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  • Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse
  • W. A. Davenport
Judith Jefferson and Ad Putter, eds. Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse. Leeds: Leeds Texts and Monographs, New Series 17, 2009. Pp. 311. £40.00; $65.00 paper.

It is difficult to make a completely satisfying book from a set of conference papers, and the editors’ choice of title for this collection (emanating [End Page 346] from a 2005 conference in Bristol) highlights the differences of perspective in the thirteen essays; they do not even claim that the contributors are discussing a single meter, though they have provided a unified bibliography (but not an index). So, although a significant number of essays take as their starting point the existence of “rules” for the composition of the alliterative long line, following Hoyt Duggan and others, and attempt further definition of the patterns of lifts and dips, the constraints that operate in the two half-lines, the presence or absence of pronounced final -e, the hierarchies of allowable alliterating words, and so on, usually by subjecting chunks of poetic text to statistical processes, others return to basic questions about linguistic history and how alliteration works, and to the consideration of individual poems.

In my youth, before computers, I served a two-year apprenticeship to the scholarly alliterative trade by analyzing the syntax of every sentence of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and from close study of J. P. Oakden's monumental Alliterative Poetry in Middle English developed, alongside interest in the subject, a fair dose of skepticism about the rum-ramruffery of it all. How did discussion of alliterative meter get stuck in “lifts and dips” when the ear tells us that strong stresses go down, not up? Why not hops and skips, thumps and flutters, landings and scurries? Noriko Inoue takes the nine manuscript versions of The Siege of Jerusalem as the coal-face from which to chisel evidence that preference for for to + infinitive over to + infinitive is always a metrically determined choice in b-verses and that, therefore, its use in a-verses is proof that the requirement for a long medial dip is stricter than the need to observe the aa/ax pattern. But I cannot help wondering why one should trust in matters metrical a poet who is such an indifferent performer in matters narrative. Working alongside are Nikolay Yakovlev, who challenges the view that final -e had disappeared in northern dialects by the end of the fourteenth century by examining all the b-verses in Sir Gawain; Donka Minkova, who uses the b-verses of Winner and Waster and The Parliament of the Three Ages to demonstrate constraints on metricality with an impressive display of statistics, tables and code words; Geoffrey Russom, who compares Beowulf and Sir Gawain in terms of the classes of words that may bear alliteration, to demonstrate patterns of alliterative usage and the contrasts between a-verses and b-verses; and Gilbert Youmans, who examines syntactic inversions in the alliterative Morte Arthure in order to rank the poet's metrical principles in order of strictness, with observance of the ax pattern in the b-verse scoring highest, followed by the avoidance of unstressed words at the line ending. All [End Page 347] these bear witness to a good deal of meticulous labor and are within the boundaries of the modern orthodoxies of rules and constraints; yet they have a quaint look about their methodology—Youmans almost made me nostalgic for my own unreadable M.A. thesis of fifty years ago by using some familiar examples of noun/adjective inversion such as “on a stede ryche.”

It is refreshing to find some essays that step outside the world of the alliterative long line, as Thomas Cable does in examining the alliterative lyrics from the Harley manuscript in terms of Duggan's theory of alliterative meter and asking whether a native or foreign model lies behind them. His conclusion that there is no single alliterative meter but various meters that use alliteration “as a cue to metrically stressed syllables, which in turn establish a rhythm” opens a door to the broader discussion of alliteration as a metrical phenomenon. Allan Gaylord...

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