Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius (review)

Eduard Sievers's study of Old English meter had two distinct components. One sorted verses with acceptable linguistic patterns into categories called verse types. This practical, taxonomic component has been widely used in textual criticism as a guide to the metrical facts. The other component was more theoretical. It attempted to identify general principles that distinguished acceptable verses from unacceptable ones. Sievers did not claim to have a proper theory. What he offered was a rule of thumb with exceptions that he could not explain. Most (but not all) of the acceptable verse types seemed to have four metrical positions: two strong positions, called "lifts," and two weak positions, called "dips." A strong position contained a stressed syllable or an equivalent "resolvable" sequence of a short stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. A weak position contained one or more syllables with weak stress or no stress.

In Reconstructing Alliterative Verse, Ian Cornelius views the English alliterative tradition from the perspective of a 2008 doctoral thesis by Nikolay Yakovlev. Yakovlev's main concern was to show that differences between Old and Middle English alliterative poetry were the expected results of language change. He offered a comprehensive analysis of metrical change in formulaic traditions, drawing on research by Eastern European linguists. He also applied statistical methods to good effect, showing that Layman's verses had characteristics we would expect to find in an evolving meter of the early Middle English period. Among Yakovlev's contributions to late Middle English metrics was his "schwa rule," a requirement that certain monosyllabic dips should be filled by the kinds of weak, centralized vowels found in inflectional syllables.

In historical metrics, as R. D. Fulk has observed, one theory sometimes serves as well as another, provided that there is good agreement about the metrical facts. Yakovlev accepts Fulk's dating methodology (thesis, p. 3), and his results can be understood from more than one theoretical perspective. To keep his project within manageable limits, Yakovlev committed to a single theory, his own modified version of Sievers's four-position theory.

Cornelius's original contributions are concentrated within the Middle English period, a very active site of metrical research (Chapters 3 through 5 and Epilogue). His special concern is with "plain style" poems, which are metrically less strict than "high style" poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Particularly interesting is a detailed comparison of Piers Plowman (B version) with Pierce the Plowman's Creed. Metrical differences between these texts are attributed to a gradual process of metrical change that might have continued indefinitely, were it not for active hostility from the literary establishment. Comments by Early Modern observers are brought forward to illustrate this hostility. Cornelius's comparative observations can be understood from more than one theoretical perspective and should provoke discussion within this flourishing research area.

Cornelius focuses on theoretical topics in his Chapters 1 and 2. He begins with a survey of opinions about alliterative poetry from the classical rhetoricians to Sievers, providing an informative history of usage for terms like stress, syllable length, and alliteration. Discussion of Sievers highlights his acceptance of the "accentual paradigm," a basic assumption that the metrically significant feature of an Old English verse is its stress contour. Cornelius has three objections to the accentual paradigm (pp. 54–56): (1) In accentual-syllabic meters, stressed syllables are normally separated by unstressed syllables, whereas in Old English poetry, stresses routinely clash. (2) Verse patterns cannot be defined in terms of stress alone because syllable length is also metrically significant. (3) In types A and D, verse-initial prefixes and negative particles must be excluded from the metrical pattern to make normal scansion possible. Since every syllable of the verse is part of its stress contour, the extrametrical status of these constituents seems inexplicable within the accentual paradigm. Cornelius also highlights a metrical fact that has...