Abstract
Modern metrical analysis of germanic alliterative poetry (GAP) has invariably proceeded from
edited texts in which the poem is represented visually as verses on a printed page or screen. Of
course, that is not how these poems came down to us. The manuscript form of a GA poem is
typically indistinguishable from prose, the words (and abbreviations) inscribed margin to
margin on parchment, with little or no indication of where one verse ends and another begins.
This manuscript arrangement is a trove for learning how medieval poets and scribes assembled
and presented their materials. Remarkably, the abstract structure of a GAP poem can be
recovered from manuscript “storage” by someone having no prior familiarity with the poem.
Hitherto, to present the poem has been to lose the manuscript. I propose an alternative that
illuminates on the one hand the continuity between manuscript and poetic text, and on the
other, the versecraft of the poet as evidenced in the text.
Registration link
The annotation scheme and processing method outlined in this thesis allow us to create a
TEI/Menota compatible xml document based on a medieval germanic poem realized in a
particular manuscript. This document can contain several overlapping layers of information: the
layout of the words on the manuscript page along with their linguistic and morphological
features and decomposition into syllables; the organization of those words into poetic lines and
verses; and a projection of metrical features onto this abstract structure. While being itself a
data source for further programmatic analytic and comparative work, this document can in turn
be transformed into an interactive html representation showing any of these layers of
information. In this presentation, you will see how these methods and tools work in the context
of selections from five poetic manuscripts including portions of Beowulf and the Poetic Edda.
Biography
Peter DeVault hails from the upper Midwest of the United States, where he works at a
healthcare software company leading a team developing applications for clinical genomics.
Having discovered Signum University in 2019 while tracking down linguistic resources for
Tolkien’s invented languages, he has since immersed himself in a world of medieval germanic
languages and texts. When he isn’t grappling with philology and metrics, Peter composes and
records music and talks with his grandchild about dragons.
