Analyzing the Metre of Bea Wolf

Bea Wolf, @ZachWeiner's retelling of Beowulf as a kids graphic novel, is a great book and you should check it out

Also, as a linguist I am excited to see it because alliterative Old English metre is a really cool verse form! Why should iambic pentameter get to have all the fun! https://t.co/ajFVtBmoyV

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

So this is the first full page of @ZachWeiner's Bea Wolf

Let's analyze the metre!

Read it out loud and see what you notice! pic.twitter.com/aJkXJDEJeO

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Old English metre is built from two half-lines, connected by alliteration

This means an important word in the first half of the line (not strictly syllables but before the pause/comma/syntactic break) has to begin with the same letter as an important word in the second half

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

What's an "important word"?

Well it's a word that contributes a lot to the meaning of the text, so nouns and verbs are great candidates for alliteration, tiny function words like pronouns and prepositions less so

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Also you wanna have your repeating sounds be at the beginning of stressed syllables

This is what makes alliterative metre fun and exciting compared to other verse forms we're familiar with, which care about endings (rhymes) rather than beginnings/medial repetition

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

So in this line, the repeating sound is p

It occurs in the first half-line in "parent"
And in the second half-line in "politeness-proof" (double! bonus points!)

Also bonus points for the p beginning the stressed syllable of "improper" pic.twitter.com/M76oTrXJBE

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

So, alliterative metre is not the same as creating a tongue twister!

We're not trying to get every word beginning with the same sound, we're trying to use it to emphasize the important parts

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Also, alliterative metre is a memory technique, remember Beowulf was originally an oral poem!

So if you can remember that one important word in this line starts with p, that'll help you with the second half

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

We also avoid tongue twister effect by picking a different sound to alliterate on for each line

(obviously there are only so many sounds so we'll eventually have to do p again but we'll wait a bit)

Here the next lines are with b and f pic.twitter.com/uKzLQUhqNx

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

(despite the linebreak, for aesthetic purposes I presume, I'd consider "the unbowed bully-crushers" to be part of the same line as "the bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers" from a metrical perspective, there isn't an exact syllable count but there's a line length ~vibe) pic.twitter.com/Ik4xRSvYLf

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

One of the great things that any metrical form lets you do is emphasize certain bits of information: here we have a lot of alliteration with s which emphasizes the kid's name, Sonya pic.twitter.com/8VI8hc6DFF

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Compare this to the introduction of Tanya, who gets repetition of t instead to emphasize her name (though not as intensely as the s for Sonya's intro) pic.twitter.com/dn0hpBOfhN

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Comparatively, if you want to emphasize names in rhyming metre, you need to delay them to the end of the line

eg a limerick "there once was a man from Nantucket" / "there was a young lady named Sally"

It's just a whole different vibe!

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

I'm really looking forward to an explosion of people writing in alliterative metre in about 20-30 years once these kids grow up https://t.co/LBBZhfjMPl

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Yes, I've also noticed that a lot of children's literature uses alliteration in some form, even if it's not strictly speaking metrical (where metre is defined as giving yourself strict constraints to work in, often culturally shared with other people)https://t.co/4yVO16AWjz

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Another thing that's not strictly speaking metrical but is very very characteristic of Old English poetry is the use of compounds (kennings) to describe people and things

eg whale road for sea, ring-giver for king https://t.co/Z9BBnhaLSH pic.twitter.com/TWfxwQaA4p

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

English is grammatically so well suited to compounds!

It's just easy for us to make them, and this is as true for Modern English as Old English

It's also a thing of the Germanic languages, though English tends to use spaces or hyphens where eg German writes as all one word

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Look at all these descriptive compounds in Bea Wolf!

World-fighters
Parent-unminding
Politeness-proof
Bully-crushers
Bedtime-breakers
Raspberry-blowers
Fun-killers pic.twitter.com/r5Yg89vOxz

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023

Another book that uses alliterative metre (there aren't that many!) is @rkirstein's Steerswoman series,

In this case not the whole thing but as specially a poetic verse form of a fictional group of people with an oral poetic tradition pic.twitter.com/NpLm7A2gZS

— Gretchen McCulloch (@GretchenAMcC) March 21, 2023