Introduction

IX Introduction The fin de siecle has been marked by a welcome surge of interest in poetic form. Virtually no prosodic theory survives for the vernacular literature, yet conclusions that emerge from recent linguistic and manuscript studies can recover a perception that, on the whole, writers of Old and Middle English verse were more aware of what they were about than w e have been. The work of the last two decades on constraints in Old English metre and strong-stress metre, on morae and syllabledivision , and onfinal-e, have advanced not only a more precise definition of the genres, configurations and 'music' ofearly verse, but a realisation that the prosodic focus, acumen and ability of medieval writers call for more appreciation than the imprecise state of manuscript witness and some of our edited texts provide. This special edition of Parergon comprises eleven recent studies from established literary scholars. From fields as disparate as textual editing and analysis, literary criticism and linguistics, the contributors share an ear for poetry. And it is hardly surprising that, in theirfieldsof study, music meets mathematics and measuring. Technology advances fast at this time of writing, and the tools of systematic data collection and analysis seem to us most useful, though doubtless they will, in no time, seem primitive. However, through cybernetics and syllable counting, and careful listening, w e practise our art and our science, and conclusions from the diverse texts examined inform that, within their own parameters, the prosody of poets from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, if not that of their scribes and editors, was systematic. The types and degrees of that system can be gauged from data that the painstaking scholarship represented here can reveal. In the twentieth century Chaucer's versification was rescued from earlier disparagements. From the evidence of this volume, it seems that, as w e X move into the twenty-first century, major texts such as Beowulf and the works of Chaucer can still bear scrutiny; and poets previously denigrated for defective metre - La3amon, later alliterative poets, Hoccleve, Lydgate - may be yet further elucidated, not least for the pleasure of the reader. The thrust of these studies is largely recuperative. From the 1980s one study after another has shown that the rhythmic constraints in strong-stress verse were considerably more stringent than hitherto realised, and proofof forbidden rhythmic patterns constituted a major advance in metrical theory. Verse patterns that do not occur, indeed appear to be 'forbidden', are acute pointers to metrical constraint and, as Mary E. Blockley points out, can help confirm an old axiom or lead to a new one. Her speculation pinpoints a hypothetical heavy verse that is not employed by the Beowulf-poet. With the resources of Old English vocabulary she constructs an elegant 'negative proof from examples that show that the absence ofthis pattern is not accidental - for the sequences of syllables in it tax neither the lexical resources of Old English nor its syntax. Her paper is thefirstappearance in print ofwhat must become 'Blockley's Rule', and will inevitably add to the understanding of a complex subject. The abstruse corpus of Early Middle English 'fiction', once integral to undergraduate courses, possibly deserves a renewal of focus, and much work remains to be done on versification of works such as the Brut, the Poema Morale and the Ormulum. It is particularly welcome that this special edition can introduce substantial contributions to work on O r m and La3amon. W i m Zonneveld's unique study draws some conclusions about the non-linearity of literary history through a comparison between the Ormulum and the Middle Dutch Life ofSaint Lutgart. Both texts are isolates in that they exhibit iambic metre and (to different degrees) enjambement before these had been widely adopted in European vernaculars. Disclosing a little-known link between these works, and referring to a variety of texts of the period, Zonneveld opens several new fields for discussion and further exploration: the Dutch connection, early isosyllabicity, the septenarius in the vernacular, and polysyllabic word stress in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. S. K. Brehe draws important conclusions about the shifts in La^amon's practice, suggesting that the use of the caesura...