Rhyme in Old English alliterative poems

Abstract

The main focus of the article is the study of the sound organisation of Old English alliterative verse. In nearly a third of the extant lines of Old English poetry, alliteration is enriched by additional sound devices, whose structure and function appear to be crucial for the development of Old English metre. The function of consonances and full rhymes is studied not only in the units of poetic speech, such as compound words, lexical repetitions, repetitions of genetically related words and rhymed formulas, but also in the metrical units of verse (long and short lines). The change in the distribution of different types of rhymes and consonances within halfand long lines is accounted for by the linguistic changes as well as by transformations taking place in alliterative verse. In typologically late written texts, where alliterative verse begins to metamorphose, internal rhymes are used comparatively rarely, but the repetition of sounds usually involves the fourth stressed syllable of the line, which was avoided by alliteration. In long lines, anaphoric and chiastic rhymes perform functions common to alliteration, culminating and connecting. Less frequent ring rhymes are endowed with an ambivalent function in verse: they emphasise the autonomy of the long line and contribute to the destruction of its accentual pattern. End rhyme, unmotivated by lexical repetitions but originally relying on rhythmic-syntactic parallelisms, reinforces the internal caesura and breaks the rhythmic pattern of the long line into independent segments. Typologically early Old English poems, derived from the oral tradition, are dominated by rhyme types that serve to strengthen alliterative verse (anaphoric and chiastic rhymes, rhyme in odd short lines). Among the various sound devices participating in the phonetic arrangement of verse in typologically late written poems, end rhymes, which destabilise the structure of alliterative verse, acquire special functional significance. The analysis of the sound organisation of alliterative verse appears to establish the most reliable criterion for tracing the evolution of Old English metre and can therefore be used to assess the reliability of other criteria for dating Old English poems such as changes in phonology (the appearance of epenthetic vowels, lengthening of vowels as a result of the loss of [h], shortenings due to the loss of intervocalic sounds, the syncope and apocope of unstressed vowels), hypermetric lines, placement of the caesura and alliterative canons.