The next thing I was going to do, after I finished the alliterative-verse detection program, was to apply it to another work that obviously wasn’t trying to remind the reader of Old English. So — who’s the least-old-english writer I can think of.
The one who came first to mind was James Joyce. He’s writing about the same time as Tolkien, and his affection for myth is just as strong (though directed differently). Best of all, he’s in the public domain, so I can get high-quality plain-text versions of his works from Project Gutenberg. Ulysses might be a perfect comparison.
So I downloaded it and fed it into the maw of the machine. It’s 265,000 words, compared to The Lord of the Rings at 470,000, so it should be manageable, right? Right? Wrong. LotR had just under 2,000 words I needed to encode by hand. Ulysses has almost 10,000. I’ve loved LotR for almost half a century, and I can recite lots of it from memory, so that was a manageable task. It still took me almost a month, though. For Ulysses, I have no such affection. No way am I going to devote a third of a year to converting it to machine pronunciation.
Second option: I asked Sørina whom she could recommend for comparison. (She’s working on her Ph.D. so she knows everything.) She suggested foreign novels in translation. There’s an idea — African literature! African writers have a completely different sense of rhythm and sound than the Norsemen do. And in many countries, they write in English. They’ll be perfect.
Well. If there’s a public-domain novel written by an African, I can’t find it. Nothing before 1930 even seems to exist on line. There are quite a few 20C novels, but they’re all still under copyright. Everything before then has been consigned to the dustiest shelves of university libraries. Bloody colonialists. By what seemed like a fortuitous coincidence, Wendy Belcher fired off a Twitter thread about African literature just as I was giving up. She’s writing an anthology that will give me all kinds of examples. “Will.” Someday, alas. Right now, the chapters I need are just headings with blank spaces underneath.
If anyone has any other ideas, I’d be happy to hear them.
Kate Neville
Dylan Thomas. Try A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I used to use the opening portion as an audition piece and I recall some lovely alliterative phrases.
Joe
That’s a good thought. It will be interesting to see whether the statistics are stable over just a few thousand words.
Jeff
Here’s one from 1891, but I haven’t found the plain text online: https://archive.org/details/guanyapaustorya00waltgoog/page/n3
Not sure if this one from 1968 is free from copyright, but the plain text is available through a link here and has no copyright markings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_Cassava_Patch
Joe
Nice finds. I knew there was some reason I send a donation to the Internet Archive every December. Thanks!