The Alliterative Verse of The Fall of Arthur

1.0. Introduction

In a letter to Tolkien, written on December 9, 1934, R. W. Chambers declared himself convinced that “the Beowulf meter can be used in modern English” (FA 10). The claim is a bold one, though not without foundation since it was made upon reading Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur (now recently published), a long alliterative poem that adapts the meter of Old English verse to the modern English language. So impressed was Chambers that he exhorted Tolkien to complete the work. Unfortunately, despite the praise of Chambers and the success that Tolkien achieved in adapting alliterative meter to the modern language, the work remained unfinished. Nevertheless, Tolkien’s work represents a milestone in a twentieth-century revival of Old English meter that was later built on by poets such as Seamus Heaney and W. H. Auden. To evaluate Tolkien’s success in this endeavor requires a thorough metrical analysis of his work and an understanding of the tradition from which it emerged. Despite being neither the only nor the longest composition by Tolkien in Old English meter, The Fall of Arthur is the ideal subject for such an analysis as, through its Arthurian subject matter, it constitutes a continuation of a medieval alliterative tradition.

Alliterative Old English verse finds its roots in a common Germanic oral tradition existing early in the migration period. With the subsequent divergence of Germanic peoples, this tradition diverged also, resulting in the related, though distinct, alliterative meters belonging to Old Norse, Old English, and Continental Germanic languages. Perhaps the oldest written example of specifically Old English verse is to be found in the engravings on the Franks Casket, a small chest of whalebone dating to the early seventh century. Most, however, of the Old English verse surviving today is preserved in four manuscripts, all of which were made in the 10th century. The dates of composition of these poems are, however, far more broadly spread than the age of their manuscripts might suggest, and there survive early preclassical poems such as Widsith, classical poems of which Beowulf is by far the best known, and late poems such as Durham, with each period displaying its own characteristic features within the larger field of Old English meter.¹ Despite variations in the meter between these periods, the most distinguishing features remained constant, and it can be generally said of Old English verse that it displays a long line that is divided into two half-lines by a strong caesura and that these two halves are linked to each other by the alliteration of stressed elements.

This is only a very simplistic description of the meter, and theories regarding the correct way to scan Old English verse have been many and various; but the most generally accepted method of scanning Old English meter remains that of Eduard Sievers. Sievers proposed that all half-lines could be described as one of five verse types, which are as follows, with Old English examples from Beowulf and modern English examples by Tolkien from “On Translating Beowulf ” (M&C 62). All stress marks are my own:

(As can be seen in the preceding example, a dip may consist of more than one unstressed syllable.)

The first lift of each half-line is generally obliged to participate in alliteration, and the second lift of the a-verse may participate while the second lift of the b-verse may not.

Tolkien, then, favored the scansion of Old English verse according to Sievers’s five types, as can be seen from the preceding quoted examples, and consequently applied this system to his creation of modern English verse in the alliterative meter. It therefore seems logical also to apply the system to our analysis of The Fall of Arthur.

Any detailed study of the meter of The Fall of Arthur requires first an awareness of post-Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in order to place the work in context. There have been two major periods of alliterative revival in the past millennium. The first of these is the postconquest revival, and the second is...