The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf

This book argues that the formal art of the Old English epic Beowulf is shaped and determined by the poetic language that the poet inherited from the traditional, oral culture of Anglo-Saxon England. The patterns of meter and alliteration exhibited in the poem were not imposed by the poet on his language, but were part of the language that he spoke, the rules of which constituted his metrical grammar. Professor Kendall investigates the constraints of syntax, meter and alliteration that gove...