Old English Metre: An Introduction by Jun Terasawa (review)

Old English meter is one of the most powerful devices at scholars’ disposal for coping with the radical indeterminacy of Old English verse texts, for descriptive meter touches on, among other important subjects, the language, dating, authorship, and editing of Old English poetry. In one sense, Jun Terasawa’s slender book, published as a matter-of-fact introduction to the discipline of Old English meter, represents a triumph building for the last two decades over a once standard position in Old English studies that viewed the logic of using metrical criteria for the language, dating, authorship, and editing of Old English verse as contrived and circular. Indeed, Terasawa’s taut introduction to Old English meter, as useful to students learning the bases for the first time as it is to scholars learning some of the finer points, is an elegant argument for the validity of metrical analysis as an independent and self-reinforcing framework for the language of Old English poetic texts. The author announces that the book “attempts to provide beginners with the basics of Old English metre” (p. x) and “provides an up-to-date view of current work in the field of Old English metre” (p. xi), and the volume delivers both objectives with equal parts material clarity and intellectual force. In the background of Terasawa’s exposition of Old English meter is the professed belief in textual conservatism that has obtained among many scholars and the corresponding skepticism of metrical analysis’s predictive value; this thin volume’s precise and transparent explanation of how meter interacts with language in quantifiably explicit ways is a profound demonstration of why meter matters to any student, beginning or advanced, of Old English poetry.

The first three chapters, a brisk forty-eight pages, form a basic introduction to Old English meter for new students. Of course, other basic introductions to meter are numerous, but rarely do they match Terasawa’s in clarity of presentation or in organization. The concepts covered include alliteration as the most salient feature of the verse; types of alliteration; the effects of alliteration on the language of verse; alliterative precedence; rhythm, syllable, and foot structure; resolution; Sievers’s Five Types; anacrusis; and hypermetricity—all copiously illustrated with examples from Old English verse, a virtue of the whole of the book. Another prominent feature of the book that cements the information presented to beginners is the series of exercises (with answers in an appendix) that appear immediately after sections explicating particularly crucial elements of metrical analysis. Short, focused paragraphs on ancillary topics best understood in the context of meter, like textual conservatism or u-apocope, appear in smaller type set off from the main text—Terasawa suggests in the preface that beginning students skip these short forays into more advanced subjects. The third chapter on the basics of rhythm lays out the essential Sieversian system of five basic types and their major variants, but the presentation of this material is appropriately inflected by the discoveries, concerns, and consensus of the important work done on Old English meter over the last two decades. For example, although Sievers made use of the foot as a metrical unit, Terasawa points out (p. 48) that some metrists, especially recent ones, find the foot a concept without much use in describing Old English meter.

These basics cleared, Terasawa’s book really becomes airborne in its last four chapters on advanced topics in rhythm, meter and word order, meter and grammar, and problems of meter and authorship and dating. Simply put, these chapters form the clearest and most economically expressed account and demonstration available of the major ways that Old English poets bent their language to accommodate the patterns of their poetic meter. Chapter 4, “Rhythm: Advanced Topics,” for example, offers a robust tour of the four-syllable principle in Old English versification and the phonological conditions expressed through poets’ adherence to the principle in the phenomena of contraction, parasiting...