Auxiliary and verbal inBeowulf

Abstract

The principles of Old English prose syntax are on the whole well understood, but there is no general agreement about verse syntax. There are many reasons why verse syntax should differ, at least in some respects, from the syntax of prose. The Old English poetic tradition is known to have been conservative, and it is therefore possible that certain ancient syntactic patterns, obsolete in prose, might have survived in verse. The more ‘rhetorical’ purposes of verse might have made it necessary to call extensively on usages either rare or unknown in prose. Above all, the metre might have exercised such a constraint on the syntax that certain syntactic patterns could not be used at all, or could be used only in favourable circumstances. Such general considerations would no doubt be accepted as plausible by all students of Old English poetry, but there is still no agreement about how they may have operated in detail: the result is that any attempt to judge the style of an Anglo-Saxon poet is frustrated at every turn. It is impossible to tell how far his usage is the result of choice, how far the result of constraint; there is no way of judging how skilful he is in avoiding such constraint, or of assessing the ingenuity he exercises in saying what he wants to say in spite of the difficulties imposed by the metrical form; there is no way to tell how far his variations from prose usage are dictated by ‘rhetorical’ motives. Judgement is necessarily limited in this way until there is an agreed analysis of verse syntax.