The earliest written English is Anglo-Saxon, or Old English as it is often called. Although some Germanic fighters had previously been invited to Britain briefly as temporary allies or mercenaries in an unsuccessful attempt to oust the Romans, the first recorded invasion of Angles, Saxons and Jutes occurred in 449 A.D., nearly forty years after the collapse of Roman rule. To begin with, the British natives tried to fight the English raiders off, but eventually these new immigrants not only settled here in large numbers, but their Germanic language, culture and legal system predominated in most of what we now call England. The British had to learn to live with the newcomers as they had with the Romans, but kept political control in much of Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the south-west of England: Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, Erse and Cornish are, along with Breton, Celtic languages.
A large body of Anglo-Saxon verse survives, much of it religious or moral or philosophical in tone, which is, perhaps, why monastic scribes were prepared to employ valuable time and materials copying it out. One or two fragments of love poetry and some riddle-conundrums also survive alongside the more serious verse. Probably the best known Anglo-Saxon poem is the long celebration of the adventures of the legendary hero Beowulf, who in his youth slew two fearful monsters that were terrorizing a neighbouring kingdom and in his old age died killing a dragon that had ravaged his own land and people.
Beowulf as we now have it was probably composed and reworked during the eighth and ninth centuries (though fragments may be older). It is written in long stretches of non-rhyming four-foot lines, which seem to be the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the ubiquitous blank verse in Modern English poetry. There is usually a syntactic break (between phrases, clauses or sentences) in the middle of the line, so that the verse proceeds in a marching rhythm. (Occasionally in Anglo-Saxon poetry, important events and ideas are expressed in a short run of slightly longer lines, containing one or two extra feet.)
Here is a sample of Beowulf, together with a rough translation (lines 217-224).
Anglo-Saxon has more inflexions, or grammatical endings, than Modern English and therefore many words are longer than their modern descendants. This means that there is frequently a greater number of light or unstressed syllables between beats than usually occurs in more recent verse. However, in certain situations the converse is true, with Anglo-Saxon English using fewer syllables than the equivalent Modern English construction. For example, a one-syllabled genitive inflection can often do the work of “of a” or “of the” or “belonging to” in later English. If you read aloud the above lines from Beowulf, pronouncing every syllable, you will find twelve syllables altogether in line 217, ten in lines 218, 219, 222 and 223, nine syllables in lines 220 and 221. Although the average number of syllables per foot is, therefore, two and a half, the syllable run is not always as smooth as these figures suggest. In line 223, for instance, the number of syllables in each foot successively is: two, five, one, two.
A survey of the syllable-lengths shows that there are comparatively few short beat-syllables. Of the thirty feet in these lines from Beowulf, there are only two feet (each of 3 syllables) with a short beat-syllable; all the other feet have long beat-syllables. Two feet are monosyllabic; two feet are long-short; fifteen feet have 2 equal syllables (even-feet); five feet have 3 syllables; three feet have 4 syllables; one foot has 5 syllables. Clearly, syllable counting in the manner of Chaucer or Pope was not part of the poetic process. The high proportion of even-feet is particularly interesting: this is the rarest type in verse written in Modern English.
In a passage of comparable length from the late 10c Battle of Maldon, one of the last poems in the Anglo-Saxon heroic tradition, there are no short beat-syllables. The number of monosyllabic feet is similar to that in Beowulf, but there are far more feet with three or more syllables (sixteen, in fact) and, consequently, fewer disyllabic feet (eleven altogether). Nine of the the latter are the popular even-feet. This increase in the number of syllables per foot in alliterative verse (to an average of just under three) continues into the medieval period. (Matters are quite different in medieval rhymed verse.) One reason for the larger syllable-count is the decline in the use of picturesque compound nouns and a consequent increase in the number of adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on; the definite and indefinite article are also employed more frequently in later poetry.
Here is a suggested scansion of the Beowulf lines:
There is always a clear syntactic boundary in the middle of each line, so that the four beats march firmly two by two throughout the poem. (Because of this, scholars often refer to the “half-lines” in Anglo-Saxon poetry.) Sentences often begin and end in the mid-line break (as in 224 and possibly in 223). New episodes, or paragraphs, however, start at the beginning of a line (as in 217). True run-on lines are rare: although sentences are often many lines long, line-ends usually coincide with the ends of syntactic units (phrases or clauses).
Rhyme is not normally found in this ancient verse, which is tied together by another kind of sound repetition: alliteration of the beginning of beat-syllables. In most lines, three out of every four feet begin either with the same consonant sound, or with zero-consonant sound (i.e. with any vowel sound). The first beat-syllable in the second half-line almost always carries alliteration and is called the head-stave (a term borrowed from the Icelandic hofuth-staf).
There are one or two variations on this scheme. Occasionally lines are found with double alliterative echoes: two of the beat-syllables alliterate on sound one and the other pair on sound two. More often, lines have only two of the beat-syllables alliterating, especially in passages of direct speech. Moreover, the frequent long speeches in the narrative poems are often introduced by a line where only two of the beats alliterate because there is no available verb meaning “spoke” or “declared” which happens to begin with the same sound as the name of the speaker. But, allowing for such exceptions as these, the large number of synonyms in literary Old English generally enables the poet to alliterate according to the regular pattern.
Very rarely and surprisingly, we find patches of internal rhyme as well as alliteration, notably in The Phoenix, in the epilogue to Cynewulf’s Elene and in the so-called Rhyming Poem in the Exeter Book. Here is an example from The Phoenix:
The rhythm in the rhymed lines here is much smoother than that of the Beowulf extract, with fewer weak syllables. But in the whole stretch of thirty feet of The Phoenix there are three more polysyllabic feet than occur in thirty feet of Beowulf (fourteen as against eleven) and three more monosyllabic feet (five as against two). Clearly this poet is generally less concerned to throw up disyllabic feet than is the Beowulf poet, with whom even-feet, in particular, predominate. However, in other ways the metrical style of The Phoenix passage is similar to that of Beowulf, with ten different patterns of foot altogether (eleven in Beowulf), and only three short beat-syllables (two in the Beowulf passage).
Two poems in The Exeter Book have a refrain. In Deor, the reflection thæs ofereode, thisses swa mæg (“that problem resolved itself: fingers crossed for this one”) recurs several times. In Wulf and Eadwacer, an urgent love poem, there is also a kind of refrain, although it appears only twice.
These snippets of rhyme and refrain and occasional passages of almost lyrical love poetry may be oddities, or they may be taken as evidence that the Anglo-Saxons composed secular and popular poetry of a kind that scribes, with their religious background, did not normally think worth either recording or keeping. It is hard to believe that, apart from riddles, no cheerful popular verse at all existed in Old English: if it did, presumably it was rarely or never written down.
Anglo-Saxon poems have come down to us chiefly because, even though transmitted orally at first by professional storytellers, they were eventually considered worth copying out by scribes trained by the Church. The survival of individual manuscripts since then has been largely a matter of chance: in the days of candles, library fires were common; the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII led to the dispersal and destruction of many manuscripts. We cannot know how characteristic the existing remnants are of Old English verse in general. What is clear is that four beat-syllables per line, three of which alliterated initially, was the metrical norm. As far as we know, rhyme and refrains were rare, and stanzaic forms non-existent. Beat-syllables were more often long than they are in present day or even Shakespearean English. Even-feet were much more common than in later verse. The resultant effect is that the Anglo-Saxon verse we have inherited sounds to us weighty and sonorous.