Corey Olsen gave a talk at Mythmoot XI on the subject of Gimli’s song about the glory days of Moria. (LotR, II iv.) He began with the fact that the song’s rhythm is iambic tetrameter, steady as a metronome, and its rhyme pattern is a plain-vanilla aabb. This is kind of boring, so why is the song so interesting? Olsen’s answer is that there’s a counter-melody interwoven with the rhymed verse. When you look for stressed-syllable alliteration, a different verse-form emerges. Here are the last four lines. Look at the D’s and W’s:

But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep.
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

Hypothesis: the te-tum-te-tum of the iambics is just the rhythm section, and there’s a melody going on in the alliteration that’s much more varied and interesting. Olsen thought of a hip-hop singer over top of a mechanical rhythm track; I’d have said a baroque concerto over a continuo. The alliterative patterns aren’t rigid or repetitive enough that it’s easy to say for certain that Tolkien created the counter-structure intentionally.

We can confirm or refute the hypothesis if we look at the full distribution of sounds in the poem. First thing I did was tweak the program I wrote for finding Old English alliterative long lines. Out with the Sievers types; now I just want to flag the initial sounds of stressed syllables. Start at the beginning of a text. Count how many stressed syllables there are before I reach the next repetition of its sound. Then do the same for the second stressed syllable. Repeat until we run out of text.

To see what this distribution ought to look like for different kinds of texts, let’s take some easy examples. First, the least-poetic thing in the world: Choose 50 random sentences from the Simple English Wikipedia. (Drop sentences with numbers in them.) I got this from Goldhahn, et al., ¹ The histogram of intervals looks like this:

Fig. 1. Unpoetic intervals

This is a geometric distribution, more or less. If all stressed sounds were equally common in English, and people didn’t like the sound of alliteration, the distribution would be exactly geometric. But some letters are more common than others, so there are random peaks and valleys, and people like alliteration even when they’re not writing poems, so there’s a bit of a spike at zero. So far, so good. Let’s cut the graphs to hide the extreme outliers from now on — extremes tell us mostly about the length of the text, not so much about sounds.

Now let’s pin down the other end of the spectrum of possibility with the “Song of the Mounds of Mundberg”. Tolkien said in Letter 187 that it was “written in the strictest form of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.”² Old English long lines have alliteration patterns of either axay or aaax, so we’d expect the histogram of distance through the text to be heavily weighted at 0 and 1.  And so it is:

Fig. 2. Intervals in strict Old English form.

More than half of the time, an alliterating sound comes with the next or next-but-one syllable. This is a good benchmark for the low end of alliteration intervals.

Last, we’d like a statistic to compress the information. The median over all intervals in the poem is not sensitive to the extreme tails of the distribution, but catches how scrunched-up to the left everything is.

Comparing Poems and Prose

Let’s look at a variety of texts that span a range of unintentional and intentional alliteration. I am indebted to Paul Deane’s overview of alliterative verse for good examples of verse-forms I’m not so familiar with.

1. Wikipedia, as above. Tagged “wiki”.
2. “The Mounds of Mundburg”. Strict Old English, as above. Tagged “mundburg”.
3. Gimli’s Khazad-dum poem, where we started. Tagged “khazad”.
4. The section of prose right before Gimli’s poem, for comparison. Tagged “prose”.
5. “Far over the Misty Mountains cold” from The Hobbit. Thorin & Co. aren’t trying to alliterate, but you can’t avoid it when you’re talking about the Misty Mountains. This is what happens when Tolkien’s natural penchant for alliteration gets polished into verse. Tagged “mistymts”.
6. Legolas’s song about Nimrodel. Not trying to alliterate at all.
7. “Rosemary” by Andrew Frisardi. A modern adaptation of strict Old English verse form.
8. “Quest for Valhalla” by Robert Cuthbert. Using Old Norse form.
9. “Sea Change” by John Beaton. This is in a Middle English style of alliteration.
10. “Old English, New World“, by me. An attempt to reconcile modern Southeastern-US word order with Old English form. Tagged “shenandoah”.
11. “Do you hear me, Mere-Watcher?” by Laura Varnam. This is purely modern free verse, using alliteration to allude to Beowulf. ³ Tagged “merewatcher”.

The histograms in Fig. 3 give us a feel for what’s happening. “wiki” and “prose” seem to be the most spread out, as we’d expect.

Fig. 3. Interval histograms

Ranking the texts by median interval of sound similarity in Fig. 4, the prose texts are at the high end and the Old English are at the low end, as the metric was constructed to do.

This metric left the Old Norse patterns in the middle of the pack. “Valhalla” does have a strong presence of 0 and 1-syllable intervals, but it has a heavy presence of longer ones, too. Wrapping the alliteration around the end of a line⁴ moves it up the graph.

The most interesting thing about Fig. 4 is that it doesn’t have an obvious breakpoint between alliterative and non-alliterative verse. I was expecting a big gap, but the possible uses of alliteration form a continuum, visible even in this small sample.

Fig 4. Ranked text samples.

The histogram for a poem with a free-form alliterative “melody” should have a secondary peak in its histogram at some larger spacing than the 0-1 that come from strict alliteration. We see something like that in Varnam’s poem, which definitely has such a melody. It’s a short poem, only half the length of the other texts, so its histogram can have large fluctuations around the ideal form. “Sea Change” has two linked stanzas, the second of which occasionally harks back to the first with K and S sounds, which puts a small peak about 15.

Alas for Prof. Olsen’s idea, Gimli’s song has barely closer alliteration than prose texts do. Figure 3 almost has a secondary peak at 5, but it’s not significantly different from random fluctuation. Now, I’m not one to claim poetry should have statistical significance, but the prose section just before Gimli’s song has more of those peaks than the song does. If anything, this method of measuring suggests Tolkien removed alliteration to make the poem, as John Ruskin totally didn’t advise.

Technical Details

There are 28 sounds on which we can alliterate here, since we count all vowels as one class, C is either K or S, etc. I’ve added the sound “KH” to the set since we’re dealing with Dwarves.  Using the CMU notation, the sounds are “B” “CH” “D” “DH” “E” “F” “G” “HH” “JH” “K” “KH” “L” “M” “N” “NG” “P” “R” “S” “SH” “SK” “ST” “T” “TH” “V” “W” “Y” “Z” “ZH”.

The CMU pronouncing dictionary thinks “Shenandoah” is a four-syllable word with the accent on the “do”. John Denver probably deserves the blame for this geographical lapse. I overrode the dictionary entry to restore the name to its true dactylic nature. (The Boss said so.)

There are quite a few 2’s in the “Mundberg” graph that shouldn’t really be there. That’s because the intervening word is one that sometimes has a stress and sometimes doesn’t, and my program isn’t smart enough to tell which is which. This happens in all the texts. The extreme case is in “Mere-Watcher”: The last line of this poem is “So fucking what?” Under the usual rules, “so” would be unstressed. It’s stressed here, so I jumped into the program’s output and fixed it by hand to give it the proper weight. I imagine Seamus Heaney had the same problem, once.

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Just watched “The Rings of Power” episode 6. About four minutes in, Adar is giving his troops an inspirational speech. Maybe I’m imagining it, but it sounds like he’s trying for alliterative verse. I was scribbling as fast as I can, but this is pretty close to what he said:

We cast off our shackles,  crossed mountain and field,
Frost and fallow, till   our feet bloodied the dirt.
From Ered Mithrin to the Ephel Arnen,  we have endured…

Oops — mistake there at the end. (“Overcome” would have worked.) I guess when you’ve been warped by the evils of Morgoth, one of the first things you lose is strict adherence to poetic form.

Just came across a wonderful paper. “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry” by Dennis Wilson Wise.⁵

According to Wise, scholars of the history of poetry have missed most of the impact of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “one-man alliterative revival”.⁶ Tolkien was joined by Poul Anderson here in the USA, who updated Old Norse verse forms in much the same way Tolkien updated Old English.  Anderson published in fantasy and science-fiction magazines, where English professors used to deny hanging out. Both of them inspired lots of poets, it turns out. Wise finds enough examples that we might be able to call it another revival, or perhaps a revival of the revival. The people who carry on their ideas do so within the world of F/SF fandom and the Society for Creative Anachronism. It’s good to see us lowlives appearing in the refereed literature.

A non-surprise (at least it’s not surprising once I’ve given it a moment’s thought) is that alliterative humorous verse has a long history. Avram Davidson wrote one in 1961, entitled “Lines Written By, or To, or For, or Maybe Against, That Ignoble Old Viking, Harald Hardass, King of the Coney and Orkney Islands.” Tom and I aren’t the first.

Personal note: Wise singles out for praise for the poetry of Jere Fleck, a professor who was the faculty advisor of the Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia when it was a student group in the 1970s. I spent a lot of convivial evenings in the company of the MMMM back then, so I’m pleased to see the organization still exists. They’re a lot better equipped now, if the photos are any guide.

When I started automating detection of alliterative verse, the original hypothesis was to watch the phrases that look like lines of Old English poetry spike up dramatically when the story got to Rohan. Well, that’s not what happens. J.R.R. Tolkien uses alliteration so much that even when we restrict him to Sievers’s five patterns, there’s a constant stream of alliterative lines.

Here’s the density of alliterative lines in the text, as a function of the number of words since the beginning of the Prologue.  (I used a 100-word bandwidth, for those who care.) You can see a rise in the frequency of alliteration in Book III, where I expected it.  There are also some nice spikes in Book 5, when the Rohirrim make their entrance and when the bard sings a long song in honor of the fallen.The highest density-spike of alliterative lines comes in “The Uruk-Hai” (III,iii, in dark grey) when Pippin is talking to himself.  That was unexpected. In the next chapter, though, Treebeard comes through.  He doesn’t provide any high spikes, but the low troughs disappear. Ents never stop alliterating, murmuring in their slow musical voices. (This sentence shows that I allow quite a few unstressed syllables; Type E can have four in a row.)

Book IV also starts out with a lot of alliteration. Sam is talking to himself, this time. For some reason, writing out Sam’s dialogue with formal line breaks and caesurae is hilarious to me:

Numbskulls! You’re nowt but / a ninnyhammer, Sam
Gamgee; that’s what /  the Gaffer said.

The lowest density of alliteration is in the chapter “Minas Tirith” (V, i). I noticed this the second time I read the book – the tone changes abruptly from the previous volumes. When they encounter a line like, “For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels…” even teenaged Idiosophers are brought up short by the new voice.

Alliteration is not just part of the story, though. The Prologue has a solid population of alliterative lines.  Those bits are Bilbo’s and Merry’s voices, so from this we can derive a consistent theme: The constant background of alliteration is there because the book is narrated by hobbits.  When they’re talking to Ents or Rohirrim the rate ticks up about 5%.  Elves or Gondorians drag the rate down, roughly the same amount. With a larger bandwidth, smoothing over 2000-word intervals, we lose the poem-spikes, but it’s easier to see the overall changes.

Surprisingly to me, the field of metrical research in Anglo-Saxon poetry is thriving. It’s not like any new Anglo-Saxon verses have been discovered recently, but we do have some new alliterative poems. I just found a paper by Nelson Goering [1] (one of the lecturers in my Anglo-Saxon class) that applies analytical techniques developed for Old English to J.R.R. Tolkien’s recently published verse.

The thing that jumped out at me was what Goering calls “crossed alliteration”. Where Anglo-Saxon verse alliterates on one sound per line, crossed alliteration takes advantage of the four stresses to alliterate twice: either A-B-A-B or A-B-B-A.  Examples he gives from The Fall of Arthur are “Fiercely heard she / his feet hasten” (II, 111) [2] and “of south Britain / booty seeking” (I, 9). He notes that 7% of the lines of the poem have crossed alliteration, which is “nearly double the rate of a classical Old English poem such as Beowulf.”

That’s the sort of thing that really gets an Idiosopher (provided that he has spent a year or so on text preparation and code-building) rolling. In this case, rolling right into a brick wall.  To order a computer to look for crossed alliteration, we’d need a regular expression that looks for (string), (any string but that one), (the first string) (the other string).  I’m ashamed to admit that I spent a month trying to turn that into a regular expression.  It just can’t be done in any language I speak. Back-referencing the complement of a single character is possible, but the CMU phoneme set can have two characters, and trying to kluge together a fix got totally out of control.  The reason I’m ashamed is that there’s no reason to use a powerful tool like regular expressions — I don’t need any wild-cards in this simple case so I can just use equals-signs for the test. Most likely you saw it some time ago, and have been laughing at me.

Here are some good ones:

He wandered in loneliness, weeping a little.  
'Spoons? Fiddlesticks!' He snapped his fingers.
Galadriel stood, alone and silent.

The sun was warm and the wind was in the south.
Boromir seemed to be swimming or burrowing...
Then suddenly Frodo fell asleep.

Here’s one that’s bogus: “‘…Black Riders.’ ‘Black Riders!'” JRRT repeats a phrase for emphasis fairly often, and I really think that ought not to count.

Overall, the numbers for LotR are higher than for The Fall of Arthur. A-B-A-B crossed alliteration is 10% as frequent as simple alliterative lines. A-B-B-A crossed alliteration is about the same, 10.5% as common as the simpler case.  Note that the latter was not included in the original computation, but the former was.

To wind up, here’s one that’s intriguing: “Again she fled, but swift he came / Tinuviel! Tinuviel! / He called her by her Elvish name;’   Cross-alliterative enjambment in ann-thennath sounds obscure enough for a whole dissertation.

Notes

[1] Goering, Nelson. “The Fall of Arthur and The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: A Metrical Review of Three Modern English Alliterative Poems.” Journal of Inklings Studies 5.2 (2015): 3-56. Preprint here.

[2] Goering has the caesura in a different place from the text, which has been corrected here. Fly-specks like this are of no interest to anyone, but they are commonly pointed out in the literature. Were I to forbear to mention it, this blog would never be taken seriously by any community of scholars.