The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse

Roberta Frank's book explores the etiquette of early northern verse, revealing the codes of a now-extinct verse technique and the techniques used to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, forcing audiences to read between half-lines and hear what was not said.

Format: Hardback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 01 May 2022
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press

In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank delves into the northern poet's workshop, uncovering the craft secrets of Old English and Old Norse verse. This book brings two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into conversation, revealing their shared membership in a single community of taste and a traditional stylistic ecology that played a significant role in political and historical affairs. Each chapter seeks to uncover the codes of a now-extinct verse technique. The first chapter explores the underlying architecture of the two poetries, their irregularities of pace, startling formal conventions, and tight verbal detail work. While much of the circumstantial detail that literary scholars in later periods take for granted has been worn away by the passage of time, the public relations savvy and aural and syntactic signals of early northern verse remain to some extent retrievable and relatable, an etiquette prized and presumably understood by its audiences. The second and longest chapter investigates the techniques used by early northern poets to retrieve and organize the symmetries of language. It illustrates how supererogatory alliteration and rhyme functioned as aural punctuation, marking off structural units and highlighting key moments in the texts. The third and final chapter describes the extent to which both corpora reveled in negations, litotes, indirection, and down-toners, modes that forced audiences to read between half-lines, to hear what was not said. By decluttering and stripping away excess, by drawing words through a tight mesh of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, the early northern poet filtered out dross and stitched together a poetics of stark contrasts and forebodings. Poets and lovers of poetry of all periods and places will find much to enjoy here. So will students in Old Eng.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780268202521