When poetry didn’t rhyme
The ancient art of alliterative verse
The scent of wood smoke hangs heavy in the air. Warriors gather in the mead hall, their faces illuminated by the dancing flames of the central hearth. The evening's feasting has given way to that sacred moment when the scop — the Anglo-Saxon poet — arises, his harp cradled in weathered hands.
Silence falls as he strikes the first note, his voice carrying the first words across the hall. He speaks not in the everyday language of the kitchen and the marketplace, but in the ancient metre of his people:
Hwæt, ic swefna cyst secgan wylle
hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte
“Lo, I want to tell the best of dreams,
what appeared to me in the middle of the night” (Dream of the Rood 1–2)
The words pulse with a peculiar rhythm, each line cleaving neatly in two, yet bound together by repeated sounds that strike the ear like hammer blows on an anvil: "swefna... secgan... ġemætte... midre."
The pattern is distinctive — and distinctively poetic. It’s not the sing-song rhymes of later ages, but something older, more primal.
This is the alliterative verse of the Anglo-Saxons, the cornerstone of a poetic tradition that flourished for centuries before fading into obscurity in the centuries after the Norman Conquest.
The singing bones of English
The form of poetry which dominated English literature from the late seventh century until the Norman invasion in 1066 is called alliterative verse.
Alliterative verse is poetry structured around the repetition of the initial sounds in words, rather than end-rhymes. When two syllables begin with the same sound, they are said to alliterate: for example, in “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” the words good and golly alliterate, as do Miss and Molly.
This type of poetry wasn't merely one literary style among many, but the very skeleton of Anglo-Saxon cultural memory. Before literature was written down, these patterns of repeated sounds made stories easier to remember and recite in a largely oral culture.
The surviving body of Anglo-Saxon poetry — some 30,000 lines across around 400 poems — represents only fragments of what must have been a vast tradition. Most of the poems composed were likely never written down, living and dying only in the memories of the scops who carried them from hall to hall.
What makes this alliterative verse form particularly interesting is that it was used across Germanic cultures. Similar patterns to the ones found in Old English poetry appear in Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German poetry, suggesting a common poetic inheritance predating the separation of these peoples.
When Anglo-Saxons heard these rhythms, they were connecting not just to their immediate cultural heritage, but to an ancient tradition shared with their continental cousins.
The heartbeat of the line
The foundation of Old English poetry lies in its complex structural patterns. At its foundation, however, is the single line of poetry, which is broken into two half-lines (called the on-verse and off-verse), separated by a pause known as the caesura.
The caesura isn’t always marked in modern printed editions of Old English poetry, but if we look at the opening lines of Beowulf with two lines (||) printed where the caesura falls, the pattern emerges:
Hwæt! We Gardena || in geardagum,
þeodcyninga || þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas || ellen fremedon.
“Lo, we have heard of the power
of the Danish kings in former days,
how the princes performed deeds of courage.” (Beowulf 1–3)
If there were nothing more to the poem than a caesura in the middle of the line, the two halves might feel disconnected — but this is precisely where alliteration comes to the rescue. Alliteration serves as the crucial binding force between the on-verse and the off-verse.
The typical pattern features two stressed syllables in the first half-line that share an initial sound with the first stressed syllable of the second half-line. Consider this line from Beowulf:
feasceaft funden. || He þæs frofre gebad
“(since he was first) found destitute; he had consolation for that.” (Beowulf 7)
Here, the ‘f’-sound links the key stressed syllables across the caesura, creating a sonic cohesion that both pleases the ear and aids memorization.
The rules governing this alliteration are precise. Consonants must generally match exactly, though certain consonant clusters like “st-”, “sp-”, and “sc-” alliterate only with themselves. For vowels, however, any vowel can alliterate with any other vowel. This is why the third line of Beowulf works: in hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon, ‘æ’ and ‘e’ alliterate with each other, since they’re both vowels.
The rhythm which governs these lines follows such consistent patterns that the 19th-century German philologist Eduard Sievers was able to classify them into five basic types: unimaginatively, they’re called Type A, B, C, D, and E.
These patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables created a template flexible enough for narrative variety, yet with enough structure to stand the test of time, sticking in cultural memory across generations.
Echoes in Modern English
After the Norman Conquest in 1066, which dethroned Old English in favour of French as the language of the social elite, the use of alliterative verse declined. Nevertheless, its ghost haunts English poetry to this day.
In the 14th century, alliterative verse experienced a remarkable revival in poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which adapted the old form of poetry into contemporary (for the Middle Ages) English, which had changed a great deal since the days of Beowulf.
Though alliteration was eventually supplanted by rhyme as the primary way of writing poetry, it never fully vanished from English verse. Instead, alliteration became a seasoning rather than the main dish — Shakespeare's “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes” employs it for emphasis, as does Coleridge's “furrow followed free.”
Even today, we instinctively respond to alliterative phrases in everything from advertising slogans (“maybe it’s Maybelline”, “melts in your mouth”) to political rhetoric (“strong and stable,” “build back better,” or even “make America great again” — alliteration cares about the stressed syllable of the word, which isn’t always the first one). Something about the repetition of these stressed sounds seems to call forth a strong response — positive or negative — from an unconscious part of the human mind.
But the most influential modern champion of alliterative verse was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and his academic work on Beowulf kept the tradition alive in scholarly circles. His own poem, The Lay of the Children of Húrin, recaptures the old music:
Lo! the golden dragon of the God of Hell,
the gloom of the woods of the world now gone,
the woes of Men, and weeping of Elves
fading faintly down forest pathways
And keen readers of Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s other works will notice many more examples of how alliterative verse is alive in Modern English.
The true legacy of Old English alliterative verse isn't just in the thousands of lines of poetry that have survived, but in the way it established patterns of rhythm and sound that continue to move us when we hear them in English poetry and prose today.
We hear it in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ precisely crafted alliteration: “swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” We encounter it in W.H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, with lines like “Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.” Even the prose of Vladimir Nabokov exploits alliteration's musical quality with phrases like “the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.”
Each of these lines echoes — however faintly — the Anglo-Saxon scop's song, still resounding from the torch-lit mead hall across more than a thousand years of history.
English nursery rhymes combine both alliteration and rhyme: Jack and Jill || Went up the hill or Hickory dickory dock || The mouse ran up the clock. Perhaps that is why these rhymes have endured for so long.
I love writing and reading alliterative verse! Great post.