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Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21638195.94.1.08

2163-8195

Anatoly Liberman,

Linguistic Variation and Morphology

The title of this book is somewhat misleading because the reader will encounter in the text only a detailed treatment of hypermetric verses in three Old Germanic languages. Such verses, as follows from the term, are longer than expected. For example, “in Old English, a hypermetric verse is one that is half-again as long as a normal verse, through the addition of either a stressed position or two unstressed positions” (p. 3). Since hypermetric verses occurred in the Old Germanic poetry of all periods, innovation refers to the poet's individual use of longer lines, rather than the introduction of a new technique.Germanic metrical studies, as we know them today, began with Eduard Sievers and were later seriously influenced by Hans Kuhn, but nearly all the titles in Hartman's exhaustive bibliography (about 220 items) are in English. This area seems to have become the turf of Anglo-American scholars. I missed only one title in Hartman's impressive list, namely, Jean Fourquet's 1938 L'ordre des éléments de la phrase en germanique ancien. This work is important because Fourquet noticed two weak spots in Kuhn's reasoning: (1) Kuhn identified the Indo-European tone (a feature of word stress) with Old Germanic sentence stress (a typical “aberration of vision” in native speakers of German, including Wilhelm Wackernagel); and (2) he did not distinguish between the metrical ictus and stress.With regard to Hartman's exposition, disregarding Kuhn's second “sin” resulted in the all-too-familiar mythologizing of the concept of stress. I was taught to avoid Kuhn's mistakes by S. D. Katsnelson, the author of a book on Germanic accents and my mentor in this area. However, there was no need for Hartman to learn Russian, because Katsnelson dealt only with Scandinavian and German syllable accents and because some relevant considerations on stress could be found in my Germanic Accentology.What then is word stress? Is it another name for the ictus? Apparently, not to Hartman. I will quote several of her statements: “The reduction of stress, particularly on trisyllabic words, can be seen largely th[r]ough manuscript spellings” (p. 162). “Poetic compounds, such as swanrād ‘swanroad’ . . . must have a relatively high degree of stress on the second element because understanding the term as a whole requires understanding all of its elements” (p. 163). “Linguistically, Old Norse has a stronger root stress than Old English” (p. 95). “Where Old Norse has a particularly strong root stress, Old Saxon stands at the opposite end of the spectrum, with Old English in the middle, and is characterized by a particularly weak root stress” (p. 125). Is stress a physical force (intensity, loudness)? This is what descriptivist textbooks, with their distinction of multiple degrees of stress in a word, taught us. Do the root syllables of Swedish leva “to live” and Icelandic lifa (both verbs have full endings) have “a relatively lower degree of stress” than the root syllables of Norwegian and Danish leve (with a schwa in the second syllable)?Old scholarship produced a myth of an ever-increasing Germanic word stress, responsible for syncope, apocope, and nearly everything else. The proof of this lethal force was the presence of those same changes: for example, English underwent strong vowel reduction in postradical syllables because of strong root stress. How do we know that Old English root stress was strong? Look at the reduction! An ictus can, naturally, be neither strong nor weak. A more reasonable theory of stress would not have changed anything in Hartman's description of hypermetric verses, but it might be good for such a fine specialist in Germanic prosody to treat this phonetic phlogiston with the suspicion it deserves.Metrical studies often remain detailed exercises in statistics. An attractive feature of Hartman's book is her focus on the artistic function of hypermetric verses. As is noted on the first page of the introduction, “the idea that certain types of meter are appropriate for certain topics has been around for a long time, as evidenced by Aristotle's Poetics. Poets of the Renaissance and afterwards wrote prolifically on the various effects of metrical patterns” (p. 1). Hartman worked within the framework of this tradition and wanted to understand why hypermetric verses appeared where they did.Yet here we again find ourselves in a vicious circle, though the danger is not so great as in the previous case, because here we have no other way out. While dealing with a living language (especially our own), we can perhaps trust our intuition. But in analyzing a text in a dead language, the researcher will inevitably suggest that since the line has lengthened, there must have been a reason for it in the content. I will quote part of the conclusion of chapter 1: The Beowulf poet wishes to create rhetorically heightened passages that frame the thematically significant moments of the poem, giving them more emphasis and formality; the Guthlac A poet, in contrast, wishes to draw attention to the transitions in his poem, while still creating a character with authentic speech patterns whose words hold power over the devils who attempt to persecute him; and the Exodus poet saves his hypermetric passage until the end, where it can stand apart from the rest of the poem and immortalize the story the poet is trying to tell in totem. (p. 51)The countless small observations on Old Germanic metrics and syntax show that Hartman has full command of three traditions: Old English, Old Norse (with its stanzaic form), and Old Saxon (with its countless anacruses and other individual features). Her conclusions cannot be verified but always make sense. Quite naturally, she looked on the poems as texts. However, the poets could well be (inwardly) singing some lines to themselves in the process of composition. Perhaps some verses lent themselves especially well to such a process and recitation suggested lengthening. This is, of course, pure guesswork.To conclude: those who will pick up where Hartman left off will find a foundational work on an intricate problem of Old Germanic poetic metrics, syntax, and style. Her erudition and attention to detail guarantee the success of the book, especially because given the state of the art, her weaknesses were probably unavoidable.