A History of Old English Meter

Some New Work on Old Problems

“…calic endings that alternate with zero after a heavy stem. Fulk (1992) claimed that it only applied to a disyllabic stressed sequence that is subordinated to an immediately preceding primary stress, which means it is practically limited to second compound members; he also attributes its workings to the original distinction between final long and circumflected long vowels in Proto-Germanic. Hutcheson (1991Hutcheson ( , revised in 1995 sees the law as being only of very limited validity, reflecting ancient formulaic constraints that are difficult or impossible to recover.…”

Studies in the history of the English language: A millennial perspective. Edited by Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell. (Topics in English Linguistics 39.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Pp. vi, 496. Hardcover. €98.00

“…Geoffrey Russom's "Dating criteria for Old English poems" proposes a new set of metrical dating criteria for Old English verse from the perspective of Russom's own word-foot theory (see Russom 1987Russom , 1998, in which metrical form is a direct projection from linguistic structure, an original but (regrettably) not widely employed modification of Eduard Sievers's five-types theory. Russom's analysis provides additional support to the linguistic dating criteria examined by Fulk (1992) by assessing the relative frequencies of verse types (which represents an extension of the analysis proposed by Russom [1998]) under the working assumption that diachronic linguistic change complicates the composition of Old English poetry in its native tradition. In "How much shifting actually occurred in the English vowel shift?," Robert Stockwell challenges the time-worn notion that the Great Vowel Shift is the classic example of a chain shift.…”

Prototypes and structures in eddic poetry

“…Some scholars have of course noted the imperfections of the model, and alternative approaches have been suggested, e. g. Cable's four-position theory (Cable 1974, Yakovlev 2008, and Russom's word-foot theory (Russom 1998, Goering 2016). Yet, central figures in the field of Old Germanic metrics (e. g. Bliss 1967, Cable 1974and Fulk 1992 basically interpret the system in a deductive way, it seems.…”

“…Bliss 1967, Fulk 1992; for a recent presentation of the model see Terasawa 2011). In spite of some attempts at replacing the model, such as Russom's word foot theory (Russom 1998(Russom , 2009) or Cable's theory of positions and strength relations (Cable 1974: 84 ff.…”