Early English Metre by Thomas A. Bredehoft (review)

REVIEWS 195 One is left with a wonderful resource for those already interested in Boswell’s work, as well as those entirely unfamiliar with it. DANA POLANICHKA, History, UCLA Thomas A. Bredehoft, Early English Metre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005) 183 pp. Students of Old English poetry are generally introduced to the analysis of Old English verse through the five verse types formulated by Eduard Sievers in the 1880, and modified by A. J. Bliss in the 1950s and 60s. Whilst the SieversBliss system has proved remarkable in its ability to describe the majority of Old English metrical patterns, it does so by means of often arbitrary rules which tell us little about the way poets actually composed verse or its underlying logic. Since the 1960s a number of metrical studies have attempted to address the deficiencies of the Sievers-Bliss system, but—in part because the scholarship has become increasingly inaccessible to non-specialists—no generally accepted alternative has emerged.1 Thomas Bredehoft’s Early English Metre ambitiously sets out to present such an accessible alternative while demonstrating to nonspecialists that there is a great deal at stake in how we choose to read Old English meter. The book begins with a useful introduction to Sieversian formulism and its faults. Bredehoft highlights the tendency the Sievers-Bliss model to encourage scholars to dismiss as corrupt poems—especially late ones—which do not conform to its principles. This has prevented readers from appreciating the range of poetic effects these poems achieve. Bredehoft argues that a more flexible formalism, one which allows us to examine metrical usage in evolutionary terms, can open up previously unobserved poetic effects and help to explain the relationship between classical Old English verse and the alliterative verse of the early Middle English period. Bredehoft’s scansion is based on Geoffrey Russom’s view that Old English metrical feet are ultimately modeled on word patterns, with primary, secondary, and unstressed syllables (abbreviated S, s, and x). Each type of foot resembles a different semantic category of word: x-feet for function words, prefixes, and particles; s-feet for verbs and their associated particles, and S-feet for high content words such as nouns and adjectives. The maximum number of syllables possible in a foot corresponds to the maximum number of syllables possible in Old English words of each type. So, for instance, x-feet may have one, two, or three syllables, corresponding to words and particles such as ge- (x), oððe (xx), and hwæþere (xxx). Similarly, s-feet are formed like sceal (s), setton (sx), gesægd (xs), gesette (xsx), forðon sceall (xxs), and ne gefeah he (xxsx). S-feet are modeled on words like god (S), sweorde (Sx), and fultuma (Sxx). Secondary stresses can occur in S-feet in proper names and compound words, e.g., Beowulf, seleweard (Ss). Bredehoft’s major innovation is the s-foot, which is marked as secondary in terms of alliteration. This allows him to explain the apparently variable stress of finite verbs in Sieversian formalism but also re1 Influential alternatives to the Sievers-Bliss system are John C. Pope The Rhythm of Beowulf (rev. ed. New Haven 1966); Thomas Cable, The Meter and Melody of Beowulf (Urbana 1974); and Geoffrey Russom, Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory (Cambridge 1987). REVIEWS 196 strict the ad hoc use of anacrusis to explain the presence of extra unstressed syllables before the beginning of the first foot of some verses. There are relatively flexible foot combination rules for how the three foot types can be combined into verses (half-lines). Verse combination rules further exclude certain combinations in the b-line and make alliteration the link between the first Spositions of the two verses in a line. The rules and exceptions are not quite as simple to follow as non-specialists would like, but Bredehoft shifts most of the technical issues to the notes, which total some fifty pages, in order to keep the discussion relatively simple. In any event, many of the complexities are observations about metrical patterns. For the most part, it is possible to scan verse successfully with knowledge of the three-foot patterns and the rules...