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A Unified Account of the Old English Metrical Line

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A Unified Account of the Old English Metrical Line !" #$!! % & ' ( ) $ * + ( , , + $ + ( $* + - . $/ (0 + , -( , , $ * $* + ( $ , (, , 1 1 $ , ( , ,2 $/ , , $* ( 3 4 , $* (, ( , (, 5 , (, , $ , +( $* $ * , , ( ' + $% + , $* ' , , , + + $* , $ * , $/ , (, , , 6$$"""7 8 , - 9 $ , + +% +- $ $/ , ( + ( +% +$ !" :;; $$ ; < = :: : : 12#"! />%?"2?""?"!1? />%?"2?""?"!@!" (!? A UNIFIED ACCOUNT OF THE OLD ENGLISH METRICAL LINE Andrew Cooper A unified account of the Old English metrical line Andrew Cooper ©Andrew Cooper, Stockholm University 2017 ISBN print 978-91-7797-049-1 ISBN PDF 978-91-7797-050-7 Cover photo: The Kingston Brooch, courtesy of National Museums Liverpool. Printed in Sweden by Universitetsservice US-AB, Stockholm 2017. Distributor: English Department, Stockholm University. For and because of Lena Acknowledgements When fate causes a formless stone to fall into a river, how many grains of sand must brush past it before it becomes a shapely pebble? And how much more must it be carved and polished by skilled artisans before it can be fitted into the inlaid boss of a brooch? Many significant and beloved relatives, friends, teachers, colleagues and classmates have had indirect but nevertheless essen- tial influence on the formation of my mind, my interests and the education which eventually contributed to the completion of this project. It would be churlish to select individuals and otiose to attempt to list them all. No doubt an appropriate punishment can be found for my laxity in excluding them – nevertheless they are continually in my thoughts. Perhaps, perforce, a few of the shinier stones can be selected from the treasure-hoard for especial venera- tion. My principal thanks must be to my supervisors. I consider myself fortunate in the extreme that the beginning of my academic career coincided with the peak of Nils-Lennart Johannesson’s. His enthusiasm for the project and confidence in my abilities was matched only by his encyclopaedic knowledge of the source material and his generosity of spirit. I was supported and directed in the early part of the project by Alan McMillion, who also first recommended that I apply for the doctoral programme at a time before I had considered an advanced degree. The influence which Tomas Riad has had on this project can hardly be overstated: a spirit of cheerful optimism pervaded our regular super- vision sessions, punctuated only by his extremely precise and perceptive sur- gical strikes against the weak arguments, methodological dead ends, misun- derstandings of basic terminology and misleading formulations with which I would unfeelingly plague him. The English Department of Stockholm University provided as supportive and collegial a working environment as ever a chap could desire. I was fortunate to share my time as a doctoral student with an unusually large number of fel- lows in the same condition, both in the English department and in the other language departments. My classmates in the Special Doctoral School in Lin- guistics 2011–2012 all contributed both to my education in general and to the development of this text. These various brainboxes are shiny stones indeed and I look forward to seeing them rocket up the ranks of academia across the globe, a process which has already begun in earnest. All of us were supported and directed by the august council of linguists who made up the steering com- mittee, captained by the inestimable Masha Koptjevskaja Tamm. I was fortunate enough to be able to consult both Paul Kiparsky and Chris Golston during the early development of the project, and found their advice 1 on its direction invaluable. Earlier version of the text were weighed in the balance by Leena Kahlas-Tarkka and Patrik Bye, and their comments allowed for the final form to take shape. Beyza Björkman contributed much to the comprehensibility of the introduction, and Johan Sjöns provided a similar ser- vice for the Swedish summary. You have probably already noticed that the following text contains at least one error. I put it there by accident, in defiance of the advice of the worthy per- sonages named above. Take note, gentle reader, and take heart. 2 Abbreviations Languages and texts And Andreas OE Old English Beo Beowulf ON Old Norse BT Bosworth-Toller OS Old Saxon Dan Daniel PDE Present Day English Gen Genesis Rhym The Rhyming Poem Gmc Common Germanic SGen Old Saxon Genesis Jud Judith Wan Wanderer ME Middle English Grammatical Categories acc accusative pl plural dat dative pres present gen genitive pret preterite inst instrumental sg singular nom nominative Phonological symbols C consonant σ syllable V vowel μ vocalic mora H heavy syllable Σ sum of moras L light syllable ɸ phonological foot Metrical Notation primary stress ڭ (lift (primary / \ half-lift (secondary) : secondary stress x metrical drop . unstressed syllable | caesura || line break ! breach of metrical template P prominent position without lexical stress 7 8 1 Introduction All lines of Old English poetry show evidence of having a common underlying metrical structure marked by alliteration. Nevertheless, they also show great variation in the usual indicators of metrical structure: line length and the po- sition of stresses. Exactly how that structure has been described over the past 150 years or so has depended on the objectives of the authors and the theoret- ical paradigms fashionable at various times of composition. The most influ- ential description is a typology of verses categorised by sequences of stressed and unstressed positions, developed by Eduard Sievers for Germanic verse in general (e.g. 1968). While comprehensive, this system requires extensive modification when applied to continuous texts usually by increasing the num- ber of autonomous metrical types and/or by explaining why some syllables should be considered extrametrical (as by Bliss, 1958 etc.). Other metrical analyses have either explicitly accepted Sievers’ general as- sumptions and built upon them (e.g. Bliss, 1958; Cable, 1974; Kendall, 1991; Hutcheson, 1995; Momma, 1997; Bredehoft, 2005; Goering, 2016), or have used OE as a test case for a newly developed theory (e.g. Halle & Keyser, 1971; Getty, 2002; Fabb & Halle, 2008). Rarely, scholars have tried to pro- duce a new model from scratch, sometimes with a statistical basis, with both limited scope and success (e.g. Hoover, 1985; Golston & Riad, 2003a, 2003b). The present study follows in the last two traditions, in that a quantitative anal- ysis is used to organise the data and an Optimality Theory treatment with a basis in Metrical Phonology is used to create a model allowing for the produc- tion of all acceptable OE metrical lines. The study of the metrical structure of the verse is a central topic in Old English studies and has a long but fairly homogenous history. Most models of analysis mentioned in the previous paragraph are based on typologies of acceptable arrangements of stressed and unstressed syllables.1 These typologies are usu- ally very complex as they concentrate on listing acceptable abstractions, such as stress contours, but do not investigate the underlying factors which distin- guish acceptable metrical structures from unacceptable ones. Bredehoft 1 Stockwell & Minkova (1997) provide a thorough chronological summary up to the date of publication. 9 (2005) notes that “the work involved in revising established prosodical theo- ries is complex and, as it seems, never-ending, with absolutely necessary ad- justments and refinements always just around the corner” (2005, p. 3). This need for constant tinkering is an indication that the underlying causes of met- rical variation in OE have not yet been discovered. The association between metrical prominence and primary lexical stress is an underlying assumption of almost all studies in this field (§2.3), something which inevitably leads to complicating factors, since four metrical promi- nences are expected in each line, but lines with less than four primary stresses are quite common. Recently, however, a second approach has gained ground, which associates the metrical structures of the verse with the phonological structures of OE in general. These studies have highlighted an association be- tween the verse foot, as a principal metrical structure, and the prosodic word, a phonological structure (starting with Russom, 1987). The present study fol- lows in this newer tradition while incorporating a quantitative constraint to measure variation in the length of the verse foot and therefore of the metrical line. What is the point of developing metrical models? To support linguistic studies of metrical texts, highest amongst the possible objectives must be included the following goals: 1. organising data, 2. identifying underlying structures, 3. reflecting the internal operations of the language function, 4. supporting further studies in the interaction of metre with other
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