Comparing poetries is a little like marriage: you begin by stressing mutual affinities and end up accentuating differences. As in lawful wedlock, the relationship between Old English and dróttkvætt verse encompasses stylistic mirroring and variation on multiple levels, a family resemblance reinforced by several periods of proximity and intercourse. The two vernacular poetries connected, even if it was an on-again off-again affair. Like many couples, they developed horizontal intimacies outside the immediate family. The Old English verse that has come down to us took shape within a culture of literacy; for some poems, a long-lasting attachment to Latin predecessors was an open secret. The post positioning of prepositions along with several other stylistic devices may have been reinforced by the practice of Latin poets. Nor was the earliest dróttkvætt verse immune to continental modes and the charms of Carolingian poetic ekphrasis. Both corpora weathered various forms of inequality; a range of economical, ideological, geographical, and cultural disparities all left a mark. Still, despite their distinct public personalities, the list of compatibilities confirming Old English verse and viking-age dróttkvætt as a viable pair is long.
Dróttkvætt verse presents itself as lean, tight, neat, and closemouthed, Old English, as run-on, messy, and expansive; the former is notably abstruse, devious, and unnatural, committed to maximizing gain at minimal cost and energy; the latter, warm, repetitive, and seemingly open. Handbooks teach that dróttkvætt verse is recondite, occasional, subjective, arrogant, formal, convoluted, esoteric, self-conscious, self-seeking, elitist, situation-bound, and datable, that Old English poetry is uncomplicated, narrative, objective, leisurely, expansive, and dignified, concerned with religious/heroic tradition and wisdom. One member of this couple underpays; the other over-tips. Nevertheless, they manage to get along and to demonstrate good manners in the other’s presence, a familial code of etiquette based on the tenet “if you can’t be kind, at least be vague.” Frankness, relevancy, logical fullness, staid clarity, a desire to be informative: the modern conversational principles set out by Grice are rarely in sight. Meaning in both poetries is cunningly camouflaged, half-hidden within a flow of compliments, negations, weasel words, and stray observations. In each, dignity, emotional minimalism, restraint, civility, even stealthy one-upmanship take precedence over the communication of facts. Urbane detachment and politeness rule.
From a distance, the underlying architecture of the two bear a resemblance, the deep framework alluded to by the twelfth-century Chinese writer Chiang T’e-li, whose poem on how to do plum blossoms advised: “Painting plum blossom is like judging a horse. You go by bone structure, not by appearance.” In northern verse, these limbs are often artfully scattered. The disjointedness of the dróttkvætt stanza is notorious: within each quatrain, clauses are segmented and placed discontinuously, the sense dispersed over four lines. Old English half-lines do not undergo such drastic dismemberment, but they, too, are mobile; parenthetical clauses, syntactic retroversions, and other unnatural behavior abound. Fifty years ago, T. A. Shippey pointed out that, although subordinate clauses beginning with ‘when’, ‘since’, and ‘after’ are free to come before or after a main clause, in Beowulf such clauses almost invariably come second; the fact or emotion comes first, the explanation, cause, or time-indication trails behind. The surviving stanzas of the first extant Old Norse praise-poem in regular dróttkvætt, Þorbjǫrn hornklofi’s Glymdrápa ‘Resounding-drápa’ (c. 890), consistently and similarly subordinates the second half-stanza syntactically to the first, using conjunctions such as “before” or “when” (SkP 1.1: 73–91). The cumulative effect of this stylistic habit – “they rejoiced … until” – seems meaningful. Nothing in life is certain until the last word is in.
