The development of alliterative metre from Old to Middle English

310 Pages·2008·1.542 MB·English

by  Nicolay Yakovlev

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ALLITERATIVE METRE
FROM OLD TO MIDDLE ENGLISH

Nicolay Yakovlev

Wolfson College
University of Oxford

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Hilary Term 2008
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ABSTRACT

The Development of Alliterative Metre from Old to Middle English

Nicolay Yakovlev D.Phil. English Literature
Wolfson College Hilary Term 2008

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.
The first three chapters of the thesis examine the alliterative metre in Old
English (primarily on the basis of Beowulf), early Middle English (primarily on the
basis of Layamon's Brut), and late Middle English (primarily on the basis of Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight, Morte Arthure, and the Siege of Jerusalem). The discussions pay
particular attention to those points that are subsequently used in the historical
reconstruction presented in the final chapter. At the same time, each of the period
chapters aims to provide a coherent systemic formulation of the particular metre.
The chief method employed by the study is the standard procedure of matching
the linguistic and metrical data, as described in the introduction. The historical
reconstruction is based on the premise that in particular types of poetic environments
certain changes in the linguistic prosody will automatically result in a restructuring of
the metrical system. The premise leads to a new version of the history of English
alliterative poetry based on the concrete evidence of the extant texts.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My greatest debt is owed to my supervisor, Ralph Hanna, for his boundless
patience and expert advice on every matter I struggled with. Working with him was a
great privilege, and the imperfection of my efforts was a bad tribute to his kindness and
brilliance.
I am grateful for the generous support and opinion I received from Malcolm
Godden, Noriko Inoue, Judith Jefferson, Anastassia Loukina, Ad Putter, and Myra
Stokes. My debt to O.A. Smirnitskaya should be clear from the thesis, which was
intended as an inadequate postscript to her Verse and Language of Old Germanic
Poetry. Special thanks are due to my mother-in-law, Elena Strigina, who taught me the
proper use of electronic tables and thus speeded up my data analysis by several years,
and to my wife, Maria Artamonova, without whose gentle but persistent encouragement
the thesis would still remain in the form of spreadsheets.
I would like to thank the Clarendon Fund of Oxford University and the Overseas
Research Student Awards Scheme of the UK Government for providing the financial
support for the DPhil course, and Wolfson College for its ever welcoming atmosphere.
Last but not least, my deepest gratitude goes to Yuri Kleiner. His questions
started the project, and I may only hope to have answered some of them. How much I
owe to him he alone knows.
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ABSTRACT...............................................................................................................................................II
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS....................................................................................................................III
KEY TO SCANSION SYMBOLS..........................................................................................................VI
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS................................................................................................................VII
INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................................1
LINGUISTIC CHANGE AND THE CONTINUITY OF ALLITERATIVE VERSE......................................................1
The alliterative tradition in medieval England....................................................................................2
Theories of continuity.........................................................................................................................9
The framework hypothesis...............................................................................................................14
Prosody and alliteration....................................................................................................................23
Outline of the thesis..........................................................................................................................24
METHODOLOGY OF THE METRICAL STUDY ............................................................................................29
CHAPTER 1. OLD ENGLISH METRE.............................................................................................42
THEORIES OF OLD ENGLISH METRE: THE SIEVERS TRADITION................................................................42
A metrical system or rhythmical catalogue: Sievers, Pope, and Bliss..............................................43
Cable's metrical theory.....................................................................................................................54
HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT ASPECTS OF THE THEORY OF SIEVERS AND CABLE....................................62
Interdependency of the rules.............................................................................................................62
Patterns with five metrical positions.................................................................................................65
THE PROSODIC BASIS OF OLD ENGLISH VERSE.......................................................................................70
Secondary stress...............................................................................................................................70
A morphological metre.....................................................................................................................74
A SIDETRACK: OLD ENGLISH EXTENDED METRE....................................................................................83
CHAPTER 2. LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH ALLITERATIVE METRE...........................................89
THE GRAMMAR OF FINAL -E...................................................................................................................93
Chronology of loss............................................................................................................................93
Inflections in the final dip in SGGK.................................................................................................98
Inflections in the medial dip in SGGK...........................................................................................107
Inflection of disyllabic adjectives...................................................................................................109
Final -e in SGGK: conclusions.......................................................................................................115
Inflections in the final dip in MA...................................................................................................116
Singular nouns in the final dip in MA............................................................................................122
Inflections in the medial dip in MA................................................................................................127
Evidence for final -e in SGGK and MA: a comparison..................................................................134
Final -e in MA: conclusions...........................................................................................................138
SYLLABLES IN THE WEAK DIP...............................................................................................................142
Suffixes in the weak dip.................................................................................................................142
Extent of the restriction..................................................................................................................149
THE FORM OF THE A-VERSE..................................................................................................................155
Two-lift a-verses.............................................................................................................................156
Three-lift a-verses: a rhythmical catalogue and strong final dips...................................................161
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Three-lift a-verses: non-schwa syllables.........................................................................................167
Existence of three-lift verses..........................................................................................................172
Three-lift b-verses...........................................................................................................................180
LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH ALLITERATIVE METRE: A SUMMARY...............................................................185
CHAPTER 3. THE METRE OF LAYAMON'S BRUT...................................................................188
THE METRE OF LAYAMON'S BRUT: THE LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERSPECTIVE.....................................188
Language and spelling....................................................................................................................190
Initial metrical statement and preliminary tests..............................................................................194
The prefix licence...........................................................................................................................198
Elision.............................................................................................................................................200
Compounds.....................................................................................................................................201
Scansion of the basic fragment.......................................................................................................203
Comparison to the Otho passage....................................................................................................204
Prefix licence: summary of the evidence........................................................................................207
Layamon: an intermediate stage.....................................................................................................208
THE METRE OF LAYAMON'S BRUT: FURTHER OBSERVATIONS...............................................................211
Length and resolution in early Middle English verse: introductory remarks..................................212
Resolution in Layamon...................................................................................................................217
The form of the final dip.................................................................................................................221
Suffixes: the strong dip...................................................................................................................222
Suffixes: compound stress..............................................................................................................229
Suffixes: primary linguistic stress...................................................................................................232
Suffixes: the weak dip....................................................................................................................235
Suffixes: resolution.........................................................................................................................241
Rhythmical patterns of two-lift b-verses.........................................................................................243
Rhythmical patterns of three-lift b-verses.......................................................................................246
Rhythmical patterns of a-verses......................................................................................................248
Existence of three-lift verses..........................................................................................................250
Length and resolution in early Middle English verse: concluding remarks....................................252
LAYAMON'S VERSE: SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS.................................................................................261
CHAPTER 4. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ALLITERATIVE METRE.........................................266
From Old English to early Middle English.....................................................................................267
From early to late Middle English..................................................................................................280
Dynamism of the metrical system..................................................................................................282
The antiquarian question.................................................................................................................285
Which Old English metre?..............................................................................................................287
When did Middle English begin?...................................................................................................290
CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................................293
BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................................295
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Key to scansion symbols

Syllables in strong metrical positions

S metrical stress; or primary metrical stress
s secondary metrical stress
š secondary metrical stress on a short syllable (where relevant)
r resolved syllable; so, Sr is a resolved or resolvable sequence (e.g. heofon)

Syllables in weak metrical positions

x metrically unstressed syllable
p syllable of a prefix
o unstressed syllable with a non-schwa vowel (in Middle English verse)
f suffixal syllable or the second syllable of the root (where relevant)
x...x sequence of two or more unstressed syllables
(x) metrical position that may contain either one unstressed syllable or no syllables

# word boundary
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List of abbreviations

ASPR Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records
JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology
PBB Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

DT The Destruction of Troy
MA Morte Arthure
O Ormulum
P3A The Parliament of the Three Ages
PM Poema Morale
SGGK Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
SJ The Siege of Jerusalem
W&W Winner and Waster
WA The Wars of Alexander

EME early Middle English
LME late Middle English
ME Middle English
OE Old English
OFr Old French
ON Old Norse
1
INTRODUCTION

Linguistic change and the continuity of alliterative verse

In 1923, Roman Jakobson formulated an idea that has since become
commonplace: metrical prosody depends on the prosody of the language.1 In its
simplest terms, the idea is an acknowledgment of the fact that certain metrical systems
cannot be implemented in some languages because the prosodic phenomena that
underlie those metrical systems are not universal. So, quantitative poetry in the manner
of either Greek or Latin is impossible in Modern English or Russian, since the former
does not have the equivalence of a prosodically 'long' sequence to a combination of
prosodically 'short' ones, while the latter does not distinguish syllabic or segmental
length in any form. Similarly, the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables that
forms the basis of iambic metres in English, Russian or German is very difficult to
achieve in French due to the nature of phrasal stress in that language.

1 Roman Jakobson, O cheshskom stikhe preimuschestvenno v sopostavlenii s russkim [on Czech verse,
primarily in comparison with Russian verse] (Berlin, 1923), repr. Über den tschechischen Vers, unter
besonderer Berücksichtigung des russischen Verses (Bremen, 1974).
2
The match between linguistic and metrical prosody goes beyond such basic
restrictions: since the only prosodic universal is the syllable, any metre developed
within or adopted into a poetic tradition is necessarily shaped by the particular linguistic
prosody.2 It has long been established, for example, that iambic metres in various
European traditions – Russian, Polish, German, English, even late Middle English and
early Modern English – show markedly different characteristics that can all be related to
the prosodic structure of the respective languages.3
The present thesis examines the history of alliterative metre in Old and Middle
English with regard to the history of the English language. I attempt to demonstrate that
many features of alliterative verse reflect the contemporary system of linguistic
prosody, and that the sometimes radical contrasts between the verse of different periods
can be accounted for by the linguistic changes that are known to have occurred in
English between the production of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The alliterative tradition in medieval England

The extant alliterative poetry in English comes mainly from two historical
periods: Old English, starting from about the seventh century and gradually
disappearing towards the Conquest, and late Middle English, starting c. 1350, gathering
full force until the end of the century, and still surviving in the course of the fifteenth. In
between, there is a gap that largely coincides with the period of general scarcity of

2 For analyses of the linguistic foundations of the metrical prosody in various poetic traditions, cf. e.g.
Versification: Major Language Types, ed. W.K. Wimsatt (New York, 1972) and J. Kuriłowicz, Metrik
und Sprachgeschichte (Wrocław, 1975).
3 See, for example, V.M. Zhirmunsky, O natsionalnykh formakh yambicheskogo stikha [on national
variants of iambic verse], in Teoriya stikha (Leningrad, 1968), pp. 7-23; V.Ye. Kholshevnikov, Russkaya
i polskaya sillabika i sillabotonika [Russian and Polish syllabic and accentual-syllabic verse], in Teoriya
stikha (Leningrad, 1968), pp. 24-58; Marina Tarlinskaya, Strict Stress Meter in English Poetry Compared
with German and Russian (Calgary, 1993); Thomas Cable, The English Alliterative Tradition
(Philadelphia, 1991), pp. 117-129.
3
English writing, as far as the extant texts are concerned. Nevertheless, even within the
relatively small corpus of English poetry written between 1066 and 1300, and especially
within the much greater array of poetry extant from the first half of the fourteenth
century, alliterative verse is rare, and for that reason the group of long narrative poems
composed in a distinct style with an alliterative accentual metre in the next fifty years or
so are collectively known as the 'Alliterative Revival'.
The history of alliteration in medieval English literature can shortly be presented
as follows. At the start of the extant tradition there stands 'classical' Old English verse
preserved mostly in manuscripts of c. 1000. Dating the composition is notoriously
difficult for almost every poem.4 Nevertheless, as demonstrated by Robert Fulk, it is
possible to construct a relative chronology for the major poems based on the evidence
of their language and metre.5 This relative chronology accords quite well with the
development of style across the poems, which show a gradual systemic transformation
of heroic diction to make alliterative verse suitable for the expression of Christian
themes and concepts. In absolute terms, Fulk dates the major poems to the period c.
675-850, much earlier than the extant manuscripts, and this point of view is accepted in
the thesis.
Despite the internal differences in their language, style, and skill, 'classical' Old
English poems form a unified group when set against a number of other compositions,
in particular the psalms of the Paris Psalter, the Metres of Boethius, Solomon and
Saturn, the Battle of Maldon, and the historical poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
All of the latter compositions belong to the tenth century or later and show a marked
loosening of alliterative, prosodic, and syntactic patterns, poverty of poetic vocabulary,
incorrect use of the surviving diction, and a generally low level of poetic skill. While it
is tempting to conclude that tenth century verse reveals a deterioration of Old English

4 A well-known example of such difficulty is the discussion in The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Colin Chase
(Toronto, 1981).
5 R.D. Fulk, A History of Old English Meter (Philadelphia, 1992).