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New Perspectives on Old and Middle English Language and Literature

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New Perspectives on Old and Middle English Language and Literature 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, Alliterative Verse, Old English, Old Norse, Resolution, Sievers The context and content of Altgermanische 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.
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