ‘‘End of the Line,’’ 70).
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tion. The minimal statement is rather impersonal: consciously or unconsciously, the Revival poets upheld a distinction between two classes of
words, one with an etymological form ending in schwa, the other with no
ending or a nonschwa ending. It is unsatisfying merely to tabulate the metrical facts. One really wants a pattern of poetic transmission, a means of
measuring archaism and innovation. If poets did recognize or intuit the
history of their own meter, one should not expect this recognition to take a
form commensurate with the vocabulary of modern linguistics. To look for
archaisms on the level of the ‘‘prefix’’ or the ‘‘morpheme’’ is always, in a
sense, to be looking in the wrong place.
In this matter, it is easier to discard bad conclusions than to draw good
ones. For example, English alliterative poetry is in some important respects
not analogous to Homer as Parry conceives of him. Parry’s analysis of digamma does not quite jibe with the evidence of fourteenth-century final -e,
which is not restricted to set formulaic phrases. The cause of the persistence
of final -e in alliterative meter from generation to generation, even after its
extinction in the spoken language, must have been both stronger and more
general than ‘‘formulaic tradition.’’ While Anglo-Saxonists have achieved a
modus vivendi with Francis Magoun’s modification of Parry’s oral-formulaic
hypothesis, it is hotly contested whether it makes sense to speak of ‘‘formulae’’ in Middle English poetry.46 Behind closed doors, many Middle English
scholars might agree with Derek Pearsall’s judgment that oral tradition ‘‘is
inevitably ‘low’ and inevitably makes wretched what it touches.’’47 Everyone
agrees, in any case, that neither Old nor Middle English verse is as purely
oral as Parry considered Homer to be. The applicability of Parry’s interpretation to alliterative meter therefore indicates either an oral aspect of an
increasingly literary tradition or else the broader implications of the original hypothesis. Either Middle English verse owes a larger debt to oral tradition than most scholars are willing to allow, or Parry unwittingly pinpointed
a metrical phenomenon that could and did function in a highly literate culture. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Ultimately, the problem lies in Parry’s rigid dichotomy between orality and literacy. The alliterative tradition has it both ways, and metrical vestige may have been only one
of a number of subtle mechanisms that propelled the craft of the scop into
the literary future. It is easy to imagine the interdependence of Kaluza’s law,
the Sievers types, and the whole system of traditional epithets. Most of the
short-ending second compound elements relevant to Kaluza’s law are nouns
denoting objects or ideas (-bealo, -gripe, -gryre, -searo, and so forth), while the
circumflex- or consonant-ending elements are nouns or adjectives denot46. Francis P. Magoun, ‘‘Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry,’’ Speculum 28 (1953): 446–67.
47. Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1977), 155.
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ing persons or monsters (-berend, -cwida, -cyning, -floga, and so forth).48 The
old distinction between short and circumflex endings may have continued
to function as a convenient means of coining metrically agreeable epithets.
The story of alliterative poetry is neither one of decay and neglect nor of
the inevitable triumph of a language or a culture. At each moment, poets
must have had access to an array of metrical attitudes ranging from the
avant-garde to the nostalgic, full of sounds newfangled, familiar, outdated,
and all but forgotten. Future scholarship on alliterative verse would do well
to attend to the poetry’s motley meter, built of past language states but not
reducible to any one of them; in constant development but never caught
up with the times; forever at play with invisible friends, old sounds that had
disappeared without going obsolete.
48. Similarly, Roberta Frank identifies both thematic content and morphology as possible
criteria for distinguishing short-ending from circumflex-ending compound elements in Kaluza
verses; see Frank, ‘‘Scandal,’’ 858–61. See also Weiskott, ‘‘Semantic Replacement.’’ Hutcheson,
‘‘Kaluza’s Law,’’ contains a complete list of relevant second compound elements, arranged by
weight and grammatical form.
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