Dobbie’s Attitude toward Metrical Evidence in the ASPR Edition of Beowulf

Abstract

In their influential editions of Old English poetry (Krapp and Dobbie 1931–53), the editors promulgate a negative attitude toward the metrical system proposed by Sievers (1893). Today editors are reluctant to emend Old English poems for metrical reasons alone. Here I focus on the distribution of manuscript verses, which provides much stronger metrical evidence than is generally realized. A metrical rule with one or two exceptions in the manuscript is now often regarded as invalid, but when the number of exceptions is compared with the number of instances in which the rule holds true, some verse patterns rejected by Sievers are identifiable as gross statistical anomalies. Distributions of manuscript verses are facts, not theories. Conceptually simple emendations for gross anomalies include removal or restoration of optional prefixes and restoration of archaic word orders. Sievers’s constraints on metrical form often converge with predictions of a generative theory that explains why the frequencies of manuscript verse patterns are as they are. Judgments of neo-Sieversians are also shown to converge with this theory.