Automated Detection of Alliterative Verse: Intro

One doesn’t have to get very deep into studying Middle-earth to notice Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. It’s right there on the surface, but an American teenager probably won’t get that it’s a structured verse-form. (At least, I didn’t. I thought it was another kind of vers libre.) I don’t know what fraction of Tolkien fans end up fascinated by this mostly-forgotten poetic form but I’m one of them. 

After one gets the hang of its rhythm, the really interesting part starts: alliterative lines start to show up in all kinds of places in Tolkien.  The first one I noticed was when the Riders of Rohan came to the Pelennor Fields:
‘In dark Mindolluin’s sides / they dimly echoed.’

Years later, I was listening to the Prancing Pony Podcast and heard (line breaks and caesurae added):

Then the warriors of Nargothrond went forth, and…
Tall and terrible / on that day looked Turin,
And the heart of the host / was upheld, as
He rode on the right hand / of Orodreth.[1]
Silmarillion, chapter 21, p. 239.

I started wondering how many of those buried alliterative lines there are in The Lord of the Rings. If there are a lot, they’re almost certainly carrying meaning. Could this be one of the techniques JRRT used to give a feel for where the story was in space and time? Maybe we’ll see lots of them in Rohan (even apart from the poems), and almost none in Lothlorien. If this works, it might be actual scholarship.

I raised one objection with myself: isn’t this just an Anglo-Saxon version of the “found poetry” that was all the rage in the 1960s? My English teachers inflicted that on us and I hated it. Without “intentionality” (as real scholars call it) it can’t be poetry, was my main objection.  I think this isn’t the case, for two reasons. First, nothing Tolkien wrote was unintentional. If alliterative lines are there, he left them there for us to find. Second, the poems they find always seemed to be free verse. If the poetry-finders had ever found a sonnet, or even a limerick, I’d have thought much better of them. Here, I’m looking for a strict verse form.

Granted, it’s possible to accidentally create a formal alliterative line. Tom Shippey pointed out that Steve Earle did it in a country song. Earle wrote it as a couplet:

When your Subaru is over and your Honda’s history,
I’ll be burnin’ down the back roads, just my baby and me…

“Sweet Little ‘66”, lines 22-23

but that second line scans perfectly. This isn’t the same thing as found poetry, because Earle was intentionally writing verse, and liked the alliteration. It’s the mirror image of what Cædmon wrote :

Þa middan-geard  / mann-cynnes weard

“Cædmon’s Hymn”, line 7

Which rhymes, but the rhyme is a poetic flourish, not part of the structure.

In keeping with proper Idiosophical practice, I decided to give the job to a computer. [2] Telling what happened is too long for one blog post, so I’m making this into a series.  Part 2 will be the delights of getting a text in shape. Part 3 will be a scream of frustration at the scholarship of Old English poetic meter. Part 4 will be algorithms, and Part 5 will be the results.

Teaser: the first thing the computer found was something I’d been staring at for a generation without seeing: “Bilbo Baggins / of Bag End” .

[1] This is how I learned the correct pronunciation of “Orodreth”.

[2] That was almost a year ago – I could have done it by hand by now.