Abstract
In a recent article in this journal, Leonard Neidorf argues for a seventh-century date for the Old English poem Widsith, while countenancing the possibility that one portion of the poem was composed before the migration of the Angles and Saxons to Britain (adventus Saxonum). The present article disputes the possibility of a pre-adventus date for this and other portions of Widsith. Metrical considerations tend to contradict such an exceptionally early dating, with ramifications for the categorization and interpretation of the poem as a whole. After reviewing the pertinent metrical evidence, this article argues that the available metrical form of Widsith is the essential feature by which the poem, whenever and wherever it was composed, can be recognized as ‘the poem’ in the first place. This article concludes that Widsith is not an ancient poem from a pan-Germanic distant past, but an encyclopedic Old English poem that turns inherited vocabulary to its own rhetorical purposes.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson, G. K. (1957). The literature of the Anglo-Saxons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cable, T. (1974). The meter and melody of Beowulf. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Cable, T. (1991). The English alliterative tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cable, T. (2009). Progress in Middle English alliterative metrics [Review of Putter, Jefferson, and Stokes (2007) and Yakovlev (2008)]. The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 23, 243–64.
Campbell, A. (1959). Old English grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chadwick, H. M. (1912). The heroic age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chambers, R. W. (1912). Widsith: A study in Old English heroic legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Donoghue, D. (1987). On the classification of b-verses with anacrusis in Beowulf and Andreas. Notes and Queries, 232, 1–6.
Fulk, R. D. (1992). A history of Old English meter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Harris, J. (1985). Die altenglische Heldendichtung. In K. von See (Ed.), Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschat: Band 6—Europäisches Frühmittelalter (pp. 237–275). Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft.
Hogg, R. M. (1992). A grammar of Old English: Phonology (Vol. 1). Oxford: Blackwell.
Hogg, R. M., & Fulk, R. D. (2011). A grammar of Old English: Morphology (Vol. 2). Oxford: Blackwell.
Liuzza, R. (1996). Review of Newton 1994. Albion, 28, 73–74.
Malone, K. (Ed.). (1962). Widsith. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger.
Marsh, J. K. (2012). Pre-Old English. In A. Bergs & L. Brinton (Eds.), English historical linguistics (2 vols.) (Vol. 1, pp. 1–18). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Mees, B. (2007). Before Beowulf: On the proto-history of Old Germanic verse. Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 3, 209–223.
Mees, B. (2012). Early runic metrics: A linguistic approach. Futhark, 3, 111–118.
Minkova, D., & Stockwell, R. P. (1994). Syllable weight, prosody, and meter in Old English. Diachronica, 11, 35–64.
Neidorf, L. (2013a). The dating of Widsið and the study of Germanic antiquity. Neophilologus, 97, 165–183.
Neidorf, L. (2013b). Beowulf before Beowulf: Anglo-Saxon anthroponomy and heroic legend. RES, 64, 553–574.
Newton, S. (1994). The origins of Beowulf and the pre-Viking kingdom of East Anglia. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer.
Putter, A., Jefferson, J. A., & Stokes, M. (2007). Studies in the metre of alliterative verse. Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures.
Richter, C. (1910). Chronologische Studien zur angelsächsischen Literatur. Halle: Niemeyer.
Sievers, E. (1885). Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 10, 209–314 (I) and 451–545 (II).
Stevenson, J. (Ed.). (1840). Rituale ecclesiæ dunelmensis. London: Surtees Society.
Suzuki, S. (1988). The Indo-European basis of Germanic alliterative verse. Lingua, 17, 1–24.
Wormald, P. (2006). The times of Bede: Studies in early English christian society and its historian. Oxford: Blackwell.
Yakovlev, N. (2008). The development of the alliterative metre from Old to Middle English (unpublished dissertation) (pp. 57–60). University of Oxford.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Weiskott, E. The Meter of Widsith and the Distant Past. Neophilologus 99, 143–150 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-014-9401-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-014-9401-9