Old Germanic alliterative metre has at its disposal two distinct kinds of verse and line, the normal and the hypermetric (section 1.2), presumably as an inherited feature of Indo-European metre (Suzuki 1988; 1992). In this chapter, I shall be concerned with the synchrony and diachrony of the hypermetric verse and line in the metre of the Heliand, with emphasis on the diversification and restructuring that this metrical category underwent.

The composition of hypermetric verses: a synchronic perspective

One of the defining features of the normal verse is that the maximal number of lifts does not exceed two. However, there are a number of verses that have more than two lifts. These overlong or overweighty verses are called hypermetric verses. Hypermetric verses thus by definition cannot be reduced to any of the existing normal verses with two lifts. More specifically, a hypermetric verse contains a lexical-stressed syllable that cannot be scanned as a drop in contrast to a heavy verse, which is fully reducible to one of the independently occurring forms of normal verses by demoting that extra strong syllable in metrical terms. Formal irreducibility to a normal verse is thus identified as a primary structural feature of a hypermetric verse. Some implications of this working hypothesis will be explored in due course below.

Despite the presence of an extra lift, the number of alliterating lifts per verse is, with rare exceptions, two in the a-verse and one in the b-verse, as with the normal verse; the additional, third lift in the hypermetric verse is thus immune to alliteration.