When I started automating detection of alliterative verse, the original hypothesis was to watch the phrases that look like lines of Old English poetry spike up dramatically when the story got to Rohan. Well, that’s not what happens. J.R.R. Tolkien uses alliteration so much that even when we restrict him to Sievers’s five patterns, there’s a constant stream of alliterative lines.

Here’s the density of alliterative lines in the text, as a function of the number of words since the beginning of the Prologue.  (I used a 100-word bandwidth, for those who care.) You can see a rise in the frequency of alliteration in Book III, where I expected it.  There are also some nice spikes in Book 5, when the Rohirrim make their entrance and when the bard sings a long song in honor of the fallen.The highest density-spike of alliterative lines comes in “The Uruk-Hai” (III,iii, in dark grey) when Pippin is talking to himself.  That was unexpected. In the next chapter, though, Treebeard comes through.  He doesn’t provide any high spikes, but the low troughs disappear. Ents never stop alliterating, murmuring in their slow musical voices. (This sentence shows that I allow quite a few unstressed syllables; Type E can have four in a row.)

Book IV also starts out with a lot of alliteration. Sam is talking to himself, this time. For some reason, writing out Sam’s dialogue with formal line breaks and caesurae is hilarious to me:

Numbskulls! You’re nowt but / a ninnyhammer, Sam
Gamgee; that’s what /  the Gaffer said.

The lowest density of alliteration is in the chapter “Minas Tirith” (V, i). I noticed this the second time I read the book – the tone changes abruptly from the previous volumes. When they encounter a line like, “For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels…” even teenaged Idiosophers are brought up short by the new voice.

Alliteration is not just part of the story, though. The Prologue has a solid population of alliterative lines.  Those bits are Bilbo’s and Merry’s voices, so from this we can derive a consistent theme: The constant background of alliteration is there because the book is narrated by hobbits.  When they’re talking to Ents or Rohirrim the rate ticks up about 5%.  Elves or Gondorians drag the rate down, roughly the same amount. With a larger bandwidth, smoothing over 2000-word intervals, we lose the poem-spikes, but it’s easier to see the overall changes.

Surprisingly to me, the field of metrical research in Anglo-Saxon poetry is thriving. It’s not like any new Anglo-Saxon verses have been discovered recently, but we do have some new alliterative poems. I just found a paper by Nelson Goering [1] (one of the lecturers in my Anglo-Saxon class) that applies analytical techniques developed for Old English to J.R.R. Tolkien’s recently published verse.

The thing that jumped out at me was what Goering calls “crossed alliteration”. Where Anglo-Saxon verse alliterates on one sound per line, crossed alliteration takes advantage of the four stresses to alliterate twice: either A-B-A-B or A-B-B-A.  Examples he gives from The Fall of Arthur are “Fiercely heard she / his feet hasten” (II, 111) [2] and “of south Britain / booty seeking” (I, 9). He notes that 7% of the lines of the poem have crossed alliteration, which is “nearly double the rate of a classical Old English poem such as Beowulf.”

That’s the sort of thing that really gets an Idiosopher (provided that he has spent a year or so on text preparation and code-building) rolling. In this case, rolling right into a brick wall.  To order a computer to look for crossed alliteration, we’d need a regular expression that looks for (string), (any string but that one), (the first string) (the other string).  I’m ashamed to admit that I spent a month trying to turn that into a regular expression.  It just can’t be done in any language I speak. Back-referencing the complement of a single character is possible, but the CMU phoneme set can have two characters, and trying to kluge together a fix got totally out of control.  The reason I’m ashamed is that there’s no reason to use a powerful tool like regular expressions — I don’t need any wild-cards in this simple case so I can just use equals-signs for the test. Most likely you saw it some time ago, and have been laughing at me.

Here are some good ones:

He wandered in loneliness, weeping a little.  
'Spoons? Fiddlesticks!' He snapped his fingers.
Galadriel stood, alone and silent.

The sun was warm and the wind was in the south.
Boromir seemed to be swimming or burrowing...
Then suddenly Frodo fell asleep.

Here’s one that’s bogus: “‘…Black Riders.’ ‘Black Riders!'” JRRT repeats a phrase for emphasis fairly often, and I really think that ought not to count.

Overall, the numbers for LotR are higher than for The Fall of Arthur. A-B-A-B crossed alliteration is 10% as frequent as simple alliterative lines. A-B-B-A crossed alliteration is about the same, 10.5% as common as the simpler case.  Note that the latter was not included in the original computation, but the former was.

To wind up, here’s one that’s intriguing: “Again she fled, but swift he came / Tinuviel! Tinuviel! / He called her by her Elvish name;’   Cross-alliterative enjambment in ann-thennath sounds obscure enough for a whole dissertation.

Notes

[1] Goering, Nelson. “The Fall of Arthur and The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún: A Metrical Review of Three Modern English Alliterative Poems.” Journal of Inklings Studies 5.2 (2015): 3-56. Preprint here.

[2] Goering has the caesura in a different place from the text, which has been corrected here. Fly-specks like this are of no interest to anyone, but they are commonly pointed out in the literature. Were I to forbear to mention it, this blog would never be taken seriously by any community of scholars.

Humans have it easy. If we want to know whether two words alliterate, we can just listen and decide for ourselves.  It’s poetry, so if it sounds good, it is good.  Computers don’t have that option.  We have to tell it which sounds are equivalent and which are different.  The basics are taken care of by the pronouncing dictionary, but we still have to deal with the edge cases.

In Anglo-Saxon verse, Jun Terasawa is the authority. That’s the scheme I’ll start with. B, D, F, G, L, M, N, P, R, T, and W are in classes by themselves; they don’t alliterate with anything but themselves. The complicated classes are: {G, even when pronounced like Y}; {C, whether pronounced as CH or K}; {S}; {SC}; {SP}; {ST}; and {A,E,I,O,U,Y,H}.

The pronouncing dictionary takes care of G and C.  The letter “S” is different from the three di-consonants it helps form in Anglo-Saxon. (but read on!)  The vowels have a couple of interesting features. Not every case of a word beginning with a vowel alliterates. This came up in the first version of the program: It found the line, “Aragorn and Éomer and Imrahil rode” and said that was a good alliterative line. I put it to the company at Thursday Nights at the Green Dragon, all of whom agreed it was not.  This is because the thing that’s really alliterative isn’t the vowel, it’s the glottal stop when the previous word ends with a vowel, too. (Terasawa, §2.1.) That’s how the “H” finds its way into that group. In a sense, H plays the same role as the glottal stop. We know this is a complicated issue because the English still have problems with words beginning in “H”.

Now off to the computer. We know a syllable has the stress when its vowel has a “1” after it. So when the computer finds a “1”, we can tell the computer to back up to the previous consonant and that’s the sound on which we alliterate – almost. Some stressed syllables begin with two consonants, and we want to alliterate on the first of them. Like “blue-embroidered”: using the naive rule rule would say the consonants to check are L and R, and the computer would return “no”. But those of us with ears to hear would call that an alliteration on B. So we build those in as special cases to test first.  The di-consonants are: BL BR CL CR DR DW FL FR FY GL GR KL KN KR PL PR SC SK SL SM SN SP SQ ST SW TR TW.  When it sees one of these cases, the computer has to back up two consonants to find the beginning of the syllable.

I’m breaking some of Terasawa’s rules since we’re speaking Modern English — I think phrases like “second story” alliterate now, so “S” and “ST” are in the same equivalence class. “S” and “SH” are still different, so “SH” isn’t in the list of di-consonants.

Works Cited

Lerner, Alan Jay and Frederick Lowe. My Fair Lady. New York, 1956.

Terasawa, Jun. Old English Metre: An Introduction. University of Toronto Press, 2011.

Prominent features in Anglo-Saxon poetry

The cool thing about Old English alliterative verse is that the rhythms can shift around freely. The hardest thing about teaching a computer to recognize it is that the rhythms can shift around freely. There’s no pattern.

Well, that’s not strictly correct. There is an enormous literature devoted to finding patterns. Daniel O’Donnell wrote an excellent short introduction to the topic, which I used to get started. Here’s something he says that I believe to be universally true: a line of alliterative verse is comprised of two half-lines. Each half-line is built around two important stressed syllables. After that, things start to fall apart. The patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables have been classified according to many systems, the most durable of which was devised by yet another German with an infinite attention span, this one named Sievers. He identified five rhythmic patterns: A, B, C, D1, D2, and E. See the problem? Thomas Cable came up with a better way to think of it [1], and concluded that D2 was actually a form of E, but there are still six things in this set of five.

This is a phenomenon I recognize from my day job: it’s a sign that the analyst is imposing a structure on the system, not observing a structure that is really there. And it gets worse. Some lines have five stresses, others have three, weak positions in the line come and go as the poet pleases, the caesura might be a full stop or it might not be discernable with the ear. The exceptions to any metrical system pile up in epicycles upon epicycles until the readers throw up their hands and go plant potatoes. (It was sunny and 60 degrees today, so that’s what I did.)

Here’s where it turned out to be a good thing that I held off on this post to take a class in Anglo-Saxon at Signum University. Nelson Goering is one of the professors teaching the class. He wrote a very detailed description of alliterative scansion, accessible to the educated layman (as Scientific American used to say). And his paper makes the same curious turn of thought, as if he’s classifying an existing fauna, not dictating to it. I was about to write an essay on the theme of “You’re all full of crap.” But now that I’ve listened to his lecture on the topic, it’s clear that they all know they’re full of it, but conceal the fact for purposes of creating scholarly literature. Lectures are great — they give the speaker a lot more leeway to tell embarrassing truths.

Here’s another thing I think is universally true: Poets are not natural rule-followers. They write what sounds good. You know who nature’s rule-followers are? Scientists. We typically write humorous verse, which is the one genre of poetry where meter must be followed exactly. Here’s a poem by James Clerk Maxwell, to show what I mean.

Tolkien was a poet, not a scientist. So when Treebeard says, “Learn now the lore of living creatures: First name the Four, the free peoples”, I’d have to say he’s writing alliterative verse. But there are five stresses in these lines (bold), and the alliteration is on 1, 3, & 4. The rules say the extra stress goes in the second half, not the first. But I don’t care. I’m going to teach the machine to recognize things like this, and forget the rules.

[1] Cable, Thomas. “Metrical Simplicity and Sievers’ Five Types.” Studies in Philology 69.3 (1972): 280-288.