The Basics

Old Germanic poetry is very different from the poetry we are used to today, yet it is not at all difficult. The old Germanic poets verse had a very few basic principles, and stuck to them valiantly, preserving poetic traditions long after their languages had changed. This article may serve as a rudimentary introduction to old Germanic Poetry, at least until someone more knowledgeable comes along. Let us start with a few lines, drawn from throughout the Germanic world, and see what commonalities they share. The following lines come, respectively, from the Old High German poem about the end of the world, the Muspilli; from an Old Saxon (Low German) amalgamation of the gospel stories into verse known as the Heliand; from the Old English poem Beowulf; and from the Old Norse Völuspá. They are probably all from the 9th century, save the Völuspá, which is from the late 10th. The bolded syllables are stressed (see #3, below).

uuili den reht-kernon         daz rihhi kistarkan.
he will strengthen         the kingdom of the righteous.

uuerod bi themu uuatare,         thar uualdand Crist . . .
the crowd [stood] by the water,         where the mighty Christ . . .

Fyrst forð gewat;         flota wæs on yðum . . .
Time passed further;         the boat was on the waves . . .

Hljoðs bið ek allar         helgar kindir . . .
I ask attention from all         the sacred holy peoples . . .

In these lines we may note the following generalities:

1. It is separated by a space, which indicates the presence of a pause or caesura. The two halves of the line are fittingly called half-lines, or verses. These spaces were of course not written as such either in the manuscripts or the runic inscriptions, but we know both from syntax and from the rules that follow that the half-line was the basic metrical unit of old Germanic poetry.


2. Each half-line has two main, stressed syllables, and any number of weak ones (at least two). This has some interesting consequences, the foremost of which is that old Germanic verse subordinates the meter to the text (the text is primary), rather than vice-versa. Poetry is not so different from prose here. It does not construct a meter and fit the words into it, rather it draws out the natural rhythm of the language itself. In other words, if you wouldn’t stress a syllable in normal speech, it doesn’t get stress in verse either. Clearly the old Germanic peoples, for whom the greatest fate was to live on after death in song, were very interested of the sounds of their own language and its natural flow. Contrast this with classical Latin or Greek poetry, or later poems and songs in English for that matter, where enjoyment comes rather from seeing the artist’s or poet’s skill in fitting the language into a much more rigid metrical form, often one that counts every syllable, stressed or unstressed; in such cases, as in modern songs, words are often stressed that would not be in normal speech. The only other metrical system that in practice places text above meter in this way is Gregorian Chant, with its flexible system of grouping notes into twos and threes.


3. The syllables in a given half-line (almost) always match one of five metrical patterns. (This rule is not observable from the above lines alone, but it is a rule you will want to be aware of.) This does not contradict the last paragraph, as you will see shortly. While the number of weak-stress syllables is variable within a half-line, their placement between and around the strong-stress syllables has to match one of five configurations (with few exceptions). (I will discuss how they are used for poetic effect in another article.) In this list, the ‘/’ indicates strong or primary stress, ‘\’ indicates secondary stress (not considered a strong-stress syllable), and the ‘x’ indicates weak or no stress. The modern English examples are those of J.R.R. Tolkien.

   A-line:	/ x / x	(falling)	‘knights in armour’
   B-line:	x / x /	(rising)	‘the roaring sea’
   C-line:	x / / x	(clashing)	‘on high mountains’
   D1-line:	/ / \ x	(broken, falling)	‘bright archangels’
   D2-line:	/ / x \	(broken, rising)	‘bold brazenfaced’
   E-line:	/ \ x /	(fall-and-rise)	‘highcrested elms’

   These were compiled by Edvard Sievers, who put them thus in descending order of occurrence. (Type A is the most common.) Note that weak-stressed syllables in many cases (e.g., at the beginning of the half-line) don’t count, and therefore may be as numerous as the language requires. (E.g., the first OHG half-line shows the pattern x x x / / x which is a version of type C) Most commonly it is nouns and adjective that receive stress, then verbs, then (almost not at all) smaller helper words. In the examples above, we see: types C-A in the Muspilli, A-B in the Heliand, D2-A in the line from Beowulf, and E-A in the Völuspá.

4. Alliteration occurs between at least one strong syllable in each half-line. This has the effect of binding the two verses of a line together, so that while the basic metrical unit of old Germanic poetry is the half-line, the basic alliterative unit is the (full) line. In the first verse of a line, both stressed syllables in the first half-lines may often alliterate; it is common but not required. Thus the first half-lines in the OS and OE examples have two alliterating syllables, while the OHG and ON examples only show one. In the second half-line, only one stressed syllable alliterates, and it is always this first strong syllable of the second half-line that determines the alliterating letter or sound for the entire line. This is useful if one is unsure of the metrical pattern of a line, since one alliteration is easier to spot than meter, and one can always count on alliterated syllables being stressed.

   There are two more points to know about alliteration: A) All vowels alliterate with all other vowels. (If you want to know: technically what is alliterating here is the glottal stop that initiates vowels. This is why the liaison that is so common in, e.g., French, rarely happens in Germanic languages.) B) In OE, the letter ‘g’ is considered to alliterate, according to the rules, even when representing different sounds. Thus, gear (year), pronounced with the OE soft ‘g’ (like modern consonantal ‘y’) is deemed to alliterate with Grendel, clearly a hard ‘g’ sound. The reason for this is an indication that the Anglo-Saxons inherited their system of verse structure from a time when all their g’s did sound the same.

Just how old is this form of poetry, which all the Germanic tribes inherited? One of the oldest runic inscriptions, and probably the most famous, is from one of the the now lost Golden Horns of Gallehus. It has been called proto-Norse, but the forms it exhibits could just as easily be the ancestor of German, English, or Gothic, as of the Scandinavian languages. Here is the inscription, and its transliteration into Latin figures (those of you studying runes can read along):

ek hlewagastiR holtijaR         horna tawidô
I, Hlegest of Holt         made [the] horn.

This inscription dates from as far back as the 4th century, yet we can still see four major stressed syllables, connected by alliteration. The half-lines appear to be both of type A, the most common. Clearly, by the time the first lines of verse in English, German, and Norse arrive on the scene, the Germanic poetic tradition was already ancient.

The Varieties

While this overall poetic structure dominated the various Germanic languages, still the sundering of the tribes that resulted in different tongues also resulted in different poetic styles, within the same structure. This was not done by discarding the basic rules, but by working within them and at times adding additional ones. The main difference has to do with the relative wordiness or terseness of the language, both in number of words used, and in length of words in syllables. Old Saxon, for example, was much wordier than Old English. Reflexive pronouns were more common, so that where OE would have ongann, ‘began’, OS would have bigan imu, thus doubling the syllable count. Moreover, even where OE and OS prose syntax might be similar, OS poets were more likely to fit more into a single half-line. Thus, while there are still only four main stresses per line, there were a great deal of unstressed syllables, making their verse long and belabored. The following line has seven syllables before the first strong syllable is reached:

bigan imu an themu uuege uuahsen;         thô it eft thes uuerodes farnam,
it began to grow on the path;         then it afterwards [was] destroyed by the people, . . .

Old Norse was by contrast very terse, expressing the same ideas in very few syllables. This led to a lot of stylizing by later poets, who revelled in the beautiful efficiency of their language, seeing just how succinct they could make it. To the existing rules of alliteration and meter they added further rules concerning number of syllables and internal and external rhyme-schemes, a device borrowed from the Celts. Here are some excellent descriptions of the different types of Norse poetry by Ancient Worlds member lilja Harfagri, but for now just notice the almost complete lack of weak syllables in lines like these from the Hávamál:

Deyr fé, deyja frændr
Die cattle, die kin. . . .

Ár skal rísa sá er annars vill
fé eða fjör hafa;
Early must he rise who would another’s
life or wealth have.

Old English may be considered midway between the two extremes of Old Saxon and Old Norse. (This makes sense given the history of the Anglo-Saxons: They had their roots on the continent, yet had more influence from the Norse than their cousins back home.) Thus the particular OE flavor of poetry demanded one weak syllable for each strong one (thus four syllables minimum per half-life), and in fact usually had between 1 to 2 weak syllables for each strong one. Here is a sample of OE poetry from the poem-fragment of the Battle of Maldon:

"Gehyrst þu, sælida, hwæt þis folc segeð?
Hi willað eow to gafole garas syllan, . . .
Hear thou, seaman,         what this people sayeth?
They will give you         a tribute of spears, . . .

The great exception to this rule in OE poetry is the long verse. This is a phenomenon that contains three strong syllables per half-line. These long verses occur always in pairs (always with another long verse on the same line), and usually in groups. Here is a passage from the Dream of the Rood that has both long and regular verses:

"Þæt wæs geara iu,         (ic þæt gyta geman),
þæt ic wæs aheawen         holtes on ende,
astyred of stefne minum. Genaman me ðær strange feondas,
geworhton him þær to wæfersyne,         heton me heora wergas hebban.
Bæron me ðær beornas on eaxlum,         oððæt hie me on beorg asetton,
It was years ago         (I remember it still)
That I was hewn down         at the edge of the forest,
cut from my trunk.         Strong foes took hold of me there,
there made for themselves a spectacle of me,         commanded me to carry their criminals.
There warriors bore me there on their shoulders,         until they set me on a hill.

The Silent Tribes

The languages of many ancient Germanic tribes are not fully known, at least not as distinct from other larger and closer tribes. Gothic, Old Frisian, and Old Franconian, while known languages with their own extant texts, nevertheless are not mentioned here because no poetry from these languages has survived. Still, one is probably safe in guessing that if they had, they would follow the same pattern. This guess has led modern scholars to imagine what they would sound like in verse. Here are two examples, one by another Ancient Worlds member, and one by Professor J.R.R. Tolkien:

Wulfilaliuthis, by Thiudareiks Gunthigg

Bagme Bloma, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Bibliography

• The Muspilli (End of the World)
• The Heliand
• The Dream of the Rood
• Beowulf on Steororume (Beowulf in Cyberspace)
• The Hávamál
  
• Robinson, Orrin W. Old English and its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992.
• Mitchell, Bruce. An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1995; reprint 1998.
• Diamond, Robert E. Old English: Grammar and Reader. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970.
• Bjork, Robert E. and John D. Niles, eds. A Beowulf Handbook.