Jun Terasawa's Old English Metre: An Introduction is a textbook aimed at the beginning student. It introduces students to what is in essence the approach to scansion and understanding of Old English metre developed by Eduard Sievers in the nineteenth century and later improved upon and further developed by A. J. Bliss in the 1960s (Sievers 1885, 1893; Bliss 1962, 1967).
In the preface, Terasawa indicates that his book has a "twofold purpose": "First, as an introductory book, it attempts to provide beginners with the basics of Old English metre" (x), and second, it seeks to provide "an up-to-date view of current work in the field of Old English metre" (xi), which, in Terasawa's terms, means primarily "the interaction between Old English metre and other components, such as word-formation/word-choice and grammar" and "metre-related problems of dating, authorship, and the distinction between verse and prose."
The book delivers on these goals in an uneven fashion. It has excellent exercises and a superb appendix on how students might approach the scansion of a line of Old English poetry. The sections on the interaction of metre with word choice, grammar, and other literary and historical questions are also very good and present some excellent questions for advanced students to pursue as they learn to apply their new knowledge of Old English prosody. On the other hand, the first part of the book seems to be less successful--and probably more frustrating to the student--than many already-existing basic introductions to Old English metre. Given the author's express aim of bringing the student from an absolute beginner's knowledge up to a level advanced enough that they can follow "current work" in the field, moreover, the lack of any significant discussion of alternate theories and practices to scansion, of which several promising ones have been developed in the course of the last quarter century, is also surprising.
Evaluating a textbook as a textbook is probably the most subjective thing a reviewer can be asked to do. Almost inevitably, the answer will depend on questions of taste and experience: "Do I think that this textbook would work with my students?" "Do I think this textbook would have worked with me?" "Do I prefer this treatment of the subject over the introductory textbooks I already use (and hence am more familiar with) or that I myself was taught from?"
Unfortunately, in my case, the answer to most of these questions is "no." The author suggests that "recent Old English grammar books and readers often dispense with metrical matters, or at best content themselves with a brief introduction to the subject" (x). But in doing so, he is able to list nearly a half-dozen "exceptions," most published within the last twenty years, including Pope-Fulk's student edition Eight Old English Poems (2001) and Baker's Introduction to Old English (2007). Terasawa omits recent editions of Mitchell and Robinson's Guide (1992 onwards) from this list, although this may be because he considers their treatment of metre to be too brief.
In my opinion, many of these books do as good or better a job of introducing students to the basics of Old English metre, especially the Sievers-Bliss system Terasawa focusses on. This is especially true of Pope-Fulk, which introduces almost all the material in chapters 1-4 of Terasawa's book, in a more compact (29 vs. 62 pages), and, to my mind, more overseeable fashion. While the material is largely the same, Terasawa's exposition strikes me as more likely to be confusing to the beginning student. His first chapter begins by diving straight into a summary of the major points of the rest of the book: a quick account of details of alliteration and rhythm and then some more advanced issues of the interaction of word choice and grammatical variation. In addition to introducing a large number of potentially quite confusing and foreign concepts to the student all at once, this approach neglects to provide the kind of contextual orientation that students often seem to find quite useful: broad, conceptual answers to questions about the history of Old English metre, how it differs from the more familiar poetry, or the (quite interesting) story behind how we know anything about it.
Similar issues with organisation and approach appear throughout the chapters designed to introduce students to major concepts. An important element in understanding Old English poetry, for example, involves a knowledge of the relationship between word classes, metre, and sentence stress. Certain types of words in Old English are more likely than others to take stress in a line. Nouns, adjectives, non- finite verbs, some adverbs, and certain types of pronouns, for example, almost always receive stress in the line; proclitics and other particles that normally immediately proceed stress-bearing words usually do not receive stress; and a third category including finite verbs, some adverbs, demonstrative pronouns, and the like may or may not take stress depending on position and the other words in the line.
Terasawa explains this principle quite well at the beginning of his third chapter, "Rhythm: the Basics." The problem, however, is that the student may already be confused by this point. In the previous chapter, he or she had been introduced to a more limited version of the same concept, under a different name and said (not entirely accurately) to apply only to nominals and finite verbs, during a discussion of the "Alliterative Rule of Precedence" (a method for determining which words in a given line take alliteration). By the time the broader concept of precedence has been introduced in chapter three, indeed, the student has already read about and had an exercise on exceptions to the more limited presentation of the same rule a chapter earlier.
Given the author's emphasis on current work in the second half of the book, an important lacuna in Old English Metre: An Introduction is its failure to present adequate alternatives to the Sievers-Bliss system. While the Sievers-Bliss method is useful descriptively, it does not, as Fulk has suggested in his revision of Pope, "constitute a plausible theory of meter" (Pope 2001, 149). Since many of the alternate approaches that have been proposed over the years have fared poorly when subjected to serious scrutiny, and since few have been adopted widely for even brief periods of time, it would be a mistake to devote much space to teaching their details. But, especially in the last twenty-five years, some serious and reasonably widely-practiced alternatives (perhaps especially Russom 1987, 1998) have emerged that could be usefully introduced to the type of students on whom Terasawa is focussing after they have mastered the basics of Sievers-Bliss.
Although, on the whole, Old English Metre: An Introduction seems to me to be less useful as an introductory textbook than other readily available works, there are ways in which it is far superior to anything else on the market. Terasawa's book has simply the best exercises on Old English metre (and to a certain extent literary analysis) I have ever seen. The second section of the book, on the relationship between metre and questions of word-choice, grammar, and other literary topics, is also superb and likely to prove fascinating to the advanced student. And finally, it concludes with an appendix that provides students with an algorithmic approach to scansion that seems to me likely to be of great help to any student of the subject.
What these excellences in the book have in common is their ability to lead students into asking themselves complex research questions about their subject in a way they can answer with the skills they have just learned--Professor Terasawa is clearly a superb teacher! Students have no sooner learned about alliteration than they are asked to consider why certain patterns never appear; they learn about rhythm and they are asked to consider how the demands of rhythm has affected poets' compositional choices. The examples used in these exercises are extremely well chosen, and the questions are simple yet very thought- provoking.
So in the end, Old English Metre: An Introduction is probably more useful as a resource for the teacher and advanced student of Old English poetry than it is as a textbook for a class of beginners. While better resources exist for teaching the principles of the Sievers-Bliss system to novices, there are few if any better sources for excellent exercise questions, topics for discussion, and interesting advanced problems in the application of metrical principles to literary problems.
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Works Cited
Baker, Peter S. 2007. An Introduction to Old English. Second Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bliss, A.J. 1962. An Introduction to Old English Metre. Oxford: Blackwell.
---. 1967. The Metre of Beowulf. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mitchell, Bruce and Fred C. Robinson. 1992. A Guide to Old English. Fifth Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pope, John C. 2001. Eight Old English Poems. Third edition, revised by R.D. Fulk. New York: Norton.
Russom, Geoffrey. 1987. Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
---. 1998. Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sievers, Eduard. 1885. "Zur Rhythmik des germanischen Alliterationsverses." Beitrge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 10: 209-314, 451-545.
--- 1893. Altgermanische Metrik. Halle: Max Niemeyer.