An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

particular to Old English. It is usually referred to as anacrusis. It occurs
far more often in type A half-lines than anywhere else, for reasons you
should be able to work out yourself.
There are several other variations which can occur, and of these
perhaps the one that must be noted here can be found in the following
half-line:
héofona hláford
There is a metrical requirement that every stressed syllable must be
heavy (see the discussion in Chapter 3 for how this operates). This poses
no problem in the case of hla¯ford, where the stressed syllable is indeed
heavy. However, it is clear that the stressed syllable of heofona is light, for
its diphthong is short and there is only a single following consonant. The
metrical rule which saves such forms is called resolution. Resolution
states that a light syllable occupies a stressed position if the immediately
following syllable is also light. This is phonologically parallel to the
morphological position where, as shown in Chapter 3, heavy-stemmed
word ‘words’ is the equivalent of light-stemmed sc
.
ipu ‘ships’.
If we now turn to the system of alliteration, there are several interest-
ing features which in part reflect interestingly on the present-day
VARIETY
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language. Essentially, as the example above from The Battle of Maldon
shows, alliteration links two or three stressed syllables in the long line
in terms of identical initial consonants. This itself demonstrates that
alliteration has a stylistic and functional meaning not dissimilar to
rhyme in later poetry. There are still questions to be asked, however,
notably, which syllables alliterate, how many syllables alliterate, and
which sounds count as identical?
Usually alliteration is based on the first stressed syllable of the second
half-line and the initial consonant of that syllable must alliterate with
the stronger of the two stressed syllables in the first half-line. I cannot
here go into the vexed question of how we determine which syllable that
might be, but roughly speaking nouns, adjectives, infinitives and par-
ticiples are stronger than verbs and adverbs. The other stressed syllable
of the first half-line may, however, participate in the alliteration also.
The same, however, is not true of the second stressed syllable of
the second half-line, which can only participate in alliteration in very
special circumstances which are outside the scope of this work. There
are exceptions to the above, but they are mostly a matter of literary style,
and do not affect the fundamental linguistic points.
I still have to address the question of which sounds count as identical.
The essential position is that only one single consonant is involved in the
alliteration. But that leaves three cases to consider. Firstly, it is normally
the case that if there is an initial consonant cluster, then alliteration still
remains associated with only the initial consonant, as can be seen in
another line from the same poem as before: