Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of CB Hieatt

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Prosody and Poetics is a collection of 12 essays on the linguistic
aspects of early medieval writings. Most of the essays focus on Old
English literature in their attempt to define what editor M.J. Toswell
calls the “style” and “stylistics” of early medieval poetry.
According to Toswell, recent studies of Old English literature have
ignored the subject of style, partly because “to discuss style is to
engage in evaluation—which is a procedure generally kept implicit.”
The intention of this book is to give consideration to the “intrinsic
merits” of Anglo-Saxon literature.

Style is difficult to define, but it clearly involves some combination
of content and form. While some essays in this collection do indeed
combine form and content in their assessments of the poetry, others
focus simply on form. As is typical of any essay collection, the quality
of the individual contributions varies. Thus we have M.S. Griffith’s
fine study of the names of places and heroes in “The Battle of
Maldon,” but also a faddish and quirky paper by O.D. Macrae-Gibson and
J.R. Lishman entitled “Computer Assistance in the Analysis of Old
English Metre: Methods and Results—A Provisional Report.”