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 BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD 
 
 REPRINTED FROM 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 IN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
 
 NUMBER 2 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013340033 
 
, BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 1 
 
 William Ellery Leonard 
 
 Tinker's dissertation, The Translations of Beowulf (Yale 
 Studies in English, XVI, 1903) records six English transla- 
 tions in prose, inclusive of Thorpe's line for line parallel 
 printing, and five in verse. Of the verse translations two 
 are in rhyme. Wackerbarth's (1849), though readable in 
 itself, is in the pseudo-ballad verse of Scott's Marmion, essen- 
 tially a metrical sophistication in the eighteenth century 
 tradition, and in its musical superficiality as unsuited to the 
 rugged manner of Beowulf in one direction as its surprising 
 adoption by Conington, however skilful, proved it unsuited 
 to the charm, pathos, and intellectual depth of the Aeneid in 
 another direction. Lumsden's 2 in seven-accent couplets, 
 iambic in movement, with caesura frequently varying to either 
 end of the movement, is the measure of Chapman's Iliad, and 
 forceful though it be in retelling the Germanic folk-epic, it 
 has all the metrical associations of the Elizabethan Eenaissance 
 — as well as all the unBeowulfian qualities of "ballad verse." 3 
 Three 4 are in "imitative verse," which, if my ear as a verse- 
 writer does not deceive me, are not verse, and which, if my 
 judgment as a scholar has not gone all astray, are not imita- 
 tive either (see Section VI) — a criticism that must apply, if 
 correct in principle, to the otherwise fine work and workman- 
 ship of the subsequent version of Gummere. 5 To complete the 
 
 1 The following metrical study forms the Appendix to a new version of 
 Beowulf, to he published shortly. 
 "1881, 2nd Ed. 1883. 
 
 s So Tinker ; and Gummere, The Translation of Beowulf, AJP, VII, 1886. 
 •'Garnett's, J. L. Hall's, and Morris". 
 • The Oldest English Epic. 1909. 
 
100 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 list we must add three prose translations since 1903: C. G. 
 Child's (1904), Wentworth Huyshe's .(1908), E. J. B. Kert- 
 lan's (1913). There exist, then, eight prose and six "verse" 
 translations, a notable tribute to the scholarly and poetic chal- 
 lenge of the old tale, notably paralleled by the many versions 
 (as listed by Tinker) in German. 
 
 It is not my purpose to examine here any of these fourteen 
 versions. We note that the earlier prosemen were using 
 translation to explain exact philological conclusions: that is, 
 translation was designedly commentary, albeit occasionally, 
 as in the version of Kemble, the first English scholar and 
 translator, the very literalness has an indisputable literary 
 effect, not unlike that of the semi-Hebraisms in the Author- 
 ized Version of the Bible. Later prosemen, though nearly 
 all technical Beowulf scholars, have striven for literary form 
 and imaginative spirit in the interests of a non-technical 
 reading public. But that a prose-translation may still be 
 valuable as commentary is proven by the frequent and re- 
 spectful citations from Clark Hall's version (1901) in the 
 highly technical notes to the latest and best Anglo-Saxon 
 edition of Beowulf. 6 Presumably, the only verse translation 
 that has scholarly value as commentary is Gummere's — I am 
 speaking of course of the translation itself, not of Gummere's 
 keen and luminous notes. 
 
 However, with all the distinguished effort indicated above, 
 the student and lover of the original still always experiences, 
 I think, a peculiar discontent, — a discontent differing in 
 principle not only from irritation at blunders in meaning, 
 but from the chafed resignation which admits that transla- 
 tion as such must be mere translation, at best a makeshift, 
 unable to communicate to others the things most precious to 
 student and lover of the original. I mean it is discontent 
 not with a necessary makeshift, but with a poor, an unneces- 
 sary makeshift: one feels that the right makeshift has not 
 been found, but can be. One feels, for example, that the 
 stiffness of phrase, the unclearness in narrative movement, 
 the falsification of atmosphere, the jerkiness, the blurring of 
 
 'By Chambers, 1914. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIBBELUNGEN COUPLET 101 
 
 outlines in imaginative details, the stridency or high-pitch 
 or superficiality of the tune as tune, — one or more of which de- 
 viations in one degree or another balk the reader of any Beo- 
 wulf translation, — are not inherent to the exchange of New 
 English for Old. Moreover, one feels that "an exact equiva- 
 lent" would be no equivalent— for times change. The nearest to 
 an exact equivalent would be that translation which made 
 the modern reader sit up, all ear ; made him take in the tale, 
 somewhat as the old listener sat up and took it in. This is 
 the only literary meaning of equivalence. 
 
 Some such discontent it was that seems to have impelled 
 my own metrical experiment, when I seated myself to read 
 once more 
 
 hu tha aethelingas ellen fremedon, — 
 
 as it happened, just after reading that other Germanic tale 
 
 von heleden lobebaeren, von grosser arebeit, 
 
 and found the Anglo-Saxon becoming the couplets of the 
 Niebelungenlied. 
 
 That the translation should have shaped itself as verse 
 and not as prose was inevitable, if the impulse was what 
 moved the imagination rather than what interested the under- 
 standing. The translator's function, as imaginative self- 
 identification and dramatic re-creation — briefly indicated in 
 the preface to my translation of Lucretius — implies prose for 
 prose, verse for verse, and some not pedantic, but organic 
 equivalence of specific form (as blank verse for hexameter in 
 the case of Lucretius) — form, which is more and more spirit 
 as we pass from speech as communicating knowledge to 
 speech as communicating ideas, actions, moods, and power. 
 As to Beowulf, the excitement, suspense, advance, differentia- 
 tion of motifs, demarcation of the culminating moment of one 
 movement or mood, the demarcation of the beginning of 
 another, with all the divers modes for emphasizing character 
 or situation, the grimness of understatement and of other 
 types of irony or foreboding, the sonorous vigor and cumula- 
 tive effect of phrasal groups, the imaginative differentiation or 
 
102 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 climax in the parallelisms and repetitions, the rendering of 
 the kennings in speech-surroundings sufficiently exalted and 
 remote to transcend an effect of strain or grotesqueness, the 
 tunes and above all the tune — how, for example, are these 
 to be achieved in prose? The story, yes— but this is not 
 "the whole story." 
 
 II 
 
 However, though the extant prose renderings of Beowulf, 
 the later as well as the earlier, remain, in nature if not in 
 design, commentary rather than translation, still such is the 
 disputed state of text and interpretation, still such is the 
 implication of technical scholarship with imaginative pleasure, 
 that only such medium will satisfy as verse which satisfies 
 also as an exact record of specific opinion. Can the Niebe- 
 lungen verse be adapted to the demands of philology? It 
 seems to me it can. 
 
 Take the lines 15*M5 (in Chambers), on Grendel's diabolic 
 inveteracy : 
 
 sibbe ne wolde 
 ■with manna hwone maegenes Deniga 
 
 feorh-bealu feorran, fea thingian. , 
 
 Chambers in his notes records as alternatives: 1) "he wished 
 not for peace or to remove the life-bale"; 2) "he would not 
 out of compassion to any man remove the life-bale"; (fea 
 thingian he leaves untranslated). Gummere renders: 
 
 [He] refused consent 
 to deal with any of Daneland's earls, 
 make pact of peace or compound for gold. 
 
 Clark Hall renders : 
 
 [He] would not peaceably avert life's havoc from any man of 
 Danish stock nor stay for tribute. 
 
 The problem centres in sibbe. Is it to be taken as an 
 accusative object of wolde (so Gummere, apparently), and 
 parallel to the infinitive clause feorh-bealu feorran (Cham- 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 103 
 
 bers 1), or as an instrumental (Clark Hall, Chambers 2) ; 
 and, if instrumental, is with manna hwone to be construed 
 with it (Chambers 2) or with the verb feorran (Clark Hall) ? 
 Is sibie parallel to fea, in parallel infinitive clauses and does, 
 then, with manna hwone, etc., belong in effect to both in- 
 finitives, feorran, thingian? Philologus would have it litera- 
 tim: ' ' Over against any man at all of the might of the Danes, 
 he would not remove the life-bale by [terms of] peace, 
 [would not] accept a settlement by money-payment." In 
 the verse: 
 
 Would not, by a peace-pact set the Danesmen free; 
 
 Would not with the aethelings e'er compound for fee. 
 
 The point is not that the solution is correct, but that, 
 whether correct or not, the verse-medium is sufficiently 
 plastic to permit a record of that solution. So with all the 
 many passages about which scholarship has contended; and 
 if sometime my classroom notes on a number of passages 
 should be published, they would be anticipated in their con- 
 clusions by the renderings of the translation. 
 
 Two further illustrations from neighboring passages. The 
 famous crux (168-9) : 
 
 no he thone gif-stol gretan moste, 
 
 maththum for Metode ne his myne wisse. 
 
 Clark Hall renders : 
 
 He [Grendel] might not, however, mount to the throne — a 
 precious possession in the Creator's sight — nor did he know His 
 [God's] purpose. 
 
 Gummere renders: 
 
 And ne'er could the prince [Hrothgar] approach his throne, 
 — 'twas judgment of God — or have joy in his [H's] hall. 
 
 These among many others, some of which, moreover, make 
 "throne" refer to "the great white throne of God." The 
 
104 UNIVBHSITT OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 present version incorporates the conclusions of a long MS 
 note thus : 
 
 Yet not his [Grendel] the power — God forbade him then— 
 
 E'er to greet the gift-stool, e'er to come anear 
 
 Throne itself of Hrothgar, nor partake its cheer, 
 
 i. e., the cheer of the throne, like a good retainer who comes 
 up and receives gifts from, the king, the breaker-of-rings. 
 
 The lines that sing the buoyant voyage of the young 
 Viking's relief-ship (217-223) : 
 
 gewat tha ofer waeg-holm winde gefysed 
 
 flota fami-heals fugle gelicost, 
 
 oth thaet ymb an-tid othres dogores 
 
 wunden-stefna gewaden haefde, 
 
 thaet tha lithende land gesawon, 
 
 brim-clifu blican, beorgas steape, 
 
 side sae-naessas. 
 
 The crux is in an-tid (219), for which see Chambers' note. 
 1 prefer the old interpretation of Grein, Jiora prima, i. e., 
 the dawn, on a number of counts, not the least being the 
 imaginative appropriateness it adds to brim-clifu bMcan, "the 
 glow on the cliffs" — for imaginative appropriateness is a 
 criterion that scientific philology, dealing with a work of the 
 imagination, sometimes finds useful. The translation records 
 the preference ("well-braced" translates the bundenne of 
 the preceding line.) : 
 
 The well-braced floater flew, 
 The foamy-necked, the bird-like, before the winds that blew, 
 
 Over the waves of the waters — till after the risen sun 
 
 Of the next day the curved prow her course so well had run, 
 
 That these faring-men the land saw, the cliffs aglow o'er the 
 
 deep. 
 Broad sea-promontories, high hills steep. 
 
 In general, the objection to verse as a sure stumbling block 
 to scholarly accuracy, even when the translator has the 
 knowledge and the will to be accurate, is largely a tradition 
 from the older classical scholarship that amused itself, now 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 105 
 
 and then, with a look at the front-parlor translations of its 
 favorite texts made by the mob of gentlemen who wrote with 
 ease in the eighteenth century. "It is a pretty poem, Mr. 
 Pope; but you mustn't call it Homer," said Bentley. I have 
 elsewhere contended for the very opposite view: that, at 
 least as between blank verse and prose as the medium for 
 rendering the exact meanings (aside from poetic quality) 
 of the Roman poet-philosopher, the advantage may be with 
 blank verse. In particular, it depends upon the verse-medium 
 in its adaptation to the original. Spenserian stanzas would 
 be a pretty sure stumbling block in translating Beowulf with 
 scholarly accuracy, quite apart from a worse falsification of 
 poetic tone than remarked of the mediums used by "Wacker- 
 barth and Lumsden. But the Spenserian stanzas of Worsley 
 became both an accurate and a beautiful version of the 
 Odyssey. The Niebelungen couplet would botch the meaning 
 (as well as all else) of Lucretius' hexameters or of Calderon's 
 rhymed theatre. But it seems precisely the medium for 
 Beowulf. And its availability for scholarly accuracy is, I 
 think, amply supported, indeed explained, by its peculiar 
 appropriateness as an art-form. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The claims are made for the Niebelungen couplet, not for 
 the Niebelungen stanza. This delimitation is contracted for 
 by the Anglo-Saxon original. Four line passages of a strophic 
 character may be detached here and there from the continuum 
 of poetic speech, as the coast-guard's reply to Beowulf, just 
 disembarked on the strand (286-289) : 
 
 Weard mathelode, thaer on wicge saet, 
 
 ombeht unforht: "Aeghwaethres sceal 
 
 scearp scyld-wiga gescad witan, 
 worda ond worca, se the wel thenceth." 
 
 The watchman, doughty servitor, from his steed replied: 
 
 "Behooveth the keen shieldman, he who thinketh well, 
 
 'Twixt words and works the tokens cunningly to tell." 
 
106 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 Or the coast-guard's leave-taking after guiding Beowulf and 
 his band inland to Heorot (316-319) : 
 
 "Mael is me to feran; Faeder al-walda 
 
 mid ar-stafum eowic gehealde 
 
 sitha gesunde! Ic to sae wille 
 
 with wrath werod wearde healdan.'' 
 
 "Time for me to fare hack; in his mercy may 
 
 The Almighty Father keep ye safe alway 
 
 On your voyage and venture. I will' to the coast, 
 
 There to hold my sea-watch 'gainst a hostile host." 
 
 These remind one at once of one or another of the many- 
 short (strophe) speeches in the Niebelungen, which is in such 
 general contrast with Beowulf as to dialogue, particularly 
 brief dialogue : 
 
 Des antwurte Sivrit, der Sigemundes sun, 
 "Gistu mir dine swester, so wil ich es tuon, 
 
 die schoenen Kriemhilde ein kueneginne her: 
 
 so ger ich keines tones nach minen areheiten mer." (333) 
 
 Thereon answered Siegfried, the son of Sigmund he: 
 
 "Give to me thy sister, and this I'll do for thee, 
 
 The high-born Kriemhilde, a princess fair-beseen, — 
 
 So crave I meed none other for any toil of mine or teen." 
 
 But whatever the practice in Old Norse Fornyrihislag or in 
 prehistoric Anglo-Saxon lay, and whatever old Germanic 
 tradition may have been preserved (as I think it was pre- 
 served) in the Niebelungen strophe, the Beowulf, as we have 
 it, is clearly of another tradition, presumably West Germanic 
 and later. If Moeller's reconstruction "in der ursprueng- 
 lichen strophischen Form" 7 , with its excisions and rearrange- 
 ments, is anything more than a very clever exercise, then, once 
 upon a time some craftsman with another technique (itself a 
 growth and an inheritance) deliberately set to work to destroy 
 the strophic form of primitive tradition, with that fine artistry 
 which consistently introduces new moments of the narrative 
 
 'Das altengllsche Volksepos. 1883. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 107 
 
 (while keeping preceding moments of the alliteration) with the 
 second half -line. la - Thus the Niebelungen strophe would be a 
 falsification of "form in a translation of Beowulf. But though 
 something might be said for it in this respect, with Hoff- 
 mann's modern German version to buttress the argument, it 
 would involve besides a serious falsification of substance (by 
 omission or padding), in our uninflected English at least, 
 through the translator's effort to compress or round out each 
 four (English) lines into something like a unit. It would 
 go well enough perhaps with the second specimen of the 
 Anglo-Saxon quoted above. But with the first specimen the 
 four AS lines (a unit) became three, with nothing in the 
 context to yield the translator matter for an organic fourth. 
 Abandoning the strophe, we abandon, likewise, the lengthened 
 last half of the last line which marked the strophe. 71 * 
 
 The Niebelungen couplet enlists the associations of Ger- 
 manic folk-epic, even though specifically an epic of a later 
 Kultur. This is an advantage, to begin with, great out of all 
 proportion to any necessity of dwelling on it. 
 
 It is a rhymed couplet; and rhyme is not only old Ger- 
 manic (AS and ON as well as OHG, MHG), but in any 
 forthright narrative of elemental actions and moods, in any 
 forthright report of elemental scenes and speeches, has an 
 initial advantage over unrhymed verse for the English ear, 
 trained as it is from childhood to associate verse-story with 
 rhyme-story in all story that is folk-lore. This is, likewise, 
 at once evident. And the bondage of "end-rhyme" is liberty 
 and joy compared to the bondage of "initial rhyme," in rigid 
 reproduction of the Anglo-Saxon formula. At once evident, 
 too, is the advantage of the Niebelungen couplet as a run- 
 over couplet on occasion, permitting the verse movement to 
 record, unimpeded, the movement of action, mood, etc. The 
 reasons for abandoning the strophe are reasons for adopting 
 
 'a Of course, in instances where the break is slight this may go back to 
 a device of strophe composition, a 3-5 or a, 5-3 division of 8 half-lines. 
 Cf Kaluza, Engl. Metrik, 1909, Section 14. 
 
 'b Professor Klaeber in a letter suggests the use of this type of line as 
 an effective conclusion to the separate "Fyttes" ; it might also be available 
 for reproducing "expanded lines." But I have not had the opportunity 
 to try it out as yet. 
 
108 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 the couplet. On the other hand, the occasional interior 
 rhyme (of course, dissyllabic with secondary stress), as in 
 the first couplet (and second) of the ancient song, 
 
 Uns ist in alten maeren wunders vil geselt 
 
 von heleden lobebaeren von grosser arebeit, 
 
 make a perfectly idiomatic variation on occasion in the Eng- 
 lish, as likewise in the first couplet, 
 
 What ho! We've heard the glory of Spear-Danes, clansmen 
 
 Kings, 
 Their deeds of olden story, how fought the aethelings! 
 
 And here may be the place for a note that my end-rhymes 
 are more usually monosyllabic than in the Niebelungen. Bat 
 such rhymes as Hagene and tragene (a trisyllabic rhyme 
 occupying the last two accents of the half line) and klagen 
 and sagen (practically short-syllable dissyllabic rhyme 
 without secondary stress), occur occasionally, yet without 
 observation of the Niebelungen rule of the short syllable and 
 the so-called "resolution." I should note, also, that I have 
 found the introduction of triplets, alternate end-rhymes, or 
 other irregular groupings, sometimes an effective variation. 
 Evident, again, is the advantage to the translator of that 
 half-line structure in the old Germanic tradition of Beowulf 
 itself, which invites us, in keeping with that tradition, to 
 make a new start, now and then, with the second half-line. 
 But its advantages in respect to the less obvious, but more 
 important, matter of phrasal equivalence can perhaps best 
 be presented by typical examples. 
 
 a) The English long-line corresponds to an Anglo-Saxon long- 
 line, half for half, as (264) 
 
 gebad wintra worn aer he on weg hwurfe. 
 
 He tarried many winters before he fared away. 
 
 (It may correspond, likewise, in inverted order, second half for 
 first.) 
 
 b) The English long-line corresponds to the second half of one 
 and the first half of the next, as (48) 
 
 leton holm beran, 
 geafon on gar-secg. 
 Let the billows bear him, gave him to the deep. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 109 
 
 c) The English corresponds to the first half of one line and the 
 second half of the preceding, as (222) 
 
 beorgas steape, 
 side sae-naessas, 
 Broad sea-promontories, high hills steep. 
 
 d) The English corresponds to the first halves of two succeeding 
 AS lines, in uninverted or (as here, 148) in inverted order. 
 
 wine Scyldinga, [weana gehwelcne,] 
 
 sidra sorga 
 
 [woes with never end,] 
 Sorrows unbounded, he the Scyldings' friend. 
 
 (It may correspond, likewise, to the second halves of two suc- 
 ceeding AiS lines, in uninverted or inverted order.) 
 
 e) The English corresponds in its first half to a complete long- 
 line in the Anglo-Saxon, and in its second half to the first half of 
 the next Anglo-Saxon line, as (221) 
 
 thaet tha lithende, land gesawon, 
 
 brim-clifu blican. 
 That these faring men the land saw, the cliffs aglow 
 
 o'er the deep. 
 
 f ) The English corresponds in its first half to the second half of 
 one and the first half of the next, and in its second half to the last 
 half of the next, as (389) 
 
 Tha with duru healle 
 Wulfgar eode, word inne abead. 
 
 Then went to doorway Wulfgar; and spake he from 
 
 within. 
 
 Other combinations of the three parts (the one and a half Anglo- 
 Saxon line) into the two parts of one English line, with the Ger- 
 manic middle pause, are practicable and in fact occur, though the 
 shorter second half of the Niebelungen verse is scarcely adapted to 
 render an Anglo-Saxon long-line in the (hypothetical) combina- 
 tions, AS half-line (or long-line) for the first half, and AS long- 
 line for the second. 
 
 Such two halves for three constitute the inevitable solution 
 of the problem of quantitative difference in speech-material 
 between the relatively synthetic Anglo-Saxon with syllabic 
 inflection, and the analytic English idiom. To translate 
 rigidly half -line for half -line into the Niebelungen verse (how- 
 ever normal that equivalence is at times — see a and cf. b 
 and c) would involve a very un-Germanic diffuseness, — just 
 as to translate half-line for half -line into English alliterative 
 
110 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 "imitative verse" produces an impression of trivial hurry 
 and bustle, of staccato thinness (among other impressions!), 
 which is both un-English and un-Germanic — at least for 
 heroic themes. The result of two halves for three is, of 
 course, a gradual development of a numerical breach between 
 the Anglo-Saxon and the translation. Line 100 of the AS 
 is line 88 of my English; line 200 is line 167. 
 
 The equivalence of half-line structure does not always 
 work out in such exact phrasal equivalence. Many English 
 half -lines are built up by taking here a little, there a little — 
 sometimes bits from two AS half lines, whilst the remainder 
 of the AS half-line furnishes matter for an adjacent English 
 half-line. But the half-line effect is preserved and the corre- 
 spondences are fairly close. 
 
 The half-line manipulations which this good old couplet 
 thus makes possible are of particular practical service in 
 adapting to an English style the frequent parallelisms, con- 
 trasting or additive, of clause or kenning. These frequently 
 need to be rearranged to avoid awkwardness, unclearness, or 
 burlesque; but, integral to the very life of Anglo-Saxon 
 poetry as they are, it would blur and impoverish to para- 
 phrase or eliminate them. Take, as one illustration for many, 
 Beowulf in his courtliest vein piling up appellatives (kenn- 
 ings) to win the royal ear of King Hrothgar, and incidentally 
 putting in a good word, by repetition, for his own followers 
 (426 ff.) : 
 
 Ic the nu tha, 
 brego Beorht-Dena, biddan wille, 
 
 eodor Scyldinga, anre bene, 
 
 thaet thu me ne forwyrne, wigendra hleo, 
 
 freo-wine folca, nu ic tbus feorran com, 
 
 thaet ic mote ana ond minra eorla gedryht, 
 
 thes hearda heap, Heorot faelsian. 
 
 So now, O prince of Bright-Danes, thou Shelter of the 
 
 great, 
 
 Of thee one boon I'm begging: O Scyldings' Bulwark-bar, 
 
 Deny not, noble Folk-friend, now I have come so far, 
 
 That I alone with mine here, who still would share my 
 
 lot, 
 
 This throng of hardy thanesmen, may purge thee Heorot. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET HI 
 
 The half-line structure is only rarely an embarrassment. 
 Certain recurring formulae (in the AS) should recur, and 
 should recur in the same English verse-structure; but they 
 do not always recur in equally adaptable context. Again, 
 mathelode recurs 19 times (Cook's Concordance), each time 
 in the first half-line. Here the difficulty is simply in filling 
 out the half -line; for the speech introduced by mathelode 
 should not begin except with the beginning of the second 
 half. Take line 499, where Unferth begins his taunt of 
 Beowulf, at the feast of welcome : 
 
 Unferth mathelode, Ecglafes beam, 
 the aet fotum saet, frean Scyldinga, 
 Onband headu-rune 
 
 "Spake" is the traditional rendering. I have adopted an 
 apparently illegitimate formula "made a speech then," — 
 yet, as it not only fills the half-line, but besides brings out 
 narrative sequence (a very important stroke in making 
 Beowulf intelligible in English), and emphasizes the idea of 
 formal address, it is not mere prettifying or padding, I think : 
 
 Unferth made a speech then, at Hrothgar's feet who sate, — 
 
 Let loose, that bairn of Ecglaf, his secret grudge of hate. 
 
 This couplet illustrates, also, the rearrangement of half-lines 
 and parallelisms, and witnesses to the fact of occasional 
 variation of stock expressions, frean Scyldinga becoming 
 "Hrothgar," just as Hrofhgar has presumably become in 
 some line, "the Scyldings' friend." 
 
 So much for the advantages of the half -line in the Nieoe- 
 lungen verse because it is verily a half -line. But a word, to 
 end this section, on its advantages because it is not a half- 
 line — sometimes. One occasionally meets in Beowulf with a 
 long-line like 43, 
 
 Nalaes hi hine laessan lacum teodan, 
 
 where the division breaks both sense and syntax. I have no 
 doubt the division was intended to be kept metrically, how- 
 ever, as, too, in the Edda (e. g., Thrymskvitha, stanza 15), 
 hafi hann it mikla men Brisinga. 
 
112 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 It has one or another emotional effect — precisely like that con- 
 flict between logical stress and verse stress often intended by 
 modern English poets and as often disregarded by modern 
 English readers to the destruction of mood and music, as in 
 
 Chorus hymeneal, 
 
 Or triumphal chant, 
 
 Matched with thine, would be all 
 
 But an empty vaunt. 
 
 If it were not in the Niebelungen verse, I should not hesitate 
 to use it in my adaptation of the Niebelungen verse, as being 
 a device of the AS original, — 
 
 no need for thee to care 
 Farther then about my body's food and fare, 
 
 translating 450-1, in Beowulf's testamentary address to 
 Hrothgar before going to watch for Grendel. But, fortunate- 
 ly for my translation, if it should ever go for review to a 
 rigor-and-vigor man, one can find the device, by looking 
 long enough, in the Niebelungenlied too, as (stanza 380) 
 
 Si fuorten riche spise, dar zuo guoten win, 
 
 den besten den man kunde finden umben Kin. 
 
 They fetched the richest dishes, and thereto goodly wine. 
 
 The best that one could ever find along the Rhine. 
 
 I use it simply as an occasional variation, without pedantic 
 pains to use it just when and where the Beowulf-scop did. 
 
 Moreover, this conflict between verse structure and gram- 
 matical structure at the end of the first half-line tends to 
 give the last syllable before the pause a certain emphasis of 
 quantity and pitch and these give (as is normal in English 
 speech) the effect of accentual emphasis. This is one way of 
 reminding the English ear that this final syllable is always 
 to be read with the secondary stress of the MHG. A more 
 usual device is to intersperse such verse endings for the first 
 half as carry secondary (or level) stress in ordinary (prose) 
 speech. Compare in the passage below the effect of Lord's 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 113 
 
 doom (level stress) and war-hall, hide then, fen-lair (all 
 secondary stress), in persuading the ear to hear at the end 
 of the first half often, body, stalker with secondary stress — 
 a persuasion reinforced by gore, if and about my (altered 
 quantity and pitch) . It is the passage from which I quoted 
 just above. 
 
 The one whom death shall hale, 
 Let him believe the Lord's doom. He will, If he prevail, 
 
 Me thinketh, in that war-hall eat unfearingly 
 
 The Geat-folk, as so often the Danishmen did he. 
 
 No need for thee to hide then this head of mine or veil; 
 
 He'll have me, sprent with gore, if 'tis I whom death 
 
 shall hale; 
 He'll bear my bloody body, he'll think to taste his prey, 
 
 He'll eat — this lonely stalker — unmournfully away; 
 
 He'll track with me his fen-lair: no need for thee to care 
 
 Farther then about my body's food and fare. 
 
 For that matter, the Niebelungen poet sometimes did like- 
 wise, as (stanza 898) 
 
 Si sprach, "du bist min mac, so bin ich der din", 
 
 just as for such variation as 
 
 Yet can God that scather mad turn from his deed 
 
 he furnished ample precedent in such lines as (stanza 884) 
 Liudegast und Liudeger die habent mir widerseit, 
 
 and (902) 
 
 und sich dar inne badete der kuene recke guot, 
 
 where the secondary stress, following an unstressed syllable, 
 occupies the place of the brief half-line pause and thus de- 
 stroys the two-part make-up of the line. At least that is, 
 in brief, my theory,— with due apologies to the contrary- 
 minded. 
 
114 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 IV 
 
 From the lines already quoted it will be observed that no 
 attempt has been made to reproduce the alliterative formula 
 of the Anglo-Saxon, though it occasionally appears exactly: 
 
 The henchman and the herald, of Hrothgar, lo, am I. 
 
 Oftener, however, as in 
 
 And well he kenned the coast-marks wise in sailor-craft, 
 
 it is accompanied by a secondary alliteration (here on the 
 k sound). The general procedure is between the consistent 
 triple (dual) alliteration of the Anglo-Saxon and the 
 sporadic (relatively) lawless alliteration of the Niebelungen- 
 lied. That is, my line is characteristically (but by no means 
 always) alliterative, and alliterative in freely varying com- 
 binations that tend, however, to group themselves into types. 
 
 a) The four strongest stresses alliterate throughout the line, as 
 On the Breast of the 6ark the heroes &ore their bright 
 
 array, 
 to) The four strongest stresses alliterate alternately (as In the 
 AS first line of Beowulf) thus, 
 
 The /oamy-necked, the &ird-like be/ore the winds that 
 
 Mew. 
 
 c) The four strongest stresses alliterate in criss-cross fashion 
 (chiasmus), as 
 
 The stout one under helmet, till at the hearth he stood. 
 
 d) One word (in any one of three possible stresses) in the first 
 half alliterates with one word (in any one of three possible 
 stresses) in the second, as 
 
 [mightily did shake] 
 
 With his hands his spear-shaft and in parley spake 
 
 or, 
 
 Anchored well their sea-wood, whilst their armor 
 
 clanked; 
 or (with secondary alliteration, here on th), 
 
 Thither in thanks my royal gii ts, that he in j/rip-of-hand. . . 
 
 There are, of course, other possible long-line combinations, such 
 as (e) two (or three) in the first alliterating with one in the 
 second, e. g., 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 115 
 
 Afirainst the greed of Grendel. This j/oodly youth unto.... 
 
 or (f) one in the first alliterating with two (or three) in the sec- 
 ond, e. g., 
 
 Under roof of fleorot. The ftero strode aftead 
 
 All serve the function of the AngloHSaxon alliteration, that of 
 binding the two half-lines together. 
 
 g) But each half-line may alliterate within itself (upon varying 
 feet), as 
 
 Bounded over the billows. Flood was asurge with foam 
 
 h) The first half may have alliteration (upon varying feet), the 
 second not, as 
 
 Had a town and treasures. All his vaunt 'gainst thee 
 
 i) The second half may have it, the first not, as 
 Did the son of Beanstan /ulfil /aithfully. 
 
 Just as the long-line types serve, as in the AS, to remind us that 
 the two halves are metrically a unit, these half-line types serve to 
 remind us that this unit is actually made up of two halves — a fact 
 of which one needs more often a reminder in the English than in 
 the AS, owing (primarily) to end rhyme. 
 
 ]) There is sporadic run-over alliteration, as sporadically in the 
 original. Compare either of the two strophic passages {Wear A 
 mathelode, etc., or Mael is me to feran, etc.) above with such a 
 passage as this (from Beowulf's first address to Hrothgar). (I 
 mark only those alliterations concerned in the run-over.) 
 
 Hail and health, O Hrothgar! Of Hygelac's kin and kith 
 
 Am I, who've pained in young days glories not a few. 
 
 A/ar this thing of Grendel on my home-turf I knew. 
 
 Sea-farers say it standeth, this excelling ftall, 
 
 Idle and empty ttnto each and all, 
 
 When wnder fteavens* follows the evening light is MA 
 
 Or mark off such a couplet as this, where (as notably in the above 
 AS "strophes") a non-alliterating word in one line furnishes the 
 letter for the alliterating words of the next: 
 
 Bade make ready for him a rider-of-the-sea; 
 
 Quoth, he'd seek this war-king o'er the swan-road, he! 
 
 I was certainly surprised at the discovery of these devices — 
 having been conscious in the writing only now and then that 
 I was using alliteration at all. Nor should I be distressed if 
 the reader failed to discover them. But I should want him 
 to feel the effect, somewhat — may I say it ? — as those Germanic 
 clansmen when 
 
 scop hwilum sang 
 hador on Heorote. 
 
116 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 V 
 
 A few words on the more strictly metrical availability of 
 the Niebelungen verse. 
 
 I take it, the Niebelungen gets its characteristic movement 
 from the two movements of lines like these : 
 
 a) Do sprach diu kueneginne, "nu brine mir min gewant." 
 
 (416) 
 
 b) "Nein, durch mine liebe", sprach diu kuenegin. (520) 
 
 They are represented in the English by such lines as : 
 
 a) Of all mankind the strongest in might and main was he. 
 
 b) Made, through nights eternal, misty moors his home. 
 
 Of course even between the corresponding MHG and English 
 lines of these pairs there are subtle but easily distinguishable 
 differences of movement, depending upon delicate differences 
 in distribution of the more important stresses, in lightness 
 or heaviness of the arsis, in correspondence or }ion-corre- 
 spondence of word or word-group with metrical foot. Such 
 differences, like differences in vowel- values (particularly 
 pitch), like differences in the intrinsic relations between 
 musical sound (vowel) and noise (consonant), or in the 
 various modulations superimposed by logic or emotion, are 
 the differences which render every line that is really alive 
 different from every other. But with these differences I am 
 not concerned in this discussion. 
 
 These two types, with or without the simple modifications 
 resulting from combinations of the two halves of each, so 
 dominate my translation as to give to the whole a somewhat 
 different metrical character than that of its mediaeval model 
 in versification. (Prom the brief specimen in Tinker, I 
 judge the same difference holds for Hoffmann's German 
 version.) There is, in other words, much less of the old 
 Germanic freedom in relation between position of stress and 
 adjacent stresses, particularly (not solely) in relation between 
 stress and the use or the omission of unstressed speech be- 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 117 
 
 tween stresses. Theoretically, any of the cadences might occur 
 and many do occur in my translation. The difference is 
 not in their occurrence but in the infrequency of their 
 occurrence. Some of them appear in the passages quoted 
 above, as "high hills steep," "sorrows unbounded" (two 
 stresses on sorrows, primary and secondary), "idle and 
 empty" (two stresses on idle, primary and secondary). 
 Others may be remarked in such random passages as follow. 
 Of the open season for joy in new-built Heorot: 
 
 He spake who knew full fair 
 
 To tell mankind's beginning, how God Almighty wrought 
 
 The earth, that shining lea-land which waters fold about; 
 
 Quoth, how God set, triumphant, the sun and the moon 
 
 As lights to lighten lands' folk; how he adorned soon 
 
 With leaf and limlb the fold all ; and eke created birth 
 
 For every kind that moveth on ocean, air, or earth. (90ff.) 
 
 Of the burial-ship for Scyld : 
 
 There in haven stood she, prow bedight with rings, 
 
 Icy and out-hound, large of the Aetheling's. (32) 
 
 Of Beowulf's presenting his credentials of prowess to 
 Hrothgar : 
 
 So my best of henchmen, my canny carls, they did 
 
 Teach me, Sovran Hrothgar, that I should seek thee out, 
 
 For that so well they wotted this strength of mine how 
 
 stout. 
 Themselves, had they seen me from sore straits come alive, 
 Blood-flecked from foemen, where I'd bounden five, 
 Killed the kin of ettins, . out upon the main 
 By night had smote the nicors, suffered stress and pain, 
 Avenged their hate of Geatmen (415 ff.) 
 
 The cadence blood-flecked from foemen reappears in the 
 second half of lines like these : 
 
 Mickle long the while was; twelve winters' tide. (146) 
 
 Is my folk-on-floor, 
 My warrior-throng of hall-men, almost no more. (476) 
 
118 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 But the cadence high hills steep is metrically more idiomatic 
 in the second half, when the line is already well under way. 
 So too, for the same reason, of some of the modifications of 
 normal prose stress. A secondary accent upon a normally 
 unstressed syllable in order to mark time (as in sorrows 
 unbounded) goes as well (i. e., is as metrically idiomatic) 
 in the first as in the second half ; but a deliberate interchange 
 of primary and secondary (as in almost no more) or of pri- 
 mary and non-stress (as in fulfill faithfully or in over the 
 sea-surging, rhyming with king) goes better as a rule in the 
 second. The law here is the law of the possible ratio of 
 recurrence of all such departures from the English norm: 
 there must be a decided rhythmical set; a rhythmical echo 
 must merge with the variation to keep it from getting out of 
 the rhythm altogether. That is my reason for quoting above 
 such cadences with so much rhythmical context. It is a 
 manifestation of the first law of all English versification: a 
 line of verse has no independent existence. 
 
 But why should the danger of such cadences getting out 
 of the rhythm (and so ceasing to be such) prove greater in 
 English than in the Nieielungenf Aside from the greater 
 danger depending on an intrinsic difference between the 
 speech-material of English and MHG, it depends upon the 
 well-known (and closely associated) historical fact: that our 
 metrical (and rhythmical) tradition, so largely Germanic as 
 I believe it is (from nursery rhyme to Shelley's lyric), has 
 still been vitally modified by three other traditions, — essen- 
 tially one, — the common non-Germanic tradition 8 of Old 
 French, Mediaeval Latin, and Renaissance. Much more 
 vitally than the Niebelungen verse, which in its turn, of 
 course, owes something of its difference from earlier Ger- 
 manic verse ultimately to mediaeval Latin (cf. Section VI) — 
 something, not all because the changes in speech-material and 
 the rhyme (itself in part a Germanic phenomenon) con- 
 tributed to develop that difference. And every English verse- 
 writer, no less than verse-reader, is under the compulsion of 
 
 8 Primarily to be identified by the dominance of the principle of 
 alternation or (and) the principle of quantity. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 119 
 
 the non-Germanic tradition. On the other hand, English 
 verse entirely in the non-Germanic tradition is precisely that 
 English verse which, as all through the eighteenth century, 
 most loses in haunting charm and musical depth — not because 
 non-Germanic versification is inferior as such (though I think 
 it is), but because English, as a Germanic speech, cannot for 
 its most idiomatic rhythmical effects do without its Germanic 
 inheritance. (Some so-called Niebelungen verse in English 
 is practically the French Alexandrine!) My translation, as 
 a translation of a Germanic story, in a Germanic measure, 
 is particularly under the spell of our Germanic tradition, 
 but, as a translation into modern English, it must submit 
 also to the persuasion of the other. It is metrically success- 
 ful or unsuccessful chiefly as to the tact with which the two 
 traditions combine and interpenetrate. 
 
 There are, again, some cadences in the Niebelungen that are 
 more developed and frequent in my English, such as in the 
 second half of the line (stanza 406), even if we carefully 
 read geben as two short syllables ("resolution" is a myth!) : 
 
 Do sprach ein kameraere, "ir suit uns geben diu swert." 
 
 Examples in above cited passages are: 
 
 Over the .waves of the waters 
 
 On the breast of the bark the heroes 
 
 The cliffs aglow o'er the deep, 
 
 flood was asurge with foam, 
 
 (tending to the non-Germanic regularity). 
 
 A group of cadences like these, as they succeed one another 
 in the following passage, is a wide departure— but my widest 
 — from the typical Niebelungen movement. It translates, 
 however, a passage particularly characterized by rhetorical 
 ingenuity and by a spiritual philosophy foreign alike to 
 Beowulf and the Niebelungen (lines 178-188). 
 
 Such was their devil-practice and hope of these heathen 
 
 men; 
 'Twas Hell in their hearts they remembered and God was 
 
 not in their ken; 
 
120 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 The Doomsman of Deeds they wist not, wist not the Lord 
 
 of Love, 
 Nor worshipped the Wielder-of-Wonders, the Helm of the 
 
 Heavens above. 
 Woe to the soul that perversely shall fling to the fiery pit, 
 
 Never to ween of comfort, never to change a whit; 
 
 Weal to the soul that after the day of his death is come 
 
 May seek out the Lord and crave there in arms of the 
 
 Father a home. 
 
 But its tendency toward dipodic scansion awakens Germanic 
 memories — ancestral reverberations long antedating the 
 Niebelungen or Beowulf, and best heard today from the lips 
 of unsophisticated children. 
 
 The passage suggests mention of another difference between 
 my handling of the movement and the MHG. My variations 
 tend to go in just such groups, and thus to demarcate fairly 
 extended passages of different texture, where the imagination 
 has transferred differences in idea, action, mood, setting to 
 differences of rhythm, — more (or less) under the influence 
 of the Beowulf rhythm in the same passage. The abrupt- 
 ness and haste of the coast-guard's leave-taking, quoted 
 above, is given in a four-line group of "trochaics," any half- 
 line of which is to be found in the Niebelungen, but never 
 (I believe) in such a group of half -lines. The very next 
 passage (the opening of V) introduces a new moment of the 
 story; and the buoyant march of Beowulf and his warlike 
 band to Heorot renders itself thus in a group of "iambics" 
 of ten lines, till the movement again shifts with the speech 
 of the Dane, the wlonc haeleth of B 331, inquiring who they 
 be. The opening passage begins in English : 
 
 The street was laid with bright stones; the road led on 
 
 the band, 
 The foattle-byrnies shimmered, the hard, the linked-by- 
 
 hand; 
 The iron rings, the gleaming, amid their armor sang, 
 
 Whilst thither in dread war-gear to hall they marched 
 
 alang. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 121 
 
 No such ten line passage occurs in the Niebelungen, quite 
 apart from the break made by the second half of every fourth 
 line. 
 
 On the other hand, the Niebelungen variations are far 
 briefer — far more numerous, far more elusive and delicate, 
 and echo and answer one another, flow into or away from one 
 another, in little waves of sound that it would require the 
 technical vocabulary of the musician to describe. And 
 though the Anglo-Saxon original of Beowulf has, likewise, 
 a complex metrical pattern, the effects are broader and more 
 elemental, the structure and content of the whole more mas- 
 sive, just as the psychology and the action itself is more simple 
 and naive. Possibly the broader and more elemental and 
 massive strokes — as described of my version — do better for 
 Beowulf in English than would the subtler music of the 
 Niebelungen — even were it possible of attainment. 
 
 About a hundred years ago, a young enthusiast in Northern 
 Antiquities, falling upon Thorkelin's editio princeps (1815) 
 with its (to us) so ridiculously incorrect Latin version, 
 learned the whole poem by heart and was the first to discover 
 what it was all about. His emendations have been incor- 
 porated in the text or cited in the notes of all subsequent 
 editors. But his heart was set upon another matter. With 
 a corrected copy of Thorkelin's original transcripts before 
 him — made by his friend Rask — he went to work upon a 
 translation in his mother tongue. It was published in 1820, 
 and the old man's second edition, forty-five years after, 
 bears witness to the depth and persistence of his early 
 enthusiasm. I have little knowledge of the personal life of 
 the Dane, Nicolas Frederic Grundtvig, "praest"; but he 
 seems more to me than merely a familiar name in a technical 
 discipline. His personality speaks in his emendations and 
 in his introduction, but chiefly — in his translation. The very 
 freedom with which he lets his imaginative excitement over 
 the old text, and lets his rich memories of old Germanic lore, 
 lead him — mislead him, if you please — into rugged and 
 picturesque elaborations of situations and speeches is intoler- 
 able to us wiser ones — who, to be sure, have not learned the 
 
122 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 poem by heart — but eloquent of his own Germanic loves. If 
 he has "cheapened the story" (so Tinker), he has made it 
 go, as no translator since. And this translation is in verse — 
 rhymed verse, of varying metres and stanzas. And the 
 passage open before me (in the very rare 1820 edition) is 
 in the verse he used most, and it runs : 
 
 Kong Hrodgar; sagde Helten, hilsael i dit Gemak! 
 
 I Salen og i Feldten jeg tjener Higelak, 
 
 Hans Praende mon jeg vaere, og tjener i hans Gaard, 
 
 Heel mangen Daad med Aere jeg drev i Ungdoms-Aar. 
 
 I Gotheland jeg hoerde, at Graendel dig bestreed, 
 
 Og Skippere mig foerde oin Sagen den Beskeed. 
 
 (B. 407 ff.) 
 
 Despite some obvious differences, these lines — from the first 
 translation of Beowulf in any tongue — are in effect the 
 couplets of the Niebelungerilied. I discovered this fact only 
 after I had begun my own. If my translation errs, it errs 
 in company venerable and distinguished. 
 
 VI 
 
 Herewith my account might properly conclude. Questions 
 of style, except as related to the verse-medium, however vital 
 in the translation, do not belong within the limits of this 
 account of the translation. There must be adaptation of old 
 ways of saying things to new ; what, for instance, in Beowulf 
 are repetitions of the same object or idea would often seem 
 in English to be enumerations of different objects or ideas, 
 unless the repetition were emphasized by some difference in 
 grouping, or by a "this," "the same," etc., or, in the case 
 of infinitives, by repeating the main verb. 9 There must be 
 adaptation of the new ways to old, by the occasional use of 
 archaic words and forms, still not too archaic (as in Morris) 
 nor too specifically associated with feudalism and Arthurian 
 romance (as in Earle)- There must be good use of our Ger- 
 
 ' Examples of these devices appear among my previous citations. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 123 
 
 manic word-stock. Out of 480 words which render approxi- 
 mately the same passage in Gummere's, Clark Hall's, and the 
 present version, I find that the non-Germanic words (all 
 L or OF excepting the Celtic clan) are respectively 61, 85, 
 and 46. But numerical proportion as such is not enough. 
 Compare the following ad hoc sentences. "I trust you will 
 be so good as to send to Hygelac my heart-felt acknowledge- 
 ments of all his manifold kindnesses" is both Germanic and 
 Anglo-Saxon Germanic, but the total effect of the words is 
 un-Germanic. Again, "[The] stout chiefs, refusing peace- 
 pact, tracked [to] haunted lake [the] cruel monster, [and] 
 closed round [the] beast [in] fierce quarrel." This, though 
 Latin, is in total effect of the words, Germanic. The difference 
 between the two effects is in the different connotations which 
 the words both bring to each passage and acquire in each 
 passage. Philology, as such, won't settle the matter. Words 
 take on certain features, just as, according to some anthro- 
 pologists, descendants of early settlers in America come to 
 take on a suggestion of the Eed Indian — the so-called Amer- 
 ican physiognomy. 
 
 What I want still to emphasize, however, is one more point 
 of metrics. If not well taken, fortunately it cannot subtract 
 anything from the contentions for the Niebelungen verse thus 
 far made; but, if well taken, it will add not a little. I 
 have thus far contended exclusively that the Niebelungen 
 verse is the verse for the Beowulf because it is so well adapted 
 to the Beowulf. My final contention goes farther: it is 
 adapted to the Beowulf because it is essentially the verse 
 "of" the Beowulf. 
 
 The scholarly acrimony of fifty years concentrates in this 
 apparently innocent preposition. What does this "of" 
 mean? For me it means, frankly, the belief in what Kaluza, 
 with cheerful defiance, calls "die gute, alte, viel geschmaehte 
 und oft todtgesagte, aber deshalb nur urn so zaeher am leben 
 festhaltende Lachmannsche vierhebungstheorie. " 10 I believe 
 
 ,o "The good-old-mueh-desplsed-and-often-pronounced-dead-but-on-thls- 
 account-only-so-much-the-more-tenaciously-clinglng-to-life — Lachmannian 
 four-accent theory." Der altenglische Vers, 1894, Vorioort. 
 
124 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verses (and with them the ON 
 Fornyrthislag) were composed and recited with four accents 
 and must be so read today if they are to render up their 
 musical meaning — and all those poetic values dependent 
 thereon. We have become so habituated to Sievers' five- 
 types — viewing (and reviewing) them in the back of every 
 Primer and Reader, putting them on the blackboard, correct- 
 ing them in the blue-books — that we now take them for 
 granted as the ABC (DE) of Germanic metrical science. 
 Indeed, to a confirmed disciple of Professor Sievers, the 
 difference between a defense of palmistry (or cannibalism) 
 and a defense of the four : accent theory is scientifically only 
 a difference of degree — with the advantages of intellectual 
 and social respectability. indubitably on the side of the former. 
 But great as is Sievers' name, there are great names on the 
 other side: Lachmann (in spite of some now antiquated 
 views), Muellenhoff, Heyne, Schade, Trautmann, Kaluza, and 
 (with varying differences) in effect Moeller, Hirt, Fuhr, ten 
 Brink. And even Sievers admits, with Saran, a four-accent 
 stage lost with the change from sung to spoken verse. 
 
 There is need, shortly, for a new and completer statement 
 of its claims. No other theory so well explains the inter- 
 relations, Indo-European and Germanic, known to obtain in 
 other linguistic elements, and even by the "two-accent men" 
 admitted to obtain somehow in metrics. None so well ex- 
 plains the Germanic relations of development (in MHG and 
 ME) known to obtain in other linguistic elements and even 
 by two-accent men (as Luick and Schipper) admitted to 
 obtain in metrics. 11 None other works so well in Anglo- 
 Saxon, the Germanic language that has preserved the most 
 extensive body of early Germanic verse, nor in the ON 
 
 11 Though this paper discusses — and that most briefly — only a few of 
 these relationships, it may call attention in a note particularly to 
 "tumbling verse" and "Knittelvers" as likely to be adduced against the 
 four-accent position, (cf. also Gummere's partial derivation of our 
 "five foot iambus" from the AS long-line as presupposing a two-accent 
 theory. The Translation of Beowulf, AJP, VII, 1886). "Tumbling 
 verse" and "Knittelvers" with their (assumptive) four erratic stresses, 
 though differing from old Germanic half-lines of four erratic stresses 
 by sporadically greater amounts of speech-filling (as opposed to possible 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 125 
 
 Fornyrthislag, which, with the strophe and the related fact 
 of verse units (as opposed to enjambement), represents, 
 though in smaller amount, doubtless a still earlier phase. 
 
 The theory does away with the anomalies of three-accent 
 types (D, E, and some of A), and a four-accent type (the 
 familiar sub-form of A), and a long-line of seven accents, 
 like 
 
 gfith-rinc gold-wlanc, graesmdldan traed 
 
 (B. 1881) 
 
 beside a long-line of four, like 
 
 on beor-sele bene gerymed. (B. 492) 
 
 In the transitional versification of early ME, or in quite 
 modern versification, at least since Eomanticism broke with 
 the classical prescriptions, such irregularities would not sur- 
 prise the reader or embarrass the critic ; but in that rigid, 
 self-directive, self-perpetuative formalism of folk-art rightly 
 posited for Germanic metrics by both two-accent and four- 
 accent men, such anomalies at once render suspiciously incon- 
 sistent any theory that cannot eliminate them absolutely. 
 
 The four-accent theory does away with that hurried slough- 
 ing and piling up of syllables which make, if not impossible, 
 at least very difficult and strained, the preservation of old 
 Germanic articulation. 12 To be sure, the outstanding phonetic 
 peculiarity of the Germanic languages is their strong stress 
 basis, and strong stress on one syllable tends to weaken stress 
 (and with stress, articulation) in other syllables; and the two- 
 accent men thus try to prove their position by precisely the 
 same reminder of "Germanic phonetics" as is here adduced 
 for the opposite position. But the reference above is to 
 
 pause-filling) between stresses, may still be related to the old half -lines; 
 and the clue to the relationship may well be in Ihe broken-down old 
 Germanic verse of the Heliand, which on either a two or a four accent 
 theory differs from the older in this respect. Unless, indeed, they be a 
 much later phenomenon: some relate the "Knittelvers" to the Court 
 Epic. For other views (particular alternating syllables with distorted 
 word-accent) and a thorough discussion of NHG verse before Opitz, see 
 Saran, Deutsche Verslehre, 1907, p. 300 ff., and 320 ff. 
 
 :J The term is used briefly for a complex of inseparable factors. 
 
126 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 articulation in specific cases which involve word-elements 
 that, upon all available evidence, could not have been pro- 
 nounced, before the period of leveling, without the clearest 
 articulation — except to the impairment of their functional 
 character in the speech and thought complex. The conten- 
 tion is not that they all bore stress — secondary stress — in 
 prose ; but that in normal discourse they were not subject to 
 that degree of subordination and obscuration which is so 
 often demanded by any consistent two-accent reading of an 
 old Germanic alliterative line. The contention is that the 
 definitely muscular articulation of such syllables would in- 
 vite the poet to give them secondary stress rather than to in- 
 fringe upon their functional character — would invite, in short, 
 to the four and not the two-accent scansion. The differentia- 
 tion between single and double consonants (marina, Jiel-le, 
 mid-dan), kept in Otf even in final, or final derivative syl- 
 lables (men, necklace, menn, men; hamar, Jiamarr — here of 
 course, strictly, short and long consonants), the differentiation 
 among vowel endings (a, o, u, e) and vowel-consonant end- 
 ings (an, on, urn, en), the secondary stress in certain deriva- 
 tive syllables like -ende, -ode, -ian (appearing as rhyme 
 stresses in OHG, MHG- and ME) are differentiations that 
 point to a scansion not only where these differentiations were 
 not obscured but where they may well have been organically 
 dynamic, even determinative, for the scansion itself, in a 
 more thorough-going fashion than is possible in the Sievers 
 scheme where their metrical value is partial and sporadic. 
 The considerations of this paragraph are purely linguistic. 
 They lead directly to others. 
 
 The four-accent theory is more in accord with what we 
 know, or have reason to conjecture, was the nature of poetry 
 in those old days. That nature was the farthest remove 
 from "naturalness" — from modern conceptions of simplicity 
 and immediacy to the daily life of men and men's speech. 
 The primary intent, as so exhaustively elaborated by Rich- 
 ard M. Meyer (Die altgermanische Poesie, nach ihren formel- 
 Tiaften Elementen oeschrieben) was, in ideals, in vocabulary, 
 in structure, to create a difference, but a difference by em- 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 127 
 
 phasis, not by contrast. The point of departure remained 
 the folk-ideal and the folk-speech. The difference was only 
 that in the poem the king must be ten times as brave or gen- 
 erous, and the speech ten times as exalted or picturesque. 
 Thus it would be strange if, in their scansion, they inverted 
 the process, and deliberately wider-emphasized, in a strict 
 phonetic sense, the normal prose pronunciation of phrase, 
 word, or syllable. Rather did they over-emphasize, over-ar- 
 ticulate, with a grandiose idealization in metrics and deliv- 
 ery, corresponding to the entire concept of poetry as idealiza- 
 tion. And the twanging harp guided and completed the 
 differentiation, the idealization. 12a 
 
 But this argument works both ways, the Herm Opponenten 
 might reply, reminding us that the twofold accentuation is 
 precisely that over-emphasis, the indigenous Germanic nature 
 of which is witnessed even in excited and emphatic prose to- 
 day. If it does work both ways, then admittedly, its cogency 
 is as much neutralized for them as for us. But the four- 
 accent man is not content with such a truce. Excited prose 
 drives home points — comes out strong on the logical stresses. 
 In this it is not the norm for verse. Moreover, even excited 
 prose of old Germanic speech could not slough the characteriz- 
 ing functional syllables to the degree referred to above as often 
 necessary in a two-accent theory. Much less then could the 
 verse — for the emphasis would be in a direction away from, 
 not toward determinable rhythms and metrical balance in the 
 speech as speech, — away from, as is the case in the liturgical 
 chanting of prose versions of the Psalms, sometimes, with the 
 Predigt-stil, so strangely adduced indeed as veritable illus- 
 trations of the two-accent technique in reading Germanic 
 verse. The essential point, however, is this: that the over- 
 emphasis I so strongly suspect is over-emphasis of all rela- 
 tively important syllables, a heightening of the entire speech- 
 material, not a distortion of a part at the expense of the 
 rest. I mean over-emphasis in all verse-pronunciation in dis- 
 
 »a Vigorously assisting the main stresses, but lending particular sup- 
 port and stylistic quality to the secondary stresses. Of course, in itself 
 the use of the harp proves neither two nor four stresses. 
 
128 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 tinction to ordinary emphasis in all prose-pronunciation, 
 not over-emphasis of some members within the verse in dis- 
 tinction to other members within the verse. 
 
 Nor in the much-heralded change from sung to spoken 
 verse is there any necessary distinction of principle. Recita- 
 tion was measured declamation — with the harp, or, so to 
 speak, with the memory of the harp and of the poetic tradi- 
 tion. I mean, for aught that can be cited to the contrary. 
 The assumption that AS verse was sprach-metrisch is neces- 
 sary only — to explain the two accent theory ; even as the two- 
 accent theory is then used for all it is worth to prove — that 
 the AS verse was sprach-metrisch. Moreover, the "change" 
 took place by no phonetic or metrical law not in equal opera- 
 tion today. Wherever musical notation is characteristically 
 syllabic, i. e., a note to a syllable (as particularly in primi- 
 tive music or children's rounds), — in distinction from sev- 
 eral syllables to a note (as in the enterprise of Psalm- 
 chanting), or several notes to a syllable (as in modern airs) — 
 there is normally no structural change in the metrical char- 
 acter of the words when spoken. The verse, coordinated 
 with song as sung, remains so coordinated, reveals the na- 
 ture of the coordination in itself, apart from song. "0 
 Strassburg, Strassburg, du wunderschoene Stadt" has in 
 the lyric as read aloud, the same secondary stresses on -burg 
 and -schoene that it has when sung. (So, too, Kaluza.) 
 "Yes, but this is because you recall the music." Not at all, 
 it is because the music is in the words as well as in the 
 notation; as one may prove by reading aloud, say, some old 
 English or German nursery rhyme the mtm'c-tune of which 
 you have never heard and then comparing it, as to time, 
 pitch, etc., with the music. Personally, I read Strassburg 
 according to the "music" long before I knew the "music." 
 Such verse notates in its organic metrical character a specific 
 "tune" — and no verse is truly "lyrical" if it does not. 
 And if the experiment does not work with you, I'll tell you 
 you haven't read the verses right. There is no way of escape : 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 129 
 
 Schneckhaus, Schneckhaus, 
 
 Strecke deine Hoerner aus,' 
 
 Und wenn du sie nicht strecken willst, 
 
 Werf ich dich In Graben, 
 
 Fressen dich die Raben. 
 
 The words don't tell me all about the folk-tune that may 
 have gone with them — (they can't tell me just how much 
 higher, for instance, the syllable Hoer- was than Streck-, 
 though they almost tell me that, too) — but they tell me in- 
 dubitably that it was in 4-4 time, and I unconsciously read 
 the lines dipodically. They undergo no organic change as 
 spoken. The secondary stresses remain on -haus, dein-, -aus, 
 etc., and on the -en f of Graben and Raben, and the whole is 
 read (as sung) line by line with four accents — is in fact a 
 group of old Germanic half-lines in the aboriginal tradition, 
 that know nothing about a change to two-accent scansion, 
 when I now speak what little Fritz used to sing. 13 
 
 The uncouth and shamefaced Caedmon left his fellow- 
 revellers when it came his turn to sing to the harp (be kear- 
 pan singan), but soon found himself able, in the cattle-stall, 
 to sing in his visionary sleep {tha ongon he sona singan) — 
 even without the harp. But there was a dream-harp, you 
 say. That is just it: the harp of the imagination — which 
 the scribe who recorded the beginning of his song (leotTi) 
 for us doubtless heard, too, even if he, peradventure, spoke 
 the verses aloud in the scriptorium. The notes of Caed- 
 mon 's dream-harp have not been lost to this day. They are 
 written into the metrical manner. His verses are today 
 what they were in the old days. And what are these verses? 
 They are nothing less than excellent specimens of typical 
 
 "A metrician and pupil of Sievers, Dr. Ernst Feise, writes on my MS, 
 "This happens to be right, but need not," and cites a. little modern 
 poem in which dipodies consisting successively of secondary and primary 
 stresses in the metre as spoken become dipodies consisting successively 
 of primary and secondary stresses when sung to the music. This is an 
 interesting modern exception, wherein the music seems to be compelling 
 the verse to an old popular movement (which indeed it can be made to 
 take on without the music). But it does not invalidate my main con- 
 tention : the change is not from dipodic to monopodia or in the number 
 of stresses. 
 
130 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 AS alliterative verse, — the same in heathen charm, religious 
 hymn, personal lyric, folk-ballad, Christian tale, or Germanic 
 epos. The intrinsic difference between singing and speak- 
 ing is a phonetic, not a metrical difference. 
 
 As to Beowulf, the effect upon our polite ears would have 
 been, I doubt not, a subordination of dramatic to musical 
 emphasis, perhaps a suggestion of childish sing-song. But 
 we would hear a tune to it; we would know it was verse — 
 sonorous, often melodious verse, with its well-defined modu- 
 lations of pitch, tempo, loudness, and pause, however, always 
 under the control of the metre. If, on the other hand, the 
 scop had been a "two-accent man", the effect upon our ears 
 would have been oratory, not verse — at best, impressive 
 rhythmical prose, but more often a succession of phonetically 
 disjointed "breath-groups" like those of a solemn and ex- 
 cited Medicine Man at a tribal pow-wow. But there is 
 place here for little scientific argument. Kaluza's analysis 
 (Der altenglische Vers, 1894) I accept as far as it goes, in 
 the essential principles 14 (though Kaluza might not accept 
 all the remarks of this paper). 
 
 However, I believe our repugnance to the four-accent the- 
 ory is too often not a scientific repugnance at all. I believe 
 it is often, as it was in part with myself, the unconscious 
 effect of defective imagination; the substitution of today for 
 yesterday, the twentieth century for the eighth, — a substitu- 
 tion, too, of our own sophisticated maturity, accustomed to a 
 verse coordinated with spoken prose for our Mother Goose 
 childhood instinctively taking to a verse coordinated with 
 song — until this form of original sin was drubbed out of us 
 in the schoolroom. 
 
 The repugnance seems to be this — when it is not some- 
 thing more delimiting still, to wit, entire incapacity to read 
 the lines with four accents at all. For a fact, one has to 
 learn. "The natural way", in spite of much intermittent 
 gulping of "unstressed syllables", is perhaps as often with 
 
 M Recall particularly section 12, where he skilfully directs against 
 his opponents the entire force of their old argument drawn from verses 
 made up of % Germanic plus % Latin or of % Latin plus % Germanic. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 131 
 
 two, or rather three, accents as with four. The "natural 
 way" is of course an English or a German student's talking 
 his English or German — in Anglo-Saxon; a doubly un- 
 natural way from the point of view of the old Scop. But 
 we have to learn the metres of Horace or Greek chorus. We 
 have to learn the more uncommon movements, even in mod- 
 ern verse in our own tongue — set the average reader of 
 poetry to a sight reading of Meredith's Love in the Valley, 
 for instance. That is, we grown-ups have to. For very few 
 of men's activities are rhythmical any longer — except the 
 dance, and the rhythm seems fast disappearing from that. 
 
 But the repugnance may sometimes be due to a curious 
 misunderstanding of the theory itself : it was partially so in 
 my own case, for I had been a pupil in Trautmann's 
 Beowulf seminary, at the very time he was so bravely "re- 
 vising" the text. The scansion is not an old Indo-European 
 monopodic long-line of eight theoretically equal stresses, as- 
 suming — which is very doubtful — that the IE line was mon- 
 opodic. To call the half-line a four-accent line is mislead- 
 ing, for Trautmann alone considers the four stresses to have 
 been equal. Stress is roughly in three grades, 3, 2, 1, — 
 non-stress (true arsis) being representable as 0. (I bor- 
 row the numerals from Kaluza.) In the old Germanic 
 metre of the Beowulf form, of the four stresses, three, two, 
 or only one might be dominant, and of the secondary stresses 
 one might be more dominant than the one other (or, re- 
 spectively, the two others). Nor should the reduction of 
 these variations to exact formulae on paper, as in Kaluza 
 (op. cit.) permit our eye to delude our ear that the difference 
 was so great as to destroy the unity of metrical effect, as it 
 is for a fact destroyed by the two-accent theory with its ir- 
 reducible anomalies (not to speak of the destruction of any 
 metrical effect). The long-line was one characteristic line, 
 just as much as in the "iambic pentameter" of blank verse 
 or rhymed, though this has freer variations in the number 
 (and freer variations in the relative position) of primary 
 and secondary (that is, heavier and lighter) stresses, as the 
 following familiar verses will recall to us: 
 
132 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring (5 primary) 
 
 A p&gan suckled In a cregd outworn (4 " ) 
 
 Mother of this unfathomable w6rld (3 " ) 
 
 And that his grave should b6 a mastery' (2 " ) 
 
 No difficulty is made by the alliteration, which, is of course 
 only on primary stresses. And to any objection that the two 
 alliterative sounds in an AS half-line are presumptive evi- 
 dences for the two-accent theory, one may reply, besides, 
 that the evidence is at best available for first half-lines, and 
 then only for some; while for the rest and for all second 
 half-lines it is, by the same token, evidence for a one-accent 
 theory! The "difficulty" may be resolved by experiment. 
 The alliteration loses nothing by the four-accent reading; on 
 the contrary, it actually gains, as coordinating and coordinated 
 with the rest of the speech-material, in one onward move- 
 ment, as opposed to the tendency toward spasmodic isolation 
 which it manifests in a two-accent scansion. Moreover, in MB 
 and Md E two-fold alliteration is a common (and, I believe, 
 the characteristic and natural) alliteration in a four-accent 
 line, as in the following random illustrations : 
 
 Where Is al thi michele pride, 
 
 And thi tede that was so !oud? 
 
 Whi list ou there so bare o side, 
 
 Ipricked in that pore shroud? 
 
 (Debate of Body and Soul) 
 
 Or idly Zist the shrilling Zay 
 
 By warriors wrought in steely weeds .... 
 
 (Marmion.) 
 
 Or shall we say the two alliterations here prove a two-stress 
 line? 
 
 To say that these added stresses are prevailingly weak 
 stresses is not the same as saying the result is merely the 
 familiar Sievers types : the weak stresses — even the weakest — 
 are still stresses, for the simple untechnical reason that 
 they mark time in the verse, which Sievers' unaccented syl- 
 lables don't; they may make time, but they don't mark time. 
 This point of difference is of vital importance. And a re- 
 minder of Greek dipodies should be sufficient answer to a 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 133 
 
 demur that "accents are accents", and that thus alternations 
 of strong and weak stress are alternations in effect of strong 
 and non-stress. A complete shutting of the ears is such a 
 demur. 
 
 In talking about metrics, no object lesson, however ele- 
 mentary, may be dismissed a priori as superfluous. It is 
 bound to be useful to somebody. So I may be pardoned for 
 the following demonstratio ad hoc. I attempt to amuse my 
 little friend, Daisy Jones, with extempore rhymes. I say 1) 
 
 Daisy, Daisy, Daisy, Daisy, 
 Little lady, don't be lazy. 
 
 And I say it over 2) 
 
 Dai — sy, Dai — sy, 
 Little lady la— zy. 
 
 Number (1) is a couplet of four accents with the child's 
 name four times repeated. Number (2) is a couplet of four 
 accents with the child's name twice repeated. There is a 
 difference of stress, between the second-and-fourth stresses 
 of (1) upon the dai-, on the one hand, and the second-and- 
 fourth stresses of (2) upon the -sy, on the other hand, — 
 which is the difference between monopodic and dipodic struc- 
 ture; but there is no difference in respect to each pair hav- 
 ing the same time-marking function in their respective verse 
 schemes ; and there is all the difference in the world between 
 the two -sy's in (2), with their secondary stress — still stress — 
 and the four -sy's in (1) with no stress at all. The dipody 
 dai-sy, dai-sy, of number (2), is applicable at once to a more 
 specific difficulty in the understanding of the four-accent 
 theory in Beowulf. It corresponds to such half-lines as 
 sidra sorga (ON. asa gartha) of which (to borrow from 
 Sievers' tables — and without Sievers' help who could attack 
 Sievers!) there are 497 instances in the first half, and 592 in 
 the second, i. e., 1089 out of the 6364 half lines in B. To 
 affirm that any scop could employ such a percentage of four- 
 syllable half -lines in a four accent half -line is (you say) at 
 once a reductio ad absurdum as to the theory, and cause for a 
 
134 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 writ of de inquirendo as to the theorist. To stress all syl- 
 lables is the same as to stress none — either is equally a can- 
 cellation of metre. But sidra sorga is nothing but daisy, 
 daisy — or the Schneckhaus, Schneckhaus of our preceding 
 quotation from a German nursery. 
 Or again, take the lines 
 
 Cross-patch, draw the latch, 
 
 Sit by the fire and spin; [pause] 
 
 Take a cup and drink it up, 
 
 And call all your neighbors in. [pause]. 
 
 This is an old Germanic four-accenter, like the Schneckhaus 
 verses, — except for the replacing of the fourth accent by 
 second half-line pauses (as in the Niebelungenlied) that do 
 not concern us here. Sidra has in its line the metrics of 
 cross-patch in its line. And if you'll modify the first and 
 third lines, as I used to when swinging on the front gate — 
 geong in geardum — 
 
 Cross-patch, draw latch, [half pause] 
 Sit by the fire and spin; [full pause] 
 Take cup, drink up, [half pause] 
 And call all your neighbors in [full pause], 
 
 . you'll have sidra sorga. "Yes, but these are rhymes". 
 Change then, to 
 
 Cross-patch, shut door, 
 
 Sit by the fire and spin; 
 
 Take cup, drink down, 
 
 And call all your neighbors in. [pauses as above] 
 
 There is nothing impossible about it — when the tune is sup- 
 plied by familiar custom or metrical context. Indeed, Siev- 
 ers himself scans such A lines as guth-rinc gold-wlonc with 
 just this cadence. And the cadence is of "such frequent re- 
 currence" in Beowulf for the sufficient reason that the old 
 scop liked the cadence, particularly as interwoven into many 
 different metrical patterns. And he liked it presumably 
 because it was flesh and blood of the very oldest tradition 
 (most typical of the common Germanic cadences, and nearest 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 135 
 
 kin to the pre-G-ermanic). And to a modern reader of 
 Beowulf it should offer no difficulties. 
 
 To all of which the two-accent man, irritated but unshaken, 
 would doubtless reply, if he deigned to reply at all : " Siev- 
 ers' theory is not a theory but a fact — the laws he has 
 worked out in such detail work out themselves in every ap- 
 plication to detail. It is a priori inconceivable that a false 
 principle can bring intellectual order to the phenomena to 
 which it is applied." It is thus that we so often natter 
 ourselves into intellectual content, in the face of racial ex- 
 perience. The Ptolemaic theory manipulated the heavenly 
 bodies into a workable system for intelligence; the Linnean 
 classification was workable and served a good purpose be- 
 fore the days of Lamarck and Darwin; the molecular the- 
 ories of physics and chemistry of but yesterday yielded 
 workable formulae that advanced science; but all three have 
 been overset by theories more workable, as men came to 
 know about more facts and more about what "workable" 
 means for the facts. "Workable" is a purely relative term, 
 — relative to the stage of our knowledge and the stage of 
 our reason. No principle that works is totally false for an 
 intelligence like man's which is constantly moving on. But 
 Sievers' principle, in this our modest science of metrics, is, 
 in any case, not false, but rather incomplete (in this more 
 like old-time physics than old-time astronomy). The type 
 distinctions, the proportionate use of types, the relations be- 
 tween quantity and accent, the rules of alliteration, etc., 
 the application of such formulations to text criticism, — all 
 these remain in great part as invaluable for the four-accent 
 theory as for the two-accent theory. 
 
 But there is another concept of workability besides appli- 
 cation of intellectual analysis. It is application to organic 
 movement. Let it be reiterated: the four-accent theory 
 goes better, works better in that it reveals an organic move- 
 ment, a metrical life; and the two-accent theory to a sur- 
 prising degree does not. The obvious retort is that this is 
 to surrender the whole case over to subjective whim. It 
 is not. I am convinced by such objective experiments as 
 
136 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 it has been practicable for me to make that, if the two modes 
 of reciting the lines should be tried out before any audience 
 (as tried out in my classes) — however ignorant of AS, pro- 
 vided only it were composed of alert and trained ears, — the 
 decision as to which was metrical and which was not, as to 
 which was verse and which not, would be forthcoming at 
 once. And it would be a decision of the same human met- 
 rical consciousness to which the verse was originally ad- 
 dressed. Nor is it insignificant that, for myself, I found it 
 possible for my verbal memory — fairly practiced in verse — 
 to retain the lines without effort, only after adopting the 
 four-accent scansion — and this small fact of my subjective 
 experience is no less objective as fact than any other fact. 
 The difference of effect and manipulation in the two modes 
 is to me as great as the difference between Dry den's and ten 
 Brink's scansion of Chaucer. 
 
 Argument from authority will get us nowhere. Sievers' 
 pupils will recall Sievers' affirmation that his ear preferred 
 the two-accent recitation; but pupils of Eoethe will recall 
 Eoethe's reading a passage of the Heliand with two accents 
 and throwing the book down on the desk with the despair- 
 ing remark, "Ja, aber meine Herrn, das sind keine Verse 
 mehr!" Let one like what one likes — but let the objective 
 and impersonal metronome, if you insist, decide whether 
 what one likes is metre, one metre with freely varying mod- 
 ulations, or a continuum of five (in truth more than five) 
 variously interwoven brief prose, or semi-prose, rhythms. 15 
 However, no scientific apparatus exists of such nice preci- 
 sion as to tell us whether the metrical movement (proven by 
 metronome!) is merely accidental to a modern and entirely 
 unhistorical scansion, or intrinsic to the old Germanic art 
 itself! One can read Homeric hexameters in two ways: ac- 
 cording to the prose accentuation or according to the quan- 
 titative measure. The latter is metrical, the former is not; 
 and the metricality is its own justification, without carrying 
 
 "Aelfrie's oft remarked poetical prose-passages might seem a bit of 
 evidence for this view ; but they cannot be discussed here. Sievers, of 
 course, admits that his "scansion" has similarities to prose-rhythms. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 137 
 
 the Iliad into the laboratory. So with the old Germanic. 
 A four-accent reading is consistently possible and consist- 
 ently metrical; a two-accent reading is consistently possible 
 (if one has an elastic palate and a tripping tongue, and 
 forgets with D and E to count 3), but far from consistently 
 metrical. "Which was the old Germanic mode for Germanic 
 poetry? Which is closer to that orchestic rhythm — by com- 
 mon consent as basic for the beginnings of OG poetry as it 
 is for the relatively modern folk-song? 16 
 
 There is a folk, far up by the northern seas, that speaks a 
 Germanic language which is today still representative (in 
 some respects) of an earlier ethnic (linguistic) stage, than 
 Anglo-Saxon even of the eighth century. This folk talks 
 essentially the language that Ohthere, the Viking, talked 
 when he told "Alfred, his overlord", of his voyage around 
 the North Cape, the Amundsen of men's first polar expedi- 
 tion — which Alfred made into an ON saga and inserted in 
 his Orosius. Their favorite reading is still in the ancient 
 stories of their heroic age. I have been told by one of 
 them, now a graduate student in Germanic literature at 
 Wisconsin, that during the long Arctic evenings, when the 
 laborers of the country-side gather in some big farm-house 
 living room to card wool or to spin, the master of the house, 
 or one of their number with a good voice, reads to them, as 
 
 16 1 don't mean that a change in metrical structure may not develop in 
 the course of time — or has never developed — from an orchestic rhythm ; 
 I mean simply that there is no reason whatever for supposing that it has 
 to in general, or that it did in the OG. Nor, does evolution in speech 
 from generation to generation necessarily involve evolution of metrics 
 (e. g. from four to two stresses). Changing speech-material may be 
 plastic to an unchanged tune — and a tune (like any other phenomenon of 
 a formula character) is always relatively conservative. Chaucer wrote 
 rhyme-royal stanzas in a ME dialect; Sackville, 150 years later, was 
 manipulating the very same cadences, after epoch-making changes in the 
 reduction of final syllables and in the shifting of word-stress. The 
 analytic subtilties, the practiced realism (i. e . the sense for aural fact) 
 in the service of the most difficult, because most familiar, phenomena, 
 in such books of the Sievers' school as Saran's Terslehre, have greatly 
 advanced our general understanding of prose-speech and verse-speech, 
 in the last decades ; but still leave us free to demur at the sanction they 
 lend to the two-accent theory. The modern four-accent man does not 
 go back to the doctrine before 1885 any more than the modern 
 Lamarckian goes back to the doctrine before 1859. 
 
138 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 they work, saga after saga in the very words. And although 
 the more difficult language of the earlier Edda is even to the 
 modern Icelander somewhat strange, it is still his language 
 as it is not ours; and I hold it not insignificant that, when 
 he reads me aloud the Thrymskvitha, again and again I 
 distinctly mark the secondary stresses that would not be 
 there to mark if read conscientiously by a two-accent man; 
 and that, when I read it aloud to him with careful attention 
 to a four-accent delivery, he finds in such scansion nothing 
 grotesque or foreign to his ear — but rather catches (in 
 spite of my American nasality) the reverberations of an 
 ancestral tune: ' 
 
 Flo tha Loki, fjathrliamr dunthi, 
 
 unz fyr utan kom asa gartha 
 
 ok fyr innan kom jotna henna 
 
 Thrymx sat a haugi, thursa drottinn, 
 
 Greyjum sinum gull-bond snoeri, 
 
 ok morum sinum non jafnathi. 
 
 Or of Thor, just awake, showing his wrath at the loss of his 
 hammer : 
 
 Skegg nam at hrista skor nam' at dyja, 
 
 reth Jarthar burr urn at threifask 
 
 Took to shaking beard then, took to tossing hair; 
 
 The son-of-Earth he started groping round him there. 
 
 And the Nieoelungen form of the above couplet reminds 
 us of the practical purpose of this apparent digression: to 
 popularize the contention that the Niebelungen verse is ulti- 
 mately the same verse as the ON just cited, is the same as 
 the Beowulf. 
 
 The unrhymed eight accent long-line of the earlier art 
 became the rhymed eight accent long-line of the later, with 
 loss of some types and with more speech-filling between ac- 
 cents and less demarkation at times between primary and 
 secondary accents, a final pause coming to occupy like the 
 ghost of a dead sound, the place of the original last foot. A 
 word at this point on the final pause. This linguistic — not 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 139 
 
 metrical — shortening of the second-half seems to have been 
 an evolution mainly due to rhyme-evolution. (But cf. note 
 to types lib, III, page 145 below). Half-line and long- 
 line rhyme were present sporadically before any Latin in- 
 fluence. Where later the rhyme technique developed in half- 
 lines, the second line remained in speech-material nearly 
 equal to the first, as in Layamon and the ME couplets in 
 direct line of descent from Layamon, or as in Otfried and 
 the MHG couplets in direct line of descent from Otfried; 
 when the rhyme technique developed in long-lines, the old 
 tendency (noted by Wilmanns) of the second-half to con- 
 tract its speech-material, owing to the Hauptstab, seems to 
 have been accentuated, after the loss of the Hauptstab, by 
 end-rhyme. The long-line end-rhyme became apparently an 
 insistent terminus ad quern and one hastened to get there 
 as soon as possible — and rest up a bit afterwards. The end- 
 rhyme obscured the original fact of half-line pairs of fairly 
 equal speech material; and gave to the long-line a unity it 
 did not originally possess; it was now felt as a long line — 
 and rather too long. But the old metric asserted itself, and 
 still does, in the final pause. 
 
 The details of the process, — how the shortening took 
 place — cannot be here examined; they must remain, in any 
 case, a matter of conjecture; for what we have are the two 
 sets of facts: the four-accent second-half and the three-ac- 
 cent second-half. The versifier never thought to record the 
 psychology of the change consciously and the unconscious 
 record is unclear in meaning. But conjecture may be mere 
 manipulation of formulae on paper or it may depend in a 
 measure on the insight of personal experience. My own ex- 
 perience in versifying has in its own way its dangers too, 
 but I cannot eliminate it from my thinking and feel that I 
 should not, for it constitutes my sole claim to contribute to 
 the subject and stresses a means of approach that has never 
 been given due recognition by the "science". It seems clear 
 to me as a versifier that an important detail of the process 
 must often have been the loss of a secondary stress some- 
 where before a masculine rhyme (i. e., a rhyme on a final 
 
140 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 dominant stress — theoretically in types Ha or lib and III 17 — 
 but practically almost always in Ha, lib) . Take this chance 
 couplet in Beowulf (890-1) : 
 
 hwaGthre him gesaeldS tha&t thaet swurd thiirhwod 
 
 wragtlicnS w|rm tha&t hit on weallS aetstod. 
 
 If these lines had come in the midst of an end-rhyme con- 
 text, — and not in this half-line context — the second halves 
 would have lost each that accent which, on one ground or 
 another, was the easiest to be lost. The loss in these lines 
 might have been the loss of the first weak stress (thaet) of 
 each second half-line, or of thurh and of the e of wealle 
 respectively (with the probability much in favor of the 
 former, for fhurh is a heavy syllable and logically emphatic, 
 and the e in wealle is elsewhere an already insistent ca- 
 dence, and emphasized by the aet- following). The lines 
 would then read 
 
 hwagthre him gesaeldg thaet thaet swfird thurhwod 
 
 wrae'tllcne w^rm thaet hit on weallS aestfid. 
 
 If one could transpose the order of secondary and primary 
 stresses in the first-half of the second long-line, one would 
 have here almost a Niebelungen verse. The process seems, 
 also, to have been furthered by the awkward technique of 
 rhyme-matching, whereby sometimes a rhyme was single 
 (on primary stress sar, gar, or on. secondary stress, himiles 
 and UiTiaftes), or single-double (on both primary and sec- 
 ondary stress wibes libes) where there was rhyme already at 
 the third stress. 18 This would work toward a weakening of 
 the end- rhyme, i. e., a reduction of secondary stress to non- 
 stress, to what we call feminine rhyme, and the line would 
 then have lost its last foot, — and the further shortening to 
 masculine rhymes would involve no metrical difference. It 
 will be remembered, too, that in Kaluza's types I, IVa, IVb 
 (Sievers' A, C, Dl), the last stress is a secondary, and that 
 
 " The student who has forgotten these types of Kaluza's formulation 
 will find further references on p. 143 ff. 
 18 The examples are from Otfried's OHG. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 141 
 
 in IVa and IVb always, and in I, usually, it immediately 
 follows the preceding (a primary) stress, so that in these 
 three very common types the reduction of but a single syl- 
 lable yields us the three-accent second-half. But I have no 
 right to say this much if I cannot say more ; and more now 
 would lead me too far afield. 19 
 
 Yet one word may be permitted on Otfried — the Scholar's 
 House of Confusion, where already lie so many Germanic 
 worthies slain by the monster, Metrik. Gaeth a Wyrd swa 
 Jieo sceal — and if it's my turn, very well. But like a brave 
 man I will say my thought before my end. In thus con- 
 ceiving Otfried as the intermediate stage between Beowulf 
 and the Niebelungen, I conceive, of course, that Otfried 's 
 eight-accent long-line is as to number of accents, not at all, 
 and as to relative position of accents, only in part, affected 
 by the metrics or the rhyme of the mediaeval Latin hymn. 
 And this is to assert that Otfried, anxious though he was 
 to accommodate his "barbaric" German to the finesse of the 
 new "Christian" culture, was still unemancipated from old 
 folk-tradition, — was still, in short, writing what was m 
 principle Germanic verse, though one of the old types (the 
 so-called "E") has all but disappeared. 19a 
 
 That he was trying, like Opitz later, to do something 
 new is clear both from his preface, his accent-marks, his 
 rhymes, and the Latinized modification toward greater reg- 
 ularity in interchange of thesis (stress) and arsis which his 
 
 "/Professor G. P. Jackson of North Dakota in a paper, The Beginnings 
 of Rhyme, read at the meeting of the Modern Language Association, at 
 Madison, Dec. 1917, derives the rhyme at the end of a seven-accent 
 long-line from the effect of compensative stress before the end-pause, 
 and from the coincident rhythmical character of the "melodic curve" 
 (i.e. the movement from an harmonically fundamental initial tone to the 
 final return to the tonic of the scale) in the accompanying music. His 
 brief outline promises interesting and important results. If I understand' 
 him, his theory inverts the relations suggested above, by making the 
 seven-accent line and its final pause, and the coincident melodic curve, 
 precede rhyme. The question is also involved with the Latin septinarius ; 
 but the seven-accent line cannot be explained merely as an imitation of a 
 foreign model. 
 
 "a Peculiarities which in a four-accent scansion of Beowulf are pro- 
 nounced artistically or psychologically impossible seem to occasion no diffi- 
 culties to the objectors when they mark the scansion of Otfried — in prin- 
 ciple precisely as the four-accent men mark the scansion of Beowulf. 
 
142 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 lines underwent as his work proceeded. But this "some- 
 thing new" would not have left such admitted reminders 
 of something old (in metre, phrase-formula, and word-ac- 
 centuation) if it had been something entirely new, — that is, 
 if it had been an eight-accent Latin line for a four-accent 
 Germanic. The break would have been too complete. Let 
 us suppose blank-verse is the folk-verse of my race and the 
 only verse I have composed in. Then, blank-verse (five 
 accents) might well hamper me in trying to write English 
 hendecasyllabics (five accents) after Catullus, — and my hen- 
 decasyllabics would betray my blank-verse inheritance — nor 
 is my illustration altogether without reference to experi- 
 ence^ — but memories of blank verse in my ear or in my 
 handicraft would not hamper me in attempting a double 
 anapestic dimeter aeatalectic (four dipodies, eight accents) 
 after the Greek. Such an illustration from my metrical 
 consciousness and performance proves of course nothing for 
 Otfried's metrical consciousness and performance. One 
 must go to Otfried himself, but one must go with full 
 realization of the nature of the problem — and concrete ex- 
 perience may supply useful clues. The intuitionalism of 
 modern speculative philosophy has its application to phil- 
 ological science. 
 
 The preceding section (V) outlined the metrical relations 
 between the verse-medium of my Beowulf translation and the 
 Niebelungen verse. The present section has identified the 
 Niebelungen verse historically with the verse of Beowulf. 
 This section (and therewith this discussion) now concludes 
 with some illustrations as to the relation of my verse di- 
 rectly to the AS, which may serve to bind the two sections 
 together. They are illustrations, I say, not arguments. The 
 procedure will depart pretty far, I fear, from the traditions 
 of scientific method, but it is the most practical method for 
 one who writes verse and writes about verse. I will now 
 try to manipulate modern English speech-material in the 
 AS manner and evolve it into its own manner. There are 
 all but insuperable linguistic difficulties in the modern Eng- 
 lish: the level-stress of many essential compounds, the ab- 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 143 
 
 sence of secondary accents on derivative syllables of non- 
 compounds, and the only too variable and plastic quantity 
 and quality of vowels must permit some freedom of manipu- 
 lation on my part, as it will require a particularly acute 
 ear and a total suppression of the sense of humor on the 
 reader's part. Adopting the type-notation of Kaluza, we 
 set down a few of many possible metrical parallels, type for 
 type, between AS and MdE. 
 
 I. (Sievers' A). 
 
 (Scheme: / \ / \) 
 sidra sorga 
 folcum gefraege 
 gamol-feax ond guth-rof 
 hylde him tha heatho-deor 
 
 Sorrows unbounded (translating sidra sorga in my version) 
 
 Wind-cliff and wild wave 
 
 Geat-folk in sorrow 
 
 Higelac's thane did 
 
 Hasten to the haunted 
 
 Sinketh he, sinketh she 
 
 These correspondences are generic, not pedantically imita- 
 tive, as they might be made — cf. sidra sorga. = take cup, 
 drink up. 
 
 Ha (Sievers' B). 
 
 (Scheme: \ / \ /) 
 ne leof ne lath 
 mid his haletha gedriht 
 waes him Beowulfes sith 
 
 Where the longest of them lurks 
 He the mighty man of men 
 Seeks the monster in the murk 
 
 To render in English such a cadence as ne leof ne lath one 
 particularly needs metrical context and a special start. It 
 would reveal itself in the final line of such funereal nonsense 
 as this: 
 
144 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 Pax vobiscum, ye who know 
 Never a blessing, never a blow, 
 Never a high thing, never a low, 
 nor a weal, nor a woe, 
 
 Nor friend nor foe. 
 
 This cadence is impossible in my translation, but only be- 
 cause the whole type is impossible : impossible in the second- 
 half because the second-half has in speech-material only three . 
 stresses; impossible in the first because there the half -line 
 ends on a secondary stress, — even in an atypical line with arsis 
 between last two stresses, like 
 
 "Yet can God that scather mad turn from his deed" 
 
 quoted on page 113. It can be adapted to {I do not say it 
 evolved historically into) type I by one of two modifications: 
 a) by shifting first secondary stress to last (e. g., "He the 
 mightiest of men" to "The mightiest of men, he"), or by 
 reversal of second secondary and final dominant (e. g., "He 
 the mighty man of MEN " to " He the mighty MAN of men = 
 "Yet can God that scather mad".) The type can exist in the 
 Niebelungen only in the second half of the fourth line of the 
 strophe ; but even what there at first seems to be this type has 
 often a somewhat different disposition of primary and sec- 
 ondary stresses, as (1717) 
 
 und will im immer wesen holt. 
 
 I and Ha are dipodic; but I remains so in later Germanic 
 more consistently than Ha, I believe. 
 
 lib (Sievers' D2). 
 
 (Scheme: / / \ /) 
 atol ytha geswing 
 blaed wide sprang 
 
 Fiercest foul thing aswim, 
 Gray, green thing grim, 
 Came and cat-clawed him. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 145 
 
 Impossible in my translation, but elimination of the one 
 weak-stress word reduces it to second half-line cadences like 
 high hills steep. 
 
 See previous quotation from the translation. 
 
 I utilize rhyme and stanza here, as under Ha, to assist 
 whipping the recalcitrant English material into metrically 
 satisfactory behavior. 
 
 Ill (Sievers' E). 
 
 (Scheme: / \\ \ /) 
 Aethelinges faer 
 murnende mod 
 wlite-beorhtne wang 
 
 (Stresses run: 3, 2, 1, 3, — No. 1, the weakest, being on-es, 
 -e, -me) 
 
 OPF-spring of HELL 
 
 EVen-tide in EAST, 
 
 SHIMmer-ing oft SHORE (or: SHIMmers light off SHORE) 
 
 These are not satisfactory as parallels, obviously, unless read 
 under the guidance of the AS cadence. The type appears 
 to have been always subordinate and the first to be modified 
 or abandoned in the later developments of Germanic languages 
 and metrics, — cf. Otfried. It is impossible in my line: im- 
 possible in the second-half because it is a four-accenter, im- 
 possible in the first-half because its fourth stress is primary. 
 It would appear in the first-half with the final primary and 
 secondary reversed, as I, "Shimm- 'ring OFF-shore", (or as 
 IVb, "Shimmers light OFF-shore,") and, in the second with- 
 out the weakest stress, "Even-tide in east" (cf. murnende 
 mod in Beowulf with vliesendes. bluot in Niebelungen.) 
 
 IVa (Sievers' C). 
 
 (Scheme: \ / \\ \) 
 Over lagu-straete 
 thaet ic sae-naessas 
 O'er the billows' by-ways* 1 
 By the sea-nesses 
 
 80 Possible too, as \ \ / \ which is not an AS cadence, at least 
 theoretically. 
 10 
 
146 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 IVb (Sievers' Dl). 
 
 (Scheme: / / \ \) !1 
 gode thancode 
 Maere mearc-stapa 
 Mighty march-roamer 
 
 An easy one for the English in the first half-line of a 
 Niebelungen verse : cf . note under III above. 
 
 Let us try putting such lines together, changing words a 
 little to get some long-line alliteration, and interweaving 
 with others in similar cadences, to make a little "episode", 
 suggested by a passage in the Beowulf: 
 
 Geat-folk unfearful follow to the eery 
 
 Wind-cliffs and wild waves where weird ones are splashing; 
 
 Hygelac's thane did what never other: 
 
 He the mighty man of men seeks monster in her lair — 
 
 Mighty march-roamer, moody sea-farer. 
 
 Even-tide in east, all up the heavens; 
 
 Shimmers light off shore: shadowy from the evil eyes, 
 
 Where the longest of them lurks. Lankest foul thing afloat, 
 
 Gray, green thing there, grips and cat-claws him. 
 
 Sinketh he, sinketh she, under surface of the deep. 
 
 By the water's high-ways, and the waves' tumult, 
 
 On the sea-nesses, seated all in war-coats, 
 
 Geat-folk in sorrow grieve for the morning. 
 
 No reading can make this sound like modern English verse. 
 But,, moreover, no reading can make this sound exactly like 
 the Beowulf. Obviously it does not sound like the familiar 
 two-accent scansion, because it is a four-accent scansion. 
 But even as a four-accent it is unlike : there is more speech- 
 filling and the types tend to run into pairs or groups, and 
 here are already the first changes in the direction of my mod- 
 ern English line. 
 It might be made over into half-line (4 accent) rhymes: 
 
 Geat-folk undaunted 
 Hasten to the haunted 
 Wind-cliffs and wild waves 
 Where foul things defiled waves; 
 
 » As to the relation of these paper-formulae to the living verses, 
 particularly with reference to primary and secondary stress, see above, p. 
 131. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 147 
 
 Hygelac's thane did 
 What never Dane did: 
 He the mightiest of men 
 Seeks demon in den, 
 Mighty march-roamer, 
 Swiftest sea-comer 
 
 which is Layamon and Otfried (a little set to rights). 
 It might be made over into long-line (8 accent) rhymes: 
 
 Geat-folk unfearful follow to the eery 
 
 Wind-cliffs and wild waves woeful and dreary. . . . 
 
 which is what the ME author of On god ureison of ure lefdi 
 was apparently trying for : 
 
 Vor thu me havest iholpen aueole kunne wise, 
 
 And ibrouht [me] of helle into paradise — 
 
 the first attempt to adapt a Latin poem and metre into Eng- 
 lish, and, if studied in all its lines, quite as Germanic as Ot- 
 fried, and for similar reasons. 
 
 But what there is to the "episode"' as action, image, and 
 tune only emerges in modern English when we arrange and 
 modify the lines thus: 
 
 The Geat-folk unfearful follow to the sea, 
 
 To wind-cliffs and wild waves where foul beasts he. 
 
 And Hygelac's thane doth what Dane would never dare: 
 
 He the mighty man of men will seek the monster's lair — 
 
 Mighty march-roamer, swiftest ocean-beast. 
 
 All up the heavens eventide in east; 
 
 Shimmers light off shore, from the shadowy eyes 
 
 Of evil where the longest of the lurkers lies. 
 
 Fiercest floating foul thing, gray, green, grim, 
 
 Comes she and clutches and cat-claws him — 
 
 Till sinketh he and sinketh she to the deep and dim 
 
 By the water-highways, by the wild mere, 
 
 On the sea-nesses, in their warrior-gear, 
 
 The Geat-folk in sorrow await the morning here. 
 
 This, with a proviso, is the Niebelungen verse of my transla- 
 tion. It differs, like the Niebelungen couplet, from the AS 
 by the disappearance or modification of types Ha, lib, and 
 
148 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 III. And the other differences between the Niebelungen and 
 the earlier verse, remarked above — the substitution of final 
 pause for last foot, the tendency to greater speech-filling be- 
 tween stresses, the less clear demarkation at times between pri- 
 mary and secondary stresses (due probably to this tendency) — 
 obtain here likewise, implicated in the modification of types. 
 The proviso is that the cadences in the above passage — all of 
 which could presumably be tabulated from the translation it- 
 self — are in the translation variously supported by others, 
 previously noted in the metrical comparison between the Eng- 
 lish and its MHG model. And though the above exercise is 
 frankly an artifice, the verse-form it illustrates is no artifice. 
 It is simply the familiar idiomatic English long-line : 
 
 Sing a song of sixpence, a bag full of rye, 
 
 Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie; 
 
 When the pie was opened the birds began to sing — 
 
 And wasn't this a dainty dish to set before the king. 
 
 Moreover, if the four-accent theory is sound, the above 
 illustrations will have emphasized that the metrical deviations 
 of my medium from the original Niebelungen verse are in 
 principle largely but an extension of deviations of the Niebe- 
 lungen itself from the earlier metrical practices, as in the 
 AS, deviations which it is significant became more marked in 
 the recensions. Thus the claim for organic relationship be- 
 tween that medium and the AS verse it translates may be 
 taken in both a metrical and an historical sense: organic as 
 metrically similar, and organic as metrically derivative. It 
 is no merely organic imitation, like Tennyson's Galliambics or 
 Swinburne's Sapphics, of an otherwise exotic tune; it is no 
 invention of the present translator ; it is something in which 
 one can trace, in the midst of later variations, the old and 
 autochthonous, just as Priedlander has traced some themes 
 of Germanic music through the centuries down to our day. 
 
 Perhaps the gist of the whole matter can be summarized by 
 the following comparative scansions. 22 
 
 s" The distinctions between heavier and lighter secondary stresses can 
 not be conveniently recorded. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 149 
 
 Magi is me to feran; Faeder alwalda 
 
 Mid ar-stafum eowic gehealde 
 
 sltha gesunde! ic to sag wille 
 
 with wrath werdd wearde healdan. 
 
 Time for me to fare back; in his mercy may [pause] 
 
 The Almighty Father, keep ye safe alway [pause] 
 
 'On your voyage and venture. 1 will td the coast [pause] 
 
 The>e to hdld my sea-watch gainst a hfistile h6st. [pause] 
 
 Of course only rarely (as here in the first clause) will the 
 metrical parallelism be a metrical identity, half-line for half- 
 line. 
 
 Finally, the slighter differentiation between primary and 
 secondary stresses that tends, as already pointed out, to obtain 
 in the English, is associated with serial and proportionate 
 distribution of primary and secondary in combinations not 
 present in the AS, and with occasional un-AS alliterations on 
 secondary stresses. Perhaps some enterprising Cand. PMl. 
 will sometime tabulate them. 
 
 SPECIMEN PASSAGE (BEOWULF IX) 
 
 IX. "Thus the loathly lurkers pressed me sore and oft. 
 
 I served them with my dear sword in ways not soft. 
 
 For those foul devisers the hope of fill was o'er — 
 
 To eat me, to sit round a feast on ocean's floor! 
 
 But upon the morrow, wounded by the glaive, 
 
 They were lying up along the leavings of the wave, 
 
 Put to sleep by sword there — ne'er to thwart again 
 
 Sailor-folk in ferrying the fords of the main. 
 
 From the east a light rose — God's beacon bright; 
 
 The rolling seas subsided, so that see I might 
 
 Headlands and windy walls. Wyrd will often save 
 
 An earl who is no fey man if he be but brave. 
 
 And so to me 'twas granted that with sword I slew 
 
 Nine there of the nicors. Nay, I never knew 
 
 Under the vault of the heavens by night a fight more 
 
 fierce, 
 Nor on the streams of the ocean a man put to it worse. 
 
 Way- weary, yet I scaped the clutch of monsters fell; 
 
150 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 And the sea up-cast me, flood-tide and swell, 
 
 On the land of Finn-men. Never about thee 
 
 Such straits of strife, such terrors of sword-Wades heard 
 
 I tell; 
 Ne'er yet at war-play Breca, nor neither one of ye, 
 
 Did deed so bold with bloody brands — nor boast I of 
 
 that fray — 
 Though thou forsooth thy brothers, thy kin-of-heart, 
 
 didst slay! 
 (Whence curse of hell awaits thee though good thy wit 
 
 may be.) 
 I say t6 thee in sooth now, thou of Bcglaf son, 
 
 That Grendel ne'er so many gruesome things had done, 
 
 The Grisly ne'er such havoc in Heorot to thy King, 
 
 If thought of thine, if soul of thine, were grim as thy 
 
 telling. 
 But he hath found he needeth fear or feud or stroke 
 
 Little from thy people, the Victor-Scylding folk! 
 
 He taketh the forced pledges, unsparingly he rends, 
 
 He hath his lust of slaughter, 1 he puts to sleep, he 
 
 sends, — 
 He recketh not of any contest with the Dane. 
 
 But speedily 'tis mine now to show him might and 
 
 main, 
 The warrior-work of Geatmen! Let him go who can 
 
 Blithe to mead tomorrow — when o'er bairns of man 
 
 Shineth from the southward, on other day begun, 
 
 Once more that light-of-morning, the sky-girt sun." 
 
 Then the Prince of Bright-Danes, the Treasure- 
 
 Breaker he, 
 The old-haired and war-famed, had his time of glee. 
 
 Now in help he trusted; from Beowulf he caught, 
 
 He his people's Shepherd, the firm-resolved thought. 
 
 Then was there heroes' laughter, and rang the shout 
 
 and song, 
 And merry speech was bandied; and then stepped forth 
 
 along 
 Wealhtheow, queen of Hrothgar, mindful of manners all, 
 
 And gold-bedight she greeted the guest-men in the hall. 
 
 And then the high-born lady erst gave the cup in hand 
 
 To him who was the Warder of East-Danes' fatherland; 
 
 1 Reading on lust wigeth. 
 
BEOWULF AND THE NIEBELUNGEN COUPLET 151 
 
 And him she bade be blithesome 2 at the bout-of-beer, 
 
 Him beloved of clansmen. He took with goodly cheer 
 
 The banquet and the beaker, the King of victory-fame. 
 
 Then round the hall to each and all she stepped, the 
 
 Helmings' dame, 
 And gave to young and older the goblet rich-beseen, 
 
 Till came the happy moment when in hall the queen, 
 
 Crown-bedight and high-souled, the cup to Beowulf bore. 
 
 She greeted the Geats' lord; God she thanked therefore, 
 
 Wise in her word-craft, that her wish had thriven 
 
 That she could trust some earlman for help 'gainst hor- 
 
 rors given. 
 He took the cup from Wealhtheow, a warsman fierce-to- 
 
 smite; 
 And then he offered answer, eager for the fight. 
 
 Beowulf made a speech then, bairn of Ecgtheow he: 
 
 "When with my troop of tribesmen, I mounted on the sea, 
 
 And sate me in my sailor-boat, I had this thought in 
 
 me: 
 Either to work for all time thy peoples' will at last, 
 
 Or to fall afighting in grip of Grendel fast. 
 
 Firm am I to do my earlman's deed withal, 
 
 Or to dree my end-of-days in this mead-hall." 
 
 Those words well pleased that woman, — the Geat- 
 
 man's battle- vows; 
 And gold-bedight she went, then, to sit beside her 
 
 spouse, 
 Folk-queen high-born. And once again there be 
 
 Brave words spoken, and hall-men in glee, 
 
 And uproar of victor-folk — until the King anon, 
 
 Would seek his evening resting-place, Halfdane's son. 
 
 He knew that battle waited the fiend on that high floor, 
 
 After they the sun-light could see no more, 
 
 After the dun night was over all about, 
 
 And the shapes of shadow should come aprowling out, 
 
 Wan beneath the welkin. Together rose the clan; 
 
 Then Hrothgar greeted Beowulf, man wishing luck to 
 
 man; 
 Gave him of that wine-house the power and sway, and 
 
 swore: 
 "Never have I trusted to any man before,— 
 
 Not since I could heave up band and shield of me,— 
 
 a i. e., Wished him good cheer, said "prosit." 
 
152 UNIVERSITY OP WISCONSIN STUDIES 
 
 This brave house of Danesmen, until now to thee. 
 
 Have now and hold it — this excelling hall! 
 
 Remember thy glory, — make known thy might to all! 
 
 Watch against the wrathful! Each wish of thine I'll do. 
 
 If with thy life thou seest this deed of daring through." 
 
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