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Article: A History of Old English Meter.
- Article from:
- Philological Quarterly
- Article date:
- June 22, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 University of Iowa. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By R. D. Fulk. U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Pp. xxi + 466.
Once upon a time, we thought we knew quite a bit about the chronology of the surviving poetry of Anglo-saxon England and about the regional dialects in which the poems were originally written. This knowledge depended heavily (though not exclusively) on the minutiae of Germanic philology -- on such arcane matters as etymological reconstructions, sequential sound changes, orthographical distributions, and metrical analyses. But, in the waning decades of the twentieth century, it has come to seem that the edifice erected by the old-fashioned philology was constructed of circular arguments, mistaken ...