Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

THOMAS A. BREDEHOFT, Early English Metre.

2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/notesj/gjn212

1471-6941

Mary Griffith,

Linguistic Variation and Morphology

IN a brief book of four chapters, the author attempts to re-describe Old English metre and to apply his theory to classical and late Old English poetry and to Layamon's Brut. There are extensive end-notes, a rather slender bibliography and an index. Portions of the second and third chapters have previously appeared in Notes and Queries and Anglo-Saxon England. The introduction and first chapter present some familiar criticisms of Sievers's five-type theory. It is unfair to base these, however, on the introductory section to ‘Metre’ in Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English, the necessary simplicity of that synopsis being mistaken for rigidity in Sievers's account. The second chapter follows Russom's ‘word foot’ theory, adapting it significantly only with respect to the much discussed problem of finite verbs in the onset of the verse (although there are intriguing remarks on cross alliteration). Judith and The Ruin are celebrated as complex products of the classical prosodic system. The third chapter contains the book's major claim, ‘the surprising and controversial discovery that Ælfric's alliterative works are formally indistinguishable from late verse’ (dustjacket). Bredehoft does not discuss the evidence for the chronology of Old English poetry, but takes ‘late’ to include not just the datably late (The Battle of Maldon, the poems of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle after Brunanburh), but also texts such as The Paris Psalter for which no precise date is known and which may not be any later than Judith. There is, inevitably, a measure of circularity in this. The metre of late verse is said not to include the rules for alliteration, compounding, anacrusis and resolution which operate in classical prosody and, accordingly, a variety of foot forms avoided by earlier poets are apparently allowed. But resolution operates normally in The Battle of Maldon (the most substantial late poem), as does alliteration in the great majority of its lines; nor does it contain anything like the general departures from the rules seen, for example, in The Death of Alfred. This contrast suggests that the late poems, far from representing a single prosodic system growing coherently out of the classical one, instead constitute differing responses to the break-up of that system. If the metrical rules for late verse are extrapolated from the practice of The Death of Alfred, then Ælfric's rhythmical prose may, perhaps, be claimed to be poetry but surely not if those rules are derived from The Battle of Maldon. A further major problem is that a model as loose as this can apply equally well to Wulfstan's rhythmical prose, or to various parts of the Vercelli homilies, or even to some of Ælfric's non-rhythmical prose. A sentence from Ælfric's Preface to Genesis re-organized as ‘verse’ (with postulated Bredehoft scansions) makes the point: Þæt micele geteld þe Moises worhte x / SxxxS (x)Sx / Sx mid wunderlicum cræfte on þam westene, (x)SxSx / Sx xx / Sxx swa swa him God self gedihte, xx / (x)S S / (x)Sx hæfde getacnunge Godes gelaðunge Sx / (x)Sxx Sx / (x)Sxx þe he self astealde þurh his apostolas xx / SxSx xx / (x)Sxx mid menigfealdum frætewum and fægerum þeawum. (x)SxSx / Sxx (x)Sxx / Sx