Forgotten Ground Regained

A Short History of the Modern Alliterative Revival

And how that history created the communities that love alliterative verse
Early 19th Century Antiquarians
I should start with a caveat: I am not a historian. But I am a professional linguist, and the history I am going to tell is deeply entangled with the roots of my discipline. So I think I can tell the broad story of how alliterative poetry became a real, living tradition again, though I will have to leave the finer points to those who make it their business to research it.
The early 19th Century was a time when people's horizons expanded -- around the world, but also deep into the past. Antiquarians discovered long-forgotten manuscripts moldering in libraries and resurrected whole literatures long lost to the consciousness of the culture. In England, it was Beowulf and the whole corpus of Old and Middle English literature. In Denmark (which then ruled Iceland), it was the Poetic Edda. In Germany, it was the Nibelungenlied, the Hildebrandslied, and various other works. Suddenly, people became aware of an older world, with its own customs, its own religions, its own poetic forms. At the same time, linguists discovered that most of the European languages, including Latin and Greek, were descended from the same common language as Sanskrit, the holy language of India. At the beginning they called these the Aryan languages, after the word the speakers of Sanskrit used for themselves (now they call these languages members of the Indo-European language family).
Late 19th Century Enthusiasts
Once the deep past had been rediscovered, it wasn't long before it all caught fire in the collective imaginations of Europeans. The primeval tales of Europe became the great romantic tales of the likes of William Morris, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or Richard Wagner. Wagner's Ring cycle -- which pioneered the use of alliterative verse (in German, stabreim) in its libretto -- set an entire generation afire, including young men like C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien.
But there were a lot of enthusiasms in the late 19th century, and they all got mixed together: ideas of primeval culture, nationality, race, and religion. That led to some nasty consequences in the 20th Century, for the racist ideas of the Nazis had deep roots in this romantic conflation of a primeval, Germanic culture, full of manly pagans, rousing alliterative verse, with a pure race from which the only real (that is, European) civilization sprang. (Sarcasm is, of course, intended.) But sweeter streams also ran from this heady mixture: medievalist scholars like the grown-up Lewis and Tolkien, full of enthusiasm not just for scholarship but for the medieval culture it embodied; the nascent genres of science fiction and fantasy, ready to imagine new societies and new worlds; modernist poets, ready to experiment with the past, to create someting new and fresh; and various groups both Christian and Pagan, eager to retrieve lost treasures from the stories of the past.
The 20th Century: Sprouting Seeds
The early 20th Century was when Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden experimented with modernist versions of alliterative verse. It was when J.R.R. Tolkien was writing -- and abandoning -- whole alliterative epics in notebooks that would not see the light of day until his son, Christopher, edited and published them long after his death. Within various small circles, enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature flourished and led to various small experiments, never reaching a large audience, nor forming any large community in which the creation of alliterative verse was a normal pracice.
This only began to change with the publication of the Lord of the Rings, with the spread of alliterative verse within the speculative fiction community by such leading figures as Poul Anderson and Paul Edwin Zimmer, and with the gradual spread of knowledge about alliterative verse in English studies, through the study and (increasingly, the availability of quality translations) of alliterative classics like Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
It is really only in the last two decades of the 20th Century that we see a real change. Some of it comes from the broader and broader circulation of the posthumously published works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the release of Peter Jackson's production of Lord of the Rings, the founding and spread of the Society for Creative Anachronism, the development of fan fiction and its transmutation from a niche activity supported by conventions and paper 'zines to broad, participatory online communities. Or most likely, to all of these things, and the shift of poetry toward a more participatory, oral culture. But many things changed, and they interacted in all kinds of interesting ways.
The 21st Century: Taking Root
This website documents what happened in the 21st Century. We have seen the continuing development of alliterative verse as serious scholarship, as another tool in the toolbox of the practicing poet, as a way to imagine speculative worlds, as fan participation in such worlds, as an antiquarian enthusiasm, and as a living part of two very different religious traditions.
These different strands lead us on to the major forms of popular alliterative verse that exist in our culture:
All of these communities are represented by the poems in this site, often more than one of them in the same person.
Copyright © Paul Deane, 2024.No part of this site may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems