Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

Download or read book Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon written by Megan E. Hartman and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of hypermetric verse in Old English and compares it to the cognate traditions of Old Norse and Old Saxon. The study illustrates the inherent flexibility of the hypermetric line and shows how poets were able to manipulate this flexibility in different contexts for different practical and rhetorical purposes. This mode of analysis is therefore able to show what degree of control the poets had over the traditional alliterative line, what effects they were able to produce with various stylistic choices, and how attention to poetic style can aid in literary analysis.