REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF A POETICAL TRADITION: FOREIGN INCLUSIONS AS A LITERARY DEVICE (stylistic aspect)

Scottish alliterative poetry, which can be regarded as a regional variety and at the same time the final step in the evolution of the alliterative tradition in England and Scotland, was composed in the second half of the 15th century, the period that marked the gradual decline of the tradition. In Scotland the alliterative verse was mainly employed for ironic or satirical purpose. The Buke of Howlat by Richard Holland, the earliest Scottish poem, can provide an example of using alliterative style in allegory and parody. The paper deals with how elements of a foreign language, as well as imitation of foreign speech can be employed as a literary device. By means of abracadabra, imitating the sounding of Scottish Gaelic, parody of Seanchas, or Gaelic genealogy, and the wrong transmission of Gaelic terms of poetry, the author creates a caricature on a Gaelic poet and the ancient oral Celtic poetical tradition, which was unjustly neglected by early Scottish writers.

Grass-Bed: A Poetic Compound in the Alliterative Tradition

The compound word grass-bed occurs four times in Old and Middle English texts. In each case, grass-bed occurs in an alliterative poem; in each case, the word is used as a kenning for a site of bodily death (a battlefield or a grave). The chronologically and metrically uneven distribution of poetic words like grass-bed in the corpus of medieval English texts raises questions about the reliability of the extant written record, the historical resources of individual writers, and the cultural meanings of poetic traditions. Meanwhile, research in alliterative metrics has begun to suggest that the division of medieval English literary history into Old and Middle subperiods masks fundamental continuities between pre- and post-Conquest alliterative verse. Progress in alliterative metrics refocuses the historical problems attendant upon rare poetic words like grass-bed. Conversely, against the backdrop of technical argumentation in the field of metrics, the study of words offers a second way of understanding the continuity of the alliterative tradition. This article explores connections between metrical history and lexical history via a case study of one especially long-lived and metrically marked poetic word.