Early Middle English Evidence for Old English Meter: Resolution in Poema morale

Abstract

In the twelfth-century Middle English Poema morale, perhaps the earliest English composition in a septenary meter, the metrical position at the end of the first hemistich is distinguished from all other positions in admitting a short syllable plus another in a pattern that would disrupt the meter, creating an extra unstressed syllable, if the two were not resolved, as in the word dede in the verse Ic welde more thanne ic dede; | mi wit oh to bi more. Here resolution seems to have been carried over from Old English into a Middle English isometric meter based on Latin models. This constitutes significant evidence for resolution as a genuine property of Old English verse, which in turn lends strong support to Eduard Sievers's metrical analysis of early Germanic alliterative verse. *

Early Old English Foot Structure

“…Looking later, Bermúdez‐Otero () has provided a good model for the subsequent stages of Old English which fits neatly with the theory of early Old English feet proposed here . Bimoraic feet continued to play a role in these later stages, and even, in some form, in early Middle English phonology and metrics (Tolkien : 117ff; Fulk ). The early Old English system has a distinctive place in this larger line of development, standing out both for its close connection to the workings of resolution in Beowulf , and as the context in which the morphologically significant process of high vowel loss arose and operated with the most regularity.…”

“…After the shortening of unstressed long vowels, both these phonological and metrical dimensions were disrupted. Resolution continued to play a role in poetry even into Middle English (Fulk ), but the detailed operation of Kaluza's law is not discernible outside of Beowulf .…”

References

“…The Germanic foot is an attempt to demonstrate that a heavy syllable (H) is phonotactically identical to a sequence of a light syllable (L) followed by either a light or a heavy syllable. This can be seen in (20) (Sievers 1893, Kuryłowicz 1948/1949 discussed in Lass 1983, Dresher & Lahiri 1991, Fulk 2002, Cable 2003, etc. Lahiri & Dresher (1991 claim that "The correspondence between H and L X is evident in the rule of Resolution [...] which plays a role in Old English verse: in a metrical pattern, a light stressed syllable followed by any unstressed syllable is considered equivalent to a single heavy stressed syllable".…”

Metrical resolution, spelling, and the reconstruction of Old English syllabification

“…It is therefore probable that preOld English syllabification was more pervasively onsetmaximal, with ambisyllabic re presentations emerging and gradually becoming stronger in Old English -this scenario fits the demise of resolution as a metrical device in late Old English -and early Middle English, but it does not exclude the strikingly archaic use of resolution as late as the Middle English Poema morale, as argued in Fulk (2002 1992: 90-91) to support his analysis of "parasiting" noted in 3.2 above, is that in some instances the orthographic evidence indicates unambiguously that mono syllabic forms of, e.g., ēþel 'country' could not have arisen by analogy, because irrespective of the use of the form in early verse, the spelling shows a vowel before <l> overwhelmingly, over 200 times, against a single instance of <ēþl>, while with the originally disyllabic sāwol, spellings with and without a vowel in the second syllable are common. acc.…”

“…The option of disyllabic <sm> exists, too, especially before consonantinitial words, as the examples in (8b) show. It has been shown clearly that resolution applies selectively in the meter depending on the position of the resolvable sequence; for details see Fulk (1992Fulk ( , 2002, Suzuki (1995), Hutcheson (1995), Russom (1995Russom ( , 2002 and refer ences there. Going back to the issue at hand: Old English resolution and the syllabification of VĆV sequences.…”