Alliterative verse - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Meter (poetry)

In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...

, alliterative verse is a form of verse

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

that uses alliteration

Alliteration

In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...

as the principal structuring device to unify lines of poetry, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme

Rhyme

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes.-Etymology:...

. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of many Germanic languages. The Old English

Old English language

Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...

epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

Beowulf
Beowulf
Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...

, as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German

Old High German

The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...

Muspilli
Muspilli
Muspilli is one of but two surviving pieces of Old High German epic poetry , dating to around 870. One large fragment of the text has survived in the margins and empty pages of a codex marked as the possession of Louis the German and now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek . The beginning and end of...

, the Old Saxon

Old Saxon

Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken on the north-west coast of Germany and in the Netherlands by Saxon peoples...

Heliand
Heliand
The Heliand is an epic poem in Old Saxon, written in the first half of the 9th century. The title means saviour in Old Saxon , and the poem is a Biblical paraphrase that recounts the life of Jesus in the alliterative verse style of a Germanic saga...

, and the Old Norse Poetic Edda
Poetic Edda
The Poetic Edda is a collection of Old Norse poems primarily preserved in the Icelandic mediaeval manuscript Codex Regius. Along with Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda is the most important extant source on Norse mythology and Germanic heroic legends, and from the early 19th century...

all use alliterative verse.

Alliterative verse can be found in many other languages as well, although rarely with the systematic rigor of Germanic forms. The Finnish

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

Kalevala
Kalevala
The Kalevala is a 19th century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian oral folklore and mythology.It is regarded as the national epic of Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature...

and the Estonia

Estonia

Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...

n Kalevipoeg
Kalevipoeg
Kalevipoeg is an epic poem by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald held to be the Estonian national epic.- Origins : There existed an oral tradition within Ancient Estonia of legends explaining the origin of the world...

both use alliterative forms derived from folk tradition. Traditional Turkic

Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...

verse, for example that of the Uyghur

Uyghur language

Uyghur , formerly known as Eastern Turk, is a Turkic language with 8 to 11 million speakers, spoken primarily by the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Western China. Significant communities of Uyghur-speakers are located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and various other...

, is also alliterative.

Common Germanic origins and features

The poetic forms found in the various Germanic languages are not identical, but there is sufficient similarity to make it clear that they are closely related traditions, stemming from a common Germanic source. Our knowledge about that common tradition, however, is based almost entirely on inference from surviving poetry.

One statement we have about the nature of alliterative verse from a practicing alliterative poet is that of Snorri Sturluson

Snorri Sturluson

Snorri Sturluson was an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician. He was twice elected lawspeaker at the Icelandic parliament, the Althing...

in the Prose Edda

Prose Edda

The Prose Edda, also known as the Younger Edda, Snorri's Edda or simply Edda, is an Icelandic collection of four sections interspersed with excerpts from earlier skaldic and Eddic poetry containing tales from Nordic mythology...

. He describes metrical patterns and poetic devices used by skald

Skald

The skald was a member of a group of poets, whose courtly poetry is associated with the courts of Scandinavian and Icelandic leaders during the Viking Age, who composed and performed renditions of aspects of what we now characterise as Old Norse poetry .The most prevalent metre of skaldic poetry is...

ic poets around the year 1200. Snorri's description has served as the starting point for scholars to reconstruct alliterative meters beyond those of Old Norse. There have been many different metrical theories proposed, all of them attended with controversy. Looked at broadly, however, certain basic features are common from the earliest to the latest poetry.

Alliterative verse has been found in some of the earliest monuments of Germanic literature. The Golden horns of Gallehus

Golden horns of Gallehus

The Golden Horns of Gallehus were two horns made of sheet gold, discovered in Gallehus, north of Møgeltønder in South Jutland, Denmark.The horns date to the early 5th century, i.e. the beginning of the Germanic Iron Age....

, discovered in Denmark

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

and likely dating to the fourth century, bears this Runic inscription in Proto-Norse:

x / x x x / x x / x / x x
ek hlewagastir holtijar || horna tawidô
(I, Hlewagastir [son?] of Holt, made the horn.)

This inscription contains four strongly stressed syllables, the first three of which alliterate on /x/, essentially the same pattern found in much later verse.

Originally all alliterative poetry was composed and transmitted orally, and much has been lost through time since it went unrecorded. The degree to which writing may have altered this oral art form remains much in dispute. Nevertheless, there is a broad consensus among scholars that the written verse retains many (and some would argue almost all) of the features of the spoken language.

Alliteration fits naturally with the prosodic

Prosody (linguistics)

In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...

patterns of Germanic languages. Alliteration essentially involves matching the left edges of stressed syllables. Early Germanic languages share a left-prominent prosodic pattern. In other words, stress falls on the root syllable of a word. This is normally the initial syllable, except where the root is preceded by an unstressed prefix (as in past participles, for example).

The core metrical features of traditional Germanic alliterative verse are as follows:

A long-line is divided into two half-lines. Half-lines are also known as verses or hemistich
Hemistich
A hemistich is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Classical poetry, the hemistich is generally confined to drama. In Greek tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in...

s; the first is called the a-verse (or on-verse), the second the b-verse (or off-verse).
A heavy pause, or cæsura
Caesura
thumb|100px|An example of a caesura in modern western music notation.In meter, a caesura is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition. The plural form of caesura is caesuras or caesurae...

, separates the verses.
Each verse usually has two strongly stressed syllables, or "lifts".
The first lift in the b-verse nearly always alliterated
Alliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...

with either or both lifts in the a-verse.
The second lift in the b-verse does not alliterate with the first lifts.

The patterns of unstressed syllables vary significantly in the alliterative traditions of different Germanic languages. The rules for these patterns remain controversial and imperfectly understood.

The need to find an appropriate alliterating word gave certain other distinctive features to alliterative verse as well. Alliterative poets drew on a specialized vocabulary of poetic synonyms rarely used in prose texts and used standard images and metaphor

Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

s called kenning
Kenning
A kenning is a type of literary trope, specifically circumlocution, in the form of a compound that employs figurative language in place of a more concrete single-word noun. Kennings are strongly associated with Old Norse and later Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon poetry...

s.

Old English poetic forms

Old English poetry appears to be based upon one system of verse construction, a system which remained remarkably consistent for centuries, although some patterns of classical Old English verse begin to break down at the end of the Old English period.

The most widely used system of classification is based on that developed by Eduard Sievers

Eduard Sievers

Eduard Sievers was a philologist of the classical and Germanic languages. Sievers was one of the Junggrammatiker of the so-called "Leipzig School"...

. Sievers' system

Sievers' Theory of Anglo-Saxon Meter

Eduard Sievers developed a theory of the meter of Anglo-Saxon Alliterative verse. This most likely would have been the theory of Anglo-Saxon prosody that Ezra Pound would have been familiar with....

is a method of categorization rather than a full theory of meter. It does not, in other words, purport to describe the system the scop
Scop
A ' was an Old English poet, the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of the Old Norse .As far as we can tell from what has been preserved, the art of the scop was directed mostly towards epic poetry; the surviving verse in Old English consists of the epic Beowulf, religious verse in epic formats such as the...

s actually used to compose their verse, nor does it explain why certain patterns are favored or avoided. Sievers divided verses into five basic types, labeled A-E. The system is founded upon accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation.

Accent

A line of poetry in Old English consists of two half-lines or verses, distichs, with a pause or caesura
Caesura
thumb|100px|An example of a caesura in modern western music notation.In meter, a caesura is a complete pause in a line of poetry or in a musical composition. The plural form of caesura is caesuras or caesurae...

in the middle of the line. Each half-line has two accented syllables. The following example from the poem The Battle of Maldon
The Battle of Maldon
The Battle of Maldon is the name given to an Old English poem of uncertain date celebrating the real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Viking invasion...

, spoken by the warrior Beorhtwold, shows this:

Hige sceal þe heardra, || heorte þe cēnre,
mōd sceal þe māre, || swā ūre mægen lȳtlað

("Will must be the harder, courage the bolder,
spirit must be the more, as our might lessens.")

Alliteration

Alliteration is the principal binding agent of Old English poetry. Two syllables alliterate when they begin with the same sound; all vowels alliterate together, but the consonant clusters st-, sp- and sc- are treated as separate sounds (so st- does not alliterate with s- or sp-). On the other hand, in Old English unpalatized c alliterated with palatized c , and unpalatized g likewise alliterated with palatized g . (This is because the poetic form was inherited from a time before /k/ and /ɡ/ had split into palatized and unpalatized variants.) (English transliteration is in , the IPA in /slashes/.)

The first stressed syllable of the off-verse, or second half-line, usually alliterates with one or both of the stressed syllables of the on-verse, or first half-line. The second stressed syllable of the off-verse does not usually alliterate with the others.

Revivals

Just as rhyme was seen in some Anglo-Saxon poems (e.g. The Rhyming Poem
The Rhyming Poem
The Rhyming Poem, also written as The Riming Poem, is a poem of 87 lines found in the Exeter Book, a tenth-century collection of Old English poetry. It is remarkable for being no later than the 10th century, in Old English, and written in rhyming couplets...

, and, to some degree, The Proverbs of Alfred
The Proverbs of Alfred
The Proverbs of Alfred is a collection of early Middle English sayings ascribed to King Alfred the Great , said to have been uttered at an assembly in Seaford, East Sussex.-Transmission:...

), the use of alliterative verse continued into Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....

. Layamon

Layamon

Layamon or Laghamon (ˈlaɣamon; in American English often modernised as ; ), occasionally written Lawman, was a poet of the early 13th century and author of the Brut, a notable English poem of the 12th century that was the first English language work to discuss the legends of Arthur and the...

's Brut, written in about 1215, uses a loose alliterative scheme. The Pearl Poet

Pearl Poet

The "Pearl Poet", or the "Gawain Poet", is the name given to the author of Pearl, an alliterative poem written in 14th-century Middle English. Its author appears also to have written the poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness; some scholars suggest the author may also have...

uses one of the most sophisticated alliterative schemes extant in Pearl
Pearl (poem)
Pearl is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the "Pearl poet" or "Gawain poet", is generally assumed, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness or...

, Cleanness
Cleanness
Cleanness is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the Pearl poet or Gawain poet, also appears, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Patience, and may have...

, "Patience

Patience

Patience is the state of endurance under difficult circumstances, which can mean persevering in the face of delay or provocation without acting on annoyance/anger in a negative way; or exhibiting forbearance when under strain, especially when faced with longer-term difficulties. Patience is the...

," and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his...

. Even later, William Langland

William Langland

William Langland is the conjectured author of the 14th-century English dream-vision Piers Plowman.- Life :The attribution of Piers to Langland rests principally on the evidence of a manuscript held at Trinity College, Dublin...

's Piers Plowman
Piers Plowman
Piers Plowman or Visio Willelmi de Petro Plowman is the title of a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in unrhymed alliterative verse divided into sections called "passus"...

is a major work in English that is written in alliterative verse; it was written between 1360 and 1399. Though a thousand years have passed between this work and the Golden Horn of Gallehus, the poetic form remains much the same:

A feir feld full of folk || fond I þer bitwene,
Of alle maner of men, || þe mene and þe riche,
Worchinge and wandringe || as þe world askeþ.

In modern spelling:

A fair field full of folk || found I there between,
Of all manner of men || the mean and the rich,
Working and wandering || as the world asketh.

In modern translation:

Among them I found a fair field full of people
All manner of men, the poor and the rich
Working and wandering as the world requires.

Alliteration was sometimes used together with rhyme in Middle English work, as in Pearl and in the densely structured poem The Three Dead Kings
The Three Dead Kings
The Three Dead Kings, also known by its Latin title De Tribus Regibus Mortuis or as The Three Living and the Three Dead, is a 15th-century Middle English poem. It is found in the manuscript MS. Douce 302, and its authorship is sometimes attributed to a Shropshire priest, John Audelay...

. In general, Middle English poets were somewhat loose about the number of stresses; in Sir Gawain, for instance, there are many lines with additional alliterating stresses (e.g. l.2, "the borgh brittened and brent to brondez and askez"), and the medial pause is not always strictly maintained.

After the fifteenth century, alliterative verse became fairly uncommon, although some alliterative poems, such as Pierce the Ploughman's Crede

Pierce the Ploughman's Crede

"Pierce the Ploughman's Crede" is a medieval alliterative poem of 855 lines, savagely lampooning the four orders of friars.-Textual History:Surviving in two complete forteenth-century manuscripts and two early printed editions, the Crede can be dated on internal evidence to the short period between...

(ca. 1400) and William Dunbar

William Dunbar

William Dunbar was a Scottish poet. He was probably a native of East Lothian, as assumed from a satirical reference in the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie , where, too, it is hinted that he was a member of the noble house of Dunbar....

's superb Tretis of the Tua Marriit Wemen and the Wedo (ca. 1500) were written in the form in the 15th century. However, 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, Scottish Ffielde, was written in or soon after 1515 for the circle of Thomas Stanley, 2nd Earl of Derby

Thomas Stanley, 2nd Earl of Derby

Thomas Stanley, 2nd Earl of Derby was an English peer.-Parents:Derby was the eldest son of George Stanley and Joan Strange, 9th Baroness Strange and 5th Baroness Mohun. Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby was his grandfather...

in commemoration of the Battle of Flodden.

One modern author who studied alliterative verse and used it extensively in his fictional writings and poetry, was J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...

(1892–1973). He wrote alliterative verse in modern English, in the style of Old English alliterative verse (he was one of the major Beowulf

Beowulf

Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...

scholars of his time - see Beowulf: the monsters and the critics

Beowulf: the monsters and the critics

"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by J. R. R. Tolkien on literary criticism on the Old English heroic epic poem Beowulf...

). Examples of Tolkien's alliterative verses include those written by him for the Rohirrim, a culture in The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...

that borrowed many aspects from Anglo-Saxon

Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...

culture. There are also many examples of alliterative verse in Tolkien's posthumously-published works in The History of Middle-earth
The History of Middle-earth
The History of Middle-earth is a 12-volume series of books published from 1983 through to 1996 that collect and analyse material relating to the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Some of the content consists of earlier versions of already published...

series. Of these, the unfinished 'The Lay of the Children of Húrin

The Lay of the Children of Húrin

The Lay of the Children of Húrin is a long epic poem by J. R. R. Tolkien, which takes place in his fictional fantasy-world, Middle-earth. It tells of the life and the ill fate of Túrin Turambar, the son of Húrin. It is written in alliterative verse and exists in several versions, but was never...

', published in The Lays of Beleriand
The Lays of Beleriand
The Lays of Beleriand, published in 1985, is the third volume of Christopher Tolkien's 12-volume book series, The History of Middle-earth, in which he analyzes the unpublished manuscripts of his father J. R. R...

, is the longest. Another example of Tolkien's alliterative verse refers to Mirkwood

Mirkwood

Mirkwood is a name used for two distinct fictional forests in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. In the First Age, the highlands of Dorthonion north of Beleriand were known as Mirkwood after falling under Morgoth's control. During the Third Age, the large forest in Rhovanion, east of the Anduin in ...

(see the introduction to that article). Outside of his Middle-earth

Middle-earth

Middle-earth is the fictional setting of the majority of author J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place entirely in Middle-earth, as does much of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales....

works, Tolkien also worked on alliterative modern English translations of several Middle English

Middle English

Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....

poems by the Pearl Poet

Pearl Poet

: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his...

, Pearl

Pearl (poem)

Pearl is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the "Pearl poet" or "Gawain poet", is generally assumed, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, and Cleanness or...

, and Sir Orfeo

Sir Orfeo

Sir Orfeo is an anonymous Middle English narrative poem, retelling the story of Orpheus as a king rescuing his wife from the fairy king.-History and Manuscripts:...

. These were published posthumously in 1975. In his lifetime, as well as the alliterative verse in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien published The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son is the title of a work by J. R. R. Tolkien that was originally published in 1953 in volume 6 of the scholarly journal Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association. It is a work of historical fiction, inspired by the Old English poem The...

in 1953, an alliterative verse dialogue recounting a historical fictional account of the Battle of Maldon

Battle of Maldon

The Battle of Maldon took place on 10 August 991 near Maldon beside the River Blackwater in Essex, England, during the reign of Aethelred the Unready. Earl Byrhtnoth and his thegns led the English against a Viking invasion. The battle ended in an Anglo-Saxon defeat...

.

Alliterative verse is occasionally written by other modern authors. W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...

(1907–1973) also wrote a number of poems, including The Age of Anxiety
The Age of Anxiety (poem)
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue is a long poem in six parts by W. H. Auden, written mostly in a modern version of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse....

, in alliterative verse, modified only slightly to fit the phonetic patterns of modern English. The noun-laden style of the headlines makes the style of alliterative verse particularly apt for Auden's poem:

Now the news. Night raids on
Five cities. Fires started.
Pressure applied by pincer movement
In threatening thrust. Third Division
Enlarges beachhead. Lucky charm
Saves sniper. Sabotage hinted
In steel-mill stoppage. . . .

Other poets who have experimented with modern alliterative English verse include Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

, see his "The Seafarer", and Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur

Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989....

, whose Junk opens with the lines:

An axe angles

from my neighbor's ashcan;

It is hell's handiwork,

the wood not hickory.

The flow of the grain

not faithfully followed.

The shivered shaft

rises from a shellheap

Of plastic playthings,

paper plates.

Many translations of Beowulf use alliterative techniques. Among recent ones that of Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...

loosely follows the rules of modern alliterative verse while the translation of Alan Sullivan

Alan Sullivan

Edward Alan Sullivan was a Canadian poet and author of short stories.-History:Born in St. George's Rectory, Montreal, he was the oldest son of Edward Sullivan and Frances Mary Renaud. In 1869, his father became rector of Trinity Church, Chicago. The family lived to the city in 1871, and thus...

and Timothy Murphy follows those rules more closely.

Old Norse poetic forms

The inherited form of alliterative verse was modified somewhat in Old Norse poetry

Old Norse poetry

Old Norse poetry encompasses a range of verse forms written in Old Norse, during the period from the 8th century to as late as the far end of the 13th century...

. In Old Norse, as a result of phonetic changes from the original common Germanic language, many unstressed syllable

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...

s 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
Hávamál
Hávamál is presented as a single poem in the Poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse poems from the Viking age. The poem, itself a combination of different poems, is largely gnomic, presenting advice for living, proper conduct and wisdom....

:

Deyr fé || deyja frændr

("Cattle die; kinsmen die. . .")

The various names of the Old Norse verse forms are given in the Prose Edda

Prose Edda

by Snorri Sturluson

Snorri Sturluson

Snorri Sturluson was an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician. He was twice elected lawspeaker at the Icelandic parliament, the Althing...

. The Háttatal
Háttatal
The Háttatal is the last section of the Prose Edda composed by the Icelandic poet, politician, and historian Snorri Sturluson. Using, for the most part, his own compositions, it exemplifies the types of verse forms used in Old Norse poetry...

, or "list of verse forms", contains the names and characteristics of each of the fixed forms of Norse poetry.

Fornyrðislag

A verse form close to that of Beowulf existed in runestones and in the Old Norse Edda

Edda

The term Edda applies to the Old Norse Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, both of which were written down in Iceland during the 13th century in Icelandic, although they contain material from earlier traditional sources, reaching into the Viking Age...

s; in Norse, it was called fornyrðislag, which means "past-words-made" or "way of ancient words". The Norse poets tended to break up their verses into stanza

Stanza

In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...

s of from two to eight lines (or more), rather than writing continuous verse after the Old English model. 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

Enjambment

Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line...

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:

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
Málaháttr
Málaháttr is a poetic metre in Old Norse poetry, which is usually described as "conversational style". It is similar to fornyrðislag except in that there are more syllables in a line, usually five.Poems with verses in this metre:* Atlakviða...

("speech meter"), which adds an unstressed syllable to each half-line, making six to eight (sometimes up to ten) unstressed syllables per line.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Author J.R.R. Tolkien also made use of the fornyrðislag in his narrative poem The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a narrative poem composed by J. R. R. Tolkien. The book was released worldwide on May 5, 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and HarperCollins....

, based upon the poetry of the Elder Edda and written to retell the Norse saga of Sigurd

Sigurd

Sigurd is a legendary hero of Norse mythology, as well as the central character in the Völsunga saga. The earliest extant representations for his legend come in pictorial form from seven runestones in Sweden and most notably the Ramsund carving Sigurd (Old Norse: Sigurðr) is a legendary hero of...

and the fall of the Niflungs. Christopher Tolkien

Christopher Tolkien

Christopher Reuel Tolkien is the third and youngest son of the author J. R. R. Tolkien , and is best known as the editor of much of his father's posthumously published work. He drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings, which he signed C. J. R. T. The J...

has added copious notes and commentary upon his father's work.

According to Christopher Tolkien, it is no longer possible to trace the exact date of composition. Based on circumstantial evidence, Christopher suggests that it dates from the 1930s

1930s

File:1930s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson show the effects of the Great Depression; Due to the economic collapse, the farms become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads through America; The Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese...

and was posthumously published in March 2009.

In a 1967 letter to W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

, Tolkien wrote,

"Thank you for your wonderful effort in translating and reorganizing The Song of the Sibyl. In return, I hope to send you, if I can lay my hands on it (I hope it isn't lost), a thing I did many years ago while trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry: an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...

."

Ljóðaháttr

Change in form came with the development of ljóðaháttr, which means "song" or "ballad

Ballad

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...

metre", a stanza

Stanza

In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...

ic 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

Freyr

Freyr is one of the most important gods of Norse paganism. Freyr was highly associated with farming, weather and, as a phallic fertility god, Freyr "bestows peace and pleasure on mortals"...

's lament in Skírnismál
Skírnismál
Skírnismál is one of the poems of the Poetic Edda. It is preserved in the 13th century manuscripts Codex Regius and AM 748 I 4to but may have been originally composed in heathen times...

:

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 (the three nights before Freyr can meet his love).

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

These verse forms were elaborated even more into the skald

Skald

ic poetic form called the dróttkvætt, meaning "lord

Lord

Lord is a title with various meanings. It can denote a prince or a feudal superior . The title today is mostly used in connection with the peerage of the United Kingdom or its predecessor countries, although some users of the title do not themselves hold peerages, and use it 'by courtesy'...

ly verse", which added internal rhymes and other forms of assonance

Assonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the is repeated within the sentence and is...

that go well beyond the requirements of Germanic alliterative verse. The dróttkvætt stanza had eight lines, each having three lifts. In addition to two or three alliterations, the odd numbered lines had partial rhyme of consonants (which was called skothending) with dissimilar vowels, not necessarily at the beginning of the word; the even lines contained internal rhyme

Rhyme

(aðalhending) in the syllables, not necessarily at the end of the word. The form was subject to further restrictions: each line must have exactly six syllables, and each line must always end in a trochee

Trochee

A trochee or choree, choreus, is a metrical foot used in formal poetry consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one...

.

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

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

running through the on-side of the half-lines, and another running through the off-side. According to the Fagrskinna
Fagrskinna
Fagrskinna is one of the kings' sagas, written around 1220. It takes its name from one of the manuscripts in which it was preserved, Fagrskinna meaning 'Fair Leather', i.e., 'Fair Parchment'. Fagrskinna proper was destroyed by fire, but copies of it and another vellum have been preserved...

collection of sagas

Sagàs

Sagàs is a small town and municipality located in Catalonia, in the comarca of Berguedà. It is located in the geographical area of the pre-Pyrenees.-Population:...

, King Harald III of Norway uttered these lines of dróttkvætt at the Battle of Stamford Bridge

Battle of Stamford Bridge

The Battle of Stamford Bridge took place at the village of Stamford Bridge, East Riding of Yorkshire in England on 25 September 1066, between an English army under King Harold Godwinson and an invading Norwegian force led by King Harald Hardrada of Norway and the English king's brother Tostig...

; the internal assonances and the alliteration are bolded:

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 Saga

Norse saga

The sagas are stories about ancient Scandinavian and Germanic history, about early Viking voyages, the battles that took place during the voyages, about migration to Iceland and of feuds between Icelandic families...

s; several of the sagas are biographies

Biography

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

of skaldic poets.

Hrynhenda

Hrynhenda is a later development of dróttkvætt with eight syllables per line instead of six, but with the same rules for rhyme and alliteration. 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

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

from the Hebrides

Hebrides

The Hebrides comprise a widespread and diverse archipelago off the west coast of Scotland. There are two main groups: the Inner and Outer Hebrides. These islands have a long history of occupation dating back to the Mesolithic and the culture of the residents has been affected by the successive...

, 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.

Alliterative poetry is still practiced in Iceland

Iceland

Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...

in an unbroken tradition since the settlement.

German forms

The Old High German

Old High German

and Old Saxon

Old Saxon

corpus of Stabreim or alliterative verse is tiny. Fewer than 200 Old High German lines survive, in four works: the Hildebrandslied, Muspilli
Muspilli
Muspilli is one of but two surviving pieces of Old High German epic poetry , dating to around 870. One large fragment of the text has survived in the margins and empty pages of a codex marked as the possession of Louis the German and now in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek . The beginning and end of...

, the Merseburg Charms and the Wessobrunn Prayer
Wessobrunn Prayer
The Wessobrunn Prayer, sometimes called the Wessobrunn Creation Poem , believed to date from c790, is among the earliest known poetic works in Old High German.-Origins:...

. 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
Heliand
The Heliand is an epic poem in Old Saxon, written in the first half of the 9th century. The title means saviour in Old Saxon , and the poem is a Biblical paraphrase that recounts the life of Jesus in the alliterative verse style of a Germanic saga...

and the even more fragmentary Genesis 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 - pronoun

Pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...

s, prepositions, articles

Article (grammar)

An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...

, modal auxiliaries - but in the Old Saxon works there are also adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....

s and lexical verb

Lexical verb

In linguistics a lexical verb or full verb is a member of an open class of verbs that includes all verbs except auxiliary verbs. Lexical verbs typically express action, state, or other predicate meaning. In contrast, auxiliary verbs express grammatical meaning...

s. The unaccented syllables typically occur before the first stress in the half-line, and most often in the b-verse.

The Hildbrandslied, 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

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

sought to evoke old German models and what he considered a more natural and less over-civilised style by writing his Ring
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four epic operas by the German composer Richard Wagner . The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied...

poems in Stabreim.

External links

Carmina Scaldica a selection of Norse and Icelandic skaldic poetry, ed. Finnur Jónsson
Finnur Jónsson
Finnur Jónsson was an Icelandic philologist who made extensive contributions to the study of Old Norse literature.Finnur graduated from Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík in 1878 and went to Denmark for further studies at the University of Copenhagen. He received a doctorate in philology in 1884 with a...

, 1929
Jörmungrund An extensive resource for Old Norse poetry
Jónas Hallgrímsson: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. by Dick Ringler (1998), ch. 3 Probably the most accessible discussion in English of alliterant placement in modern Icelandic (also mostly applicable to Old Norse).
Forgotten ground regained A site dedicated to alliterative and accentual poetry.
An interactive guide to Old and Middle English alliterative verse by Alaric Hall.

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