/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.21574895]

Why was alliterative verse replaced by accentual-syllabic verse?
>le Normans
It happened in German too.

[Anonymous No.21574907]

>>21574895
Bring back alliteratives, anon, before blabbing.

[Anonymous No.21574914]

>>21574895
Interesting question, and you are right that it wasn't the Normans in particular, alliterative verse continued to be composed in English for hundreds of years, see Gawain and the Green Knight, written about 1370.

Accentual-syllabic was more popular in Italian and French, I assume it simply spread to Germanic countries by cultural osmosis and became popular over time. Chaucer did a lot to popularise typical Romance meters in English, he was writing at around the same time as the Gawain poet.

[Anonymous No.21575022]

>>21574895
The first works best accompanied by drums, the latter more with flutes and strings. That's my hypothesis.

[Anonymous No.21575604]

>>21574907
Nice

[Anonymous No.21575714]

I think it's because they were very different languages where word order didn't matter and you instead had like a suffix for Subject Object, like KILL DUMBLEDORE-UM SNAPE so rhyming would be too easy.

[Anonymous No.21575718]

>>21575714
...

[Anonymous No.21575724]

Listen! Anonymous, the asker of /lit/
Pursued the poems, which pleased the ear
Of cultured men, curators of verse;
Though NEET by nature, they ennumerated
Many forms, the meters of old
Long since languishing, lorded-over by Latins
Who spread their accents, by syllables formed.
Oft the /lit/men laughed, and lolled at follies,
While steeped in weariness, strife and woe
Little knowing the fiend, who nearer crept:
Her name was "no gf", never a more tragic
Foe of joy, a feller of spirit
Had stalked the Chan, slaking her hunger
On poor nerds, whose pleasure was to read.

[Anonymous No.21575730]

>>21575724
Modern masterpiece
Alliterative versebros we are so back

[Anonymous No.21575983]

>>21574907
Wagner tried to bring it back.

The two features of the Eddic line now mentioned — the variations in the length of the line and its free rhythm — undoubtedly served to recommend the Eddic metres to Wagner as a musician. In A Communication to my Friends he praises this method of versification “which, in keeping with true speech inflections, can be adapted to suit the most natural and lively rhythms; which is at all times readily capable of the most infinitely varied expression …” This is obviously a musician speaking.

When Brunnhilde argues with her master in Die Walküre II.ii, Wotan makes an angry attempt to silence her:

Was bist du, als meines Willens
blind wählende Kür?—

As Wagner argued at length in Oper und Drama, the virtue of Stabreim is its ability to establish through phonology associations or antitheses between particular words and concepts. (Stabreim entails a use of language akin to music in so far as it allows the word to derive meaning from its place in a phonetic pattern rather as the musical note derives meaning from its place in a tonic pattern.) It is a verse form which, in Wagner's hands, demands that particular attention be paid not only to each word but also to each root-syllable. By means of the Stabreim, Wotan's words to his rebellious daughter here bring to a focal point certain crucial issues of the drama.
The phrasing and rhetoric of Wotan's question echo Brunnhilde's earlier plea:

wer—bin ich,
wär'ich dein Wille nicht?

Wagner is employing a highly stylized version of the old Germanic verse scheme of Stabreim, which is structured around internal alliteration. The affect is epic, the language abstract. The modernists paid heed: T. S. Eliot quotes the Rhinemaidens in The Waste Land, and Joyce has them swim in the river of Finnegans Wake.

O heilige Schmach! — O righteous shame!
O schmählicher Harm! — O shamefulsorrow!
Götternoth! — Gods’ distress!
Götternoth! — Gods’ distress!
Endloser Grimm! — Infinite rage!
Ewiger Gram! — Eternal grief!
Der Traurigste bin ich von Allen! — I am the saddest of all living things!

The alliterations of Stabreim here follow a subtler function, of a kind that Wagner discusses in Opera and Drama. When our ears detect consonant patterns—say, “heilig” (“holy/righteous”) and “Harm” (“sorrow”)—we recognize a bond between seemingly opposed emotions.

[Anonymous No.21576259]

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship.

[Anonymous No.21576668]

>>21575714
An anon types with knowledge none
Of even English, and elder tongues

[Anonymous No.21576717]

>>21574895
>Why was alliterative verse replaced by accentual-syllabic verse?
Influence of French, Italian and Latin. Those affected German too, btw, since they were the cultural lingua francas of Europe.

>>21574914
>Interesting question, and you are right that it wasn't the Normans in particular, alliterative verse continued to be composed in English for hundreds of years, see Gawain and the Green Knight, written about 1370.
Actually alliterative verse died out in English after the 12th century. There was a brief, conscious return to it after the middle of the 14th century, which scholars call the "alliterative revival". Why that happened we don't know.

[Anonymous No.21576740]

>>21576717
>Actually alliterative verse died out in English after the 12th century
Interesting, could it have survived outside of court compositions and thus disappeared from manuscripts in that period? Knowledge of the style must have continued for it to regain popularity.

[Anonymous No.21576772]

>>21576740
Yeah possibly and a minority scholars do argue that. We just don't really have enough evidence to say. Either way it lost popularity.

[Anonymous No.21576796]

>>21575983
Tolkien used it a lot too in his works.

[Anonymous No.21576905]

whenever I wrote poetry I always found myself writing in alliterative verse
it always came more naturally to me, plus it seemed to make things more... engaging?

maybe I'm a 9th century monk at heart