Editing Alliterative verse (section)

==Common Germanic origins==
{{further|Germanic Heroic Age}}The poetic forms found in the various [[Germanic languages|Germanic]] languages are not identical, but there is still sufficient similarity to make it clear that they are closely related traditions, stemming from a common Germanic source. Knowledge about that common tradition, however, is based almost entirely on inference from later poetry.<ref name="auto3">{{cite thesis |last1=Simms |first1=Douglas Peter Allen |title=Reconstructing an oral tradition: problems in the comparative metrical analysis of Old English, Old Saxon and Old Norse alliterative verse |date=2003 |hdl=2152/937 |hdl-access=free |oclc=847273745 }}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref>

Originally all alliterative poetry was composed and transmitted orally, and much went unrecorded. The degree to which writing may have altered this oral art form remains much in dispute. Nevertheless, there is a broad consensus among scholars that the written verse retains many (and some would argue almost all) of the features of the spoken language.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Pascual |first1=Rafael J. |title=Oral Tradition and the History of English Alliterative Verse |journal=Studia Neophilologica |date=3 July 2017 |volume=89 |issue=2 |pages=250–260 |doi=10.1080/00393274.2017.1369360 |s2cid=164993069 |url=https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:56fdb211-c9f7-40b0-ab71-ee09c875764a }}</ref><ref name="auto3"/><ref>{{cite book |last1=Wolf |first1=Alois |chapter=Medieval Heroic Traditions and Their Transitions from Orality to Literacy |pages=67–88 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ng-vqCqP8YQC&pg=PA67 |editor1-last=Doane |editor1-first=Alger Nicolaus |editor2-last=Pasternack |editor2-first=Carol Braun |title=Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages |date=1991 |publisher=Univ of Wisconsin Press |isbn=978-0-299-13094-7 }}</ref>

One statement we have about the nature of alliterative verse from a practicing alliterative poet is that of [[Snorri Sturluson]] in the ''[[Prose Edda]]''. He describes metrical patterns and poetic devices used by [[skald]]ic poets around the year 1200.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Wanner |first1=Kevin J. |title=Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia |date=2008 |publisher=University of Toronto Press |isbn=978-0-8020-9801-6 }}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref> Snorri's description has served as the starting point for scholars to reconstruct alliterative meters beyond those of [[Old Norse]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Orchard |first1=Andy |title=A Critical Companion to Beowulf |date=2003 |publisher=Boydell & Brewer Ltd |isbn=978-1-84384-029-9 }}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref><ref>{{cite thesis |id={{ProQuest|304689677}} |last1=Carroll |first1=Joseph Robert |date=2001 |title=Snorri Sturluson and 'Beowulf' }}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref>
[[Image:Guldhornene DO-10765 original.jpg|thumb|300px|The replicas of the Golden Horns of Gallehus exhibited at the [[National Museum of Denmark]]]]
Alliterative verse has been found in some of the earliest monuments of Germanic literature. The [[Golden Horns of Gallehus]], discovered in [[Denmark]] and likely dating to the 4th century, bear this [[rune|Runic]] inscription in [[Proto-Norse]]:<ref>{{cite book |last1=Price |first1=T. Douglas |title=Ancient Scandinavia: An Archaeological History from the First Humans to the Vikings |date=2015 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-023198-9 |page=313 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IZ_KBwAAQBAJ&dq=golden+horn+of+gallehus+hartner&pg=PA313 }}</ref>

 x  /  x x  x   /  x x      /  x  / x x
 ek hlewagastiʀ holtijaʀ || horna tawidō
 (I, Hlewagastiʀ [son?] of Holt, made the horn.)

This inscription contains four strongly stressed syllables, the first three of which alliterate on {{angbr|h}} /x/ and the last of which does not alliterate, essentially the same pattern found in much later verse.

===Formal features===
====Meter and rhythm====
The core [[Metre (poetry)|metrical]] features of traditional Germanic alliterative verse are as follows; they can be seen in the Gallehus inscription above:<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26">{{harvnb|Terasawa|2011|pp=3–26}}</ref>

*A long line is divided into two ''half-lines''. Half-lines are also known as 'verses', '[[hemistich]]es', or 'distiches'; the first is called the 'a-verse' (or 'on-verse'), the second the 'b-verse' (or 'off-verse').{{efn|[[Old Norse]] poetry is not, traditionally, written as two half-lines with a medial caesura. A half line as described above is written as a whole line in (for example) editions of the [[Poetic Edda]], though scholars such as [[Andreas Heusler]] and [[Eduard Sievers]] have applied the half-line structure to Eddaic poetry.}} The rhythm of the b-verse is generally more regular than that of the a-verse, helping listeners to perceive where the end of the line falls.<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26"/>
*A heavy pause, or '[[caesura|cæsura]]', separates the verses.<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26"/>
*Each verse usually has two heavily stressed syllables, referred to as 'lifts' or 'beats' (other, less heavily stressed syllables, are called 'dips').<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26"/>
*The first and/or second lift in the a-verse [[alliteration|alliterates]] with the first lift in the b-verse.<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26"/>
*The second lift in the b-verse does not alliterate with the first lifts.<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26"/>

Some of these fundamental rules varied in certain traditions over time. For example, in Old English alliterative verse, in some lines the second but not the first lift in the a-verse alliterated with the first lift in the b-verse, for instance line 38 of Beowulf ''(ne hyrde ic '''<u>c</u>'''ymlicor     '''<u>c</u>'''eol gegyrwan'').<ref>{{Cite web |title=Medieval Sourcebook: Beowulf (in Old English) |url=https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/beowulf-oe.asp |access-date=2023-12-06 |website=sourcebooks.fordham.edu}}</ref>

Unlike in post-medieval English [[accentual verse]], in which a syllable is either [[Stress (linguistics)|stressed]] or unstressed, Germanic poets were sensitive to ''degrees'' of stress. These can be thought of at three levels:<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26" />

# '''most stressed ('stress-words')''': [[Root (linguistics)|root]] syllables of [[noun]]s, [[adjective]]s, [[participle]]s, [[infinitive]]s<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26"/>
# '''less stressed ('particles')''': [[Root (linguistics)|root]] syllables of most [[Finite verb|finite]] verbs (i.e. [[Grammatical tense|tensed verbs]]) and [[adverb]]s<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26"/>
# '''even less stressed ('[[Clitic|proclitics]]')''': most [[pronoun]]s, weakly stressed [[adverb]]s, [[Preposition and postposition|prepositions]], [[Conjunctions (journal)|conjunctions]], parts of the verb ''[[Copula (linguistics)|to be]]'', [[Suffix|word-endings]]<ref name="Terasawa 2011 pp3-26"/>

If a half-line contains one or more stress-words, their [[Root (linguistics)|root]] syllables will be the lifts. (This is the case in the Gallehus Horn inscription above, where all the lifts are nouns.) If it contains no stress-words, the root syllables of any particles will be the lift. Rarely, even a [[Clitic|proclitic]] can be the lift, either because there are no more heavily stressed syllables or because it is given extra stress for some particular reason.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Gade |first1=Kari Ellen |title=The Structure of Old Norse Dróttkvætt Poetry |date=1995 |publisher=Cornell University Press |isbn=978-0-8014-3023-7 }}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Carroll |first1=Benjamin H. |title=Old English Prosody |journal=Journal of English Linguistics |date=June 1996 |volume=24 |issue=2 |pages=93–115 |doi=10.1177/007542429602400203 |s2cid=144142142 }}</ref>

Lifts also have to meet an additional requirement, involving what linguists term ''quantity'', which is related to ''[[vowel length]]''. A [[syllable]] like the ''li'' in ''little'', which ends in a short vowel, takes less time to say than a syllable like the ''ow'' in ''growing'', which ends in a long vowel or a [[diphthong]]. A closed syllable, which ends with one or more consonants, like ''bird'', takes about the same amount of time as a long vowel.<ref>{{Citation |last=Tranel |first=Bernard |title=On phonetic evidence for the phonological mora: comments on Hubbard |date=1995-09-14 |work=Phonology and Phonetic Evidence |pages=188–202 |publisher=Cambridge University Press|doi=10.1017/cbo9780511554315.014 |isbn=978-0-521-48259-2 }}</ref> In the older Germanic languages, a syllable ending with a short vowel could not be one of the three potentially alliterating lifts by itself. Instead, if a lift was occupied by word with a short root vowel followed by only one consonant followed by an unstressed vowel (i.e. '(-)CVCV(-)) these two syllables were in most circumstances counted as only one syllable. This is called '''[[Resolution (meter)|resolution]]'''.<ref>{{harvnb|Terasawa|2011|pp=31–33}}</ref>

The patterns of unstressed syllables vary significantly in the alliterative traditions of different Germanic languages. The rules for these patterns remain imperfectly understood and subject to debate.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Turville-Petre |first1=Thorlac |title=Approaches to the Metres of Alliterative Verse (review) |journal=Journal of English and Germanic Philology |date=2010 |volume=109 |issue=2 |pages=240–242 |doi=10.1353/egp.0.0144 |s2cid=162332950 }}</ref>

====Rules for alliteration====
Alliteration fits naturally with the [[prosody (linguistics)|prosodic]] patterns of early Germanic languages. Alliteration essentially involves matching the left edges of stressed syllables. Early Germanic languages share a left-prominent prosodic pattern. In other words, stress falls on the root syllable of a word, which is normally the initial syllable (except where the root is preceded by an unstressed prefix, as in past participles, for example). This means that the first sound of a word was particularly salient to listeners.<ref>{{cite book |doi=10.1515/9783110643282-005 |chapter=First or best, last not least: Domain edges in the history of English |title=Studies in the History of the English Language VIII |date=2020 |last1=Minkova |first1=Donka |pages=109–134 |isbn=978-3-11-064328-2 |s2cid=234663337 }}</ref> Traditional Germanic verse had two particular rules about alliteration:

*All vowels alliterate with each other.<ref name="Donka Minkova 2003">{{harvnb|Minkova|2003|loc=ch. 4}}</ref> The precise reasons for this are debated. The most common, but not uniformly accepted, theory for vowel-alliteration is that words beginning with vowels all actually began with a [[glottal stop]] (as is still the case in some modern Germanic languages).<ref name="Donka Minkova 2003" />
*The consonant clusters ''st-'', ''sp-'' and ''sc-'' are treated as separate sounds (so ''st-'' only alliterates with ''st-'', not with ''s-'' or ''sp-'').<ref>{{harvnb|Minkova|2003|loc=chs. 5-7}}</ref>

====Diction====
The need to find an appropriate alliterating word gave certain other distinctive features to alliterative verse as well. Alliterative poets drew on a specialized vocabulary of poetic synonyms rarely used in prose texts<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Cronan |first1=Dennis |title=Poetic words, conservatism and the dating of Old English poetry |journal=Anglo-Saxon England |date=December 2004 |volume=33 |pages=23–50 |doi=10.1017/s026367510400002x |s2cid=162468385 |doi-access=free }}</ref><ref name="auto2"/> and used standard images and [[metaphor]]s called ''[[kenning]]s''.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Scholtz |first1=Hendrik van der Merwe |title=The Kenning in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Poetry |date=1927 |publisher=N. V. Dekker & Van de Vegt en J. W. Van Leeuwen |hdl=2027/mdp.39015033650196 |hdl-access=free }}</ref><ref name="Kennings in Old English Verse and i">{{cite journal |last1=Fulk |first1=Robert D. |title=Kennings in Old English Verse and in the Poetic Edda |journal=European Journal of Scandinavian Studies |date=26 April 2021 |volume=51 |issue=1 |pages=69–91 |doi=10.1515/ejss-2020-2030 |s2cid=233186171 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |doi=10.1163/ej.9789004179257.i-500.43 |chapter=The Old Norse Kenning as a Mnemonic Figure |title=The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages |date=2010 |last1=Birgisson |first1=Bergsveinn |pages=199–213 |isbn=978-90-474-4160-1 }}</ref>

Old Saxon and medieval English attest to the word ''[[fitt (poetry)|fitt]]'' with the sense of 'a section in a longer poem', and this term is sometimes used today by scholars to refer to sections of alliterative poems.<ref>'[https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/70743 fit | fytte, n.1.]', ''Oxford English Dictionary Online'', 1st edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1896).</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Fulk |first1=R.D. |title=The origin of the numbered sections in Beowulf and in other Old English poems |journal=Anglo-Saxon England |date=December 2006 |volume=35 |pages=91–109 |id={{ProQuest|196661862}} |doi=10.1017/S0263675106000056 |jstor=44510947 |s2cid=163092737 }}</ref>

===Relationship with ''Kalevala'' meter===
The trochaic tetrametrical meter that characterises the traditional poetry of most [[Finnic languages|Finnic-language]] cultures, known as [[Kalevala meter|''Kalevala'' meter]], does not deploy alliteration with the structural regularity of Germanic-language alliterative verse, but ''Kalevala'' meter does have a very strong convention that, in each line, two lexically stressed syllables should alliterate. In view of the profound influence of the Germanic languages on other aspects of the Finnic languages and the unusualness of such regular requirements for alliteration, it has been argued that ''Kalevala'' meter borrowed both its use of alliteration and possibly other metrical features from Germanic.<ref name=":0" />

===Comparison to other alliterative traditions===
Germanic alliterative verse is not the only alliterative verse tradition. It is thus worthwhile briefly to compare Germanic alliterative verse with other alliterative verse traditions, such as Somali and Mongol poetry. Like German alliterative verse, Somali alliterative verse is built around short lines (phrasal units, roughly equal in size to the Germanic half-line) whose strongest stress must alliterate with the strongest stress in another phrase. However, in traditional Somali alliterative verse, alliterating consonants are always word-initial, and the same alliterating consonant must carry through across multiple successive lines within a poem.<ref name="Alliteration in Somali Poetry"/> In Mongol alliterative verse, individual lines are also phrases, with strongest stress on the first word of the phrase.<ref>{{cite book |doi=10.21435/sff.25 |title=Rhyme and Rhyming in Verbal Art, Language, and Song |date=2022 |volume=14 |publisher=Finnish Literature Society |isbn=978-951-858-587-2 |editor-last1=Sykäri |editor-last2=Fabb |editor-first1=Venla |editor-first2=Nigel |jstor=j.ctv371cp40 }}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref> Lines are grouped into pairs, often parallel in structure, which must alliterate with one another, though alliteration between the head-stress and later words in the line is also allowed, and non-identical alliteration (for example, of voiced and voiceless consonants) is also accepted.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Foley |first1=John Miles |last2=Gejin |first2=Chao |title=Challenges in Comparative Oral Epic |journal=Oral Tradition |date=2012 |volume=27 |issue=2 |doi=10.1353/ort.2012.0018 |s2cid=55908556 |doi-access=free |hdl=10355/65268 |hdl-access=free }}</ref> Like Germanic alliterative verse, Somali and Mongol verse both emerge from oral traditions.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=de Ridder |first1=Rob |last2=Finnegan |first2=Ruth |title=Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Social Context |journal=Man |date=December 1994 |volume=29 |issue=4 |pages=995 |doi=10.2307/3033992 |jstor=3033992 }}</ref> Mongol poetry, but not Somali poetry, resembles Germanic verse in its emphasis on heroic epic.<ref>{{cite book |doi=10.4324/9781003258001-16 |chapter=Mongolian oral epic poetry |title=Oral Epic Traditions in China and Beyond |date=2021 |last1=Gejin |first1=Chao |pages=121–129 |isbn=978-1-00-325800-1 |s2cid=244653496 }}</ref>