SELIM 18.indb Rafael J. Pascual, SELIM 18 (2011): 197–206ISSN: 1132–631X Terasawa, Jun 2011: Old English Metre: an Introduction. Toronto, University of Toronto Press. pp. xiv + 154. ISBN: 978-1-4426- 1129-0. 15,41€. Old English metre is a maze area, full of dead ends. The complexities and subtleties of the metrical system which underlies OE poetic compositions—and which were once intuitively known to the poets as native speakers of OE—starkly contrast with the V agmentary nature of the surviving corpus of OE poetry. In order to bridge the gap which separates the remaining manuscripts V om the actual composition of poetry, metrical theories arise. Of these theories, the one which has had the deepest infl uence upon Anglo-Saxonists has been that by Eduard Sievers (1885, 1893). The main reason is, no doubt, its powerful descriptiveness: it manages to classi[ the large number of surviving OE verses— approximately 60,000—into fi ve basic types. But the problem is that, despite its suitability for modern readers to conceptualise the metre, such a descriptive formalism fails at capturing the logic behind the metricality of verses. The inability of the Sieversian system to go beyond mere description has resulted into a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, many reformulations and refi nements of Sievers’s theory, as well as a variety of new paradigms, have appeared. But this has, at the same time, made the fi eld of OE metrical studies become so complex and specifi c that most basic readers, beginners’ books and introductions to OE either dispense with metre or present a clearly insuffi cient, o ̂en hacked account of it.1 It is the purpose of Jun Terasawa’s book, Old English Metre: an Introduction (hereina ̂er cited as OEM), to compensate for such a disproportion by off ering a straightforward introduction to OE metre for students, as well as 1 Notable exceptions are Cassidy & Ringler (1971: 274–288), Pope-Fulk (2001: 129–158), McCully & Hilles (2005: 143–185), and Baker (2012: 123–155), which contain ample introductions to Sieversian metrics. 198 Rafael J. Pascual SELIM 18 (2011) a state-of-the-art presentation of current debate.2 The aim of this review is to assess if Terasawa fulfi ls his twofold purpose, and how. Maze areas need elaborate, well-organised maps, so the fi rst thing to consider is whether Terasawa’s book off ers a trustworthy guide to such a labyrinthine fi eld. This leads us to evaluate the book’s general structure. OEM is organised into seven diff erent chapters. The basics of the metre are described in the fi rst three while the remaining four are devoted to more specifi c and ambiguous aspects, ranging ' om the phonological processes of contraction, parasiting, and syncopation through textual criticism, and currently controversial issues such as the dating of texts, authorship, and the diff erence between verse and prose. Thus, this book is arranged according to a principle of increasing diffi culty, so that its overall structure unequivocally refl ects the author’s twofold purpose. The complexity of its contents is not only regulated at book-level but also within each chapter. The signs ê and êê are used to mark intermediate and advanced topics respectively, so that more complex chapter- sections might be skipped at a fi rst reading. A/ er the general introduction given in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 focuses on alliteration—which basically means that the author has decided to begin his study ' om above. Instead of giving attention fi rst to the manner in which syllables are regulated at the level of the foot or the half-line, Terasawa opens his guide by paying heed to the structure at line level. The benefi cial point of this choice is that the student—who is usually faced with the common expression “alliterative verse”—will encounter the most noticeable feature of OE poetry at an early stage. The disadvantage is that, despite being its most noticeable feature, alliteration is not the most fundamental characteristic of OE verse (cf. Tolkien 2006: 66; Cable 1991: 2). Nevertheless, it is made clear all throughout Chapters 3 and 4 that the most essential aspect of OE 2 Alan Bliss’s An Introduction to Old English Metre has been in existence since 1962. Nevertheless, the large amount of OE metrical studies which has appeared since then made the need for a new introduction pressing. 199 Reviews SELIM 18 (2011) metre is not alliteration but the number of syllables and their rhythmic distribution along the half-line. OEM is also rich in examples, the majority of which are taken % om Beowulf—a nostalgic desire for examples % om other poems of as traditional a metre as that of Beowulf, such as Daniel or Genesis A, may arise at this point, though. But this book’s bid for practicality is not exhausted by its copious display of examples. Far % om that, each chapter is also accompanied by a number of exercises—amounting to a total of twenty-six—with suggested answers provided in Appendix A at the end. Some of them will make the student deal with the same diffi culties that the poets encountered, while some others will put the reader in the place of modern editors faced with ambiguous, metrically emendable manuscript readings. This is as welcoming an addition as a rare one—as far as I am aware, only Thomas Cable’s A Companion to Baugh and Cable’s History of the English Language (2002: 38–43) and McCully and Hilles’s The Earliest English: an Introduction to Old English Language (2005) incorporate practical exercises on OE metre. (These exercises are not, however, as plentiful and elaborate as those provided by Terasawa in OEM). Two other appendices are added: one provides practical tips for scanning verses and the other consists of a useful glossary of technical terms. Moreover, each chapter is opened with a short overview and closed by a “further-reading” section. All the works cited in these sections are gathered in the book’s fi nal bibliography, which would constitute by itself a valuable contribution to the fi eld of OE metrical studies.The meaningful structure and the intelligent organisation of OEM eff ectively contribute to the book’s practical bias, which is at the same time one of its most attractive assets. The theoretical standpoint Terasawa adopts is essentially Sieversian. In this respect, OEM fulfi ls Cable’s recommendation that more work should be done in order to contribute to Sievers’s theory rather than developing brand-new formalisms (Cable 2008: 396). But Terasawa, besides making continuous references to other 200 Rafael J. Pascual SELIM 18 (2011) points of view diff erent & om Sievers’s, also recurs to arguments & om other theoretical models which prove useful for explaining specifi c aspects of OE metre. (For example, in Chapter 2, he accounts for the nature of alliteration in terms of Geoff rey Russom’s word-foot theory). This provides OEM with an eclecticism which will be useful for students to get a panoramic view of the metre. However, although this is a very appropriate feature for an introduction, the reader should bear in mind that OEM is not a theory of OE metre in itself, but the hall which opens the way to diff erent rooms—and that a deeper understanding of OE metre will in the end mean getting to know the diff erent theories. Chapter 1 off ers a general introduction to the whole book. It is like a condensed version of the entire work. The author highlights & om the very beginning that the two most conspicuous aspects of OE verse texts, alliteration and rhythm, are regulated by strict rules. This is, no doubt, a positive aspect, since it helps counteract the old view that the language of OE poetry is the language of everyday use rather tidied up (Daunt 1946: 64). There is a real poetic metre underlying OE verse texts, and this is manifested in systematic rules, such as the four-syllable principle (which is presented early in the book), as well as in the poets’ avoidance of certain words and syntactical constructions—I will focus on this below. Despite its emphasis on rules and constraints, the section on rhythm in Chapter 1 opens with a commentary which might be thought unfortunate (Terasawa 2011: 7): Each half-line normally contains two li3 s or rhythmically stressed syllables whereas the number of unstressed syllables may vary. Thus, unlike post-Conquest poetry, Old English verse texts do not strictly regulate the number of syllables either in the half-line or in a line: some half-lines consist of four syllables […] and others of nine or even more […]. That the number of syllables in OE verse texts does not remain constant but varies & om one half-line to another does not necessarily mean that it is not strictly regulated. In fact, as some 201 Reviews SELIM 18 (2011) recent theorists have demonstrated, the syllabic variability of the OE half-line is regulated by a principle whereby the foot-structure mimics the word-stress patterns of OE, allowing a maximum of four extrametrical syllables to occur between feet (Russom 1987: 8–24). Even Cable, who is an advocate of the Sieversian essentials, acknowledges the importance of Russom’s word-foot theory in accounting for constraints on the number of weakly-stressed syllables (Cable 1991: 2). Nevertheless, this minor inconsistency does not aff ect the overall coherence of OEM, which very successfully conveys through repetition and exemplifi cation the idea that OE verse was highly systematic and strictly governed by rules. In his study on early English metre, Thomas Bredeho/ (2005a: 8, 51) complained about the defi ciency in our understanding of OE metre derived 4 om both a too exclusive overemphasis on alliteration and the neglect of end-rhyme as an occasional structural element. Donka Minkova (2008: 675) acknowledged the importance of this contribution in her review of Bredeho/ ’s work. Terasawa’s Chapter 2 includes a section on end-rhyme (2011: 24–25), as well as a subsection on secondary patterns of alliteration (2011: 18–19).This is a positive good of OEM, which will no doubt help students get a more comprehensive understanding of OE metre. Chapter 5, which deals with the relation between metre and vocabulary, is one of the most valuable and interesting parts of OEM. Three general points are tackled: (1) the poets’ preference for words with a lower number of syllables; (2) their choice for certain morphological variants of words to the detriment of others equally native to the OE language; and (3) their avoidance of certain kinds of compounds depending on their phonological structure.3 That the 3 Especially relevant is Terasawa’s appreciation that the poets avoided the use of compounds requiring resolution at the start of the second element if this was immediately preceded by an unstressed syllable (cf. Terasawa 2011: 73–74). This general tendency has been defi ned by R. D. Fulk as Terasawa’s Law (cf. Fulk 2007: 304). On the importance of Terasawa’s Law for delimiting the range of infl uence of oral tradition upon OE poetic composition, cf. Fulk 2007: 304–312. 202 Rafael J. Pascual SELIM 18 (2011) poet makes choices as to what OE simplexes and compounds fi t into his poem unmistakably means that there are strict rules restraining the number of syllables to the half-line. (Paradoxically, such a core feature of OE metre has o& en been overlooked in the past.) Further, OEM benefi ts ' om the fact that its author is one of the few scholars who have gone deep into the relation between vocabulary and metre, which makes this book unique. That the four-syllable principle is the gist of the metre is not only manifested in the poets’ lexical choices, but also in the grammatical constructions of the poetry—as Chapter 6 emphasises. The relaxation of certain grammatical features in the poetry which are clearly observed in the prose, such as the concord between subjects and adjectival complements, the use of weak forms of the adjective without the presence of a demonstrative or possessive in the noun phrase, or the blurring of syntactically distinctive word-orders— among other factors—undoubtedly means that the grammar of the poetry is subservient to the rules of the metre. Cable has remarked on the necessity of accounting for the rules of the metre in terms of the linguistic structures of OE (2008: 396–397). By devoting two whole chapters to the particular shapes that OE vocabulary and grammar adopted in order to conform to the requirements of the poetry, as well as by describing all throughout Chapters 3 and 4 the phonological constraints into which the language of poetry had to fi t,4 OEM off ers a solid introduction to the workings of OE metre which, in my opinion, anticipates the character of future studies on OE metre. In Chapter 7, a state-of the-art overview of the main controversial areas of OE metre and the study of OE verse texts—namely, dating, authorship, and the diff erence between verse and prose—is off ered. In his prefatory remarks to C. L. Wrenn’s 1940 edition of J. R. 4 For instance, Kaluza’s Law—with which some recent metrical theories dispense—is devoted a subsection in chapter 4 (Terasawa 2011: 55–56). Nevertheless, Terasawa speaks of the “metrical structure” of the resolvable sequence as the key to understand if resolution is applied (2011: 56). “Phonological structure” would be, in my opinion, a more appropriate expression. 203 Reviews SELIM 18 (2011) Clark Hall’s prose translation of Beowulf, J. R. R. Tolkien pointed out that, due to the approximately equal metrical weight of the half- lines, the OE line could be defi ned as a balance (Tolkien 2006: 63). As if in keeping with this structural principle of OE poetic practice, Terasawa (2011: 103) explicitly states that he intends to maintain a balance among the diff erent stances held by the scholars—which I think he manages to do successfully. Thus, this chapter contributes to the author’s second purpose (i.e. to introduce the advanced student to the current state of OE metrical studies, which is controversial). Nevertheless, that the author does not affi rm that Beowulf is an early poem is, in my opinion, a negative aspect, since the conformity of Beowulf to the fi rst part of Kaluza’s law furnishes strong evidence that the poem was composed either before ca. 725 if originally Mercian, or before ca. 825 if Northumbrian (see Fulk 1992: 12–13, 31, 36, 164– 168, 349, 381–392). Seiichi Suzuki (1996: 207–233), B.R. Hutcheson (2004) and Roberta Frank (2007) have questioned the validity of Kaluza’s law as an indicator of the poem’s antiquity, but their arguments have been convincingly refuted by Fulk (2007: 317–329) and George Clark (forthcoming). In the light of the latter studies, it appears unreasonable to regard the phonological conditioning of the Beowulf poet’s adherence to Kaluza’s law as anything other than a clear sign of the poem’s early composition. Hopefully, this review has made clear that because of its organisation, its abundance of examples and exercises, its theoretical standpoint and eclecticism, its increasing complexity, and the balance it maintains among currently controversial issues, OEM constitutes a fi rm introduction to OE metrical studies as well as a proper overview of state-of-the-art research in the fi eld—and subsequently its author’s twofold purpose is eff ectively achieved. Jun Terasawa’s OEM serves as an excellent introduction to the fi eld of OE metre, an understanding of which is essential in order to properly assess OE poems (cf. Bredeho6 2005b). Recently, another remarkable elementary book on OE has appeared: Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson’s eighth edition 204 Rafael J. Pascual SELIM 18 (2011) of A Guide to Old English (2012). I should like to fi nish this review by pointing out that, in my opinion, an understanding of the phonological and morphological basics of the OE language as presented in Mitchell and Robinson’s Guide (cf. §§26–32; §§15–25 and §§33–35, respectively), followed by the study of Terasawa’s OEM, would constitute a most formidable training in OE metrical studies—a swampy yet incredibly fascinating area, at the end of whose interlaced paths lies, irrespective of its complexity or low appeal to modern taste, highly signifi cant information about OE literary texts. Rafael J. Pascual University of Granada References Baker, P. S. 2012 [2003]: Introduction to Old English. 3rd ed. Malden, Wiley-Blackwell. Bliss, A. 1962: An Introduction to Old English Metre. Oxford, Blackwell. Bredeho= , T. 2005a: Early English Metre. Toronto, Toronto University Press. Bredeho= , T. 2005b: What Are Old English Metrical Studies For? Old English Newsletter 39.1: 25–36. Cable, T. 1974: The Meter and Melody of Beowulf. Urbana, University of Illinois Press. Cable, T. 1991: The English Alliterative Tradition. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Cable, T. 2002: A Companion to Baugh and Cable’s History of the English Language. London and New York, Routledge. Cable, T. rev. 2008: Bredeho= , T. A. (2005) Early English Metre. In Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107.3: 394-397. 205 Reviews SELIM 18 (2011) Cassidy, F. G. & R. N. Ringler 1971: Bright’s Old English Grammar and Reader. 2nd corrected printing. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Clark, G. forthcoming: Scandals in Toronto: Kaluza’s Law and Transliteration Errors. In L. Neidorf ed. The Dating of Beowulf: a Reassessment. Daunt, M. 1946: Old English Verse and English Speech Rhythm. Transactions of the Philological Society 45.1: 56–72. Frank, R. 2007: A Scandal in Toronto: The Dating of “Beowulf ” a Quarter Century On. Speculum 82: 843–864. Fulk, R. D. 1992: A History of Old English Meter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Fulk, R. D. 2007: Old English Meter and Oral Tradition: Three Issues Bearing on Poetic Chronology. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106.3: 304–324. Hutcheson, B.R. 2004: Kaluza’s Law, the Dating of Beowulf, and the Old English Poetic Tradition. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103: 297-322. McCully, C. & S. Hilles 2005: The Earliest English: an Introduction to Old English Language. Harlow, Pearson/Longman. Minkova, D. rev. 2008: Bredeho4 , T. A. (2005) Early English Metre. Speculum 83: 673–675. Mitchell, B. & F. C. Robinson 2012 [1964]: A Guide to Old English. 8th ed. Malden, Wiley-Blackwell. Pope, J. C. 2001 [1966]: Eight Old English Poems. 3rd ed. revised by R. D. Fulk. New York, Norton. Russom, G. 1987: Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Sievers, E. 1885: Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 10: 209–314, 451–545. 206 Rafael J. Pascual SELIM 18 (2011) Sievers, E. 1893: Altgermanische Metrik. Halle, Max Niemeyer. Suzuki, S. 1996: The Metrical Organization of Beowulf: Prototype and Isomorphism. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter. Tolkien, J. R. R. 2006: On Translating Beowulf. In C. Tolkien ed. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London, Harper Collins: 49–71. •