Rhyme and the Alliterative Standard in LaƷamon's Brut

Rhyme and the Alliterative Standard in La3amon's Brut S. K. Brehe Early in the twentieth century W. P. Ker wrote, 'The verse of Layamon's Brut is unsteady, never to be trusted, changing its pace without warning in a most uncomfortable way' He elaborated: 'Layamon . . . has no proper verse at his command. He knows the old English alliterative verse, but only in the corrupt variety which is found in some ofthe later Anglo-Saxon pieces, with an increasing taste for rhyme; Layamon, of course, had also in his head the rhymes of the French couplets which he was translating; and the result is a most disagreeable and discordant measure.' Similarly, Winfred Lehmann found in the lines of the Brut evidence of the poet's 'struggle' with two different metres, alliterating and rhyming. This essay takes issue with such negative assessments of the Brut and attempts to identify some of the stylistic features unique to that work. La3amon's Brut is one ofa few surviving early Middle English works composed in a 'loose' alliterative metre (Turville-Petre's term), and the only known extended narrative I W. P. Ker, English Literature: Medieval (New York: Henry Holt, 1912), p. 59 2 Winfred Lehmann, The Development of Germanic Verse Form (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1956), p. 53. 3 Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Brewer, 1977 p. 11. 12 S. K. Brehe composed in this metre. (For extended narrative, English poets of the era seem to have preferred rhyming metres, like those found in King Horn, Havelok the Dane, the Owl and the Nightingale, and others.) This loose alliterative metre i s comparable to earlier and later English alliterative metres but different in some important respects: like the other metres, the line of the loose metre consists of two half-lines, separated by a caesura. Each half-line m a y contain from four to twelve syllables, and the two half-lines are typically linked by alliteration. In contrast to the better-known alliterative metres of Old English and later Middle English, in the loose metre alliteration may occur in any conceivable pattern, even with alliteration on the last stressed syllable in a line; alliteration on the first stressed syllable of the second half-line is not required. Alliterative patterning is particularly various because each half-line m a y contain from two to four stressed syllables. Lines linked by just two alliterating syllables occur most often. R h y m e between the last word of each half-line sometimes occurs, either supplementing alliteration as a linking device or replacing it, and many rhymes are approximate, not exact. N o one has discerned an overall pattern to the use 4 of rhyme and alliteration in any of the works in this metre. So, though typically classified as an alliterative poem, the Brut uses a good deal of rhyme, and noticeably more than in other works in the same metre. But the published scholarship presents us with a bewildering variety of accounts describing how frequently La3amon used rhyme in the Brut. Oakden, examining about 1,900 lines, found alliterating lines in the majority overall, with rhyme in about 45 per cent of his sample; '...a very high percentage', he said. Tatlock, examining passages totalling one thousand lines 'taken at random from all through', found alliteration to be dominant throughout the poem, though he found less alliteration and more rhyme in the latter half of the work. Angus Mcintosh, examining rhyme in thefirst5,000 lines of the Brut, found continual increase in rhyme, with rhyme used in as many as 50 per cent 4 See Turville-Petre, Allit. Revival, pp. 11-13 for further details on this metre. 5 J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English, 2 vols (Manchester- Manche University Press, 1930, 1935) vol. i, 142-45. 6 J. S. P. Tatlock, 'Layamon's Poetic Style and its Relations', in The Manly Anniversa Studies in Language and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1923) pp. 3-11. Rhyme and the Alliterative Standard in Lajamon 's Brut 13 of the lines in the last portion of his sample. Jakob Schipper, examining an unspecified number of lines, found alliterative lines to...