Alliterative verse

In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. The Old English epic ''Beowulf'', as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German ''Muspilli'', the Old Saxon ''Heliand'', the Old Norse ''Poetic Edda'', and many Middle English poems such as ''Piers Plowman'', ''Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'', and the ''Alliterative Morte Arthur'' all use alliterative verse.

While alliteration can be found in many poetic traditions, it is 'relatively infrequent' as a structured characteristic of poetic form.Frog, "The Finnic Tetrameter: A Creolization of Poetic Form?", ''Studia Metrica et Poetica'', 6.1 (2019), 20–78. The extensive use of alliteration in the so-called ''Kalevala'' meter of the Finnic languages provides a close comparison, and may derive directly from Germanic-language alliterative verse.

Common Germanic origins and features

The poetic forms found in the various Germanic languages are not identical, but there is 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.

One statement we have about the nature of alliterative verse from a practising alliterative poet is that of Snorri Sturluson in the ''Prose Edda''. He describes metrical patterns and poetic devices used by skaldic poets around the year 1200. Snorri's description has served as the starting point for scholars to reconstruct alliterative meters beyond those of Old Norse. There have been many different metrical theories proposed, all of them attended with controversy. Looked at broadly, however, certain basic features are common from the earliest to the latest poetry.

Alliterative verse has been found in some of the earliest monuments of Germanic literature. The Golden Horns of Gallehus and likely dating to the 4th century, bear this Runic inscription in Proto-Norse:

x / x x x / x x / x / x x
ek hlewagastiʀ holtijaʀ , , horna tawidō
(I, Hlewagastiʀ on?of Holt, made the horn.)

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

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.

Metrical form

The core metrical features of traditional Germanic alliterative verse are as follows; they can be seen in the Gallehus inscription above:

*A long line is divided into two half-lines. Half-lines are also known as 'verses', 'hemistichs', or 'distichs'; the first is called the 'a-verse' (or 'on-verse'), the second the 'b-verse' (or 'off-verse'). 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.
*A heavy pause, or ' cæsura', separates the verses.
*Each verse usually has two heavily stressed syllables, referred to as 'lifts' or 'beats' (other, less heavily stressed syllables, are called 'dips').
*The first (and, if there is one, sometimes the second) lift in the a-verse alliterates with the first lift in the b-verse.
*The second lift in the b-verse does not alliterate with the first lifts.

Some of these fundamental rules varied in certain traditions over time. Unlike in post-medieval English accentual verse, in which a syllable is either stressed or unstressed, Germanic poets were sensitive to ''degrees'' of stress. These can be thought of at three levels:

# most stressed ('stress-words'): root syllables of nouns, adjectives, participles, infinitives
# less stressed ('particles'): root syllables of most finite verbs (i.e. verbs which are not infinitives) and adverbs
# even less stressed ('proclitics'): most pronouns, weakly stressed adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, parts of the verb ''to be'', word-endings

If a half-line contains one or more stress-words, their 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 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.

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.

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.

Rules for alliteration

Alliteration fits naturally with the 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. Traditional Germanic verse had two particular rules about alliteration:

*All vowels alliterate with each other.
*The consonant clusters ''st-'', ''sp-'' and ''sc-'' are treated as separate sounds (so ''st-'' only alliterates with ''st-'', not with ''s-'' or ''sp-'').

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).

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 and used standard images and metaphors called ''kenning