The sixth type of Germanic alliterative verse : the case of Old English Beowulf (Part I)

According to Sievers (1885,1993), there are five metrical types of Germanic alliterative poetry based on two stressed positions or lifts (S) and two unstressed positions or drops (W), i.e. SWSW (Type A), WSWS (Type B), WSSW (Type C), SSWW (Type D), and SWWS(Type E), with the sixth possible combination WWSS lacking from the inventory. A close examination of Old English Beowulf reveals that this sixth type is in fact present. The two patterns of this type WWSS are verses with a disyllabic compound filling two lifts, as Methone waelraes '...me for the murderous onslaught' (2101a), and verses with a 'contracted' vowel (i.e. a vowel that has arisen from hiatus) as the second lift, as Swa sceal man don 'as a man should do' (1534b). Previous analyses subsumed the above verses under the basic five by stipulation of metrical stress and by an interpretive device that 'decontracts' a monosyllabic word form into the stem syllable and the ending syllable, thus making a sequence of a lift and a drop, e.g. do-an from don (cf. Sievers 1885,1993, Bliss 1967, Fulk 1992, Hutcheson 1995, Suzuki 1996 among others). However, not only is metrical stress relative by nature, but also 'decontraction' as a metrical device presupposes Sievers's scansion and lacks independent motivation. Arranging stressed and unstressed position in alliterative verse is not restricted in the way in which the WWSS pattern is prohibited.