Easy. Too easy

My teacher in Anglo-Saxon told us that writing alliterative verse is hard. The computer disagrees.

If we use the simple criteria of meter and alliteration, the text of The Lord of the Rings contains 10,740 alliterative lines.  If we insist that the fourth stress not alliterate with the first and third, that number drops to 9,917.  I’m not sure about vowel-alliteration; if we leave those out the number drops to 6,494.  ‘Way back at the beginning of this project, I was expecting there would be a lot, but “a lot” was hundreds, not thousands.  I’m going to need to tighten things up a lot.

Here are some things the computer says are alliterative lines, and I think humans agree:

• Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots
• Mr. Drogo, he married poor…
• the Sackville-Bagginses scowled and wondered
• “I want to see the wild country”
• a sound like mingled song and laughter

Here are some things the computer says are alliterative lines, and I call foul:

• ‘…it all, Frodo?’ ‘Cousin Frodo has been very close…’
• …called to the hobbits, “Come, now is the time…”
• …close Forest. The hobbits felt encouraged…

Here are a couple that I can’t decide about:

• He knows that it is not one of… (the computer caught this twice in two sentences)
• was very rich and very peculiar
• He hated it and loved it as he hated and loved himself

What do you think? Should a whole-word repetition count as alliteration?

A common feature of the false identifications is that there are ellipses. These lines are the middle of a sentence, or they run past the end of a sentence and onto the beginning of the next.  I didn’t put in a requirement that a line end at a period because it’s fairly common for Anglo-Saxon verse to enjamb the lines and end the sentence at a caesura instead.  It looks like I’m going to have to include the caesura somehow, which I was dreading.  It’s not obvious how to see a caesura in written text.

One good thing about a vibrant field of research like Digital Humanities is that new works are constantly coming out.  Like this one, which not only covers Anglo-Saxon alliteration, but also Slavic verse-forms I’ve never even heard of.  One bad thing is that all those works contain a line like, “The paper does not concern the following matters… Word boundaries, caesuras, etc.” (Chapter 1) So no help from that quarter. But wait — Chapter 9 (Kruglova, Smirnova, & Skulacheva) claims they can, in Russian. If it’s good enough for Pushkin, maybe it’s good enough for JRRT.

Works Cited