Notes on the incidence and type of anacrusis in Genesis B: some similarities to and differences from anacrusis elsewhere in Old English and in Old Saxon

Notes on the incidence and type of anacrusis in Genesis B: some similarities to and differences from anacrusis elsewhere in Old English and in Old Saxon. One of the problems concerning the treatment of anacrusis in Genesis B is that although it is found more widely than would be expected by extrapolation from Beowulf, the rules governing its unusually high incidence can be traced neither to Old Saxon nor to what can be ascertained from late Old English verse. In spite of Bliss' suggestion in another context that Genesis B is omitted from a study of hypermetric verse because it is influenced by Old Saxon metrical practices, the differences between Genesis B and Old Saxon are in matters of anacrusis sometimes even more marked than those between Genesis B and the remainder of Old English verse. 2 The problems raised by the treatment of anacrusis in Genesis B are the more acute since Old English and Old Saxon usage here diverge so widely one suspects that the theoretical justification of weighting a short thesis adduced by Bliss to explain the dearth of, for example, +3E or +2A-Types cannot be applied at all to Old Saxon (or even, indeed, to some late Old English verse). It is therefore necessary to discover how anacrusis is used elsewhere in the Old English and Old Saxon corpus before discussing the eccentricities of the poet of Genesis B in detail. Since anacrusis seems to be subject to different constraints when it precedes normal and hypermetric verse and since there are different problems involving its identification, the two contexts will be discussed separately. For example, normal verse, especially normal verse with disyllabic or polysyllabic anacrusis, is readily interpreted as light hypermetric. Conversely, a hypermetric half-line containing three fullystressed syllables and the same preface cannot be taken to be hypermetric verse with both double substitution and the replacement of the first of the resultant four stresses by an unstressed introduction without postulating a new variety of hypermetric verse. Finally, a ID, IA or 2A-Type with the same anacrusis remains a puzzle, since a light hypermetric line with only one fully-stressed syllable seems a contradiction in terms. With the exception of the last, these problems of identifying anacrusis also bedevil Old Saxon; they are, indeed, further multiplied since not only can the number of isolated half-lines with an extrametrical prelude be far greater than in Old English but the prelude can also be considerably longer than any corresponding one in Old English. The Heliand, 5754b and 5807b illustrate this problem at its extreme: diopa bidolban. Hie sagda simnen, that hie scoldi fan dooe astandan an is ansiunion, so" huem s6 ina muosta undar is 6*gon scauuon Both have a decasyllabic initial dip: the complement of the first is a normal half-line, of the second a light half-line, and both are isolated from any 2 P. Bethel clusters of hypermetric verse that might indicate the category into which they fall. Because of the difficulty of distinguishing normal verse with polysyllabic anacrusis from light hypermetric verse (particularly if the halfline in question has a di- or trisyllabic preface), the discussion of anacrusis in Old Saxon is limited almost entirely to monosyllabic anacrusis. The result of this limitation is a greater apparent similarity between the rules governing anacrusis in the two languages than is warrantable at the cost of restricting the number of examples of anacrusis in Old Saxon more severely than in Old English. Monosyllabic anacrusis accounts for only 6 2 % of the instances I have found in the Heliand (946 of a total of 1530 examples) although it predominates in the examples of Old English examined here. Hence, the most striking difference in the nature and distribution of anacrusis between Old English and Old Saxon is treated very briefly. The definition of anacrusis (in normal verse) given by Bliss in paras. 46-50 of the Metre of Beowulf is, briefly, that it is a comparatively rarelyfound extrametrical prelude of one or occasionally two syllables before an A or D-Type; whilst an E-Type is not necessarily incapable of supporting anacrusis, the examples in Beowulf can be analyzed as B-Types...