I finally understand why I love the sentences of JRR Tolkien so much
First Timers | 23 May 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOrgYaP2VDg
6:12 Let's take the sentence.
The wind was howling | and the thun )der still growling.
When the siege and the assault | had ceased at Troy ... this line has two beats plus two beats, but many lines in Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight (which I read in Tolkien's translation) actually have two beats plus three beats, like above.
And they had a business getting themselves | and their ponies along.
Two beats and two beats, like the first line from Sir Gawaine. In his explanation to Beowulf, Tolkien noted that only full beats, stressed long syllables, or two short ones the first of which is stressed, count as beats. You don't count a syllable as a beat just because it's surrounded by two weak ones in Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Hence "and they had a" contains no beat and "business" is one beat, not a beat plus a weak syllable.
The one difference is, first "line" has an internal end rhyme instead of alliteration, and second "line" has no type of rhyme ... or it actually has a kind of allitteration, "b" in "business" allitterating with "p" in "ponies" ...
Not sure if Tolkien did this fully on purpose or if his daily contact with Old and Middle English allitterating poetry simply rubbed off.
7:01 Once again, it's Anglo-Saxon metre with some liberties.
It was a hard path and a dangerous path | and a crooked and a long.
In this, the first half line is involving "path" as a secondary beat, but in AS poetry, this would not have been repeated in the next descriptor.
Crooked is obviously just one beat, because the first syllable is short and needs a second one to fill out a beat.
If he had said instead:
It was a hard path and at risk | and crooked and long.
THAT would have been totally in the Beowulf metre. He came very close. The Roman rhetors had a knack of getting close to Hexameter but just avoiding it, sometimes by ending sentences like a first halfline of hexameter, and beginning them as a second halfline.
Oh, my version obviously lacks the allitteration.
Wait, I curtailed the second part. I think one could analyse it as two lines, but somewhat shorter halflines than Beowulf admits, at times, and no secondary beat:
It was a hard path | and a dangerous path
and a crooked way | and a lonely and a long.
Allitterating between the two beats of a second halfline is obviously not done in Beowulf.
7:11 Here we could pose five halflines:
and the silence seemed | to dislike being broken
except by the noise of water | and the wail of wind
and the crack of stone. ...
Pretty good Anglo-Saxon poetry. Again, two words allitteraring in the second half, not done in Beowulf, but it is done at times in Sir Gawaine.
7:38 Here, the mood is less Anglo-Saxon and more Sir Topaz meets ballad meter.
Far, far away in the West (4)
where things were blue and faint (3)
Bilbo knew there lay (3)
his own country of safe and comfortable things (5)
and his little Hobbit hole. (3)
8:25 Beowulf for one line, then looser.
Boulders too | at times came galloping
down the moun tain sides | let loose by mid-day sun upon the snow
The second line has a second half with four full beats, one more than the Gawaine metre allows ...
9:52 As on a daily basis he was teaching old poetry, from Old and Middle English (before and West of Chaucer), and sometimes translating poetry or writing poems of his own, this is a thing he actually couldn't help ... but which helped him a lot.
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