Forgotten Ground Regained
Arthur Sale and Noël Grudgings: Two Early Revivalists
Part of Forgotten Ground Regained:
A Quarterly Journal of Alliterative Verse
New Series Issue 8, Fall, 2025
We can glean from the early lives of the Inklings that, for a certain kind of young man in the early 20th century – studious, romantic of bent, with an aptitude for languages – the legends of the Germanic North, and alliterative verse, their poetic vehicle, exerted an irresistible attraction. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis wrote:
- My eye fell on a headline and a picture, carelessly, expecting nothing. A moment later, as the poet says, “the sky had turned round.” What I had read was the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to that volume … Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity … I passed on from Wagner to everything else I could get ahold of about Norse mythology … If I could at this time have found someone to teach me Old Norse, I believe I would have worked at it very hard.
While he was still a schoolboy, when he was about 14 or 15, Lewis began his first alliterative poem, Loki Bound. Similar tales can be told of J.R.R. Tolkien. At about the same time, Tolkien “delighted his friends with recitations from Beowulf, The Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and recounted horrific tales from the Norse Völsunga Saga, with a passing jibe at [Richard] Wagner whose interpretation of the myths he held in contempt.” Meanwhile, inspired by his course in Anglo-Saxon at Hamilton College, Ezra Pound was writing his own alliterative juvenilia. But Lewis, Tolkien, and Pound were hardly alone. This period came in the aftermath of the great 19th-century discovery of the old Germanic poetry in moldering and sometimes half-burned manuscripts, of Wagner’s libretto for the Ring cycle, set in stabreim – the very first modern attempt at reviving alliterative verse in any form. It was an era that erected public monuments to Cædmon, the first English poet and supported the first wave of translations of the major alliterative poems “into the original meter”.
It is thus probably not too surprising to discover that Lewis, Tolkien and Pound were not alone – that there were other young men in the first half of the 20th century who made the attempt to write modern English alliterative verse. I came across two of them almost by accident: Cambridge academic and minor poet Arthur Sale (1912-2000), and Noël Grudgings, who despite a deep interest in Norse literature made his living as a pharmacist. As the editor of Forgotten Ground Regained, I frequently do web searches for mentions of alliterative verse, and in the course of one such search, I ran across the following letter from the modernist poet T.S. Eliot to George Herbert Read, one of the most prominent British poets of his day:
- 18 January 1938 The Criterion
- Dear Herbert:
- I think I had better return your poet Arthur Sale’s stuff to you, as I don’t see that I can use any of this. He is a hopeful young man as soon as he works out of his imitative stage. His alliterative verse seems to me the best so far, but that I think it is only a useful exercise. I will leave the nursing of him to you, as you have taken him on already.
- Yours ever,
- Tom
Arthur Sale was an undergraduate at the University of Nottinghamshire, where he studied under medievalist Alice Selby. One of his fellow-students, and lifelong friend, was Noël Grudgings, who in 1931 self-published a book of Norse-style poetry, entitled Grimnismal. After his death, Grudging’s extensive library of books on Old Norse and Icelandic literature was donated to the University of Nottingham library. So during the 1930s, when Lewis and Tolkien were writing some of their best alliterative poems – though none of those would see the light of day until decades later – two young poets were also trying their hands at writing alliterative verse. Of course, after a reaction like T.S. Eliot’s, it is perhaps no surprise to learn that Sale never published any alliterative verse in his lifetime, though it appears that George Herbert Read had a much more positive view than Eliot of Sale’s alliterative attempts.
I followed up on this discovery by writing to Robert Rickard, a scholar at the University of East Anglia who wrote his thesis on Arthur Sale as an early ecopoet, and who had obtained copies of his manuscripts from his widow, Penny. When he wrote back to me, I learned that he had independently discovered some of Sale’s alliterative verse. He is currently working on a paper on Arthur Sale’s development as a poet, but he and Penny Sale graciously granted me permission to reprint some of his work. All of Sale’s poetry presented here are copyright his estate.
I must note that the alliterative verse I am about to share with you appears to be the product of Sale’s undergraduate years. These poems are nowhere near as strong as the (non)alliterative poems he published later, in two books: Under the War and Selected Poems (1975) and Selected Poems (1999). Two of them (“The Awakening of Agantyr” and “Lodding”) may actually be Noël Grudgings’ work, though Robert Rickard (personal communication) believes that they are Sale’s. The latter two poems appear both in Arthur Sale’s papers and in the Noël Grudgings collection held at the University of Nottingham, whose catalog attributes them to Grudgings.
In his own handwriting, from late in his life, Arthur Sale annotated the following poem as a “timid exercise in Anglo-Saxon manner and metre (era: undergraduate)”:
- After daywalking weary separate
- One abandoned at crossroads homes across land
- conscious of nails now only noticed
- Second ascended to empty city
- quartered in barracks coldest of fares
- alone by difficult fire Limping third
- northward travels on trolleybus top
- Smiles of farewell have set in face grooves
- Forgotten outposts to aching hearts
Lodder appears to be a riddle in the Anglo-Saxon spirit, though it is only intermittently alliterative:
- Lodder
- In a thin house the man lives
- Black with drippings from glum poplars
- And secret copper beech. His wife lay
- Days dead before found rotting.
- Funerals he furnishes says the notice
- Once—but now odd joinery keeps him
- Blabbing in pubs of devilries done—
- Foes work charms on his old trees
- And treasure—his—is turfed in his orchard.
- * * * * *
- At club—him peering—they wink
- Run out of ready, soon get more!
- Return, seem laboured, and stand drinks
- Laughing. He shrinks with hate and slouches
- Home, and in the night goes with a gun,
- Seeing all roads he roves his trees
- Whiten with witchery, hearing clogged thuds
- Of spades digging and showing his gold.
The longest piece of alliterative verse that Robert Rickard has been able to locate to date in Arthur Sale’s papers is a translation from the Old Norse: "The Awakening of Agantyr". It is very rough, as someone – probably Arthur Sale – himself notes in an introduction he added to a typescript of the translation, which I reproduce below:
- (Notes on the prosody of an undergraduate shot at translation from the Old Norse)
- In a word, there is none, but there seems to be an attempt to come close to the effect of Old Norse heroic verse, which has a tight internal line structure based not on stress as in English but on alliteration and rhyme. The rules (as I remember them from a time almost as remote as the original texts – so don’t trust me) are:
- • that each line is divided into two
- • the first half must have two rhyming alliterations plus one early in the second half, and the rest of this half line is left to look after itself.
- This last is what makes literal prosodic imitation impossible—or affected—for our lines are braced at their endings rather than systematically allowed to fall away at will. I discussed this difficulty with Seamus Heaney, who is translating Beowulf (Old English prosody is alliteratly [sic] identical with the Norse but without the structural rhymes), and I notice he does not deliberately attempt that prosodic final free-for-all.
- Your skald (Old Norse poets who composed
- on the spot; minstrels)
- Kettle Bignose (translation of Kettle
- Flatnose, an Old Norse Thug!)
The author is right that we should not trust his memory; he has confused the rules for internal rhyme in dróttkvætt with the general rules for alliteration in Old Norse. But his comments show his sensitivity to one of the key features of alliterative verse – the way the line “falls away” at the end, where alliteration is not required. This is a topic I have discussed at length elsewhere, in my article Varieties of Alliterative Meter, which discusses Geoffrey Russom’s theory that the alliteration pattern of Old and Middle English verse is linked to the falling rhythms of a language (like Old English) that has subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, and that the abandonment of alliterative verse in the 15th century was at least in part driven by the mismatch between that alliteration pattern and the rising rhythms of modern English, which has strict subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. This transcript’s testimony indicates that not only the author (Sale?), but the rather more prominent poet Seamus Heaney, were aware of this rhythmic feature of Old English and Old Norse verse, and had discussed the difficulties it created for poets attempting to reproduce the form in modern English.
Here is the opening of The Awakening of Agantyr:
- Maid has met in Moon Bay
- Fallow folding against sun-falling.
- Herdsman: Who on island hies alone?
- quick as come let quest for quarters.
- Hervor: My goal is in no guest house
- Unknown am I to any islander.
- Show me a way to walk on
- To heaps where Hjorvard is hid in ground.
- Herdsman: No man in his wits wíll walk there;
- Friend of dead to death you will fare.
- Fleet as drag feet fly.
- Fires after burn fall.
- Hervor: Collar I unclasp to keep, for counsel.
- Heroes’ lover not easy to be let.
As you can see, the commentary at the beginning of the transcript was quite correct. This poem is at best an impressionistic attempt to reproduce Old Norse poetry in modern English and suffers from other faults common to many older translations of Old Norse poetry, such as its attempts to imitate the extreme syntactic compression of Old Norse. Interestingly, several times, the poet alliterates on the final stress, even though the comments from many years later, reproducing memories of an undergraduate understanding of Old Norse verse, indicate that he knew that the end of the line should not alliterate, but should be allowed to “fall away”. It is hard, in Modern English poetry, not to put the rhythmic peak at the end of the line.
However, I do not believe that the poems I have reproduced here are all the alliterative poems that Arthur Sale produced; I rather suspect that what George Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot read must have been rather stronger, to get Read’s wholehearted support for a young poet, and even back-handed praise from Eliot. But they are what we have to date. Noël Grudgings’ alliterative work is mostly contained in his Grimnismal, though additional works in manuscript are available in Special Collections at the University of Nottingham.
Robert Rickard has expressed the opinion to me that through much of his career Sale wavered between an impulse toward alliterative diction and the blank verse that became his characteristic form. You can see that struggle in the following excerpt from his poem “The Triangle”, which is metrically blank verse. It makes one wonder what might have been.
- Craning across its inside bend the beach
- Midway turns back in gracious fear to find
- Milk roots and self on opposed banks displayed
- Like swan or goose with wings swept fore or aft.
- Differences despite, beechbole, beaches, brook,
- Strong angle irons, concerted to the sky
- Present in a triangular frame of shade
- That makes all other waters less than washed
- A tray of water fixed upon the flux
- that flashes signals at the light to dip
- Down, sip, strip, drown, and then abandon
- Nylons and heart in a delighted panic –
- Relics to irradiate and wreak miracles.
First Published in Forgotten Ground Regained, New Series, Issue 8, Fall, 2025
Copyright © Paul D. Deane, 2025. Poems by Arthur Sale quoted in this article are copyright his estate. No part of this site may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems