Anglo-Saxon Metrical Rules Considered Harmful

Prominent features in Anglo-Saxon poetry

The cool thing about Old English alliterative verse is that the rhythms can shift around freely. The hardest thing about teaching a computer to recognize it is that the rhythms can shift around freely. There’s no pattern.

Well, that’s not strictly correct. There is an enormous literature devoted to finding patterns. Daniel O’Donnell wrote an excellent short introduction to the topic, which I used to get started. Here’s something he says that I believe to be universally true: a line of alliterative verse is comprised of two half-lines. Each half-line is built around two important stressed syllables. After that, things start to fall apart. The patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables have been classified according to many systems, the most durable of which was devised by yet another German with an infinite attention span, this one named Sievers. He identified five rhythmic patterns: A, B, C, D1, D2, and E. See the problem? Thomas Cable came up with a better way to think of it [1], and concluded that D2 was actually a form of E, but there are still six things in this set of five.

This is a phenomenon I recognize from my day job: it’s a sign that the analyst is imposing a structure on the system, not observing a structure that is really there. And it gets worse. Some lines have five stresses, others have three, weak positions in the line come and go as the poet pleases, the caesura might be a full stop or it might not be discernable with the ear. The exceptions to any metrical system pile up in epicycles upon epicycles until the readers throw up their hands and go plant potatoes. (It was sunny and 60 degrees today, so that’s what I did.)

Here’s where it turned out to be a good thing that I held off on this post to take a class in Anglo-Saxon at Signum University. Nelson Goering is one of the professors teaching the class. He wrote a very detailed description of alliterative scansion, accessible to the educated layman (as Scientific American used to say). And his paper makes the same curious turn of thought, as if he’s classifying an existing fauna, not dictating to it. I was about to write an essay on the theme of “You’re all full of crap.” But now that I’ve listened to his lecture on the topic, it’s clear that they all know they’re full of it, but conceal the fact for purposes of creating scholarly literature. Lectures are great — they give the speaker a lot more leeway to tell embarrassing truths.

Here’s another thing I think is universally true: Poets are not natural rule-followers. They write what sounds good. You know who nature’s rule-followers are? Scientists. We typically write humorous verse, which is the one genre of poetry where meter must be followed exactly. Here’s a poem by James Clerk Maxwell, to show what I mean.

Tolkien was a poet, not a scientist. So when Treebeard says, “Learn now the lore of living creatures: First name the Four, the free peoples”, I’d have to say he’s writing alliterative verse. But there are five stresses in these lines (bold), and the alliteration is on 1, 3, & 4. The rules say the extra stress goes in the second half, not the first. But I don’t care. I’m going to teach the machine to recognize things like this, and forget the rules.

[1] Cable, Thomas. “Metrical Simplicity and Sievers’ Five Types.” Studies in Philology 69.3 (1972): 280-288.