Old English Metre

Old English Metre offers an essential framework for the critical analysis of metrical structures and interpretations in Old English literature. Jun Terasawa's comprehensive introductory text covers the basics of Old English metre and reviews the current research in the field, emphasizing the interaction between Old English metre and components such as word-formation, word-choice, and grammar. He also covers the metre-related problems of dating, authorship, and the distinction between prose and verse. Each chapter includes exercises and suggestions for further reading. Appendices provide possible answers to the exercises, tips for scanning half-lines, and brief definitions of metrical terms used. Examples in Old English are provided with literal modern English translations, with glosses added in the first three chapters to help beginners. The result is a comprehensive guide that makes important text-critical skills much more readily available to Old English specialists and beginners alike.

A New Theory of Old English Meter sets out a simple new theory of Old English meter that is based on a bare minimum of initial assumptions and metrical principles, and supported by rigorous arguments and by evidence from a computer-assisted analysis of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. The new theory is revolutionary in concluding that alliteration rather than stress is the most important feature of the meter, and in rejecting the traditional assumptions of two lifts and four metrical positions per verse. It provides improved solutions for many of the perennial problems of Old English meter, makes possible an elegant logical explanation for the kinds of verses that occur and those which do not occur, and prepares the way for the most radical conclusion of the book: that Old English meter is not based on rhythm.

Old English Metre offers an essential framework for the critical analysis of metrical structures and interpretations in Old English literature. Jun Terasawa's comprehensive introductory text covers the basics of Old English metre and reviews the current research in the field, emphasizing the interaction between Old English metre and components such as word-formation, word-choice, and grammar. He also covers the metre-related problems of dating, authorship, and the distinction between prose and verse. Each chapter includes exercises and suggestions for further reading. Appendices provide possible answers to the exercises, tips for scanning half-lines, and brief definitions of metrical terms used. Examples in Old English are provided with literal modern English translations, with glosses added in the first three chapters to help beginners. The result is a comprehensive guide that makes important text-critical skills much more readily available to Old English specialists and beginners alike.

Thomas A. Bredehoft's Early English Metre is a reassessment of the metrical rules for English poetry from Beowulf to Layamon. Bredehoft offers a new account of many of the most puzzling features of Old English poetry – anacrusis, alliteration patterns, rhyme, and hypermetric verses – and further offers a clear account of late Old English verse as it descended from the classical verse as observed in Beowulf. He makes the surprising and controversial discovery that Ælfric’s alliterative works are formally indistinguishable from late verse. Discussing the early Middle English verse-forms of Layamon's Brut, Bredehoft not only demonstrates that they can be understood as developing from late Old English, but that Layamon seems to have known, and quoted from, the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Early English Metre presents a new perspective on early English verse and a new perspective on much of early English literary history. It is an essential addition to the literature on Old and Middle English and will be widely discussed amongst scholars in the field.

Thomas A. Bredehoft's Early English Metre is a reassessment of the metrical rules for English poetry from Beowulf to Layamon. Bredehoft offers a new account of many of the most puzzling features of Old English poetry - anacrusis, alliteration patterns, rhyme, and hypermetric verses - and further offers a clear account of late Old English verse as it descended from the classical verse as observed in Beowulf. He makes the surprising and controversial discovery that Ælfric's alliterative works are formally indistinguishable from late verse. Discussing the early Middle English verse-forms of Layamon's Brut, Bredehoft not only demonstrates that they can be understood as developing from late Old English, but that Layamon seems to have known, and quoted from, the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Early English Metre presents a new perspective on early English verse and a new perspective on much of early English literary history. It is an essential addition to the literature on Old and Middle English and will be widely discussed amongst scholars in the field.

In A History of Old English Meter, R. D. Fulk offers a wide-ranging reference on Anglo-Saxon meter. Fulk examines the evidence for chronological and regional variation in the meter of Old English verse, studying such linguistic variables as the treatment of West Germanic parasite vowels, contracted vowels, and short syllables under secondary and tertiary stress, as well as a variety of supposed dialect features. Fulk's study of such variables points the way to a revised understanding of the role of syllable length in the construction of early Germanic meters and furnishes criteria for distinguishing dialectal from poetic features in the language of the major Old English poetic codices. On this basis, it is possible to draw conclusions about the probable dialect origins of much verse, to delineate the characteristics of at least four discrete periods in the development of Old English meter, and with some probability to assign to them many of the longer poems, such as Genesis A, Beowulf, and the works of Cynewulf. A History of Old English Meter will be of interest to scholars of Anglo-Saxon, historians of the English language, Germanic philologists, and historical linguists.

This 'prosodical' syntax is intended to replace the famous syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn through its greater accuracy and wider range of application.