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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project received plenty of help on its journey. I am grateful to Cathleen Blackburn and the Tolkien Estate for entrusting me with the work, and to Chris Smith and Sophia Schoepfer of HarperCollins for their patience and care in guiding it toward publication. For gracious assistance (in-person and remote) in accessing Tolkien’s manuscripts, my sincere thanks go to Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien Archivist at the Bodleian Library. For long and steadfast support, thanks go to Verlyn Flieger, in whose graduate seminar I first heard the voices of Tída and Totta. For generously lending his keen eyes to the interpretation of Tolkien’s handwriting, thanks to Carl F. Hostetter. For much encouragement and scholarly company, thanks to Michelle Markey Butler, Chip Crane, and Eleanor Simpson. Lastly, I wish to thank my family, to whom I dedicate this book.
FOOTNOTES
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Part One: The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son
(I) Beorhtnoth’s Death
1 According to one estimate 6 foot 9 inches tall. This estimate was based on the length and size of his bones when examined, in his tomb at Ely, in A.D. 1769.
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2 That Olaf Tryggvason was actually present at Maldon is now thought to be doubtful. But his name was known to Englishmen. He had been in Britain before, and was certainly here again in 994.
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3 According to the views of E.D. Laborde, now generally accepted. The causeway or ‘hard’ between Northey and the mainland is still there.
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(III) Ofermod
1 It was indeed plainly intended as a recitation for two persons, two shapes in ‘dim shadow’, with the help of a few gleams of light and appropriate noises and a chant at the end. It has, of course, never been performed.
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2 Cf. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2127–31.
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3 To fela means in Old English idiom that no ground at all should have been conceded. And ofermod does not mean ‘overboldness’, not even if we give full value to the ofer, remembering how strongly the taste and wisdom of the English (whatever their actions) rejected ‘excess’. Wita scal geþyldig … ne næfre gielpes to georn, ær he geare cunne. But mod, though it may contain or imply courage, does not mean ‘boldness’ any more than Middle English corage. It means ‘spirit’, or when unqualified ‘high spirit’, of which the most usual manifestation is pride. But in ofer-mod it is qualified, with disapproval: ofermod is in fact always a word of condemnation. In verse the noun occurs only twice, once applied to Beorhtnoth, and once to Lucifer.
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4 It is probably the first work to apply the word ‘letters’ to this metre, which has in fact never regarded them.
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Part Two: The Battle of Maldon
The Battle of Maldon, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien
1 (i.e. hand to hand fighting with the enemy)
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2 (let rings set against, in exchange, for protection)
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3 (whoever you are)
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4 = make peace with us
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5 or princes
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6 (joined – of the river & the incoming tide)
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7 commander
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8 (the Danes)
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9 (Byrhtnoth)
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10 (outcasts outlaws)
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11 (British square)
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12 (grimly)
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13 (Byrhtnoth)
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14 (i.e. they thought only of using their weapons to best advantage and doing hurt to foes)
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15 >man
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16 (lit. reach the life in)
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17 (? or some other)
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18 because it caused panic
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19 (let perish his initiative! – more probably a curse than say ‘may it fail!’ since it has succeeded)
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20 (not Unferð)
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21 (Long Edward cf. Edward I = longshanks)
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22 probably = Æthelric
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23 (which? That one who killed Byrhtnoth?)
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24 (i.e. again and again did their spears pierce the bodies of the English remnant and wound them mortally)
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25 (he had grown old in the service of arms in noble household)
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Part Three: The Tradition of Versification in Old English
1 To this statement the ‘Chronicle verses’ (of various kinds) are to some extent an exception.
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2 I do not rule out the possibility of ‘bad writing’.
When a metre is really hard or unnecessarily complex, or unsuitable to the purpose in hand a poet may eschew it and use an easier form, either out of consideration for his own inferior dexterity, or for a genuine artistic reason (and both motives may cohere). But the strict OE metre is not, especially not in Old English itself, hard or unnatural; it does not demand mere metrical gymnastics which interfere with ease of expression. The failure to produce it can thus only result from one of the alternatives proposed.
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3 By which I mean of course not that metre changes but that to a man using metre in his head certain old lines will not scan. But what if the man reveres the old poets? Will he change the defective lines or the metre?
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4 Except as part of a specialist lore belonging to linguistic historians, which has no effect on poetic practice, not even if the linguistic historian takes to writing verse himself.
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5 I have of course my mind chiefly on Old English; and periods in which ‘high language’ used for verse is essentially only a cultivated variety of the daily tongue. The special efforts of oral tradition in certain cultural conditions, to maintain by sacred colleges, initiated orders, or priesthoods, the right pronunciation of obsolete or alien tongues in the services of mysteries or religions, are not considered. We have not in Old English to do with conditions that obtained or obtain in the preservation of (or attempt to preserve) Sanskrit, Hebrew or Arabic – Latin itself, the sacred language of the West, had no such tradition. Its pronunciation was exposed to the constant influence of the vernacular.
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6 Of course both may have occurred frequently in lost poems oral or written; they probably did. But the principle is the same. Oral tradition may preserve a greater body of verse than has survived in writing through the destructive centuries, but it cannot preserve everything everywhere, evenly and impartially. Language itself cannot. Learners of traditional verse must often have been confronted by problems exactly such as Beo 924 presents to us.
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7 But he belonged to a poetical family – whereof most Icelandic poets owed their talent.
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8 Það var þar haft ölteiti, að menn kváðu vísur [‘That was their way there at ale-quaffings that men quoth staves’. Egil’s saga xxxi].
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9 But note this also implies a recognition both of the existence of units or lines, and of their formation out of linked hemistichs! For it is clear that both these minimum staves could not be lumped at one end only of a line.
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10 This can not without some training be fully appreciated now by English people long accustomed to end-rhymed or blank verse, and alliteration as an adornment (a function essentially different to its point in OE metre). Also our reading of OE verse is too careless usually to improve our metrical feeling. An Icelander can still readily detect (and object to) the absence of alliteration.
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11 Since phonetic change in English has usually been in the direction of reducing the total quantity of words we should have in this way developed ‘catalectic’ metres. Such do occur in Icelandic and may have been generated or suggested in this way – though this is far from certain: sheer metrical experiment and invention is more likely. Other innovations are rather enlargements. Of enlarging catalectic forms, there is no certain trace in OE.
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12 [The reference is to Eduard Sievers’ classification based on types of alliterative half-lines. A2 is a variant of the ‘falling’ half line (/ x / x).]
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13 Similar things are found in Beowulf as weardode hwile 105b, or anacrusis as in swa wæter bebugeð, 93b; þa secg wisode 402b, but even counting the cases where emendation is clear or probable the proportion is much smaller.
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14 This preservation of past forms must be distinguished from the use in verse of dialectal variants, which in certain conditions may be available to a poet – as actual variants drawn from current language; such as again rhyming with men or rain. Of course with progress of time one of these dialects may cease to be current and the forms derived from it, being enshrined in poetry, become part of poetic diction.
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15 And not all of these: for a consonant has been lost in night as much as in heart, but lost earlier; and the poets of a less pedantic day had already rhymed night/white and so on too often for the orthographically-minded to object. Also the missing consonant was one that had wholly vanished. We have no longer (X), and even spellings cannot preserve in general memory sounds that have been entirely given up in normal speech.
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16 Similarly wind pronounced to rhyme with dined. This may historically be derived from an older normal pronunciation in which this word developed, as have find, bind, blind, and so forth. But its preservation is due to the scarcity of rhymes to ĭnd (a product of linguistic history), which except in wind is found only in foreign words or in fairly recent contractions: such as sinned, pinned. And even here it is supported by the orthographical fact that ind usually represents (aind). The poetic pronunciation is seldom used unless compelled by rhyme.
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17 Though Alfred would have no difficulty in the matter of g. The two kinds of g still alliterated while he lived.
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18 When we have deducted palpable mistakes ascribable to scribal hubris or tendencies.
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19 I leave aside the plainly defective 1, 109, 172, 183; and also 29, 32, 192 where as we shall see the breach of rule is only apparent, in spite of editorial daggers.
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20 Even after inspiration – his ‘extempore’ utterance as reported is nine lines long; his later works require thought. He studied his matter and brought out verse after ‘rumination’, as Bede tells us.
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21 [Ed. note: ‘While others slept’.
‘Made I the ale of Odin, / While others slept; for captain / That sits o’er earth, all eager / Wrought I – I’m sorry for it!’ (201)]
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Appendices
I ‘Old English Prosody’
1 This of course no more means that OE poets disregarded vocalic structure than that Milton did, in spite of his remarks on rhyme. Alliteration is a most potent factor in non-alliterative poetry. The effect of opening on the foam / of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn (Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’) is mainly due to a pattern resembling but less schematic than the Welsh laws of cynghanedd. So vocal patterns play a large part in Beowulf. There are many obvious ‘echoic’ cases: streamas wundon / sund wið sande (212–13): thunder of surf; mærne þeoden / hæleð hiofende, hlaford leofne (3141–2) – lamentation.
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II ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’ [continued]
1 [For a description of this text, see note introducing Part Three of this volume.]
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2 [The beginning of the poem, as Tolkien notes in ‘Beorhtnoth’s Death’, has been lost.]
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3 The ending um of the dative (plural or singular) occurs 39 times correctly written in Maldon, including handum in its other two occurrences (4, 14). But handon even if the alteration occurred after the poem was written does not much support correction folman, since a clear case of dat. pl. on occurs in mid leodon 23 (beside 50). on also occurs in hwilon in reduced adv. use 271; and in 306, and after on in on Denon 129, 218, 266. Seven times in all. The latter cases, though the appearance of on is favoured by orthographic context, clearly indicate a phonetic change normally disregarded in spelling. This is a change of um >
