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Abstract
This dissertation uses dBase III Plus, a powerful data management program, as an organizational tool for a metrical study of Old English poetry that examines a much larger corpus in greater detail than hitherto undertaken. Virtually all Old English metrists since the time of Eduard Sievers at the end of the nineteenth century have confined themselves to examining Beowulf and little else. The personal computer, however, makes it possible to look at a much larger corpus. I examine a corpus of Old English poetry of nearly 10,000 lines, which makes for greater statistical certainty. In the dissertation, I elucidate certain still-disputed topics about Old English poetry, such as finite verb stress and the theory of resolution, in order to arrive at a more exact formulation of how the verse was actually composed.
While located firmly within the traditional five types theory of Old English meter, the present study departs from previous theories in several respects. My approach places great emphasis on syntax and formulaic diction; I demonstrate that a coherent metrical system emerges if alliteration is used as a guide to word stress, and if syntax is given priority over such notions as that of the metrical foot or the caesura. I allow verses of one stress, as well as verses of three stresses. I also demonstrate that resolution is a metrically significant phenomenon, and I argue that word-final resonants are almost never non-syllabic in Old English poetry. I thus eliminate several of the areas in which previous metrists have constructed ad hoc rules to account for metrical phenomena.
The dissertation is intended to be primarily a description of Old English meter; several features of the verse previously considered not metrically significant are shown to be in fact metrically significant, and several features of the verse previously thought metrically significant are shown to be not metrically significant. Although my work is descriptive, I have attempted throughout to explain the various distributions of metrical types; some of these explanations are theoretical in nature.