Did Old English Verse Have a “Morphological” Metre?

Abstract

The revision of the four-position theory of Old English metre by Yakovlev (2008) has had a considerable impact, both for its simplification of Sievers’ (1893) metrical principles, and for its supposed shift to a “morphological” rather than an “accentual” metrical type. I contextualize Yakovlev’s important contribution to metrical theory, highlighting that his main innovations are to eliminate the principle that every verse should have two lifts, and to collapse the metrical notions of “lift” and of “half-lift” into a single type of unit, the “strong position”. These major and thoughtful innovations are unconnected to the supposed “morphological” aspect of Yakovlev’s system, which consists of arbitrary and unmotivated stipulations of certain classes of syllables as inherently strong or weak. Calling the metre “morphological” on this basis is at best misleading, placing too much emphasis on a marginal component of the system. Moreover, the definitions of strong and weak positions are better explained with reference to linguistic stress: elements bearing some degree of stress (primary or secondary) are strong, while those bearing no stress are weak. Such a reframing leads to a slight revision of Yakovlev’s theory to incorporate the “rule of the coda” (Fulk, 1992). The result is a version of Yakovlev’s theory which is both theoretically simpler and more descriptively adequate, but in which the label “morphological” lacks even the limited and inapt validity of the original version. This reintroduction of stress into the system does not, however, make the theory “accentual”, and it remains better characterized as an “alliterative-syllabic” view of the metre (Cable, 1991).