Nelson Goering

6. Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on

Abstract Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanische Metrik remains a foundational work for Germanic metrical research, even 125 years after its publication in 1893. His impact on the field may be roughly divided into three broad approaches: 1) the impulse for the typological cate- gorization and labelling of verses; 2) the four-position principle as the basis for alliterative metre; and 3) the focus on linguistic material in metre, especially his identification of the system of resolution. The typological impulse has waned in recent years, though Sievers’ labels for different verse patterns remain widely used. The four-position principle is cur- rently the dominant paradigm for understanding Germanic metre, but there are reasons to doubt its correctness. Sievers’ most important legacy, and potentially his most enduring, may be his linguistic analysis of Germanic verse forms, including his identification of resolution. Even should the four-position theory, like the typological impulse before it, eventually decline in popularity and be supplanted by other metrical frameworks, it is likely that Sievers’ prosodic-descriptive contributions will endure, and will indeed continue to be the basis on which metrical theories are proposed and criticized. Keywords: Metrics, , , Old Norse, Resolution, Sievers

The context and content ofAltgermanische Metrik 125 years ago this year, Eduard Sievers published his seminal Altgermanische Metrik (1893a). Even after all this time and despite a significant amount of later scholarly activity on Old Germanic metrics, Sievers’ work more broadly, and this

book in particular, remain essential touchstones for discussions of Germanic alliterative verse.1 Sievers’ influence is, in fact, so pervasive that it can often be hard to accurately judge the state of his impact on the field today – but it is pos- sible to untangle a few particularly important strands of his legacy, including the vogue for categorizing verses into types, the continued influence of the idea that Germanic verses are made up of four metrical positions, and the identifi- cation of prosodic features such as the system of resolution and its suspension. Stepping back and reviewing Sievers’ continued legacy in broad terms is not just

1 This can be easily illustrated by reference to introductions to Germanic metrics, e.g. Terasawa (2011) for Old English or Fulk (2016) for Old Norse verse. Also compare the bibliography of Gade & Fulk (2000). 140 Nelson Goering an exercise in intellectual history, but it is also a good way to assess just where Germanic metrical studies stand today. Before we get into Sievers’ later impact, it is worth briefly reviewing just what the Altgermanische Metrik was all about. This 1893 book did not appear ex nihilo, but followed on from a long series of articles Sievers published in the 1870s and 1880s. This line of inquiry originally grew out of his study of Norse skaldic metre (1878, 1879, 1882), which led him on to Eddic and Old English verse forms in the 1880s. Besides a valuable case study of Eddic metres (1885a),

his most substantial achievement was the long, three-part article Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationverses (1885b, 1885c, 1887).2 Sievers worked out all the essentials and most of the details of his metrical approach in these years. Altgermanische Metrik itself has its roots in an invitation Sievers received to contribute a chapter on metrics to Hermann Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, a major handbook of the day. This was to be a fairly brief overview, giving a concise and digested presentation of Germanic metrics for a somewhat wider audience. Sievers did eventually produce the requested 36-page chapter (1893b), but in the process of writing he had outlined a plan for a much more

comprehensive synthesis of the subject. Sievers followed through on this idea too, and the result was his more famous monograph Altgermanische Metrik,3 published the same year and with the same title as the short chapter. Sievers’ entire body of work from 1878 to 1893 is best considered together as a whole, but this culminating book is justly seen as his most considered and compendious

presentation of his approach. Altgermanische Metrik deals with a range of topics,4 and devotes much space to the particulars of the individual traditions, but here I’m going to focus on the impact of just one chapter: the crucial ‘Grundlagen der altgermanische metrik’, where Sievers really lays out the approaches to Germanic metre for which he is still remembered. This presents the anatomy of the ‘classic’ Germanic verse, the form found in Old English poetry and Norse fornyrðislag. Here is where Sievers

2 At a combined 227 pages, this was nearly as long as his later book (252 pages of main text), and a mere page count does not convey the density of data, tables, and statistics that fill these pages. This work is still today no less valuable thanAltgermanische Metrik.

3 This was the second supplementary volume to Wilhelm Braune’s Samlung kurzer Grammatiken germanischer Dialekte. Sievers gives a short account of the book’s gen- esis in his Vorwort (1893a, vii).

4 The book consists of seven parts: an introduction, an outline of theoretical principles, four sections on specific Germanic traditions, and a concluding discussion of dia- chronic metrics. Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on 141 explains much of the vocabulary still familiar in the field. The basic rhythmic unit of the metre is the half-line (halbzeile), which is composed of metrical positions (glieder). Positions filled with linguistic stresses are typically lifts (hebungen),

while weaker positions are called dips: either plain, unstressed dips (senkungen), or partly-stressed half-lifts (nebenhebungen).5 Normally, each position corresponds to a single syllable, but Sievers allows two major exceptions. A typical lift must consist of a singleheavy syllable; a single light

syllable is not sufficient to form a normal lift, and usually has to recruit the fol- lowing syllable to make a two-syllable lift.6 This process, which involves several further constraints depending on context, is called resolution in English, and is a – perhaps the – central rule of Sieversian metrics (see § 3 below for more dis- cussion of this key issue). The other exception to the one-syllable, one-position correspondance comes in dips: any number of fully unstressed syllables in a row

5 The notation of these elements has varied considerably over the years and between metricists. The following table shows Sievers’ notation; the notation adopted by Terasawa (2011) in his standard textbook; the system developed by Hutcheson (1995), which has been adopted by Suzuki (2004, 2014); and my preferred notation, adapted from Russom (1987) and Stockwell (1996):

I am not quite sure who first employed the system Terasawa adopted for his text- book. Cable (1974) is a prominent precursor, but his notation is more closely derived from Sievers’ accent marks, and his lifts clearly have the form of an acute, ´, rather than simply being a slash, /. The use of the specific set /, \, × (or x) emerged, I assume, in the age of typewriters as a typographical convenience. The earliest major work I have found using these symbols is Hoover (1985), though there may be earlier examples.

6 A light syllable ends in a single short vowel (or short diphthong), while a heavy syllable is anything else: a syllable containing a long vowel (or long diphthong), or ending in a consonant. Note that a single intervocalic consonant is assigned to the start of the following syllable, so that the first two syllables offre-me-don are both light. Two intervocalic consonants are split, the first going in the end of the preceding syllable (thus closing it and making it heavy), the second belonging to the start of the following syllable: el-len accordingly has two heavy syllables. 142 Nelson Goering count together as a single metrical position, a single dip. This means that while lifts and half-lifts consist of one or at most (through resolution) two syllables, a true dip may, with relative freedom, be filled by one, two, three, or even more unstressed syllables. In addition to these principles – as well as a few notes on metrical feet, which I will have to ignore here – Sievers identifies two basic rules of verse formation: 1. The basic verse has four metrical positions, as just defined. 2. The basic verse has two, and only two, full lifts. There are six possible logical combinations of two lifts and two dips:

Of these combinations, 4–6 are problematic because they contain two dips next to each other, and normally adjacent dips should just count as a single expanded dip. In types 4 and 5, this problem may be solved by making one of the dips a half-lift, but in 6 this is not possible: half-lifts depend on linguistic secondary stress, which requires a primary stress somewhere earlier in the verse. These considerations leave the first five patterns as possible Germanic verse

forms: these are Sievers’ famous five types. Here they are, with all the possibili- ties for replacing a full dip with a half-lift, and with Sievers’ well-known labels:7

7 Combinations in parentheses are not normal subtypes, and occur in actual verse rarely, if ever. Some of these are excluded by his theory of feet, but the rarity or nonexistence of some patterns remains an anomaly under Sievers’ original theory. Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on 143

There are a few things to note about this system. Firstly, it is firmly grounded in linguistic observations. Nothing works unless you pay attention to natural lin- guistic stress and quantity, and resolution is absolutely crucial. Sievers’ scansions often approximate a purely phonological markup up each verse. Secondly, these five types are not arbitrary, but emerge from a system which, though complex, is coherent. And thirdly, the five types are, however emergent, given pride of place in Sievers’ presentation: he characterizes them as real entities, the identification of which is a major finding of his work.

1 Sievers’ typological legacy It was the idea that the complexity of Germanic verse could be reduced to ‘five types’ that dominated Sievers’ early impact in Germanic metrical studies, and probably remains his best-known – though perhaps least significant – contribution to this day. This influence began almost immediately. Just a year after the publication of Altgermanische Metrik, Henry Sweet (1894, x-xi) produced a revised preface to his popular Anglo-saxon Reader in Verse and Prose in which he adopted Sievers’ types, even while expressing some doubt about Sievers’ underlying principles.

This approach was to remain the norm for the reception of Sievers’ ideas for many decades,8 and reached its apogee in the work of Alan Bliss (1962), whose monograph on The Metre of Beowulf served several generations of scholars as the standard work on Old English metrics. This was in principle a continua- tion of Sievers’ work, though Bliss was very narrow in his scope, considering the metrical system of just a single poem from a single tradition, Beowulf. This

has set the tone for much post-Sievers metrical work, in which Old English has received more attention than Old Norse9 or , and Beowulf is much better studied that any other Old English poem. In any case, the greatest significance in Bliss’s approach was his relentless focus on types. He retained Sievers’ five letters as his baseline, but vastly expanded the

number of subtypes, establishing a complex alphabet soup of labels. Bliss did include a very short chapter10 on the theoretical underpinnings of the metre, but

8 To highlight just one example, in his preface to C. L. Wrenn’s translation of Beowulf, Tolkien ([1940] 1983) characterized the types as something more organic, ‘the normal patterns of four elements into which Old English words naturally fell’. There is a nod to the underlying principles (the ‘four elements’), but the presentation is centred around the types themselves.

9 Norse metrics has of course received some attention. Hugo Gering (1902, 1924, 1926) may deserve special mention for providing some very useful early twentieth-century contributions, very much in the tradition of Sievers.

10 Chapter 17, which is less than five pages long, and dispenses with the theory of rhythm in less than a page (1962: 108). 144 Nelson Goering his system does not make much sense, and Bliss seems to have not been deeply invested in developing or defending a metrical theory of any sort. Instead, Bliss is mainly interested in sorting verses into types. He at one point comments that: If it were not for the desirability of preserving the outline of Sievers’ classification as far as possible, a more scientific and significantclassification could be obtained… (Bliss 1962: 84; emphasis mine) This is followed by a diagram whose scientific significance is not immediately apparent; what is apparent is that Bliss considered himself essentially a taxono- mist. If he could only devise the correct typology of verses, the correct recipe of types and subtypes, a ‘scientific’ account of Germanic metre would be achieved,

he thought, even if the principles that generated this taxonomy were not fully worked out.11

This typological approach has sometimes been continued by more recent researchers. Some of this work has been very useful,12 but in general this impulse to merely categorize has faded considerably in metrical studies. Of course, Sievers’ labels do remain an essential and valuable part of the descriptive vocab- ulary of Germanic metrics, and provide a convenient shorthand to refer to spe- cific rhythmic patterns. But few researchers now are interested in taxonomy for its own sake: simply creating a new set of labels is seen not as contribution, but as just creating more terminological confusion. More importantly, attention has begun to focus more and more on asking why we find only some imaginable patterns, and not others, and how to explain the variations in the frequencies with which various types occur.

2 Sievers’ Theoretical Legacy In this turn to the underlying theories of metre, Sievers once again played a central role, and even as his typological legacy became less central, his theoret-

ical legacy gained ground. The central actor in this shift was Tom Cable (1974, 1991). His early monograph, The Meter and Melody of Beowulf,13 in particular strongly returns to the four-position principle, and elevates it to the central basis

11 For an important and much fuller critique of Bliss as a metrical theorist, see Pascual (2016b).

12 Hutcheson (1995) is to be lauded for commitment to his description, and not confusing taxonomy with theory. Hofmann (1991a, 1991b), though strongly influenced by Bliss’s approach, has given us one of our few extended studies of the metre of the Old Saxon Heliand.

13 Note again the focus on Beowulf specifically. Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on 145 for the entire system. Cable approaches secondary stresses and sequences of neighbouring stresses (stress clashes) differently from Sievers, but the basic idea is the same: to use the combinations of four positions, along with the rule of eliding adjacent weak syllables into a single position, in order to derive the five types as emergent patterns. In the process, Cable streamlines Sievers’ principles somewhat, scrapping feet, and trying to account for the anomalous types – espe- cially the difficult D* pattern – through linguistic rather than metrical means. This theoretical approach has proven very influential, and there is no need to

list all the metricists who take an essentially positional approach to Germanic metre.14 The most significant and recent advance in this tradition comes from Nicolay Yakovlev (2008), who takes up and refines Cable’s principles in his DPhil thesis. Yakovlev explicitly took many of Cable’s insights as his basis, but made a sharper distinction between the strength of a metrical position and linguistic stress, dispensing with Sievers’ ‘half-lifts’. For Yakovlev, there are only either strong positions – which have some stress, and are filled by a single syllable or a resolved sequence – and weak positions, which are filled by a single unstressed syllable, with licences to expand them into a run of unstressed syllables in certain contexts (in a more limited fashion than Sievers originally allowed). The result is a simpler set of principles, which can easily be listed in full here (2008: 74): 1. ‘There are two kinds of metrical positions: a lift and a dip. The better terms would be the “strong” and “weak position”.’ 2. ‘A verse may have four and only four metrical positions.’ 3. ‘Two dips may not be adjacent, as in this case they merge into a single dip [in the first

half of the verse].’15

14 Seiichi Suzuki (1996, 2004, 2014) has, despite some idioscyncracies, basically followed Cable in systematically applying the four-position principle to Beowulf, and deserves special mention for further extending the approach to Old Saxon and to Norse eddic poetry.

15 As originally phrased, Yakovlev’s rule is deficient, since in his own discussion he had earlier explicitly noted that the principle by which adjacent unstressed syllables merge into a single dip applies only in the first half of the verse (57). So even though Yakovlev explicitly disallows verses of the shape SSww for having two adjacent dips, his own principles as stated earlier predict that such verses should exist – and in fact they do. Verses such as lāst scēawedon (Beo 132b) or her kǫnnuðu (HH 31.8) are not uncommon, and are easily the single most frequent pattern among those that Sievers grouped under his type D. Linguistically, words like scēawedon have often troubled metricists. Sievers himself initially considered scanning verses like 132b as (1885b: 254, 301), before settling on the scansion (1893a: 126). (Also compare his uncertainy about similar verbs in what we now think of as type C verses (Sievers 1885b: 247, 297).) Yakovlev (2008: 75–76) says that morphologically, the medial syllable of words like 146 Nelson Goering

If we follow through these rules mechanically, in the same way we did with Sievers’ earlier formulation, we get the following ten valid combinations of

strong and weak positions. Using S to stand for a strong position, and w for a weak position:16

scēawedon is marked as being a strong position, but this gets him into trouble with verses like fundode wrecca (Beo 1137b), which he would then have to scan according to the impossible pattern SSwSw. All these difficulties are avoided if we recognize that the last two syllables of words like scēawedon are completely unstressed – as they probably are linguistically (Dresher 1985: 47; Ringe & Taylor 2014: 301–302; Stausland Johnsen 2015; Goering 2016a: 186–187 (§ 7.1)) – and simply allow the pattern SSww (and wSww) to stand as valid. This non-merger of two final weak positions was discovered by Fulk (1992: 179–183), who dubbed it the ‘rule of the coda’. Cable (1991: 19; 2003: 156) adapted the principle somewhat, calling it the ‘antepenultimate rule’, but Fulk’s version (prior in formula- tion, though not in publication) has proven more influential; some have even taken to calling the principle ‘Fulk’s law’. Despite its usefulness to their framework, the rule is apparently still troubling to some four-position theorists. This is seen not only in Yakovlev’s reluctance to take it up, but also in the need felt by Cable (2016) to give the rule a linguistic, and not merely metrical, grounding (though in the event Cable’s specific explanation – resting on variable syllabifications, sometimes combined with inserted glottal stops – is linguistically implausible). Such worries are not justified: all that is needed is the universal metrical principle of closure, which holds that there will be a stricter correspondance of metrical units (here, positions) and linguistic ones (here, syllables) verse-finally than verse-internally (Hayes 1983: 373; Russom 1998: 39). In the following discussion, I have systematically modified Yakovlev’s presentation to incorporate the effects of the rule of the coda. This results in no great change to his principles, and a strict increase in descriptive accuracy. I have tried to clearly, but unobtrusively, distinguish Yakovlev’s original system from my modifications for the sake of accuracy.

16 The two marked with asterisks are my additions to Yakovlev’s system; see note 15. The examples are mostly Yakovlev’s own, though I have added (simplified) Sieversian labels for reference. I have added examples for the new types, and omitted one of Yakovlev’s verses, 2436b morþorbed strēd, as this is doubtlessly correctly morþọrbed strêd, i.e. type A2k rather than ‘E2’ (Sievers 1893a: 132). It is a weakness of his theory that he cannot account for the apparently systematic absence of the ‘E2’ pattern from Old English verse (Russom 1987: 29–31; Cable 1991: 148–51); see further note 19. Note that the patterns ˣwwSw, ˣwwSS, ˣwwwS, ˣSwwS, ˣSwww, and ˣwwww are excluded by the rule disallowing adjacent dips earlier in the verse. Of these, the pattern wwSw actually does occur, and is the well-known type A3; see below for a discussion of the mismatch between metrical predictions and attested patterns. All illustrative examples are from Beowulf (Fulk et al. 2009). Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on 147

1. SwSw 8a wēox under wolcnum (A) 2. wSwS 29b swā hē selfa bæd (B) 3. wSSw 13b þone God sende (C) 4. wSww* 2985a þenden rēafode (C) 5. SSww* 132b lāst scēawedon (D) 6. SSSw 27a felahrōr fēran (A2a), 58a glæde Scyldingas (Da) 7. SSwS 18b blǣd wīde sprang (Db), 5b meodosetla oftēah (E) 8. SwSS 17a wuldres Wealdend (A2b) 9. wSSS 4a oft Scyld Scēfing (C), 2201b syððan Hygelāc læg (B) 10. SSSS 367b glædman Hrōðgār (A2ab), 54a lēof lēodcyning (Da) As can be seen, Yakovlev ends up with more types than Sievers, though fewer subtypes. This is due entirely to Sievers’ practice of reckoning types based on

two full lifts, and subtypes based in part on half-lifts, while Yakovlev counts lifts and half-lifts together as strong positions.17 The grouping of types is also a bit

different from Sievers’ system. Sievers’ subtype A2a is now scanned the same as type Da;18 both are type 6 in the above list. These differences look striking from the perspective of Sievers’ typological legacy, where the ‘five types’ were a central result of his work, but they are trivial and irrelevant if we think in terms of met- rical principles. From this angle, Yakovlev’s system is simply a refinement, firmly grounded in a long tradition going back to Sievers.

For his part, Cable has endorsed Yakovlev’s approach – though his general approval need not imply he agrees with Yakovlev on every last detail.19 In a review essay discussing Yakovlev’s thesis, Cable observes that: Yakovlev has shown that my theory depended on a concealed assumption of word boundaries, which the theory had explicitly rejected. His alternative proposal is clearly superior. (Cable 2009: 264) To some, this slow refinement of the four-position principle as the central basis of Germanic metrics might seem like a ‘triumphant vindication of Sievers’, to

17 This incidentally does away with the old ‘two stresses per half-line’ generalization that has haunted the pages of Germanic metrical studies for so long.

18 That is, Sievers’ type D1; Da is a useful cover term for types D1, D2, and D3, contrasting with Db (Sievers’ D4).

19 Cable’s original system was, for instance, able to explain the lack of verses like ˣhilderinc hār or ˣsyððan gūðrinc swealt , or the extreme rarity of verses like þa þe geolo godwebb (Rid 35.10) – this last a pattern so rare that nothing comparable appears in the very generously inclusive catalogue provided by Hutcheson (1995, 287) – through the desire to avoid stress clashes of various sorts (Cable 1991: 148–50). I am not sure how Yakovlev would explain these gaps. 148 Nelson Goering borrow a phrase that Bliss (1962, v) used, perhaps prematurely, of his own work. But even though this approach is very much in vogue right now, and there are real attractions to its theoretical elegance, it is not clear that it is either the best paradigm for understanding alliterative metre, or even the most valuable legacy that Sievers has left us. Some of the reasons for caution about the four-position principle are well known. I have already alluded to three- and five-positions verses like the following: (1) deorc ofer dryhtgumum ‘dark over war-men’ (Beo 1790a) (type Da*) (2) þrȳðlic þegna hēap ‘mighty band of retainers’ (Beo 400a, 1627a) (type Db*) (3) ne āhicgan ‘nor find out’ Dan( 147a) (type A3; alliteration on h) Various explanations for these have been proposed. For the D* types shown in (1–2), Sievers looked to his feet. Cable (1974: 80–81; 1991, 143), who had no feet, appealed to stress clashes, and Suzuki (1992; 1996: 23–35, 103–7, 110–2) took a broadly similar approach. Yakovlev (2008: 65–68) is more sceptical, and rightly objects that this approach is ad hoc and sits ill with the four-position principles more generally. He instead argues that they are a traditional relic, a diachronic fossil left over from an earlier period where (he supposes) such longer patterns were a normal part of the metre. This explanation has its own problems, and D* verses remain awkward for any four-position approach. Similarly, for so-called A3 verses like (3), ad hoc explanations may be devised, but they remain a chal- lenge to the theory. These objections are well known, and I am not by any means the first to voice them. It is worth pointing out, however, that the four-position theory is seri- ously deficient in another crucial respect: it cannot account for the diversity of Germanic verse forms. It is intended to explain the ‘regular’ verse types found in ‘normal’ Old English poetry and Norse fornyrðislag, and with more reservations in the Heliand and a few other Continental fragments. But this ‘standard form’ is only one strand in the Germanic alliterative tradition, though an important

one. Within Old English, we have hypermetric verses, which have often received cursory analysis, but remain difficult for positional approaches.20 Old Norse

20 Sievers (1893a: 135–44) followed Luick (1888) in seeing hypermetric half-lines as ‘blends’ of two types, an awkward explanation that has convinced few, and which becomes impossible if we see types as purely epiphenomenal. Cable (1974: 5) just ignores such verses, an approach enabled, perhaps, by the tradition of grounding Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on 149

shows entire poems, such as Atlakviða,21 and regular verse modes, such as the

full-verses of the ljóðaháttr metre, which involve problems of scansion similar to those presented by hypermetrics.22 There is in fact an alternative system of scansion which fares rather better with the full range of Germanic verse: classic ‘four-position’ half-lines, problem- atic patterns like D* and A3, and the various types of hypermetric and extended verse forms in English, Norse, and Continental Germanic. This is the word-foot theory, developed by Russom (1987, 1998). He rejects the four-position prin- ciple completely, and instead argues that each verse consists of two word-feet. Often these are simply two words, but a word-foot may instead be filled by a phrase following the rhythmic contour of a standard word. Normally these are simplex words, which helps define the normal weight and length of a standard

metrical studies in Beowulf, a poem in which hypermetric verses are relatively rare. Yakovlev (2008: 83–88) is to be commended for taking the problem more seriously, but his explanation assumes arbitrary and ad hoc modifications of verse construction (adding in extra metrical positions, and adding peculiar restrictions on the expansion of dips), and even so almost gives up on the opening sequences of on-verses as being ‘almost unregulated’.

21 Sievers (1893a: 79) despairingly noted of this poem that: Die unregelmässigkeit ist zum teil so gross, dass man den eindruck gewinnt, als handle es sich mehr um ganz freie rhythmen (deren grundlage allerdings wieder die in fornyrðislag und málaháttr üblichen formen bilden), als eine feste metrische form… ‘The irregularity is in part so great, that one has the impression that it is a matter more of completely free rhythm (the basis of which nonetheless is still patterned on the typical forms of fornyrðislag and málaháttr).’ Suzuki (2014: 523) makes the attempt to describe Atlakviða in positional terms, but his conclusion that it is a ‘mixed’ metre, transitional between fornyrðislag and málaháttr largely amounts to demonstration of how difficult it is to adequately deal with this and other similar poems (e.g. Hamðismál, Hlǫðskviða, Haraldskvæði, and potentially parts of Hárbarðsljóð) within a position-counting framework. For the poems in question, see Jónas Kristjánsson & Vésteinn Ólason (2014a, 2014b) and Whaley (2012).

22 All of these longer verse forms have received excellent treatment by Hartman (2011), who provides much useful formal description and contextual analysis, but leaves many specifically metrical questions open. In my view,ljóðaháttr full-verses in particular are impossible to scan satisfactorily under a positional analysis, and I have instead pro- posed a structure based on Russom’s word-foot theory (Goering 2016b: ch. 4) – though I depart significantly from the analysis of ljóðaháttr developed by Russom (2009), and in general approach draw more heavily on Heusler (1890). 150 Nelson Goering half-line. Word-feet are also regularly based on shorter compound words, and such compound-feet are the basis for, among other things, the D* verses which positional approaches have traditionally found problematic (cf. ­examples 1–2). Longer verse modes, such as hypermetrics and ljóðaháttr full-verses, are defined by their requirement of at least one compound foot, and their tolerance for slightly longer and heavier feet in general (Russom 1987: ch. 6; Goering 2016b: ch. 4). There are further restrictions on allowing light, extrametrical words, and on avoiding verse patterns that resemble single word-feet too closely (so ‘three- position’ verses tend to be ruled out because they have the same pattern as com- pound word-feet: ˣselfa bæd cannot be a verse, because it would be understood to be a single phrasal word-foot of the sort represented by hilderinc). It would lead us too far afield to explain and defend the system in full here, but I will note that, unlike so many other revisionist accounts of Germanic metre, it can ac- count for the attested range of verse forms and patterns far more robustly, while

also having considerable exclusionary power (and so can explain the absence of non-occurring forms).23 Russom’s theory is fundamentally in the Sieversian tradition, though it does not relate directly to the two legacies discussed so far. It does not have much to do with the typological approach – Russom does use Sievers’ labels, of course, but purely as a familiar descriptive device, not as a theoretical end in itself, and some verses grouped under a single ‘type’ by Sievers may be analysed as having different word-foot structures. It certainly does not belong to the four-position tradition, which Russom emphatically and explicitly

23 There is a further typological consideration to be made. The modern four-position theory must assume that its four units exist in a ‘flat’ structure, but universalist met- rical study suggests that groups of four are usually best understood as hierarchical: two groups of two (I do not recall seeing this criticism of the four-position theory in print, but Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero cogently made this point during a panel discussion at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics in Edinburgh). The word-foot theory, on the other hand, is explicitly hierarchical in structure (Russom 1987: 71–79). A line is made of two verses, the first of which is stronger than the second. Each verse in turn is made from two feet, one of which is stronger than the other. The effects of metrical subordination are reflected in patterns of alliteration and resolution. For word-feet based on compound words, these show a binary subordination by the rules of linguistic compounding. Such branching structures agree well with analyses of other verse forms, including later English verse, as being fundamentally hierarchical (Kiparsky 1977; Youmans 1982, 1996; Minkova 1996). Here is a word-foot tree for line 10 of Beowulf: Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on 151

In addition to the notations described in note 5 above, WF stands for ‘word-foot’, and W for ‘word’. Precisely what type of ‘word’ is meant linguistically is not yet perfectly clear. Stressed word-feet often resemble the phonological/prosodic word (Dixon 1977a: 89 ff.; 1977b; Selkirk 1978; Dixon & Aikhenvald 2003; Nespor & Vogel 2007; Hildebrandt 2015), especially in being marked by left-edge stress: in a word like gefrūnon, frūnon consistutes the entirety of a word-foot, and there are no word-feet of the shape wS, wSw, etc., even though one would expect the grammatical word to incorporate the prefix. On the other hand, elements such as prepositions and demonstratives, as well as other function words (conjunctions, temporal adverbs, etc.), frequently stand as word-feet, as ofer does in the above example. Such elements count as metrically ‘light’, and are usually assumed – though without direct, non- metrical evidence – to be linguistically unstressed (Momma 1997: ch. 3). These have traditionally been referred to as proclitics (e.g. Kuhn 1933: 8 and Hutcheson 1992: 133), which (if true) would preclude their being phonological words; since most proclitics alternate with stressed forms (compare in in Beowulf 1b and 19b), they might qualify as what Selkirk (1996) calls free clitics. On the other hand, it is probably more reasonable to view these elements as phonological words, though they are not usually able to head a phonological phrase (cf. Zwicky 1985: 291–292), and so cannot take alliteration. Support for this view comes from the lack of vowel reduction in prepositions like æt (normally unstressed old æ is reduced to e, as in the genitive singular ending -æs > -es). This more word-like behaviour of prepositions and demonstratives contrasts with unstressed prefixes like ge-, which meet the criteria of neither the grammatical nor the prosodic word, and often show reductions below the normal bimoraic requirements; they may correspond to Selkirk’s affixal clitics. Such elements occasionally scan as a word-foot, but this is probably a metrical mismatch: whatever type of ‘word’ serves as the prototypical basis for word-feet, it normally neither incorporates such prefixes nor recognizes them as elements in 152 Nelson Goering

rejects.24 Rather, the reason why Russom’s wordfoot theory is so successful where so many other non-Sieversian revisions fail is that he builds directly on Sievers’ most important contribution to Old Germanic metrics: his descriptive under- standing of the linguistic-metrical prosody of Germanic verse, including reso- lution. This prosodic legacy is the third and final strand of Sievers’ impact that I want to highlight here.

3 Sievers’ Prosodic Legacy Sievers established that the basis of Germanic metre lay in the structure of the language itself, and he extensively described which words and morphemes are stressed and unstressed, and how patterns of stress and quantity com-

bine to form valid verse forms – and how certain linguistically possible configurations do not occur.25 Especially important was Sievers’ argument for resolution. He noted that a sequence of a light syllable followed by another syllable functioned together as the metrical equivalent of a single heavy syl- lable. But this principle did not function across the board: resolution was mandatory in some metrical contexts, but had to be suspended in others, usu- ally in positions that immediately followed another linguistic stress or which were in some way subordinated. Some details have been adjusted slightly over the years, but Sievers’ basic approach remains fundamental for rigorous met- rical study today. Though implicitly very widely used, Sievers’ achievement as a descriptive prosodist has not received the explicit recognition it deserves. It has sometimes been conflated with Sievers’ typological work. This is why Sweet, back in 1894, was able to say:

their own right. If all this is correct, then the word-foot is based prototypically on the prosodic word, while clitics are normally invisible to the metrical framework (cf. Russom 1996). This topic could bear closer investigation.

24 Occasionally the four-position and word-foot theories are presented as being somehow compatible, complementary theories (Cable 1991: 149; Fulk 1992: 56, n. 93; Stockwell 1996: 91; Stockwell & Minkova 1996: 80–81; Pascual 2016a: 290, 294–295, 300). From a theoretical perspective, this does not seem likely, as they are mutually exclusive attempts to explain the same set of phenomena. The adoption of one obviates the need for the other; the adoption of both would be highly uneconomical.

25 Our understanding of such restrictions on a descriptive level has continued to evolve. Discoveries like ‘Terasawa’s rule’ (Terasawa 1994), which describes restrictions on the possible shapes of Old English poetic compounds, are also very much a part of this Sieversian descriptive tradition. Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on 153

Sievers’ classification of the Old-English metrical forms into types is not a theory, but a statement of facts, and … the complexity and irregularity to which [Sievers’ critics] object is a fact, not a theory. (Sweet 1894: x) Sweet’s confusion is understandable, but he mixes up Sievers’ descriptions of the prosodic arrangements of Germanic verse with his (imperfect) taxonomic analysis of these arrangements. To give just one example, Sievers noted that the D* pattern sealte sǣstrēamas, ‘salty sea-streams’, was a real verse pattern in Germanic metre. He also discussed an imaginable related pattern which he called E*, of the type ˣsǣstrēamas sealte, but noted that as a matter of descrip-

tive fact this type does not occur in the ‘classic’ verse form. He is able to fit both patterns into his typology,26 but the far more important thing is his descriptive

observation that the D* pattern is a standard prosodic configuration, while the E* pattern is not.27 Simply put, the five types are not a prosodic description of the facts of Germanic verse, though they partly overlap with such a description. This distinction between taxonomy and prosodic description was in principle already discernible in Sweet’s day, but it is much easier to see now, when metrical study has largely abandoned typology as a goal in its own right, while we still retain a central place for Sievers’ prosodic descriptions. This Sieversian descriptive prosody is also independent of the four-position principle. It is sometimes said that resolution, in particular, depends on and in turn provides support for the four-position theory (Fulk 2002: 337–40; Yakovlev 2008: 62–64; Pascual 2016a: 4, n. 15; Pascual 2018b), but this is not true. Sievers’

original arguments for resolution were based on descriptive observations, not the four-position principle, which he was still trying to justify.28 Resolution and its

26 Though neither derives well from his underlying principles.

27 But E* patterns do occur in some less ‘classic’ verse, such as Atlakviða, in ways that are very difficult for four-positional analyses to deal with. For a discussion of this type from a word-foot perspective, see Goering (2016b, 278–279).

28 Sievers (1885b: 219–220) based his defence of resolution especially on the extreme rarity of the configurationˣ SwS̆ w̄ (where S ̆ indicates a short stressed syllable, and S ̄ a long stressed syllable; cf. note 5). It thus resembles the configuration ˣSS̄ ̄ w, which also practically never occurs, rather than the extremely common pattern SwS̄ w.̄ This type of comparative logic, carried out again and again in various metrical contexts, is what actually establishes reso- lution (and in some contexts, its suspension) as a real metrical principle, not the demands of the four-position theory. Thus in the Sieversian tradition, resolution is suspended even in the final syllables of a verse like mǣre mearcstapa (Beo 103a) where this suspension creates a five-position verse. This is because suspension in this position is demanded by a coherent understanding of the verse form from a descriptive-prosodic perspective, which is far more important than trying to cram every verse into a four-position template. 154 Nelson Goering suspension are assumed even in cases where these operations make no difference to a four-position scansion. If further proof is needed of the independence of res- olution from the four-position principle, it can be seen in Russom’s theoretically- distinct word-foot system, which easily integrates Sieversian resolution wholesale. All this is only to be expected, as we now understand better that both resolution and its suspension are, at least in origin, rooted in the foot structure of Old English phonology (Kuryłowicz 1949; Dresher & Lahiri 1991; Goering 2016a). If the prosodic description developed by Sievers, and especially the principle of resolution, is fundamentally independent of both his typology and his four- position theory, then it must stand on its own – and it is in fact perhaps Sievers’ greatest achievement. It has certainly had the widest impact, being used in fields ranging from linguistics to literary history to textual criticism. Perhaps the most important work is this prosodic tradition is the landmark History of Old English Meter by Fulk (1992), which focuses on the interaction of descriptive metrics

and linguistic features such as resolution (including the rules for suspension he dubs ‘Kaluza’s law’), contraction, epenthesis, and more.29 Moreover, the broadly Sieversian metrical framework has been widely used in editing and emending

metrical texts, many of which are among the most significant literary monuments in the early .30 Beyond these extra-metrical applications, it is

Such descriptive reasoning for resolution is also recognized by Suzuki (1995: 30), who correctly speaks of ‘the significance of resolution as a metrical principle by means of which an array of distributional restrictions is made systematically explainable’. Metrical theory ought to account for these distributional restrictions, but the obser- vation of them does not depend rigidly on any single theoretical framework. Also compare Stockwell & Minkova (1996: 400–403).

29 Fulk does of course draw on other Sieversian traditions as well. He explictly takes Bliss’s typology as his primary metrical framework, and makes a real contribution to the four- position theory of the metre by identifying the ‘rule of the coda’ (see note 15 above). His basic methodology is, however, rooted in prosodic description, and the vast majority of his arguments would work equally well – sometimes better – if restated within a word-foot formalism. Fulk’s book, like so many other metrical studies, focuses on Old English, though unlike some he goes far beyond Beowulf. A classic review of the use of some metrical-prosodic features (among other things) for the goal of establishing a literary history in Norse can be found in Fidjestøl (1999); for a very useful examination of Norse prosody and metre in general, see Kristján Árnason (1991).

30 The use of metrical criteria in textual criticism has varied considerably over the years; for useful overviews of such trends in both Old English and Norse, see various discussions by Fulk (1997, 2003, 2007; 2016: 264–69). In Old Norse in particular, it may be fair to say that metrical criteria are largely downplayed or discounted in the editing of Eddic Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanisch Metrik 125 years on 155 this particular descriptive tradition that constitutes Sievers’ largest contribution to metrical theory. The elaborate taxonomies of Bliss, the four-position principle, the word-foot theory – all of these are attempts to grapple with and make sense of a substantial set of prosodic facts of old Germanic verse which Sievers brought into the spotlight, and greatly clarified with his fundamental discovery of the workings of resolution and its suspension.

4 Conclusion Sievers’ impact on the field is deep and multifaceted, and I have not even begun to touch on some major debates in Germanic metrical scholarship. For instance, I have completely ignored questions of isochrony or performance raised, partly in response to Sievers, by Heusler (1925) and Pope (1966). Nor have I gotten into diachronic questions, either concerning the prehistory of alliterative verse (Suzuki 1988; Simms 2003; Mees 2007; Marold 2011; Pascual 2016a; Russom 2017: ch. 2), or the later development of Middle English alliterative verse (Cable 1991: ch.

poetry at the moment, but historically they have played a significant role in textual criticism, and it remains a powerful tool if used wisely. Part of this is scepticism about whether we understand metrical principles well enough to emend based on them: …across the eddic corpus, a significant number of lines do not fit with the ver- sification ‘rules’ derived by Eduard Sievers for early Germanic poetry, a situa- tion which should at least give us pause before semantic interventions are made. (Quinn 2016: 65) Such scepticism is warranted insofar as emendations depend on predictions specific to an underlying metrical theory; the many three-position verses of fornyrðislag are a clear case in point. But from the prosodic-descriptive viewpoint, these objections to metrical criteria carry much less weight. For instance, some three position verses – especially those with the well-attested SwS pattern of aptan dags (Sg 6.2) – are clearly acceptible, at least in some poems, whether or not we can explain why theoretically (Russom 1998: 34–36). Sievers’ original ‘rules’ are indeed inadequate in accounting for these and other verses, and do not explain the full range of verse forms found in fornyrðislag; but a very Sieversian prosodic perspective acknowledges this, and can describe precisely which deviations from Sievers’ predictions actually occur with any frequency, which are marginal, and which simply do not occur at all. The details of these distributions are what should, in turn, provide the basis for metrical theorizing – as has in fact been done; see, e.g., Russom (1998) and Suzuki (2014). More immedi- ately, they are also perfectly valid – even necessary – considerations for an editor to take into account, in conjunction, of course, with all the other factors that one must balance in textual criticism. 156 Nelson Goering

2–4; Yakovlev 2008: ch. 2–4; Russom 2017: ch. 4–9; Pascual 2017; Pascual 2018a; Goering forthcoming).31 Still, the three strands of his legacy I have highlighted here do account for some of the most far-reaching and significant ways Sievers has shaped the study of early Germanic metre. His typological approach is no longer in vogue as an analytical system in its own right, but remains entrenched in our everyday vocabulary for describing verse patterns. His principle that every verse contains four positions has been refined and elaborated, and now serves – for better or worse – as the dominant paradigm for metrical theory today. And, most significantly of all, he gave us a robust prosodic analysis of Germanic poetic language, including the system of resolution, which can and should serve as the basis for any metrical analysis – whether it be the four-position approach, the word-foot theory, or something else entirely – and which is invaluable in the prac- tical study of old Germanic language and literature in general.

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Advisory Board: John Anderson (Methoni, Greece), Ulrich Busse (Halle), Isabel de la Cruz-Cabanillas (Alcala, Spain), Olga Fischer (Amsterdam), Marcin Krygier (Pozna ), Peter Lucas (Cambridge), Donka Minkova (Los Angeles), Akio Oizumi (Kyoto), Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffeń (UC Berkeley, USA), Hans Sauer (Munich), Liliana Sikorska (Pozna ), Jeremy Smith (Glasgow), Jerzy Wełna (Warsaw) Of ye Olde Englisch Langage and ń Textes: New Perspectives on Old Vol. 57 and Middle English Language and

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ISSN 1436-7521 ISBN 978-3-631-81795-7 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-82132-9 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-82133-6 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-82134-3 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b16935 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2020 All rights reserved. Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com