A beautiful artform with more subtleties than is often taught.

The first poem which made me want to read more poetry was The Fall of Arthur, an unfinished work by J.R.R. Tolkien. I had already read Beowulf (Heaney’s translation), but The Fall of Arthur drove home to me that enjoying poetry could be more than a one-off excursion. Since then, while my poetical studies are relatively confined, I have read more and what I have read, I have read with more appreciation. Indeed, of late I have returned to Beowulf for a more thorough understanding. Because of this bias to my passions- my regard first for The Fall of Arthur, then in retrospect for Beowulf, and eventually for The Wanderer– I have also a favorite poetic form: (Old English) alliterative accentual, the basics of which I would impart today.

The basic version of alliterative accentual poetry which I learned in high school may be known to you and is familiar enough, with a striking visual appearance in certain formats. Each line is in this understanding split into two parts; in each of these two parts, two syllables are emphasized, naturally or by the author’s expressed dictate. These four syllables must alliterate with each other; at least one in the first block and one in the second block of each line must match each other, though three or four matches is preferable, with three being perhaps the standard.

All this made, as I realized relatively quickly, a poetic form not particularly hard to write. So long as there are two emphatic syllables, after all, this iteration of alliterative accentual allows for any number of other syllables in each section of the line, a thorough break from the harsh syllabification of, say, terza rima.

Then, in time, I discovered two segments in The Fall of Arthur (in an appendix) and The Lay of Sigurd and Gudrun (also by Tolkien; in the introduction) which laid out a more structured understanding of alliterative accentual poetry, a knowledge I have only recently integrated into a single statement. That statement I give to you as a summary of what I know of the strict requirements of Old English alliterative accentual poetry, as per Tolkien.

Each line is split into two parts. Each part has at least one fully accented syllable; sometimes, it has two strong accents, sometimes the second accent is a weak accent. These blocks have six prescribed accent-patterns (written below), patterns a little more complex than stress-unstress, but the poet is free to use any of the six at any point, provided he uses one of them.

Alliteration across the line then provides connection between the two halves. As with the version mentioned above, alliteration is by syllable, not word, and can be on consonant or vowel either, being reliant on sound, not letter. The first block in each line must have at least one syllable beginning with the chosen sound, though it may have two; the second block in each line must have that sound as the start of its first accented syllable, and it may not use that sound to begin its second accented syllable.

The five accent patterns Tolkien lays out are as follows:

4-1-4-1

1-4-1-4

1-4-4-1 or 1-4-3-1

4-3-2-1 or 4-3-1-2

4-2-1-3 or 4-2-1-4

‘4’ indicates a strong accent; ‘3’ indicates a weak accent. ‘1’ and ‘2’ indicate gradations of non-accented syllables

In addition to these requirements, Tolkien notes, the Old English form also makes heavy use of parallelism, with the beginning of one line often iterating in a new or greater from the end of the previous line, and of kennings, two nouns hyphenated to form an image, a thoroughly minimal alternative to the to-us-common similes and metaphors which Old English poetry had little use for.

I hope that you, like me, find this fascinating.