Category: Alliterative Verse Page 1 of 2

Time-traveling pronunciation

On May 30, 2024

While thinking about alliterative verse, I came across an interesting case. Alliteration, in the traditional Old English form, doesn’t have to be on the first consonant in the words — it’s on the first consonant in the stressed syllables. A thousand years later, in Modern English it’s not rare to have more than one syllable in a word that gets stress, though the others are less emphasized. (24% of the words in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary have a secondary stress in them.) We still alliterate on the stressed syllable, in principle. Which brings me to the word “technological”. The way I say it, the primary stress is on “log”, and the Wise Clerks of Pittsburgh agree with me. Let’s try to alliterate with it:

“Technological Language” sounds like alliteration, and it matches the Old English form.
“Technological Treatise” sounds like alliteration, too.

It’s like the second word causes a change in how we hear the first. The secondary stress on “tech” gets promoted. The presence of “Treatise” seems to move the primary accent from the third syllable “log” to the first syllable “tech”. But I’ve already read the first word — This is time travel!

Light cone, showing the accessible past an future of any event where the speed of light is the limit.

By: K. Aainsqatsi at Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Maybe I can see a physical mechanism here. When I read, I “hear” the words in my head, but I sight-read the words much faster than that. Reading is different from systems described by the Theory of Relativity, because signals are primarily at the speed of (thinking about) sound, but there are also light signals that can exceed that maximum speed. Which makes the “sound cone” permeable, unlike the light cone we know about from Relativity.

So my eyes see the next word before I read the line into memory, and therefore later words in a line can affect the earlier ones. I’m sure every theater director already knew this.

Post Scriptum

The same thing happens with “proctological”, but in this case the dilemma can be resolved easily by never using that word in a poem.

The shoal in question, in the lee of a limestone boulder.

Shenandoah River, North Fork, July 2023

Last summer we found that over the years, all kinds of old ironmongery had been caught in the current of the river, and dumped in the lee of a boulder that’s normally underwater. I wrote about it on my Old English blog because it seemed like the sort of thing Old English elegiac poets would like.

I showed the post to Sørina Higgins’s Author’s Circle, who told me that (no Old English poets being available) I should write the poem myself. There wasn’t much to make a poem out of, though, until I read a Mastodon post from Martin Rundqvist. He pointed out that the movie version of a Viking ship burial, where the ship is set on fire, is nonsensical — the ship would only burn down to the waterline. In reality, the ship was buried. The wood rots away, but the pattern of nails tells him and his colleagues what they’re looking at. OK — now there can be a poem.

This is in the standard Old English alliterative form, which I’ve tweaked for Modern English by allowing any number of unstressed syllables among the four stresses. Many thanks to the Author’s Circle for their advice.

The Shenandoah shows a shoal among rocks.
There eddies swirl, iron comes to rest,
concealed beneath stream-flows where
salamanders swim. But summer’s drought
lowered the river to levels unheard-of.

A drought like this can dig up old times.
Farms and pastures that formerly stood
on the banks of the river in bygone days
decayed, collapsed, and crumbled to ruin.
The forest fauna, fungus, and termites
ripped out the parts of the ruins they could use.
The rest washed to the riverbed. Rainfall carried
hardware to sunken heaps out of memory.

Likewise Vikings were laid to rest
in ships whose timbers have shivered to mould.
In ages afterward, archaeologists
sifted through soil, seeking their history.
Prows like dragons, once proud and high,
deteriorate to mere traces in soil,
but the nails are waiting in numbers undiminished.

The land I call mine is littered with items
from camps built by campaigning armies:
arrowheads left by Iroquois bands;
a scabbard left over from the Civil War.
When farmers cut furrows into the earth,
hunters of relics from history come
to pick among the plow-leavings
and rummage around the river’s terraces.
Normally they turn up just nails and screws,
hinges from doors, and hoops from barrels,
and toss them back. Trash isn’t interesting.

Many are keepers of memories of war,
but few keep the old farmers in mind.

By Joe

On November 25, 2023

In Alliterative Verse

Alliteration: not just for good guys anymore

By Joe

On September 30, 2022

In Alliterative Verse

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.

Alliterative Revival Revival

By Joe

On September 25, 2021

In Alliterative Verse

Just came across a wonderful paper. “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry” by Dennis Wilson Wise.¹

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”.² 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.

Headley’s Beowulf

By Joe

On September 1, 2020

In Alliterative Verse, squibs & crackers

I have just finished reading Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. Not without some trepidation, because the reviews in the mass media and on Twitter all advertised it as a translation into current Internet idioms. That could have been awful, but I’m here to tell you it was all just clickbait. This is a “new translation” in the sense that the English used here is from the last half century. Sure, the pull quotes that they quoted are in there, but they’re not important to the text. One of the most popular lines to quote looks frankly spliced in to attract attention.

This is what I was afraid of

The words in the book are much better than the ones in the reviews. MDH uses the difference in language between the current world and standard modern English as a tool. The narrator, as I hear him[1], is the same guy who narrated the original. He’s old and getting a bit cranky. He puts in some contemporary locutions to attract the kids’ attention, but the moment he’s got it, he slides back into an archaic mode. That contrasts with the more colloquial sound of the direct quotations, forming dissonances that are sometimes brilliant:

Only then did Hygelac begin to question his comrade, calmly, commandingly, to glean the story of the war-Geats, and take the tale for his own hall-history.

“Holy hell, Beowulf, how’d it go out there?” (1988)

One question I always have to get out of the way in an adaptation of Beowulf is, “Did the translator do her homework?” Not even a question here. In the introduction, she deftly gets Tolkien out of the way, in accordance with Terry Pratchett’s dictum.

So I definitely liked this book. It is the fastest to read of all the versions I’ve read. A backhanded shot at Princess Diana was completely unexpected, but worked well, too.

[1] I’m sure “him” is still the right pronoun. That’s not the case for all the characters in this book — MDH is good at making little gender-bends that stay within the original text.

Ents’ Work

By Joe

On April 4, 2020

In Alliterative Verse, fantasy

Over at Middle-earth Reflections, Olga cheers as the Ents wreck Saruman’s plans for dominating the northwest of Middle-earth. Serves him right. Her previous post talked about the Old English origins of the word “ent” and how Tolkien re-applied the old poets’ feelings of awe for the ancient (Roman) giants who built the ruins around them. That reminds me of what may be my favorite of all the jokes Tolkien buried in The Lord of the Rings. When Theoden & Co. are riding from Helm’s Deep to Isengard, their first sign that something has happened comes in this passage:

Dark lay the vale before them, for the moon had passed into the West, and its light was hidden by the hills. but out of the deep shadow of the dale rose a vast spire of smoke and vapour; as it mounted, it caught the rays of the sinking moon and spread in shimmering billows , black and silver over the starry sky.

LotR, III, viii.

The company is miles away from Isengard at that point. The Old English poem “Maxims II” (as its title indicates, this poem is a long string of maxims saying how the world ought to be) begins,

Cyning sceal rice healdan. Ceastra beoð feorran gesyne,
Orðanc enta geweorc, þa þe on þysse eorðan syndon,
Wrætlic weallstana geweorc.

I translate these first two Wise Sayings as, “A king should hold his realm. A fortress should be visible from afar to all who are on this earth, the skillful work of giants, wonderful works of stone.” The word “Orthanc” sitting there with the Ents tells me that this is something we shouldn’t overlook, and is why Tom Shippey says it’s a joke, deep-down, where you can’t get at it.

Most places the old poets use the phrase enta geweorc, they’re referring to a ruin. So, which was the Ents’ work? The original construction, or the ruining? Grim-voiced men like the poets who wrote “Beowulf” or “The Wanderer” always meant the former. Tolkien’s sense of humor led him to wonder, what if it were the latter? And so the next chapter came to be.

Reading Tolkien with Old English

By Joe

On December 7, 2019

In Alliterative Verse, fantasy, Slow learner

This past year I’ve had the experience of hearing The Lord of the Rings with fresh ears, now that I’ve learned Old English. The first thing that jumps out differently is the names, like seeing “Haleth” in a list, and recognizing a word for “warrior”. At the Council of Elrond we meet Galdor, whose name means a magic charm.

In Rohan, the Old English echoes become louder. Merry is knighted as “Holdwine”, which I now see is a nice double entendre: sure, he can hold his drink, but also hold means “loyal” and wine means “friend”. Here’s another thing I would never have done before: I’ve searched the Old English corpus for historical figures named “holdwine”, just to see if there’s a reference I’m missing. (Can’t find any.)

Treebeard and Legolas like alliterative proverbs. So do I. Perhaps it’s a function of age. Even Gimli gets into the act: “indeed, sooner would I bear a horse than be borne by one.” The first word is modern English that could have been spoken by anyone in the book. After the first two words, though, the sentence turns into a good alliterative line. Now that I’ve read a lot of old English verse, Gimli’s motivation in saying this sounds different. It sounds like he began the sentence in his usual idiom, but when he got two words in he noticed that he could make a witty epigram in the Rohirric style.

That style permeates Book III. Gandalf, making introductions at Meduseld: “And here beside me is Aragorn son of Arathorn, the heir of Kings, and it is to Mundburg that he goes”. On first reading, that sentence sounded weird to a teen-aged idiosopher. Now I get it. Describing a character three different ways in a row is a technique that’s all over Anglo-Saxon poetry. It’s reinforced by the alliteration++ on “Aragorn”, “Arathorn”, and “heir”. (Is there a word for going beyond alliteration, matching the whole first syllable, like a modern English rhyme turned backwards?)

The ancient roots of that sentence go deeper, though. What really struck me when I first read LotR was that weird comma-spliced extra sentence at the end, with the second part just barely related to the first part. English teachers constantly correct their students for doing that. JRRT was an English teacher. What gives? It turns out Anglo-Saxons loved conjunction splices. For example, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 888: “Queen Æthelswith who was King Alfred’s sister died on the way to Rome, and her body lies at Pavia.”

This is the first of several ways Gandalf is being more British than the Queen in this chapter. “It is the will of Théoden King that none should enter his gates, save those who know our tongue and are our friends,” says the guard, so Gandalf lays it on thick.

There was one disappointment. “Éomer” is in Beowulf. Where did Éowyn come from? Her name doesn’t exist in the corpus, but “Þeowen” does. It’s a common variant of “Þeow”. “Handmaiden” is the nicest translation of that word (the others all connote slavery). Not cool! However, that word is part of Queen Wealhþeow‘s name. Maybe there’s a positive meaning we don’t have in the surviving literature. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tolkien inferred an unattested name that must have existed somewhere.

Altogether, this has been a profitable exercise. It’s not easy to have a fresh perspective, the ~50th time one reads a book. When I signed up for Intro to Anglo-Saxon at Signum last winter, the universal reaction of my friends was, “Why?” Maybe now I know the answer.

Alliterative-verse density measurement

By Joe

On September 21, 2019

In Alliterative Verse

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.

Crossed Alliteration

By Joe

On September 2, 2019

In Alliterative Verse

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.

Easy. Too easy

By Joe

On July 30, 2019

In Alliterative Verse, Digital Humanities

My teacher in Anglo-Saxon told us that writing alliterative verse is hard. The computer disagrees.

If we use the simple criteria of meter and alliteration, the text of The Lord of the Rings contains 10,740 alliterative lines. If we insist that the fourth stress not alliterate with the first and third, that number drops to 9,917. I’m not sure about vowel-alliteration; if we leave those out the number drops to 6,494. ‘Way back at the beginning of this project, I was expecting there would be a lot, but “a lot” was hundreds, not thousands. I’m going to need to tighten things up a lot.

Here are some things the computer says are alliterative lines, and I think humans agree:

Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots
Mr. Drogo, he married poor…
the Sackville-Bagginses scowled and wondered
“I want to see the wild country”
a sound like mingled song and laughter

Here are some things the computer says are alliterative lines, and I call foul:

‘…it all, Frodo?’ ‘Cousin Frodo has been very close…’
…called to the hobbits, “Come, now is the time…”
…close Forest. The hobbits felt encouraged…

Here are a couple that I can’t decide about:

He knows that it is not one of… (the computer caught this twice in two sentences)
was very rich and very peculiar
He hated it and loved it as he hated and loved himself

What do you think? Should a whole-word repetition count as alliteration?

A common feature of the false identifications is that there are ellipses. These lines are the middle of a sentence, or they run past the end of a sentence and onto the beginning of the next. I didn’t put in a requirement that a line end at a period because it’s fairly common for Anglo-Saxon verse to enjamb the lines and end the sentence at a caesura instead. It looks like I’m going to have to include the caesura somehow, which I was dreading. It’s not obvious how to see a caesura in written text.

One good thing about a vibrant field of research like Digital Humanities is that new works are constantly coming out. Like this one, which not only covers Anglo-Saxon alliteration, but also Slavic verse-forms I’ve never even heard of. One bad thing is that all those works contain a line like, “The paper does not concern the following matters… Word boundaries, caesuras, etc.” (Chapter 1) So no help from that quarter. But wait — Chapter 9 (Kruglova, Smirnova, & Skulacheva) claims they can, in Russian. If it’s good enough for Pushkin, maybe it’s good enough for JRRT.