Editing Alliterative verse (section)

===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>