Axiomatic Implications of a Non-Occurring Heavy Verse in Old English

Axiomatic Implications of a Non-Occurring Heavy Verse in Old English Mary E. Blockley Not the least of the many virtues of Rand Hutcheson's recent book on metre is its detailed and careful index of his scansions of a large number of Old English poems. With such a tool one can check for the intersections of patterns of metrical stress with word class, word boundary, and syllable boundary. Ideally, the patterns that do not occur will indicate previously unrecognised constraints on the structure of verse. But not all non-occurring patterns are created equal. To be significant, the non-occurring pattern needs to have some probability, to be something other than either an accidental gap in the data or the result of some coincidences of linguistic impossibility. Such a non-event can help confirm an old axiom or lead to a new one. Theoretically, and by theory I mean Sievers and the exponents and interpreters, such as Bliss, of Sievers' metrical system, there is nothing against 1 B. R. Hutcheson, Old English Poetic Metre (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995). Important subsequent work on the details of resolution and the problems it raises includes Geoffrey Russom, Beowulfand Old Germanic Metre, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 23 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), which considers the stricter constraints of Old Norse verse and concludes: 'In a strict sense, there are no rules for resolution, in that the syllables are matchedtometrical positions in accordance with the stress patterns ofthe language, as befits an indigenous metre' (pp. 97-117). 2 Mary E. Blockley a Sievers Type D in which thefirst,alliterating word is a monosyllable, the second word is disyllabic but resolves under stress to a monosyllable, and the third word consists of an unstressed prefix followed by a monosyllable. Such a verse has, after resolution, four syllables, arranged as lift, lift, drop, lift. It is therefore a heavy verse, in that it has three lifts, rather than the two lifts that characterise the more c o m m o n Types: A, B, and C. But the combination of word boundary and resolution apparently produces a permutation that seems forbidden by the metre, though not, as yet, by any of the metrists. This is the schema ofthis missing pattern: * / |UU|X / where | is a word boundary A few constructed examples of the forms this missing type of line might take in Old English appear below, divided into three sets. Thefirstset concerns the resources of vocabulary; the rest, in (2)-(4), concern various minimal metrical pairs. Thefirstset ofexamples is intended to show that the absence ofthis pattern is no accident of the poetic vocabulary, or of syntactic requirements. It is easy to construct a column for each of the three-word structures the verse requires using some of the highest-frequency words in the poem, as taken from the l i s t in the Bessinger concordance to Beowulf. The result is not a list, but a generator of a list of some possible but non-occurring lines, something like the buzz-word generator of complex noun phrases that some may remember from satires of American bureaucratese. Such a generator produces gems like, for example, eft sunu gefeng, or god mice/forgeaf or beam sunu genam or hord seie geweard or beam monig geseah or sweord micel genam or eft monig gelic or secg monig gefeng: 2 Jess B. Bessinger, A Concordance to Beowulf; edited by J. B. Besinger, Jr.; program by Philip H. Smith, Jr., The Cornell Concordances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Pre 1969), from which the Beowulf examples are drawn, and his later Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records programmed by Philip H. Smith, Jr.; with an index of compounds compiled by Michael W. Twomey, The Cornell Concordances (Ithaca- Cornell University Press, 1978). As Bessinger does, 1 use Klaeber's edition. Invaluable for i t s descriptive rigour remains John Collins Pope, The Rhythm of Beowulf 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). Axiomatic Implications ofa Non-Occurring Heavy Verse in Old English 3 osyllable e f t beam god helm sweord maeg hord secg resolvable (ofer) (hine) (fela) sunu (hyne) seie monig micel prefix+monosy]lable gelic gewat geweard...