Forgotten Ground Regained
About This Site
Masthead
Forgotten Ground Regained (ISSN 2996-6353) is owned and edited by Paul Douglas Deane in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and is published at alliteration.net. New issues of original alliterative verse are published quarterly. Other resources are updated as new content becomes available.
History
I posted the first version of this site more than twenty years ago. (I started the site in 1999, though the first Wayback Machine entry for it is dated Nov. 30, 2001). When I created the site, I conceived it as a mixture of three Internet genres: content index, blog, and zine, offering my take on alliterative verse, a place to publish modern alliterative poetry, and a curated set of links that would give people to access to resources that would otherwise be hidden too far down in the search engine results for anyone to find.
In the years since then, a lot has changed. People mostly stopped compiling context indexes, social media exploded, multimedia became a lot more important, and as for me, life happened. This is the first major update I've done to this in more than a decade. But I think the need for a site like this is greater than ever. Search engines now serve advertisers more than they serve any of us, and the information we generate is more fragmented and transitory and harder to sort through. It's harder than ever to find truly useful resources.
So that's one of my reasons to updating and upgrading the site: to make it easier for people to find good information on modern English alliterative verse.
The Updated Site
The new version of Forgotten Ground Regained preserves all the work I put into the old site -- the Field Guide to Alliterative Verse, the library of modern English alliterative poetry and translations, including my partial translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight *which I have finally started working on again, and which I hope finally to complete), curated links to sites offering access to original texts and translations of Old English, Middle English, and other medieval alliterative poems (including specific pages for Beowulf and the Pearl Poet), and links to other resources for fan and the the budding alliterative poet. That's all still there, though I hope people will find the site a lot easier to navigate and use.
But there's a lot here that's new! I have a whole new section of the site devoted to modern alliterative poetry, which provides links both to published work and to material only available on blogs, fanfiction sites, and social media. This includes a Noted Authors page that links to online alliterative poems by well-known poets, a page on Longer Works that highlights original, book-length alliterative epics, a Collections page that gives readers access to published works of poetry that contain (at least some) alliterative verse, a page on "The Classical, Alliterative" that shows what happens when a modern poet re-imagines Classical Greek or Latin literature in alliterative verse, and a page on "The Biblical, Alliterative" that does the same thing for passaages from the Bible. I have also extended my resources on older, medieval alliterative verse to include links to published alliterative translations of alliterative verse and scholarly works on alliterative metrics and the history of the form.
But (to quote Dr. Seuss), that is not all!
I've published an interesting selection of new alliterative poems, including work by Adam Bolivar, Math Jones, and Rahul Gupta, part of a new generation of poets working primarily in the alliterative mode. I've posted more of my own poetry, including a long fanfiction poem, The Redemption of Daeron, which I conside my masterwork. (Kudo points to anyone who knows who Daeron was. If you know that, you are another Tolkien nerd). I have added a Communities section that includes a page on the history of the modern alliterative revival and of the communities that have contributed to it -- scholars, poets and writers, Speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) authors and fans, members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Christians and Pagans. As a result, in my Index of Auhors and Poems, I have been able to provide links to pages providing information on more than fourscore 20th and 21st Century poets who have written in the alliterative mode. And that's not even mention the plethor of alliterative poetry posted to websites, blogs, and social media, which I have indexed in the community pages. And finally, I have created a Styles and Themes page, which is basically an extended essay analyzing what styles and themes these poets favor, with lots of embedded links that turn the page into a launching pad for exploring alliterative verse by published poets all over the web.
Enjoy!
Goals
This site is designed to make it easy to find, read, and appreciate modern alliterative verse -- the kind of poetry we see in such medieval classics as Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. On this site I have collected alliterative verse by a wide range of modern poets -- provided a field guide for poets who want to write their own alliterative poems -- and provided all kinds of information and resources for people who want to study the form.
That's enough information to get started, but if you want more details about the history of this site, the updates that I made to it recently (in the Fall of 2023), and how the climate for reading and writing alliterative verse has changed in the last twenty years, read on!
Or you might want to start by reading the current issue.
How Things Have Changed
Alliterative poetry is also a lot easier to find than it was in 2001. Dennis Wise's new book, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology, documents three intersecting ways alliterative poetry has spread: through SF fandom, through groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism, and through broader diffusion of knowledge about medieval English literature (there are, for example, a lot more high-quality alliterative translations of works like Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight than there used to be.)
And that's even before we take into account the impact of the Lord of the Rings movies and the publication of Tolkien's alliterative verse through the efforts of his son, Christopher. There are now a lot more practicing poets who have been exposed to good models of alliterative poetry than there used to be, and a lot more fans who have tried their hand at it themselves.
I don't think anybody's noticed how far and how deeply these influences have spread through our culture. One of my main goals in this new, updated version of Forgotten Ground Regained is to make this new growth visible. When I started working on this website twenty years ago, I felt like Niggle in Tolkien's story, "A Leaf by Niggle". Now that leaf has turned into a healthy sapling, and soon the tree may push its boughs up to spread under the sun.