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A New Approach To The Rhythm of Beowulf

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert P. Creed
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Extract

In The Rhythm of Beowulf Professor John Pope has presented a convincing case for reading Beowulf as a structure of language ordered not only by stress-patterns but by stress-patterns within strict time-sequences. According to Pope's thesis the rhythm of most Old English poetry can be described as a series of measures equivalent in length (isochronous) though varying in the number of syllables they contain and in the stress-patterns enforced upon these syllables.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , March 1966 , pp. 23 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 John Collins Pope, The Rhythm of Beowulf (New Haven, 1942). At this point I should like to express my gratitude to my former colleague, Professor William Hamrick of the University of Cincinnati, for his careful reading of this paper in all of its phases and for his many excellent and useful suggestions, many of which have been incorporated below.

2 Pope, Rhythm, p. 79.

3 Quotations from Beowulf cited from Pope (as, e.g., here) are cited exactly as they appear in Pope (= Klaeber's 3rd ed., generally). All other citations are from Francis P. Magoun, Jr., Béowulf and Judith ... in a Normalized Orthography (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959 f.).

4 Pope has located the boundaries of almost every measure in Beowulf: see his “Appendix: Catalogue of Rhythmic Variations in the Normal Verses of Beowulf,” in Rhythm, pp. 229–386. The exceptions implied in that “almost” are only the curious cases of his subtypes Bb and Cb. To have performed such a survey of this vast and long-disputed territory, to have located with such precision the bench-marks for all further study of early Germanic prosody, is for Pope to have put every scholar and every lover of this poetry deeply in his debt.

5 The word “theoretically” should be stressed, as Prof. Hamrick correctly points out to me. Hamrick, a musician as well as a student of Linguistics and Old English, suggests that the time between one beat and the next probably varied according to the expression. This suggestion accords with one made by R. B. LePage in “A Rhythmical Framework for The Five Types,” English and Germanic Studies, vi (1957), p. 96: “variation of rhythm and tempo seems to me an essential part of the Beowulf poet's technique.” But for the kind of analysis expounded here this variation—important in performance though it undoubtedly was—must be assumed to be non-significant.

6 Rhythm, p. 292. Type C 1, No. 11. Pope links the first two syllables with a ligature, though he gives a separate eighth note to each of the four syllables of æÐelingas. In his section on “The Notation” on p. 245 Pope equates two linked eighth notes with two unlinked eighth notes.

7 In my notation I shall place the appropriate stress sign over the vowel or diphthong (syllable nucleus) of long syllables and over the medial consonant or resolved pairs of syllables in such instances of true resolution. “Rhythmemic” resolution, which will be discussed later, will be indicated by a flat bar placed over the syllables so ‘resolved.‘

8 The equation of the short syllable æÐ- with the long syllable -ing-, as indicated by Pope's assigning an eighth note to each, is both unnecessary and a violation of phonemic patterns. That OE maintained a phonemic distinction between long and short syllables is clear from, e.g., Beowulf 2713a.

9 Since the four rules discussed in Section IV are more important than this one, I have followed the somewhat illogical process of numbering this Rule after those discussed later.

10 “Some Aspects of the Technique of Composition of Old English Verse,” Transactions of the Philological Society (London), 1952, pp. 1–14.

11 With Pope's solution to the problems posed by the B and C verses contrast Bliss's restatement of Sievers' solution: “The light verses [i.e., those of types B, C and A3] are made to conform by wresting an additional stress either from among the particles (Sievers' Type A3) or from the body of the stressed element itself, whenever it consists of a compound word, or even of a word containing a long derivative ending ...” A. J. Bliss, The Metre of Beowulf (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 8; my italics.

12 “Studies in the Techniques of Composition of the Beowulf Poetry in British Museum MS. Cotton Vitellius A. XV,” unpubl. diss. (Harvard, 1955), pp. 79–88. A completely revised and augmented version of this study is to be published under the title “The Traditional Style of Beowulf.”

13 For a number of further instances of such similar verses, see ibid., pp. 80 and 86.

14 The significant difference between “eallum” and “wera” is, of course, the length of the first syllable. Since the length of a primary- or secondary-stressed syllable must be taken into account, it is important that students be quickly alerted to long or doubled consonants as well as the usually marked long vowels. Compare Pope, Rhythm, p. 245: “the distinction between long and short syllables is of importance only when the syllables are heavily accented ...”

15 See John A. Nist The Structure and Texture of Beowulf (São Paulo, 1959), pp. 93–110.

16 Pope, Rhythm, p. 23 (Heusler) and p. 19 (Leonard).

17 Bliss (Metre, pp. 27–35) discusses what he takes to be the preservation of a distinction between “long vocalic endings” after a stressed syllable and short, and therefore resolvable, vocalic endings. But his list of apparently non-resolvable endings (in par. 36) might, it seems to me, be used equally well to demonstrate the need for a harp stroke immediately following the first syllable of these verses. Bliss seems curiously unaware of the fact that his statistics can at times be used to support an hypothesis other than the one he insists upon. Further, Bliss, who is eager to condemn others for not providing all of the evidence for a conclusion, fails even to take up the question of these so-called “long vocalic endings” in environments other than those discussed in par. 36. “Fruma,” listed in the compounds land-fruma, dædfruma, etc., in par. 36 (d) as one of the unresolvables, appears in Beowulf 2309b (“wæs se fruma eзeslíć”) in a position which appears to demand resolution. Bliss does not cite or discuss this appearance of the simplex and its relation to the problem of the “long vocalic endings.”

18 The linking of two or three syllables under a single stress indicator (/, \ or x)—a “rhythmemic” linkage—will be shown henceforth by the use of a flat horizontal bar over the syllables in question (e.g., rećede) to distinguish this linkage from true resolution, indicated by the curved horizontal bar (e.g., rećed-).

19 This symbol, properly Pope's tertiary (/) as here, is misprinted as Pope's primary (//) on p. 267, No. 72, from which this example is taken.

20 In my forthcoming study of “The Traditional Style of Beowulf” I shall take up in greater detail than is possible here this matter of the singer's substitution of measures and substitution within measures.

21 The reader who wishes to hear examples of Old English poetry read according to the method discussed in this paper should listen to Lyrics from the Old English, read by Burton Raffel and Robert P. Creed and released by Folkways Records [FL 9858], 1964.

22 No matter what -fréa (or the simplex, fréa) might have been originally, it can easily be accommodated as a delta in the present scansion. The need for “de-contracting” (and thus archaizing fréa to -fré[ge]a as C. L. Wrenn does in his Beowulf With the Finnesburg Fragment, Boston & London, 1953 f., p. 95 and elsewhere) is thus dispensed with. Wrenn discusses “decontraction” on pp. 31–32 of his Introduction. In this connection it might be noted that the delta measure (/ (x)) with its light stroke or note of the harp following the stressed syllable makes it possible to make some metrical sense out of, e.g., line 1 of Riddle 3, “Hwílum meć mín fréa / fæste зenearwaþ.” The line can be read as α—, ∂, α, α Similarly with the first line of Fates of the Apostles: “Hwæt! Ić þisne sang,” α—plus ∂. In effect, this is Pope's reading (Rhythm, p. 14), although Pope has failed to see the further possibilities in his use of the rest (or harp stroke) to solve this particular problem. The great rarity of the pattern α– +∂ indicates, of course, that these verses, even though they can be described in terms of our notation, were generally avoided by the poets.

23 Practice has shown that it quickly becomes possible for a student to mark only harp-strokes and, occasionally, a resolved stress in order to read from his text. The rest of the props (|,, —, etc.) are then required only as an occasional reminder—and the text remains uncluttered and legible, and yet a reliable guide to the proper reading according to the present scansion.