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The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. [2]
The Lay of the Children of Húrin (c. 1918–1925), an unfinished poetic version of the story of Túrin, going as far as Túrin's sojourn in Nargothrond.It exists in two versions, both incomplete; the first being 2276 lines long, the second containing only 745 alliterating lines, corresponding to the first 435 lines of the first version.
Alliteration is used in the alliterative verse of Old English poems like Beowulf, Middle English poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Old Norse works like the Poetic Edda, and in Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Irish. [3] It was also used as an ornament to suggest connections between ideas in classical Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit poetry.
Acrostic: a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. Example: “ A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky ” by Lewis Carroll. Concrete (aka pattern): a written poem or verse whose lines are arranged as a shape/visual image, usually of the topic.
For example: The Misty Mountains derive from the úrig fiöll in the Skírnismál. [8] The names of his Dwarves derive from the Dvergatal in the Vǫluspá. [9] His Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is a verse retelling or reconstruction of the Nibelung poems from the Edda (see Völsunga saga), composed in the Eddaic fornyrðislag metre.
Essentially, in fornyrðislag and many other forms, Norse poets treated each "half-line" of Germanic alliterative verse as a separate line. The Norse "couplet" is basically a single Germanic line, a pair of half-lines joined by alliteration. Thus, a Norse fornyrðislag stanza of eight lines corresponds to four lines of Old-English alliterative ...
The alliterative verse found in Old English, Middle English, and some modern English poems can be added to this list, as it operates on somewhat different principles than accentual verse. Alliterative verse pairs two phrases (half-lines) joined by alliteration; while there are usually two stresses per half-line, variations in the number of ...
Since "x" is pronounced [ks], the phrase Sale SaXa Sonābant "the rocks were resounding with sea water" (Virgil) can also be considered an example of this kind. Alliteration was a prominent feature of Latin literature (in contrast to Greek), especially in poetry in the 3rd to 1st centuries BC, and continued to be used by some writers even in ...