Alliterative verse

After the fifteenth century, alliterative verse became fairly uncommon; possibly the last major poem in the tradition is William Dunbar's superb Tretis of the Tua Marriit Wemen and the Wedo (c. 1500). by the middle of the sixteenth century, the four-beat alliterative line had completely vanished, at least from the written tradition: the last poem using the form that has survived, Scotish Feilde, was written in or soon after 1515 for the circle of Thomas Stanley, 2nd Earl of Derby in commemoration of the Battle of Flodden.

Modern revival

Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), a scholar of Old and Middle English and of Old Norse, used alliterative verse extensively in both translations and original poetry. Most of his alliterative verse is in modern English, in a variety of styles, but he also composed Old English alliterative verses.

Examples of Tolkien's alliterative verses include:

• Those related to his Middle-earth mythos:
  • The Lay of the Children of Húrin (c. 1918-1925), an unfinished poetic version of the story of Túrin, going as far as Túrin's sojourn in Nargothrond. It exists in two versions, both incomplete; the first being 2276 lines long, the second containing only 745 alliterating lines, corresponding to the first 435 lines of the first version. Short parts of the Lay were remodelled into self-standing alliterative poems, Winter Comes to Nargothrond (27 lines) and an untitled poem on the waters of Sirion (26 lines). All are published in The Lays of Beleriand (1985).
  • The Flight of the Noldoli (146 lines), an unfinished poem (c. 1925?) describing Fëanor's speech urging the Noldor to return to Middle-earth, and another unfinished poem (37 lines) describing the aftermath of the Fall of Gondolin. Both are published in The Lays of Beleriand.
  • The Nameless Land (60 lines), a poem in the meter of Pearl, first published 1927; subsequent revisions (dropping one 12-line stanza) were given the title The Song of Ælfwine on Seeing the Uprising of Earendil. Three versions are published in The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987).
  • Numerous short verses in The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955): At Théoden's Death (3 lines), Burial Song of Théoden (5 lines), Call-to-Arms of the Rohirrim (3 lines), Éomer's Song (4 lines), Lament for Théoden (21 lines), The Long List of the Ents (17 lines), Malbeth the Seer's Words (12 lines), Song of the Mounds of Mundburg (27 lines), Théoden's Battle Cry (5 lines). Most of these are attributed to the Rohirrim, a nation in The Lord of the Rings whose language and nomenclature are portrayed as Old English, though all of these verses are in Modern English.
  • A verse version of the oath of Fëanor and his sons (16 lines), incorporated into the text of the Annals of Aman for the year 1495, published in Unfinished Tales (1980).

• Related to other legends and histories:
  • Völsungakviða en nýja (1360 lines) and Guðrúnarkviða en nýja (668 lines). These two Modern English narrative poems of the 1930s, in the Old Norse fornyrðislag stanza, are based largely on the Völsungasaga and Atlakviða, retelling the Norse legend of Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs. These poems are published together under the title The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009), edited by Christopher Tolkien.^[13]
  • King Sheave, a poem describing the arrival of Sheave (Sceaf), a postulated Germanic culture hero, in 154 lines. It was originally an incomplete portion of a longer projected poem written in the late 1930s, but was treated as a complete poem for its insertion into Tolkien's unfinished novel The Notion Club Papers, published in Sauron Defeated (1992). Nearly identical versions appear in The Lost Road and Other Writings and in Sauron Defeated. It was loosely integrated into Tolkien's writings on Númenor, but contains no material specific to Tolkien's mythos.
  • The Fall of Arthur, an unfinished poem on the betrayal of Mordred and Arthur's last battles, 954 lines, published 2013.
  • The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, 354 lines, an alliterative verse drama describing the aftermath of the Battle of Maldon, first published in 1953.

• Written in Gothic
  • Bagme Bloma ("Flower of the Trees"), an 18-line poem in Gothic in a trochaic metre, with irregular end-rhymes and irregular alliteration in each line. Published in Songs for the Philologists (1936).

• Written in Old English
  • Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo ("Two Recently Discovered Saxon Riddles"), two riddles written in Old English, describing an egg and a candle respectively. The first (of 10 lines) is written in normal alliterative metre, while the second (6 lines) includes internal rhyme in each line. First published in a poetry collection called A Northern Venture (1923).
  • An unfinished Old English poem based on the Atlakviða (68 lines in two separate sections), published in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun.
  • Four lines in Old English describing the repulse of the dragon Glómund (later renamed Glaurung) by the Elf-king Fingon, appearing in The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986).
  • Five lines in Old English attributed to the mariner Ælfwine, the fictional translator of various Elvish works. These appear in the story of The Lost Road, attached to a poem called The Song of Ælfwine, and as part of a preamble to the text called Quenta Silmarillion, all published in The Lost Road and Other Writings; and again in The Notion Club Papers.
  • Seven lines in Old English that are part of an Anglo-Saxon episode written for the story of The Lost Road; these are an alteration and expansion of ll. 36-38 and 44-46 of The Seafarer. A revision of the same, together with a Modern English translation in 7 verse lines, appears in The Notion Club Papers.
  • Six Old English lines translating the first four lines of King Sheave, appearing in The Notion Club Papers.
  • Four lines of Old English heroic verse, celebrating King Edward the Elder's victory over a Viking army at Archenfield; these are a parody of lines 1-4 of The Battle of Brunanburh. They appear in The Notion Club Papers.

• Translations:
  • A verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 2532 lines, of which 2027 are alliterative.
  • A verse translation of Pearl in 1212 lines of rhymed verse. Both were published posthumously in 1975.
  • A verse translation of some nine lines from the Old English Battle of Brunanburh, forming part of an essay on "Anglo-Saxon verse" and published together with The Fall of Arthur.
  • Remaining unpublished is an incomplete verse translation of Beowulf of about 600 lines.

Lewis

Alliterative verse is occasionally written by other modern authors. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) wrote a narrative poem of 742 lines called The Nameless Isle, published posthumously in Narrative Poems (1972). Lines 562-567:

Auden

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) also wrote a number of poems, including The Age of Anxiety, in a type of alliterative verse modified for modern English. The noun-laden style of the headlines makes the style of alliterative verse particularly apt for Auden's poem:

Wilbur

Richard Wilbur's Junk opens with the lines:

Other poets who have experimented with modern alliterative English verse include Ezra Pound in his version of "The Seafarer". Many translations of Beowulf use alliterative techniques. Among recent ones that of Seamus Heaney loosely follows the rules of modern alliterative verse while the translations of Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy follow those rules more closely.

Old Norse poetic forms

The inherited form of alliterative verse was modified somewhat in Old Norse poetry. In Old Norse, as a result of phonetic changes from the original common Germanic language, many unstressed syllables were lost. This lent Old Norse verse a characteristic terseness; the lifts tended to be crowded together at the expense of the weak syllables. In some lines, the weak syllables have been entirely suppressed. From the Hávamál:

Deyr fé   deyja frændr

Cattle die;   kinsmen die...

The various names of the Old Norse verse forms are given in the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. The Háttatal, or "list of verse forms", contains the names and characteristics of each of the fixed forms of Norse poetry.

Fornyrðislag

The Fyrby Runestone tells in fornyrðislag that two brothers were "the most rune-skilled brothers in Middle Earth."

A verse form close to that of Beowulf existed in runestones and in the Old Norse Eddas; in Norse, it was called fornyrðislag, which means "past-words-law" or "way of ancient words". The Norse poets tended to break up their verses into stanzas of from two to eight lines (or more), rather than writing continuous verse after the Old English model.^[14] The loss of unstressed syllables made these verses seem denser and more emphatic. The Norse poets, unlike the Old English poets, tended to make each line a complete syntactic unit, avoiding enjambment where a thought begun on one line continues through the following lines; only seldom do they begin a new sentence in the second half-line. This example is from the Waking of Angantyr:

Vaki, Angantýr!   vekr þik Hervǫr,

eingadóttir   ykkr Tófu!

Selðu ór haugi   hvassan mæki

þann's Svafrlama   slógu dvergar.

Awaken, Angantyr! It is Hervor who awakens you,

your only daughter by Tófa!

Yield up from your grave the mighty sword

that the dwarves forged for Svafrlami.

Fornyrðislag has two lifts per half line, with two or three (sometimes one) unstressed syllables. At least two lifts, usually three, alliterate, always including the main stave (the first lift of the second half-line). It had a variant form called málaháttr ("speech meter"), which adds an unstressed syllable to each half-line, making six to eight (sometimes up to ten) unstressed syllables per line.

Ljóðaháttr

Change in form came with the development of ljóðaháttr, which means "song" or "ballad metre", a stanzaic verse form that created four line stanzas. The odd numbered lines were almost standard lines of alliterative verse with four lifts and two or three alliterations, with cæsura; the even numbered lines had three lifts and two alliterations, and no cæsura. This example is from Freyr's lament in Skírnismál:

Lǫng es nótt,   lǫng es ǫnnur,

hvé mega ek þreyja þrjár?

Opt mér mánaðr   minni þótti

en sjá halfa hýnótt.

Long is one night, long is the next;

how can I bear three?

A month has often seemed less to me

than this half night of longing.

A number of variants occurred in ljóðaháttr, including galdraháttr or kviðuháttr ("incantation meter"), which adds a fifth short (three-lift) line to the end of the stanza; in this form, usually the fifth line echoes the fourth one.

Dróttkvætt

The copper Sigtuna box with a dróttkvætt verse written with the runic alphabet

The Karlevi Runestone contains a dróttkvætt poem in memory of a chieftain.

These verse forms were elaborated even more into the skaldic poetic form called the dróttkvætt, meaning "lordly verse", which added internal rhymes and other forms of assonance that go well beyond the requirements of Germanic alliterative verse and greatly resemble the Celtic forms (Irish and Welsh). The dróttkvætt stanza had eight lines, each having usually three lifts and almost invariably six syllables. Although other stress patterns appear, the verse is predominantly trochaic.

In the odd-numbered lines (equivalent to the a-verse of the traditional alliterative line):

• Two of the stressed syllables alliterate with one another.
• Two of the stressed syllables share partial rhyme of consonants (which was called skothending) with dissimilar vowels (e.g. hat and bet), not necessarily at the beginning of the word (e.g. touching and orchard).

In the even lines (equivalent to the b-verse of the traditional alliterative line):

• The first stressed syllable must alliterate with the alliterative stressed syllables of the previous line.
• Two of the stressed syllables rhyme (aðalhending, e.g. hat and cat), not necessarily at the end of the word (e.g. torching and orchard).
• The last two syllables form a trochee (there are a few specific forms which utilize a stressed word at line-end, such as in some docked forms).^[15]

The requirements of this verse form were so demanding that occasionally the text of the poems had to run parallel, with one thread of syntax running through the on-side of the half-lines, and another running through the off-side. According to the Fagrskinna collection of sagas, King Harald III of Norway uttered these lines of dróttkvætt at the Battle of Stamford Bridge; the internal assonances and the alliteration are emboldened:

Krjúpum vér fyr vápna,

(valteigs), brǫkun eigi,

(svá bauð Hildr), at hjaldri,

(haldorð), í bug skjaldar.

(Hátt bað mik), þar's mœttusk,

(menskorð bera forðum),

hlakkar íss ok hausar,

(hjalmstall í gný malma).

In battle, we do not creep behind a shield before the din of weapons [so said the goddess of hawk-land {a valkyrja} true of words.] She who wore the necklace bade me to bear my head high in battle, when the battle-ice [a gleaming sword] seeks to shatter skulls.

The bracketed words in the poem ("so said the goddess of hawk-land, true of words") are syntactically separate, but interspersed within the text of the rest of the verse. The elaborate kennings manifested here are also practically necessary in this complex and demanding form, as much to solve metrical difficulties as for the sake of vivid imagery. Intriguingly, the saga claims that Harald improvised these lines after he gave a lesser performance (in fornyrðislag); Harald judged that verse bad, and then offered this one in the more demanding form. While the exchange may be fictionalized, the scene illustrates the regard in which the form was held.

Most dróttkvætt poems that survive appear in one or another of the Norse Sagas; several of the sagas are biographies of skaldic poets.

Hrynhenda

Hrynhenda is a later development of dróttkvætt with eight syllables per line instead of six, with the similar rules of rhyme and alliteration, although each hrynhent-variant shows particular subtleties. It is first attested around 985 in the so-called Hafgerðingadrápa of which four lines survive (alliterants and rhymes bolded):

Mínar biðk at munka reyni

meinalausan farar beina;

heiðis haldi hárar foldar

hallar dróttinn of mér stalli.

I ask the tester of monks (God) for a safe journey; the lord of the palace of the high ground (God — here we have a kenning in four parts) keep the seat of the falcon (hand) over me.

The author was said to be a Christian from the Hebrides, who composed the poem asking God to keep him safe at sea. (Note: The third line is, in fact, over-alliterated. There should be exactly two alliterants in the odd-numbered lines.) The metre gained some popularity in courtly poetry, as the rhythm may sound more majestic than dróttkvætt.

We learn much about these in the Hattatal:^[16] Snorri gives for certain at least three different variant-forms of hryniandi. These long-syllabled lines are explained by Snorri as being extra-metrical in most cases: the "main" form never has alliteration or rhyme in the first 2 syllables of the odd-lines (i.e., rimes always coming at the fourth-syllable), and the even-lines never have rhyme on the fifth/sixth syllables (i.e.: they cannot harbor rime in these places because they extra-metrical), the following couplet shows the paradigm:

Tiggi snýr á ógnar áru

(Undgagl veit þat) sóknar hagli.

[Note the juxtaposition of alliteration and rhyme of the even-line]

Then, the variant-forms show unsurprising dróttkvætt patterns overall; the main difference being that the first trochee of the odd-lines are technically not reckoned as extrametrical since they harbor alliteration, but the even-lines' extra-metrical feature is more or less as the same. The 2nd form is the "troll-hryniandi": in the odd-lines the alliteration is moved to the first metrical position (no longer "extra-metrical") while the rhyme remains the same (Snorri seems to imply that frumhending, which is placing a rhyme on the first syllable of any line, is preferably avoided in all these forms: the rhymes are always preferred as oddhending, "middle-of-the-line rhymes") — in the even-lines the rhyme and alliteration are not juxtaposed, and this is a key feature of its distinction (the significant features only are marked in bold below):

Stála kendi steykvilundum

Styriar valdi raudu falda....

The next form, which Snorri calls "ordinary/standard hrynhenda", is almost like a "combination" of the previous — alliteration always on the first metrical-position, and the rimes in the odd-lines juxtaposed (all features in bold in this example):

Vafdi lítt er virdum mætti

Vígrækiandi fram at sækia.'

There is one more form which is a bit different though seemed to be counted among the previous group by Snorri, called draughent. The syllable-count changes to seven (and, whether relevant to us or not, the second-syllable seems to be counted as the extra-metrical):

Vápna hríd velta nádi

Vægdarlaus feigum hausi.

Hilmir lét höggum mæta

Herda klett bana verdant.

As one can see, there is very often clashing stress in the middle of the line (Vápna hríd velta....//..Vægdarlaus feigum...., etc.), and oddhending seems preferred (as well as keeping alliterative and rhyming syllables separated, which likely has to do with the syllabic-makeup of the line).

Post-medieval Scandinavian alliterative verse

Alliterative poetry is still practiced in Iceland in an unbroken tradition since the settlement, most commonly in the form of rímur.^[17]

German and Saxon forms

The Old High German and Old Saxon corpus of Stabreim or alliterative verse is small. Fewer than 200 Old High German lines survive, in four works: the Hildebrandslied, Muspilli, the Merseburg Charms and the Wessobrunn Prayer. All four are preserved in forms that are clearly to some extent corrupt, suggesting that the scribes may themselves not have been entirely familiar with the poetic tradition. The two Old Saxon alliterative poems, the fragmentary Heliand (nearly 6000 lines) and the even more fragmentary Genesis (337 lines in 3 unconnected fragments) are both Christian poems, created as written works of Biblical content based on Latin sources, and not derived from oral tradition.

However, both German traditions show one common feature which is much less common elsewhere: a proliferation of unaccented syllables. Generally these are parts of speech which would naturally be unstressed - pronouns, prepositions, articles, modal auxiliaries - but in the Old Saxon works there are also adjectives and lexical verbs. The unaccented syllables typically occur before the first stress in the half-line, and most often in the b-verse.

The Hildebrandslied, lines 4–5:

Garutun se iro guðhamun, gurtun sih iro suert ana,
helidos, ubar hringa, do sie to dero hiltiu ritun.

They prepared their fighting outfits, girded their swords on,
the heroes, over ringmail when they to that fight rode.

The Heliand, line 3062:

Sâlig bist thu Sîmon, quað he, sunu Ionases; ni mahtes thu that selbo gehuggean

Blessed are you Simon, he said, son of Jonah; for you did not see that yourself (Matthew 16, 17)

This leads to a less dense style, no doubt closer to everyday language, which has been interpreted both as a sign of decadent technique from ill-tutored poets and as an artistic innovation giving scope for additional poetic effects. Either way, it signifies a break with the strict Sievers typology.

In more recent times, Richard Wagner sought to evoke old German models and what he considered a more natural and less over-civilised style by writing his Ring poems in Stabreim.

Notes

Bibliography

• Bostock, J.K., revised by K.C.King & D.R.McLintock (1976). "Appendix on Old Saxon and Old High German Metre". A Handbook on Old High German Literature. Oxford University Press. 
• Cable, Thomas (1991). The English Alliterative Tradition. University of Pennsylvania Press. 
• Fulk, Robert D. (1992). A History of Old English Meter. University of Pennsylvania Press. 
• Godden, Malcolm R. (1992). "Literary Language". In Hogg, Richard M. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 490–535. 
• Russom, Geoffrey (1998). Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre. Cambridge University Press. 
• Sievers, Eduard (1893). Altgermanische Metrik. Niemeyer. 
• Tolkien, J.R.R. (1983) [1940].