Daniel A. Rabuzzi sent me a link to his Strange Horizons review of Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival (edited by Dennis Wilson Wise); he has interesting things to say:
Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology deepens and nuances my understanding of what speculative poetry is and how it relates both to speculative fiction and to wider poetic traditions in English. In the course of this book, Dennis Wilson Wise demonstrates convincingly how the structural alliteration that was central to Old English poetry (and that of other old Germanic languages) remains vital today, drawing a line from Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Poul Anderson to Patrick Rothfuss, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, and Jo Walton. Wise carefully lays out his definition of “speculative poetry,” taking an ecumenical view that includes “SF, horror, and the weird as well as fantasy, plus “other kinds of imaginative writing with a generic kinship to fantastika” (p. 14). […]
First, the nuts and bolts: Wise has curated 166 poems by fifty-five poets, with author biographies, detailed end notes, and a bibliography, bracketed by a forty-six-page introduction (combining a thorough-going literary history with a thoughtful statement of aesthetic principles) and an eighteen-page “Metrical Essay on Three Alliterative Traditions.” He is a careful and generous scholar, making clear and considered arguments in an undogmatic way. He engages with the most influential scholars of Old English meter (including Thorlac Turville-Petre, Roberta Frank, Eric Weiskott, and, of course, Tolkien), with leading researchers into modern reception of OE texts such as Heather O’Donoghue, Tom Shippey, and Chris Jones, and with Ted Hughes, Rahul Gupta, Paul Douglas Deane, and other practitioners who have weighed in on OE matters metrical.
Wise is an able guide to the demanding intricacies of OE alliterative structure, which is alien territory for speakers of modern English. To start, he distinguishes between “ornamental” and “structural” alliteration: “However many pickled peppers Peter Piper may have picked, Mr. Piper’s exploits only teach us about the ornamental kind of alliteration, not the structural kind” (p. 377). The structure in question is based on “primary alliteration across an ax/ax or aa/ax pattern; two lifts [the heavily stressed long syllables] and two dips in each verse, and a medial caesura” (p. 380). Of course, as Wise informs us, several patterns were possible and discrepancies abound that highlight, in their contravention of them, the rules. More to his immediate point, “contemporary revivalists range across a wide spectrum of metrical fidelity [including] purists … who accurately imitate more known features of the alliterative meter than not [and] impressionists [who are] less engaged with replicating a historical alliterative tradition and instead prefer medieval ‘flavoring’ to one degree or another” (p. 12). Wise’s sliding scale of purist-to-impressionist is useful, and facilitates a broad church.
I hadn’t been familiar with either the revival of alliteration or the useful term fantastika (defined here), and I’m all for a broad church. Furthermore, Rabuzzi gave me pleasure by quoting a poet I like and don’t think many people know about:
Wise’s expansive view of what poetry can be, and how it can be judged, deserves a wide audience, both among those who read speculative literature and those who don’t. His approach should not be controversial, as it accords with that of the many recent anthologists who have opted to reject Procrustean regimes. For instance, here is Elaine Equi explaining her selection rubric for The Best American Poetry 2023 (co-edited for Scribner with David Lehman): “I understood best to mean the most engaging, most original, most stimulating work I came across. I didn’t overthink it. For my purposes, ‘best’ would be a mutable word, not a canonical one.”
I’ve got a copy of Equi’s first book, Federal Woman (1978), with its epigraph “disregard books, literature, documents – demand large words, entire cities for yourself”; her poem “Dolor” starts:
Dolor — sadness kept as a powder in small jars
sometimes distinguished by a Greek label
and scented with vanilla.
As in the sentence:
“He drave her away and took out his jar of dolor.”
You can read more recent poems by her here. Thanks, Daniel!
Looks very interesting.
I have to say I’m astonished to read a capacious review of a book on modern alliterative poetry and see no mention of Pound or Auden.
I think the closest German has to this is parodies of Wagner…
Alliteration has never gone away in Welsh poetry …
Auden’s wonderful long poem The Age of Anxiety is in alliterative verse throughout.
Elaine Equi is a wonder! And I do love her volume of BAP, for reasons selfish and otherwise.
what a fantastic review! and the book sounds amazing as well!
i do feel compelled to snarl at rabuzzi about one thing, though, which is about words and their uses so feels appropriate to bring in here. he writes: “The poets included in Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival are positive, inclusive, apolitical; their work is an antidote and corrective to the abuse and misuse of the traditions.”
this is transparently nonsense. writing poetry in a cultural tradition that has been adopted by white supremacists and fascists, and refusing to be part of that far right use of it, is a political act. so is refusing to anthologize works by poets connected to Asatru Folk Assembly, and to instead circulate writing by members of The Troth. and so is pointing out those choices in a review. things are still political if you agree with them. and moveover, encouraging the idea that any political position you agree with is “apolitical” is a powerful gift to the fascist far right, which has made that fiction central to its presentation of itself as a “third way” or “beyond right and left” for over a century.
and by the same token, writing white supremacist and fascist alliterative poetry is not an “abuse” or “misuse” of the tradition – that would be following in the footsteps of iolo [YOLO!] morganwg or james macpherson. far right alliterative poems are a use of the tradition that i, like rabuzzi and wise, think is appalling and would like not to happen. that’s our shared – and political – position, though, and has to do with what’s in the poems, not their status in the alliterative poetic tradition. if fred chappell’s picnic is a valid part of that tradition, so are the scrawlings of some chud from Asatru Folk Assembly, if their work is inside the formal zone that defines it. and dealing with the presence of that kind of writer takes concrete political thinking, and political actions like the ones wise made as an anthologist, not No True Scop dodges, which do nothing to deplatform them and hand them an opportunity to No True Skald right back.
rabuzzi seems to understand at least parts of this, writing “Traditions are, of course, mercurial, with many claimants” – so it’s disappointing to see how quickly (1 intervening sentence) the review moves determinedly away from that understanding.
DE:
Alliteration, assonance … that whole resplendent armoury of soundplay never went away, but held resounding rhetorical sway come what may by way of modish swell of rhyme and tide of metre. A timely reminder. Sonnet or song, I’d never render verse without regard for sound of syllable.
Yes, I had noticed that …
I was not specific enough in my statement.
In Welsh poetry, structural alliteration has never gone away. Not every modern poet uses it (any more than every modern poet uses rhyme in English), but the tradition is alive and well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynghanedd
@Noetica:
True are your words, but a trifle off
this piece’s point. Its alliteration’s
not merely music: it follows rules
of stress and structure, in style resembling
Nordic of old, whether near or far.
Edit: I see that Eddyshaw
says a somewhat similar thing.
Indeed: yet in leaden prose, alas.
(Words to the wise: they’re hardly ever wasted.)
Such constraints of structure, soft or strict,
were once expressed in olden ways
but faded first to options then to fads.
Next rhyme held rule, that continental crime.
A Norman norm, and levered out at last –
when lean unlovely blankness bore the bier.
Still, structured or no, see now how salient appear alliteration and assonance in Shakespeare (some seen as internal rhyme betimes, or be it rigid repetition):
(Rough and ready markup; more could be made.)
Funnily, I tend to agree with rozele, minus the stridency. Harking back to the ancient traditions of a people, race, or language does tend to be the territory of, if not fascists or supremacists, then at least people who might tend towards racialised views of history. The era of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse was confined to a particular historical period and place, before centuries of continental and then broader cultural influences effectively consigned it to the fringes. Why should an American, or Australian, or any other person with some kind of English-speaking heritage, look back at that geographically narrow, Germanic period of the history of English and hold it up as something we should somehow get back to?
I am prepared to be pilloried for this. I have moved from a romantically essentialised view of linguistic history to a certain scepticism, whether it is of the worship of the culture and script of the ancient states of China (which is concomitant with Han chauvinism), the romanticisation of pre-classical Japanese, or any other kind of past-worship by modern peoples.
Alliterative verse in premodern English was not in fact confined to the “Anglo-Saxon” period.
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and “Piers Plowman” are famous examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_Revival
There is dispute about this, but it seems to have actually been more of a reinvention rather than a revival.
Auden was no fascist.
As in Auden’s case, there can be artistic reasons for reviving older literary forms, which need have nothing to do with ethnonationalism.
There is a broader question here as well. It is not inevitable that nationalism has to be either racist or reactionary. By chance, I was just reading this:
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/escaping-england
(I’m not altogether persuaded by this, but it makes some interesting points.)
The modern history of both Plaid Cymru and the SNP shows that nationalists can be progressives, even if we proud internationalists think that this is irrational of them and would prefer the world to be simpler.
@Bathrobe:
Why should an American, or Australian, or any other person with some kind of English-speaking heritage, look back at that geographically narrow, Germanic period of the history of English and hold it up as something we should somehow get back to?
Why do you think that’s what the review and the book are about? The writers mentioned whose verse I’ve read have all written in other forms as well. They didn’t say we should get back to it. They decided to get back to it in certain poems for, as David Eddyshaw said, artistic reasons. Turning to a less successful poet, I’ve imitated Hebrew, French, Welsh, Provencal, Greek, Latin, Japanese, and Chinese forms as well as forms from the history of English up to modern times (though not this annoying idea of using slashes instead of line breaks). I didn’t do that because “we” should; I did it for the challenge and fun and in some cases because I thought the forms were appropriate for some reason. Shameless self-promotion: you can click on my name above, though you won’t find all the ethnicities I mentioned.
Quite possibly some poems in Wise’s anthology are by people who think some “we” (speakers of Germanic languages, people with a lot of Germanic-speaking ancestors, revivers of ancient Germanic religions [*]) should somehow get back to that period in literature. But I’ll bet they’re a small minority.
I hope I’m not pillorying you.
[*] In front of fields where free birds fly, he kind of revived polytheism (9).
@Noetica: Shakespeare never hurts, but I don’t see your point. If it’s that lots of verse has alliteration and other sound repetitions though it’s not in the medieval Germanic tradition with structural alliteration, nevertheless “alliterative verse” does conventionally refer to that tradition. If it’s that you don’t think old traditions should be revived or even maintained (like rhyme), you’re entitled to your tastes and so are others.
I’m quite sure Noetica knows all that, and I can assure you he loves old traditions in verse — he’s very good at them himself. He’s just making a point about the “whole resplendent armoury of soundplay.”
Rhyme became more common in English poetry post -1066, but the “mainstream” Continental tradition of rhymed poetry that spread across the Channel does not come from posh pagan Latin models but from rustic and vulgar medieval Church Latin. What’s the standard account of how rhyme first entered and then dominated the newer style of Latin (and then Romance etc.) verse? Can credit be given to the influence of the Ostrogoths or Lombards or some similarly Nordic/Aryan interlopers that unsavory revivalists could get excited about?
Reading The Lord of the Rings to my son lately, it’s gotten to the point where, when we get to a Rohan poem, he points out the alliteration before I do.
I tend to perhaps too hastily assume rhyme in medieval Latin reflects Arabic influence, like other aspects of the troubadour tradition, but I have no idea what the literary scholars think about that these days. After all, we can be fairly certain that rhyme has emerged independently in multiple places (it’s a prominent feature of Old Chinese poetry); why not in Europe as well?
I tend to perhaps too hastily assume rhyme in medieval Latin reflects Arabic influence, like other aspects of the troubadour tradition, but I have no idea what the literary scholars think about that these days.
Same here, and I too would be curious to know what today’s scholars think.
Welsh poetry rhymed from its very beginnings (before it was even, strictly speaking, “Welsh”) in Aneirin and Taliesin. Unfortunately, the question of just how far back Y Gododdin and Taliesin’s praise-poems to Urien really go is extremely fraught, but even on the least romantic showing the oldest bits seem likely to far antedate any plausible Arabic influence. Well before any troubadours …
Gwŷr a aeth Gatraeth gan wawr,
Dygymyrrws eu hoed eu hanianawr …
(Note the structural* alliteration, too. This was, of course, still a time when Welsh poetry was practically free verse. Yer proper cynghanedd hadn’t been invented yet. Why have only two constraints on formal verse form when you could have three?)
* OK?
Rhymed poetry had its origin in the Christian poetry of late antiquity:
The key in the German ulr block-quoted may be the adjective “allmählich” (= “gradually” or ” bit by bit” or something). My own unchecked recollection of when rhyme because common in Latin hymnody was off – the non-classical style of medieval Churchy Latin verse is already underway before A.D. 400 but those early examples were unrhymed and by the time rhyming was in full flower there’s no longer a timeline problem with Arabic influence. Although there are some people that say some of the earlier examples were in exactly the wrong part of Europe (Irish monks wandering around 8th-century Germany, that sort of thing) for Arabic contact to be an obvious vector. And some seem to think that the general shift from quantitative meter to rhythmic stress-based meter made rhyme such an obvious fit that it was maybe just a matter of dumb luck when and via what random catalyst that new potentiality would be actualized.
And some seem to think that the general shift from quantitative meter to rhythmic stress-based meter made rhyme such an obvious fit that it was maybe just a matter of dumb luck when and via what random catalyst that new potentiality would be actualized.
Yeah, I can buy that.
Mediaeval Irish rhyme works rather differently from that found in other traditions, IIRC (including Welsh.) And very differently from Classical Arabic.
I’m for the polycentric origin idea (the case of Chinese, that Lameen cites, is pretty clear evidence that we don’t need to assume monogenesis.)
Classical Arabic metre is quantitative, by the way, not stress-based. So rhyme is not dependent on stress in general.
Yes, and it’s important to keep emphasizing that, because our monkey brains keep looking for One Simple Explanation.
In that new-fangled Welsh cywydd poetry, a stressed syllable must always rhyme with an unstressed syllable:
O’th gerais å maith gariad
Caru am garu a gad …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cywydd
I don’t know if this is connected in some way with the shift of Welsh stress from final to penultimate syllables (itself difficult to date, but which presumably happened during the Middle Welsh period.)
Yeah, that’s German, which I described previously as follows: “Alliteration fell completely out of fashion between Old and Middle High German. The Hildebrandslied alliterates; the Nibelungenlied rhymes, and while it contains much older material which did alliterate, this alliteration isn’t used at all [–] perhaps it’s even actively avoi[d]ed. (The first example are the three kings of the Burgunds, Gunther, Gernot & Giselher; instead of occurring in the same line, they’re spread over two stanzas.)”
As before, I submit that the SNP of Indyref and Indyref2 simply isn’t nationalist anymore. It’s leftist, and figured that the only way to live in a country not ruled by Tories was to cut England loose. I don’t know enough about Plaid Cymru.
The Escaping England blog post is indeed interesting, but just goes to show that most people’s geographic identities are nested – “in Antwerp you’re from Ghent, in Brussels you’re a Fleming, in Paris you’re Belgian, in New York you’re European, in Kinshasa you’re white”. Nationalism says that of all these identities, the one that exactly coincides with the nation is either the only one that ought to exist, or at least it is/ought to be considerably more important than all the others. Rather than for nationalism, the post is an argument for federalism, and for – funnily enough – the EU’s “subsidiarity principle” (“all decisions should be made as close to the citizen as possible”, i.e. federalism all the way up and down).
I submit that the SNP of Indyref and Indyref2 simply isn’t nationalist anymore
No true (nationalist) Scotsman?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
Certainly, not wanting to remain shackled to what was represented as an irredeemably Tory England was a big part of the spiel to the unconverted put out by both the SNP and Plaid in previous elections. They were wrong about the prognosis for England, but in itself that doesn’t strike me as a disreputable reason for nationalism. And surely it is nationalism still, unless you limit “nationlism” by definition to the supposed “racial” kind? Both parties still identify as “nationalist”, and there seems no basis for accusing them of hypocrisy.
I had no idea rhyme was an old feature of Irish and Welsh poetry too. The history of rhyme sounds like a great topic for a really big cross-disciplinary project…
I noticed recently that the alliterative traditions familiar from the Kalevala are not entirely absent from Finnish pop music, as in the cheerful lines:
Etupenkiltä lasin läpi lennetyäni
Olin pyörinyt piennarta pitkin
just to clarify a little: in contrast to Bathrobe, i’m quite enthusiastic about the revival of alliterative verse in english! partly because i think anything that expands the formal range of writing is a Damn Good Thing, and partly because i (following ammiel alcalay, charles olson, and others*) think that sound and rhythm are the most exciting and important formal elements of poetry, and i think making use of the alliterative formal tradition brings writers towards taking them seriously. personally, i find it a useful formal zone to draw on in the yiddish songwriting and translating i do, since i’m not a great rhymester and the yiddish folksong tradition’s wonderfully flexible relationship to rhythm makes strict beat/foot/syllable-counting an uninteresting way to establish pattern.
i’m just not interested in pretending that what an antifascist alliterative poet does and what a RETVRNist alliterative poet does have a different standing in relationship to the historical forms/genres involved on account of their politics. they’re equally contemporary poets working in a specific literary tradition (and likely other ones as well), even if i’m only gonna punch one of them.
and i entirely agree with Bathrobe that alliterative verse has no inherent special status for anglophone poetry. but i love that people are using it, just as i love that poets like marilyn hacker are writing as-close-to-proper ghazals as they can in english alongside their villanelles and sonnets – and that people are writing open-form work, and writing things that work with all these forms at once! but that’s because of what it does and enables, formally, not because of some fiction of authenticity.
.
* i’ve recently read alcalay’s A Little History, which goes into the whys and hows of this-all, and which i found a fascinating and lovely read.
sound and rhythm are the most exciting and important formal elements of poetry
Hear, hear!
What else is there apart from sound and rhythm ??
Oh, you know — imagery, ideas, shit like that.
Well, sound and rhythm were said to be the most important formal elements of poetry. I don’t consider imagery and ideas to be “formal” elements – and they’re not peculiar to poetry. Otherwise everything counts as formal, and we’re all poets but don’t know it.
Oh, it occurs to me that maybe the word “formal” was not actually intended to mean anything, but was just included for its sound and rhythm, its poetic vibes.
No, I agree with you, I was just trying to imagine what those other people might say.
On formal elements of poetry: What else is there apart from sound and rhythm ??
Word repetition as in sestinas and ghazals, parallelism as in Biblical Hebrew or classical Chinese poetry, a turn or volta as in a classical sonnet, two images as in an ideal haiku (according to some people’s ideals anyway), a middle line that’s read differently with the first two lines than with the last two as in some tanka (I’m told), the visual appearance on the page as in concrete poetry, end-stopping versus enjambment, and such. I wish I could find the submission guidelines for some journal that said the whole point of line breaks in free verse is so the meaning of a line will change when the reader gets to the next line.
It may be obvious that I agree with @rozele in liking the situation where poets have lots of forms to choose from and innovation is welcome.
Note the structural alliteration, too.
Alas, my kenning allusion to Ulysses was all too cunningly concealed. Lean unlovely, in “Scylla and Charybdis”:
Haines? He’s the archetype of an arch-appropriator. The emerald set in the ring of the sea recalls Haines’ silver cigarette box, with its sparkling emerald representing Ireland of course. And “We feel in England … history is to blame”. Way back in “Telemachus”:
Haines also had the temerity, in “Telemachus”, to speak Irish to the ancient milk-delivering crone:
Hyde’s original lines are more alliterative than Joyce’s version, with “polished public” rather than “callous public”. That original is not readily findable at good length, so I wrested it from a PDF – and marked it up, to match Hyde’s own slightly mucked-up marking up. Douglas Hyde, The Story of Early Gaelic Literature (1895), the last two pages:
[p. 173]
During all this period the bardic colleges were not neglected, but continued to flourish as before, and to cultivate side by side law, history, and poetry. The prosody of the Irish language as reduced to form, and taught by the ollavs, was something unique and wonderful, nearly three hundred different metres being recognized and practised. To give any adequate account of these bardic schools and of the course pursued in them, is unfortunately impossible within the brief space at my disposal for this short story of our early literature. That story I have, roughly speaking, brought down to the Danish Period, overlapping it indeed – from the necessity of the case – in more than one chapter.
I may now take farewell of my readers in a few verses which may serve as a specimen of one of the best-known metres, indeed the great official one, of the Irish bards, the celebrated Deibhidh* [D’yevvee]. This metre, with all the other artificial measures of the schools, was lost in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and these lines are the first composed in it, in either Irish or English, for over 150 years:–
* The following are the requirements of the above metre, requirements which were pretty rigorously observed by the bards in later times, though I think some of the points were not reduced to rigid rule as early as the Danish period. There are four lines in each rann, seven syllables in each line, two or more alliterations of accented syllables in each line, the word which ends the second and fourth lines must have a syllable more than that which ends the first and third. If the accent falls on the ultimate syllable of the first and third lines it must fall on the penult of the second and fourth, if on the penultimate of the first and third, it must fall on the antepenultimate of the second and fourth. There must be co-arda or Irish rhyme between the last words of the first and second lines, and the third and fourth, but the third and fourth also require Irish-rhyme between two or more words in the middle of the line.
[p. 174]
Bound thee forth my Booklet quíck
To greet the Polished Públic.
Writ – I WEEN ‘t was not my Wísh –
In LEAN unLovely Énglish.
Tell of ancient Times and mén
(The Tale is Told not óften)
And to-DAY the Dust lies thíck
On Learnèd LAY and Lýric.
Speak the deeds of Famous Fínn
Of Con and of Cu-chúlain
Tales of TIME recorded áll
In Rann and RHYME and ánnal.
Cairbrè Killed among his mén
The Fenian Fall so súdden,
OSSIAN from his Seat of Sóng
By FASHION Hurlèd Heádlong.
All unWot of now, I Wís
Our Ancient Epic ríches,
Yet are SEEN , though SAD and síck
Some GLAD to GLEAN a rélic.
Glad to Glean a relic, Í,
Though Mock’d I be by Mány,
Take my TALE to stranger mén *
The GAEL the Gael is fállen.
CRÍOCH. [but given in Irish letters; “the end”]
* I have supplied what [dis]appears to be a missing acute in “men”.**
** OK?
I’ve only just got back to look at the responses to my earlier comment. Thank you all, for commenting. I’m afraid I do tend to interpret reviving something from the Anglo-Saxon-Mediaeval era as having nationalist undertones. Would Indian poets writing in English speak of “reviving” alliteration in their poetry? My feeling is that they wouldn’t. That is more likely to come from someone who feels “grounded” in their tradition, someone who identifies with the past as something they are naturally heir to. At any rate, you’ve thrown this around and come to the more composed stance that it’s all fine as a way of expanding the poetic resources of language.
@Stu:
i do think that uses of imagery (and of concepts), and functions-in-the-world are formal elements of poetry – they’re what define (for example) the nasib of a qasida, or distinguish a eulogy from a panegyric. to my mind, prescriptions like wordsworth’s “emotion reflected in tranquility”, or the idea that a poem should center on or elaborate an image, are very much formal dictates. they operate at a somewhat different level of form than a rhyme-scheme or a baḥr, but work similarly to shape a poem’s structure.
@Bathrobe:
i certainly agree that there’s a specific burden on anglophone poets who can be understood as the constituents of a nativist/nationalist political endeavor (elaborate phrase because i know my jewishness and northamericanness aren’t innoculations, given my whiteness) to actively separate their poetic projects with – for example – alliterative verse from the ways that a “revival”/”retvrn” framing can pull it into that kind of reactionary cultural intervention. it’s not a problem that arises in the same way for, say, my use of alliterative forms in yiddish, or an afro-trinidadian poet’s use of them in english.
“emotion reflected in tranquility”
= “emotion recollected in tranquillity“
Reminder.
– Kevin Wald
I dunno, Bathrobe. Saying that currently-living L1 Anglophones in majority-Anglophone societies who happen not to be blood descendants of those who spoke Old English and Middle English or for that matter Victorian English are not “naturally heir” to the entire literary tradition of their own native language seems kinda sus.
I am FWIW pretty confident that just-quoted-by-David-M. Kevin Wald (whose brother I went to college with) is not (at least to any significant quantum) a blood descendant of Old-English speakers.
Yes, it’s like implying that Ghanaians really shouldn’t write sonnets.
Or that Léopold Senghor had no business being a member of the Académie Française.
I can’t be doing with this “stay in your own lane” stuff.
(I bought my copy of the complete works of Dafydd ap Gwilym in the university bookshop in Accra. Any Ghanaian keen to compose cywyddau has my total support.)
@JWB and DE:
I understood Bathrobe the opposite of the way you did. I thnk he, like rozele, sees a problem associated with staying in your own lane in some cases, because some of the more racist or fascist nationalists do that.
Jerry Friedman is right: Bathrobe is saying he finds Anglophones who do consider themselves blood descendants of those who spoke Old English suspicious when they want to “revive” the ways of their (supposed) ancestors.
Ah. My apologies.
(So only foreigners should write alliterative verse in English?)
In that case, I await further guidance from the Red Guards as to what literary styles or genres they think I am permitted to non-suspiciously write in, given my regrettable descent in substantial part from Persons of Anglo-Saxonness.
JWB is hereby randomly assigned the frottola-barzelletta. Be grateful — it could have been the breccbairdne or the chant royal.
Poor bathrobe. He is like someone who makes a throwaway remark to the effect that he thinks large hairy men do not look well in miniskirts and fishnet tights….
I am preparing for my assignment by reading a googled-up piece titled “The Frottolists and Their Contemporaries” and I must say that “Frottolists” sounds very much like the name of a Marxist splinter group that was the subject of HUAC hearings circa 1951. They disagreed with both the Schactmanites and the Lovestoneites but even specialists in the field have trouble remembering over what.
The fissionable character of Marxist groupuscules is curiously reminiscent of the history of the Church of Scotland. Possibly the respective doctrines appeal to similar personality types?
Comrade Brewer: In view of your cooperative attitude, you may now play games other than rithmomachia.
“Stay in your lane” was the wrong phrase I should have picked up on, as the only ground for suspicion mentioned is Germanic-style alliterative verse. Novels, sonnets, etc., have no association with racism or fascism.
I feel sure you and I are also allowed to write haiku. Probably not Ewe dirges, though.
On the subject of cultural appropriation, I agree with the objections to making money with another people’s genre when they’re prevented from doing so, or representing oneself (even by implication) as their voice. But there are other cases I’m more doubtful about.
Here in northern New Mexico, a writer named Jim Sagel wrote short stories, in parallel English and Spanish versions, about people of the long-standing Hispanic culture. (He was married to a Hispanic woman.) One Hispanic man told me, “Jim Sagel never understood the culture here.” I mentioned that to another Hispanic man, who said “Of course he did!” I think that settles it.
The fissionable character of Marxist groupuscules is curiously reminiscent of the history of the Church of Scotland.
Christianity in general, if you don’t mind my saying so. The parallels are so obvious that there must be books about them.
A fascinating discussion overall! Quite friendly, and by some folks who are very well informed on such matters. A pleasure to read.
Just a point of interest that, however, may not affect anyone’s larger point. When Bathrobe asks, “Would Indian poets writing in English speak of ‘reviving’ alliteration in their poetry?” ….some may be interested to hear that the most fervent “purist” revivalist in SP&MAR is a poet by the name of Rahul Gupta.
Also, although I do believe everyone in the anthology is a native English speaker, quite a few are Americans (esp. in the Society for Creative Anachronism) who don’t have any special ties to English/British history, and who just think the Middle Ages are cool.
An interesting comments section!
I’d like to bring to the commenters’ attention my website Forgotten Ground Regained (alliteration.net), which does a pretty thorough job of documenting the modern alliterative revival, from occasional poems by modern and contemporary poets to blog posts and fanfic poetry. If you’re going to be having a debate about how to interpret the use of alliteration in modern contexts, the hundreds of poems I’ve reprinted and/or linked to should be grist for your mill … though I still recommend buying Dennis Wise’s book, which surfaces a lot of important work that isn’t available on the web.
Due to various looming tasks at the day job and the extreme rustiness of my facility in expressing myself in trochees, I cannot at present provide an estimated time for completion of my assigned barzelletta.
I did, however, manage to do a first draft of the introductory reprisa while on the train into Manhattan this morning:
Stay not in your lane – eschew it!
Comes the cry from far-off keyboard.
Blood-and-soil? Do NOT pursue it.
Chase instead a rootless reward.
@jwb
Did you mean the w in reward to be a t?
Christianity in general, if you don’t mind my saying so.
No, the church of Scotland in particular, viz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scotland#/media/File%3AReformed_Scots_Church_Denominations.svg
At the top level, I don’t think Christianity as a whole is really much more prone to faction than, say, Islam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_schools_and_branches
Or Buddhism, come to that. For example, the doctrines and career of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichiren
I think illusions of homogeneity mostly arise from lack of familiarity with the movements in question.
On the other hand, in some cases, the illusion is more or less deliberately fostered by one particular faction, which represents all others as marginal and/or inauthentic, and a bystander may then see more of the game than the players.
Without suggesting that the Scottish Kirk is uniquely brittle in this regard, I would say that it is a mistake to generalize from the fissiparousness of Protestantism in the U.S. (and a limited number of other places) in the last couple centuries to Protestantism more generally and a further mistake to generalize from the more modest fissiparousness of Protestantism-in-general to Christianity in general. And of course there are different sorts of fissiparousness – there’s the traditional Scottish variety which was traditionally about hair-splitting notions of doctrinal purity (including disagreements about whether particular issues are adiaphoric or worth a schism …) and then there are other sorts motivated instead by a more congregationalist or free-church ecclesiology in which it really just doesn’t matter all that much whether your particular congregation is within the same bureaucratic superstructure with as many other congregations as possible without tolerating grievous heresy, and there is thus no particularly strong implication that you necessarily consider all congregations not connected to the same administrative entity as grievous heretics or even mild heretics.
if memory serves, the Frottolists were (are?) distinctive for combining a belief that the Ring of Power should not have been destroyed but instead have been used for rural electrification, and a lysenkoist approach to questions of voicing and devoicing in the development of westron from rohirric.
..
@JWB, DE, etc:
i think something similar could be said about the relative fissiparousness of different marxist lineages. trotskyists are particularly prone to splits on fine points of analysis, and (neo/post)maoists are notably fissile on fine points of practice, but stalinists are far less prone to division, and council communists tend to avoid the whole problem through their basic federative orientation.
as for the christians, i mostly just want to point those who haven’t encountered it yet to james milton carroll’s detailed chart depicting the simple distinction between the true, baptist, path and the “irregular churches”. it’s not quite as much fun as the scottish churches diagram, but covers more ground.
At the top level, I don’t think Christianity as a whole is really much more prone to faction than, say, Islam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_schools_and_branches
Or Buddhism, come to that. For example, the doctrines and career of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichiren
I think illusions of homogeneity mostly arise from lack of familiarity with the movements in question.
I didn’t say Christianity was more prone to faction than those other religions. I considered mentioning Islam in my post, but decided to keep it simple, since the starting point was Christianity in Scotland. I don’t know much about sects in Buddhism.
@PlasticPaddy: No. Inter alia, the alternative with a “t” has in recent decades become deprecated in official/elite AmEng discourse as a slur to be tabooed. Not that I would necessrily shy away from using a contested lexeme for appropriate poetic effect, but this wasn’t the context to do so with that one.
there’s the traditional Scottish variety which was traditionally about hair-splitting notions of doctrinal purity (including disagreements about whether particular issues are adiaphoric or worth a schism …)
Hence the saying “Och, it isnae worth a scisma.”
James Milton Carroll
I didn’t know about him (being more into actual church history.)
It seems analogous to the Foxe’s Book of Martyrs confabulations about Celtic Christianity.
Quite apart from the inveterate untruthfulness, I can’t myself see the point of this sort of thing, even in principle.
I agree with a church elder who I heard once say that trying to model the current church on the churches described in the New Testament seemed somewhat to ignore the fact that those churches are described in the actual text as pretty dysfunctional, to say the least. (In fact, that’s kinda the point …)
But everyone likes stories about how everything was Just Wonderful in the Good Old Days, before They came and spoiled it.
Here’s a listing of religious groups in the U.S.: https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2015/05/Religious-Composition-of-U.S.-Adults.pdf
It hides a lot. As far as I can tell, the Amish and other Mennonites are all under “Anabaptist in the evangelical tradition” and “Anabaptist in the mainline tradition” (though I don’t think the Amish are either), and I suspect a history of their schisms and unions would rival that of Scottish Christianity. (My sister is Beachy Amish Mennonite.)
And a friend was just telling me about her upbringing in the Moravian Church, also not on that list.
Estimates of the number of Protestant denominations in the U.S. seem to be over 200.
I’m not sure. I’m told the French presidential election of 2002 featured three Trotskyist and two Stalinist parties.
I’ve read it’s thirty thousand… or was it thirty-eight thousand… It can’t be hard to get to this order of magnitude if you count every “non-denominational church” as its own denomination, which it after all is.
I’m not sure. I’m told the French presidential election of 2002 featured three Trotskyist and two Stalinist parties.
If Uncle Joe were still alive, there would be complete unity, comrade.
It can’t be hard to get to this order of magnitude if you count every “non-denominational church” as its own denomination
It’s not unlike the dialect-versus-language question. Individual groups vary greatly in how they regard other groups, from mutual excommunication to wary respect to “well, our differences are trivial compared to what we have in common.”
my sense of relative splittiness is based on having done some family trees of the u.s. sectarians in the early/mid 00s, and may be less true in europe. here, there are fewer splits in the stalinist stream, but the resulting groups seem to last longer (and i think are less likely to merge into one another), which can make the numbers at any given moment look less different than they are over time. (a quick look at wikipedia found 16 listed u.s. trotskyite parties, and didn’t add any to my list of 4 more-or-less stalinist outfits*)
.
* half are technically marcyites, but i think it makes more sense to think about pro-stalin trotskyists as stalinists. ymmv.
well, our differences are trivial compared to what we have in common
The well-meaning proponents of this view also tend to fall victim to
https://xkcd.com/927/
(though few would recognise the uncomfortable fact.)
There have, of course, also been formal mergers of once-separate churches. Cynics point out that this tends to happen mostly with churches that have lost the vigour that they once possessed; unfortunately, I think that there is some truth in that.
pro-stalin trotskyists
Pro-Christmas turkeys?
I leave you to reach your own conclusions as to “vigour” but this interesting chart shows the considerable administrative consolidation/unification over time of what you might politely call the less hardcore (more “moderate”? “progressive”? “squishy”?) factions of American Lutheranism into one mega-denomination that now has majority market share among self-identified Lutherans in the U.S.. But even among the super-hardcore there are e.g. essentially zero doctrinal differences between the ELS and the WELS, and they are in full communion with each other despite each having a very sensitive trigger-level for breaking communion with the insufficiently pure. That they are separate bodies that have not bothered to unify administratively is historical happenstance, due in large part to one being ancestrally Norwegian-American and the other German-American. Combined with not having an ecclesiology that makes failure to unify more fully a problem demanding a solution.
http://www.intrepidlutherans.com/2010/11/lutheran-merger-chart.html
Apropos of Islamic sects, I was just reading in the Economist about this proposal in the news recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_State_of_the_Bektashi_Order
I had some vague memory of the Bektashi order in relation to the Janissaries, but hadn’t known about the Atatürkist persecution and the consequent relocation of the leadership to Albania.
Ah yes, I read about that too — go for it, I say! The world needs fewer superpowers and more microstates.
In my modest opinion, the world needs fewer people telling the world what the world needs.
That’s what I keep telling them.
I think we should be told!
“lemme tell it to the world!”
“just tell it to the judge!”
(clearly a bektashi-inspired allusion to the divine, in its manifestations as al-ḥakam, al-ḥakim, al-ʿadl, and al-ḥasīb – or perhaps simply al-ḥaqq, given the well-known sympathies of the jets with the doctrine of al-hallaj)
I’ve been observed flagrante delicto trying to apply alliteration schemes to translations of Hávamál into English or Danish. Objectively speaking that would be a “revival,” but with an “ooh shiny” motivation rather than “we should emulate the manly Vikings”. (People coming from that direction usually have little Norse and less Latin).