Archive for the ‘Texts’ Category

The Music of the Scop

Friday, February 27th, 2026

According to the poetic corpus itself, poems such as Beowulf were typically performed in front of the lord in his feasting hall by a scop, roughly equivalent to the ON skald. There are those who doubt the reality outside literature of this class of persons, but the evidence of all ...

Pope’s Theory of Metre in Old English

Thursday, February 12th, 2026

According to Pope[1] the verses of OE poetry should be read so that one can beat time to the stresses in the same way that one can beat time to music. To emphasize this he uses musical notation to guide the reading of each syllable. He then proposes that the ...

Sievers-Bliss

Monday, February 9th, 2026

As part of my effort to create a performance-oriented version of Beowulf, I had to look into the proposed theories of metre for Old English. I thought I might as well put the summaries of what I found here.  From a study of old Germanic and Scandinavian poetic metres, Eduard Sievers[1] derived ...

Ormesson: C’est une chose étrange à la fin que le monde

Friday, January 16th, 2015

The Thread in the Labyrinth One fine July morning, under a pounding sun, I began to wonder where we had come from, where we were going, and what we were doing on this Earth.