Alan has written a scholarly afterward to accompany the Longman textbook. Here are the notes on alliteration and meter.
Like rhyme, alliteration affords both mnemonic aid and aural pleasure. The alliterative rule of Old English, when followed strictly, requires that both stresses in half-line “a” alliterate with the first stress in half-line “b.” As he began to work with the text, Tim eased the rule a bit. He did place three stressed alliterations in the majority of his lines, but he placed them in any of the four possible configurations (xxxy, xxyx, xyxx, yxxx), and sometimes he accepted alliteration on a secondary accent. Where there were only two alliterations, he usually bound them to others in a preceding or succeeding line. Often he used two pairs of alliterative words on the stress points of a line, arranged in one permutation or another: xxyy, xyyx, xyxy. In such cases he might also incorporate one or more x and/or y alliterations in adjoining lines. Our objective was to weave a web of sound, not to follow a mechanical rule. And the Beowulf poet himself indulged in such variations, though less frequently. At times we would even assonate in place of alliteration, as in line 2273, describing the dragon: “Naked and hateful / in a raiment of flame.”
Alliteration also serves a metrical function by highlighting and reinforcing the strongest stresses. There is a great deal of secondary stress in both the original poem and our translation. Without alliteration, the beat of each half line would be harder to discern. Since Old English was as rich in alliterating consonants as Italian is in rhyming vowels, the practice of alliteration came easily and naturally in its context. Modern English, with its vast vocabulary, still affords ample scope for the practice.
Meter
The following are Timothy Murphy’s comments on the matter of meter: In 1969 I sat at the feet of John Pope, the scholar who had spent a lifetime puzzling out what Beowulf must have sounded like. We students sat on the carpet quaffing Norwegian mead from drinking horns as the old man beat on the arm of his chair and belted out the funeral scene. I’m sure I was as entranced as Auden was when he heard Tolkien recite the text at Oxford 45 years earlier. And I knew instinctively that there must be a way to smuggle some of that music across the dark bourne that divides Modern from Old English.
Beowulf’s meter, though stressed, is also a quantitative meter, and as such, it is a distant cousin to the meters of classical languages. In strongly quantitative meters like those of Latin or Greek, syllables differ markedly in duration, but they are spoken with relatively little variation in emphasis. Quantitative meters are therefore based on measures of time. By contrast, the meters of Modern English are qualitative. Our rhythms are shaped by variations in emphasis, which are more distinct in our language than most others. The syllables of our speech differ so markedly in stress that their duration loses rhythmic significance.
Our translation is written in alliterative, accentual tetrameter. It is well-suited for recitation in verse paragraphs of isochronous (equally-timed) lines. But just as we have adapted the scop’s rule for more flexible alliteration, we have also arranged our stressed and unstressed syllables in patterns rather different from those of Old English. We are not experts in Old English meter, and we would not attempt to duplicate or imitate all its attributes. Such an attempt would in any event surely prove infelicitous, given the evolution of grammar, inflection, et cetera since the Dark Ages. But we have tried to recapture the excitement of a poetry meant for performance, a poetry in which the half-lines march forward with definite duration, whether they are as simple as “hold now, Earth,” or as complex as “in the tumult of combers.”
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