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Old English Metrical History and the Composition of Widsið

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Abstract

In an attempt to refute the traditional notion that portions of Widsið were composed before the adventus Saxonum, Eric Weiskott recently resurrected a dating method employed by early twentieth-century literary historians, which consists of checking the forms that the half-lines of a poetic text would have had in prehistoric Old English against the well-known four-position rule of historical verse construction in order to establish a terminus a quo for its composition. This method is thus predicated on the assumption that the four-position principle obtained before the occurrence of certain prehistoric sound changes. The present essay advances a series of arguments that demonstrate that the four-position rule is the result of the evolution of the Old English language, and that it is therefore wrong to assume that it was already operative in the prehistory of Old English.

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Notes

  1. A syllable is long or heavy only if it ends in a long vowel or diphthong or in a short vowel or diphthong followed by a consonant; otherwise, the syllable is short or light. See, for instance, Bliss (1962: §12); Pope (2001: 135–136); and Terasawa (2011: 30). A word like vin is a heavy syllable when it bears no inflection, since n must syllabify with the preceding vowel.

  2. For a concise introduction to fornyrðislag and the rest of metres of the poetic Edda, see Russom (1993).

  3. On the fundamental character of this rule, see, for example, Cable (1971: 98). For the original formulation, see Sievers (1893: §8). For a complete exposition of the four-position principle, see Cable (1974: 84–93); see also Pascual (2013–2014). A succinct summary can be found in Stockwell and Minkova (1997: 67–68); Fulk (2002: 337–340); Pascual (2014: 811–812, 2015: 174–175). On the empirical sufficiency of resolution, see Suzuki (1995).

  4. On this vocalic lengthening, see Luick (1914–1940: §103); Minkova (2014: 70–71).

  5. For a detailed study of the phonological position, see Dresher and Lahiri (1991).

  6. For example, Kuryłowicz accounted for the distribution of alliteration in the line in terms of metrical compounding. Just as the stress on the first element of a compound is greater than the stress on its second element, the first ictic syllable within each verse and the first verse within each line are more prominent than the second ictic syllable and the second verse. Consequently, the first ictic syllable of each verse must participate in the alliteration. The second ictic syllable of the first half-line may alliterate, whereas the alliteration of the second ictic syllable of the second half-line is strictly prohibited (1970: 16–20). For a detailed exposition, see Russom (1987: 71–73, 1998: 64–86); Terasawa (2011: 19–21); and Pascual (2014: 816).

  7. See, for instance, Fulk (1995); Russom (1987, 1998). See also Bliss (1962: §12); Pope (2001: 148).

  8. The idea that portions of Widsið were composed before the adventus Saxonum was widespread in earlier scholarship (see, e.g., Chambers 1912; Malone 1962), but Weiskott frames his argument as a response to an article that Leonard Neidorf recently published in this journal (2013a). Weiskott (2015: 145) represents Neidorf as a professed adherent to this view, yet Neidorf merely mentioned the pre-adventus hypothesis in passing as a possible explanation for the continental semantics of Rumwalum and Wala rīċ (Neidorf 2013a: 170, 2015). On the same page, moreover, Neidorf went on to champion an alternative explanation for this archaism, namely, that Widsið was probably composed in England during the seventh or eighth century, before the continental meanings of these words were lost and new insular senses had developed. Nowhere in his paper does he argue composition prior to the Anglo-Saxon migration. It should be noted here that the present essay is also not invested in defending the hypothesis of pre-adventus composition. Its purpose, rather, is to dispute the ahistorical conception of Old English metre inherent in Weiskott’s dating method and thereby to offer a more plausible framework for investigations into metrical history.

  9. This method was applied at the beginning of the twentieth century by, for example, Sarrazin (1907) and Richter (1910), and more recently by Amos (1980). For a penetrating critique of Amos’s study, see Fulk (1992: §§1–75).

  10. This is the form of the word before the deletion of medial unstressed vowels that took place at the end of the sixth century (see Luick 1914–1940: §350; Campbell 1959: §341; and Hogg 1992: §§6.14–15).

  11. The coda of a verse comprises the last ictus and the following linguistic material. The material preceding the coda is the verse’s onset (Fulk 1992: 201 n. 60).

  12. This verse is governed by Fulk’s law (see Fulk 1992: §§221–245; Pascual 2013–2014: 58), according to which short penultimate syllables always bear ictus. This rule is ultimately a reflection of the Indo-European principle of closure, or right justification, which requires more rigid structures towards the end of a metrical domain (see Foley 1985: 12). Fulk’s law originated by analogy to Kaluza’s law: because stress levels are higher in the onset of the verse than in the coda, resolution of disyllabic sequences under secondary stress tends to occur in verse-internal position (i.e., in type A2a verses; see Fulk 1995: 495–496). Therefore, suspension of resolution at the end of the verse came to be regarded as the norm. On Kaluza’s law, see Kaluza (1896, 1909: 57–59); Bliss (1967: §§34–37); Fulk (1992: §§170–183, 1998, 2007b: 317–323); Cable (1994); Neidorf and Pascual (2014).

  13. On the deletion of high vowels, which occurred at the beginning of the seventh century (Luick 1914–1940: §350), see Fulk (2010), which contains the most satisfactory account of its operation. See also Sievers (1898: §144 and n. 1); Wright and Wright (1925: §216); Campbell (1959: §345); Kiparsky and O’Neil (1976: 534); Hogg (1992: §§6.18–19); Lass (1994: 101); Fulk (2014: §54).

  14. Other type B verses with a disyllabic verse-internal drop are Beowulf 80a, Hē bēot ne ālēh; 272b, þū wāst, ġif hit is; 455b, Gǣð ā wyrd swā hīo scel; 1182b, ġyf þū ǣr þonne hē; 1696a, ġeseted ond ġesǣd; 1864a, ġē wið fēond ġē wið frēond; 1876b, Wæs him se man tō þon lēof; 2574b, swā him wyrd ne ġescrāf; and 2870a, ōwer feor oððe nēah.

  15. See footnote 13 above.

  16. Weiskott’s account also contains two errors based on a misapprehension of Old Germanic historical linguistics. He reconstructs the first compound element of Þēodrīċ as *Þēodu (2015: 146). This reconstruction fails to recognize that the composition vowel of ō-stems is not u, but a (see Carr 1939: 270, 273), as is attested by compounds in other Indo-European languages. For example, we find the Greek compound ψυχολογία—where the linking o corresponds to Germanic a—as opposed to the simplex ψυχή. Moreover, despite the unumlauted root vowel, Weiskott erroneously identifies the noun gūð as an i-stem. Gūð is in actuality a Germanic consonant stem that became an ō-stem in Old English.

  17. On the unmetricality of three-position verses, see Sievers (1893: §§10.1); Pope (1966: 320–321, 334, 372); Bliss: (1967: §84); Russom (1987: 33–38); Fulk (1992: §209); Hutcheson (1995: 156–158); Suzuki (1996: 120); Terasawa (2011: 49–52); Pascual (2013–2014).

  18. See also Bliss (1972: 247).

  19. The formula occurs several times in Beowulf, and recent philological research has provided compelling reasons to believe that this poem was composed between ca. 685 and 725 (see Lapidge 2000; Fulk 2007a, 2007b; Clark 2009; Neidorf 2013b; Neidorf and Pascual 2014); as well as the various essays published in Neidorf (2014).

  20. Cf. Beowulf 2458b, nis þǣr hearpan swēġ; and 3023b, nalles hearpan swēġ.

  21. Cf. Beowulf 1835b, þǣr ðē bið manna þearf.

  22. Cf. Beowulf 802b, īrenna cyst; 1697a, īrena cyst.

  23. “Wrought runes on foreign corn.”

  24. An interesting implication of this argument is that Gothic verse must have been syllable counting.

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  1. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Rafael J. Pascual

  2. Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

    Rafael J. Pascual

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Pascual, R.J. Old English Metrical History and the Composition of Widsið . Neophilologus 100, 289–302 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-015-9460-6

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