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  • A Drawn-Out Beheading: Style, Theme, and Hypermetricity in the Old English Judith1
  • Megan E. Hartman

In the study of Old English poetry, scholars generally analyze meter and content independently of each other. One possible exception to this rule is the analysis of hypermetric verse.2 Many scholars agree that these verses represent moments of heightened rhetorical diction.3 In fact, close analysis of hypermetric composition demonstrates that hypermetric meter seems to be used for some much more specific purposes. Not only do the stress patterns differ in these lines, but the syntactic patterns also shift, tending toward less variation, simpler grammatical constructions, and a greater number of syntactic breaks per verse. Poets therefore tend to use hypermetric verses in moments of the narrative in which the poet desires to create a heightened tone together with greater clarity and swift narrative progress.4 Because hypermetric lines demonstrate some clear practical [End Page 421] and rhetorical purposes, they can be fruitfully studied to ascertain how poets may have conceived of the meter as a way to reinforce the events or themes of their poems in various ways.

One poem in particular that makes strategic use of hypermetric meter is the Old English Judith.5 Judith is unusual in the Old English poetic corpus in that only Maxims I and The Dream of the Rood have a larger proportion of hypermetric verses. Upon closer inspection, the hypermetric verses appear more unusual still because they are stylistically distinct from hypermetric sections in particularly conservative Old English poems.6 They do not show the same tendency for increased narrative progress. While the number of syntactic breaks per line increases when the poet switches from normal to hypermetric meter, the increase is not as large as in some poems, the sentences themselves are often repetitive, and the poet still frequently employs variation. Furthermore, the hypermetric lines themselves remain relatively short and contained, sometimes even averaging shorter metrical patterns than the most metrically conservative poems. The difference in the length of the line is especially significant in light of the fact that Judith is presumed to be a late poem.7 While Old English poetic form remained relatively stable throughout most of the Old English period, starting around the turn of the tenth century, linguistic change began to [End Page 422] have a visible effect on poetic composition, making for verses that had longer drops with fewer restrictions.8 Because the Judith poet maintains very short and contained hypermetric verses in spite of this linguistic change, he must have made a concerted effort to keep the verse patterns short. In addition, his alteration of typical syntactic patterns also suggests that he had a very specific purpose in mind for his hypermetric verse. In this paper, I will analyze the style of the hypermetric lines to demonstrate the extent of the difference between the hypermetric composition of Judith and that of particularly conservative Old English poems, namely Beowulf, Genesis A, Guthlac A, Daniel, and Exodus. I will then look at the context of these verses to ascertain what the poet may have intended with this style. Ultimately, analysis of the hypermetric verse in Judith shows that the poet very deliberately adapted more traditional styles of hypermetric composition to create an especially elevated tone in the hypermetric sections, which he then used to emphasize the major themes in the poem.

The structure of the hypermetric verses in Judith, particularly in terms of the length and filler of the line, looks similar to the conservative poems and can even appear more condensed in some ways. The onsets of hypermetric verses in Judith are comparable to those in the conservative poems, and they even tend to be slightly shortened. The longest drop in the heavy onset in Judith is three syllables long; the conservative poems likewise tend to limit drops to three syllables or fewer, though one example has four: Engel in þone ofn innan becwōm (HE: ) (The angel came into the oven on the inside; Daniel 237a).9 The light onset in [End Page 423] Judith is even shorter than those in the conservative poems: the maximum length of the drop is five syllables in Judith, as...

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