Word choices and form changes

I’d like to talk through some of the lexical and metrical choices I’ve pursued in Spearhand Faring, and to do so I’ll use the following very short excerpt:

So petitioner talked. |
      Targe-man answered,
‘Hope I for victory, | since here I prevailed.’
With suchlike words, their path they onward sailed.

This is three lines, with a paragraph in the first line quoted. To start with the simple and clear: you can hear a new openness to French- and Latin-derived words. Petitioner, victory, and prevailed all sound a bit fancy, and ain’t Germanic. Technically, half of targe-man might also come from French; I’ll come back to that one.

When I wrote Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright, I limited the number of French- and Latin-derived words used. CWKB still has plenty of them, but they appear at a lower frequency than they would in most random samples of English.

This choice didn't stem from any dislike, and certainly not from any nationalist ideas about the Englishness of English; it is a virtue of present-day English that it isn’t very English. Rather, it made the writing process more interesting (by making it harder), and it made the verse feel deep-rooted.

Spearhand Faring uses a different set of registers. It aims for romance, in the premodern sense, an adventure story, not epic. In writing it I've therefore allowed myself to use many more Romance and Latinate words. Which makes it romance in another premodern sense of the word: sometimes romance meant a story in the vernacular, and sometimes it meant a story in one of the loose coalition of tongues we now group as French.

Prevailed and petitioner also show a frequent feature of French-derived words in English: they carry lexical stress on their second syllables: petitioner, prevailed. They don’t work like this in French, indeed in French the whole idea of lexical stress gets decidedly shaky, but they carry that second-syllable lexical stress in English.

Words that begin with a built-in x/ pattern come in handy in a rising metre, like blank verse’s five-beat rising line (prototypically, x/x/x/x/x/). Indeed, in Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright, where I tried to work with fewer Romance words, I deployed unstressed prefixes more than I would in normal speech to create rising patterns. (This’s by no means unprecedented: Middle and Old English apply prefixes in a wide range of places that we'd find odd today—e.g. Canterbury Tales VII.2614, 'Al for-brused, bothe bak and syde.'.)

In Spearhand Faring, lifting that restriction on Romance vocabulary, I have more x/ words to play with. But this creates a new risk. All the dialogue in Spearhand Faring uses alliterative verse, in a simplified version of Sievers’s five types of Old English half-line. More frequent use of French words and Latinisms might tempt the alliterative verse to sail too close to regular rising rhythms. I’ve done my best to ensure a healthy crop of /x/x A-type half-lines and also to write AV lines in which the two half-lines are different types. But, also, a little risk adds to the fun. Rather than enjoying the difficulty of avoiding romance and Latinate words, I’ve enjoyed the difficulty of using them but avoiding excessive B-type (x/x/) half-lines.

In the quotation above, ‘targe-man’ is a compound, meaning shield-man, i.e. warrior: here, Lackname, the hero of Spearhand Faring. Targe might also have entered English from French, or at least might have been influenced by French. The soft g in present-day English targe suggests as much. But Germanic languages have similar words: Old English had targa with roughly the same meaning, for instance. Perhaps French originally borrowed the word from a Germanic source. In any case, when a word is monosyllabic and feels English, like English targe, I treat it as being less Romance. Later in the poem targe-man forms one part of a neatly alliterating pairing with fully-English tackhand, a gender-neutral play on tacksman.

Something else of note here: the hardest kind of break, a new paragraph, at the caesura in the first line quoted, ‘So petitioner talked. | [new paragraph!] Targe-man answered’. Much Old English poetry permits—possibly even prefers—syntactic breaks at the caesura between half-lines. Breaking here brings forth a pleasing counterpoint between alliterative units, the lines, and syntax. It’s not unlike the counterpoint you can achieve when you uncouple syntactic breaks from line-endings in blank verse, but it rings louder (I think!) thanks to the alliteration.

We switch back to the practical in the following line, ‘With suchlike words, their path they onward sailed’. Here the poem shifts to blank verse and to more workaday interstitial narration. Though this line still alliterates, on s! Not everyone will enjoy the choice of ‘suchlike’, but in my view part of the trick to this kind of verse is not worrying about cringe.

A different kind of break, or at least shift, occurs between the third and fourth lines quoted, as we change gears from alliterative verse to blank verse. I chose to run a different sort of sound-link across this shift too: the prevailed:sailed rhyme (using one of those French-derived words!). Since I dislike trailing offbeats in blank verse lines, the preceding alliterative half-line had to end in a lift to help pull this off, which is why that’s a B-type (‘since here I prevailed’).

I’m still planning for a summer release; let’s see. Once I’ve settled the text I want to explore working up an audiobook version.

Top image: detail from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, folio 168 verso, made available by the Bodleian Libraries under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence. See more of this manuscript in their online facsimile!