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Bliss’s Rule and Old English Metrics

Old English poetry is characterized by its varying and unpredictable number of syllables per verse. In Beowulf, for example, tetrasyllabic verses such as l. 42a, on flōdes ǣht, are very frequent, but one can also find verses such as l. 1189b, ond hæleþa bearn, and l. 1954b, wið hæleþa brego, which, respectively, consist of five and six syllables. This peculiar feature puzzled early scholars of Old English poetry, who found themselves unable to come up with a coherent explanation for such a bewildering array of syllabic sequences. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Eduard Sievers managed to make sense of the disconcerting evidence furnished by Old English poetic texts. Based on the preponderance of four-syllable verses, Sievers posited the existence of a four-position metrical template that is able to accommodate all the verses equally, regardless of their number of syllables. The adjustment of verses of more than four syllables to this four-position pattern, he argued, is enacted by a process of syllabic equivalence known as “resolution” (Auflösung in Sievers’s original terminology). The operation of resolution renders a light stressed syllable and its unstressed successor metrically equivalent to a single heavy stressed syllable. The disyllabic sequences hæleand brego in 1189b and 1954b undergo resolution, thereby occupying one metrical position each, and so ond hæleþa bearn and wið hæleþa brego possess the same four-position configuration as on flōdes ǣht. Sievers’s fundamental assumption that all the verses, irrespective of how many syllables they contain, consist of exactly four positions thus shed considerable light on the workings of Old English versification. Sievers’s four-position principle accounts for such an impressive number of half-lines that many scholars consider that the few verses that fail to comply with that principle must have been tampered with by scribes, even if there is nothing wrong with those verses in terms of grammar, sense, or alliteration. Take Beowulf 25a, in mǣġþa ġehwǣre, for example. Its meaning, “in every nation,” perfectly suits the universalizing comment of which it is part (“from praiseworthy deeds comes success in every nation”); its alliterative patterning and grammar are unquestionable; and its legibility has not been affected in the course of textual transmission. This verse is nonetheless considered by many to be inauthentic because it consists of a sequence of six syllables that is not reducible to a four-position scheme (both its stressed syllables, mǣġand hwǣ-, are heavy and hence cannot undergo resolution with -þa and -re, respectively). These scholars believe that the original verse must have actually read in mǣġþa ġehwǣm, a fourposition half-line identical in structure to on flōdes ǣht, and that a scribe insensitive to the fourposition rule substituted the analogical Late West Saxon feminine form ġehwǣre for the older genderless ġehwǣm, thereby spoiling the meter. In fact, this analysis derives additional support from verses such as Beowulf 1365a, Þǣr mæġ nihta ġehwǣm, in which the feminine noun nihta depends not on ġehwǣre, but on ġehwǣm. Despite the enormous explanatory power of the four-position principle, and in spite of the additional support that can usually be found for analyzing non-four-position verses as inauthentic, modern editors of Old English verse texts remain reluctant to emend manuscript readings on the sole basis of meter. This reluctance is perhaps grounded in the non-survival of an Anglo-Saxon ars poetica or metrical treatise, which makes it impossible to check Sievers’s