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In prosody, alliterative verse is any of a number of closely related verse forms that are the common inheritance of the older Germanic languages.
This was the verse form in which the Old English epic Beowulf was written, as well as most of the other Old English poetry; so were the Bavarian Muspillo and the Old Saxon Heliand. A modified form of alliterative verse is found in the Elder Edda. Alliterative verse exists from the earliest attested monuments of the Germanic languages; extended passages of alliterative verse are attested in Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, and Old Saxon.
The basic shape of the inherited form of alliterative verse is that:
Alliterative verse existed from the earliest monuments of Germanic literature to the present. The Golden Horn of Gallehus, discovered in Denmark and likely dating to the fourth century, bears the Runic inscription:
which forms a line of alliterative verse, alliterating with /h/.
A number of rules evolved in different languages as to what counted as a proper alliteration. Generally, consonant groups like /sk/ and /st/ only alliterated with identical consonant groups. Any vowel alliterated with any other vowel.
All of these verse forms impacted the texts written in them. As they developed, standard images and metaphors called kennings developed, and one of the purposes of these kennings was to allow the poet to substitute a stock image appropriate for his alliterating line.
Old English poetry is based upon one system of verse construction which was used for all poems. The system consisted of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any one of the five types could be used in any verse. The system is founded upon accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns of syllabic accentuation.
It should be borne in mind that poetry of the time was primarily oral, and much has been lost through time since it went unrecorded. The poet, referred to as a scop, a "shaper" of words, was frequently accompanied by a harp in the process of declamation.
A line of poetry in Old English consists of two half-lines or verses, distichs, with a pause or caesura in the middle of the line. Each half-line has two accented syllables. The following example from The Battle of Maldon, spoken by the warrior Middle English; William Langland's Piers Plowman 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:
Alliterative verse is occasionally written by modern authors. J. R. R. Tolkien composed several poems about Middle-earth in Old English alliterative verse; these poems were found among his papers and published posthumously. W. H. Auden also wrote a number of his poems, including The Age of Anxiety , 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:
Other poets who have experimented with modern alliterative English verse include Ezra Pound, and Richard Wilbur, whose Junk opens with the lines:
The inherited form of alliterative verse was modified somewhat in Old Norse poetry. In Old Norse, as a result of phonetic changes from the original common Germanic language, many unstressed syllables 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:
The various names of the Old Norse verse forms are given in the Younger Edda by Snorri Sturluson. The Háttatal, or "list of verse forms," contains the names and characteristics of each of the fixed forms of Norse poetry.
A verse form close to that of Beowulf existed in the Old Norse Eddas; in Norse, it was called fornyrðislag, which means roughly "the old rules." The Norse poets tended to break up their verses into stanzas 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 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 ballad metre", a stanzaic 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's lament in Skírnismál:
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.
These verse forms were elaborated even more into the skaldic poetic form called the dróttkvætt, meaning "lordly verse," which added internal rhymes and other forms of assonance 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 (aðalhending) in the syllables, not necessarily at the end of the word. The form was subject to further restrictions: each half-line must have exactly six syllables, and each line must always end in a trochee.
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 running through the on-side of the half-lines, and another running through the off-side. According to the Fagrskinna collection of sagas, King Harald III of Norway uttered these lines of dróttkvætt at the Battle of Stamford Bridge; 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 ljóðaháttr); 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 Sagas; several of the sagas are biographies of skaldic poets.
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):
The author was said to be a Christian from the Hebrides, 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 in an unbroken tradition since the settlement.
A common problem when researching things Norse is that the spelling of names varies much depending on one's country of origin. In the articles presented here, several common forms of the names will be presented. For more information see:
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