Great and very interesting post. I will be going through your references.
I must rebut one point you made, when you said: "Third, and last, the importance of chyme to the oral tradition does not licence us to assume that it was governed by the strict ‘classical’ rules found in most of the texts. In light of the analogy with distantly related oral poetries, as well as the fact of human fallibility, it seems likely that the preliterate scop used chyme more loosely and inconsistently than did the author of Beowulf."
The problem with this is that the very same rules (including that sk/sp/st/s are each counted separately, which is probably a phonological constraint since these sounds behaved differently even with regard to Grimm's law around the 5th century BC) are consistently found also in Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German, including in poems demonstrably composed orally.
The examples you quoted are not very useful; the Old English is a type of "galder"-meter which allows for such lines, while the runic example can be read as an early form of ljóðaháttr meter:
Handulaikaz. · Ek Hagustaldaz //
hlaiwidō magu mīninō.
As for the strictness of the meter we might look at the Old Norse dróttkvætt, which is far worse in that regard, but the orality of which nobody doubts. (Although it was certainly a memorial rather than recompositional.) There are even literary instances of scalds spontaneously composing poetry in the meter. I recommend reading MCR A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics; the ON tradition is very closely related to the English, but its modes of transmission and performance are much better attested.
Thanks for the book recommendation and constructive criticism. I discussed some of these points with the email group at Forgotten Ground Regained (www.alliteration.net) and got pushback on that one from them as well. I'd be the first to admit that it's on dodgy ground, since the ubiquity of the 'classical' rules in the literature strongly suggests that they were found in the oral tradition as well.
The reason why I pursue such speculation is that I am trying to figure out what sort of meter might have been used in a preliterate, pre-memorial, recompositional tradition. This may well be a wild goose chase (whether or not that passage in Fitt XIII of Beowulf represents the memory of such a tradition is open to question), and it seems to me that the path of least resistance leads to Alan Jabbour's argument that the oral tradition was primarily memorial before the introduction of literacy.
Alternatively, it could just be that Germanic recompositional traditions worked on somewhat different principles from those discovered by Parry. It's not so much the strictness of the meter that gives me pause (according to ACW the Greek hexameter would have been harder to handle) as the forced variation precluding the free use of formulas, though there is an analogue to that in the Albanian tradition with its mostly-consistent rhyming. (The example of skalds improvising in drottkvætt is interesting, but my understanding is that the poems in this style were quite short, and recomposition is for longer narrative epic; modern rappers can 'freestyle' in rhyme for a few minutes, but some South Slavic guslars would sing for half an hour at a stretch.)
With regard to references, this one on "Anglo-Saxon Hearpan" is also well worth a read:
Beginning on p.244 there is a discussion of the accent marks written over certain words in some OE religious poetry, which are also found in part of the Heliand MS. They seem to have something to do with musical delivery, but are not consistent with metrical stress, and my suspicion is that they belong to a later plainchant-like style of delivery superimposed upon the literary tradition. (I regret not discussing it in the text; I had read it very early on and later forgot how relevant it was.)
Great and very interesting post. I will be going through your references.
I must rebut one point you made, when you said: "Third, and last, the importance of chyme to the oral tradition does not licence us to assume that it was governed by the strict ‘classical’ rules found in most of the texts. In light of the analogy with distantly related oral poetries, as well as the fact of human fallibility, it seems likely that the preliterate scop used chyme more loosely and inconsistently than did the author of Beowulf."
The problem with this is that the very same rules (including that sk/sp/st/s are each counted separately, which is probably a phonological constraint since these sounds behaved differently even with regard to Grimm's law around the 5th century BC) are consistently found also in Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German, including in poems demonstrably composed orally.
The examples you quoted are not very useful; the Old English is a type of "galder"-meter which allows for such lines, while the runic example can be read as an early form of ljóðaháttr meter:
Handulaikaz. · Ek Hagustaldaz //
hlaiwidō magu mīninō.
As for the strictness of the meter we might look at the Old Norse dróttkvætt, which is far worse in that regard, but the orality of which nobody doubts. (Although it was certainly a memorial rather than recompositional.) There are even literary instances of scalds spontaneously composing poetry in the meter. I recommend reading MCR A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics; the ON tradition is very closely related to the English, but its modes of transmission and performance are much better attested.
Thanks for the book recommendation and constructive criticism. I discussed some of these points with the email group at Forgotten Ground Regained (www.alliteration.net) and got pushback on that one from them as well. I'd be the first to admit that it's on dodgy ground, since the ubiquity of the 'classical' rules in the literature strongly suggests that they were found in the oral tradition as well.
The reason why I pursue such speculation is that I am trying to figure out what sort of meter might have been used in a preliterate, pre-memorial, recompositional tradition. This may well be a wild goose chase (whether or not that passage in Fitt XIII of Beowulf represents the memory of such a tradition is open to question), and it seems to me that the path of least resistance leads to Alan Jabbour's argument that the oral tradition was primarily memorial before the introduction of literacy.
Alternatively, it could just be that Germanic recompositional traditions worked on somewhat different principles from those discovered by Parry. It's not so much the strictness of the meter that gives me pause (according to ACW the Greek hexameter would have been harder to handle) as the forced variation precluding the free use of formulas, though there is an analogue to that in the Albanian tradition with its mostly-consistent rhyming. (The example of skalds improvising in drottkvætt is interesting, but my understanding is that the poems in this style were quite short, and recomposition is for longer narrative epic; modern rappers can 'freestyle' in rhyme for a few minutes, but some South Slavic guslars would sing for half an hour at a stretch.)
With regard to references, this one on "Anglo-Saxon Hearpan" is also well worth a read:
https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/13998/
Beginning on p.244 there is a discussion of the accent marks written over certain words in some OE religious poetry, which are also found in part of the Heliand MS. They seem to have something to do with musical delivery, but are not consistent with metrical stress, and my suspicion is that they belong to a later plainchant-like style of delivery superimposed upon the literary tradition. (I regret not discussing it in the text; I had read it very early on and later forgot how relevant it was.)