Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival: A Critical Anthology deepens and nuances my understanding of what speculative poetry is and how it relates both to speculative fiction and to wider poetic traditions in English. In the course of this book, Dennis Wilson Wise demonstrates convincingly how the structural alliteration that was central to Old English poetry (and that of other old Germanic languages) remains vital today, drawing a line from Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Poul Anderson to Patrick Rothfuss, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, and Jo Walton. Wise carefully lays out his definition of “speculative poetry,” taking an ecumenical view that includes “SF, horror, and the weird as well as fantasy, plus
other kinds of imaginative writing with a generic kinship to fantastika” (page 14). Referring to definitions offered by, among others, Steve Rasnic Tem and Suzette Haden Elgin, Wise congenially squares the circle: “A broad term like speculative therefore recognizes the real fluidity that exists among genre writers” (page 14).
Wise casts a wide net, emphasizing the demotic nature of the modern alliterative revival. He notes:
Since 1954 especially, a newfound fascination with alliterative style has lent a uniquely medieval flavor to several popular subcultures and trends [including] pulp magazines;
genre fandom; historical reenactment societies; the San Francisco Renaissance; the American Counterculture; speculative poetry; alternative spiritual movements such as Wicca, Asatru, and Neo-Paganism; and an explosion in mass-market fantasy literature … (p. 2)
In other words, Wise is using sources often beyond the notice of mainstream scholarship, for instance from the Society for Creative Anachronism. He has dug deep in various archives and conducted oral histories to highlight creative communities from the second half of the twentieth century that would otherwise have gone overlooked—and whose productions appear as pioneering in hindsight. It is a book to be read alongside The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, the highly regarded 2011 anthology edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto. Like that anthology, it may also serve as a primer, in this case for poets who may wish to emulate or experiment with structural alliterative verse.
First, the nuts and bolts: Wise has curated 166 poems by fifty-five poets, with author biographies, detailed end notes, and a bibliography, bracketed by a forty-six-page introduction (combining a thorough-going literary history with a thoughtful statement of aesthetic principles) and an eighteen-page “Metrical Essay on Three Alliterative Traditions.” He is a careful and generous scholar, making clear and considered arguments in an undogmatic way. He engages with the most influential scholars of Old English meter (including Thorlac Turville-Petre, Roberta Frank, Eric Weiskott, and, of course, Tolkien), with leading researchers into modern reception of OE texts such as Heather O'Donoghue, Tom Shippey, and Chris Jones, and with Ted Hughes, Rahul Gupta, Paul Douglas Deane, and other practitioners who have weighed in on OE matters metrical.
Wise is an able guide to the demanding intricacies of OE alliterative structure, which is alien territory for speakers of modern English. To start, he distinguishes between “ornamental” and “structural” alliteration: “However many pickled peppers Peter Piper may have picked, Mr. Piper’s exploits only teach us about the ornamental kind of alliteration, not the structural kind” (p. 377). The structure in question is based on “primary alliteration across an ax/ax or aa/ax pattern; two lifts [ the heavily stressed long syllables ] and two dips in each verse, and a medial caesura” (p. 380). Of course, as Wise informs us, several patterns were possible and discrepancies abound that highlight, in their contravention of them, the rules. More to his immediate point, “contemporary revivalists range across a wide spectrum of metrical fidelity [including] purists ... who accurately imitate more known features of the alliterative meter than not [and] impressionists [who are] less engaged with replicating a historical alliterative tradition and instead prefer medieval 'flavoring' to one degree or another” (p. 12). Wise's sliding scale of purist-to-impressionist is useful, and facilitates a broad church. As he notes:
In “Guðrinc’s Lament,” M. Wendy Hennequin presents us with the following:
Shining and splendid. Steadfast and strong.
As an Old English scholar, Hennequin knows Old English poets never alliterated the onsets sh-, sp-, or st-, and she knows that final lifts should never alliterate. Nonetheless, such niceties no longer much matter to contemporary readers, so Hennequin ignores the rules, confident her audience will find nothing amiss. (pp. 18-19)
Precisely!
So equipped, a reader can plunge into the sparkling and wide-ranging array curated by Wise. Given the OE source materials and inspiration, many of the poems commemorate battles, summonings, fallen heroes, and quests. Here's an example from Anderson (p. 85):
Rune-bound dead men,
rise and answer!Grave shall open.
Gang forth, deathlings!
And one from David Friedman (p. 185):
Hiltibrant and Hadubrant
son and father fought together,
fought apart. The heroes fasten
well-tried war-coats. Over ring-shirts
belt their brands on, ride to battle.
But poets working within this tradition, then and now, addressed many other topics as well, from weddings, prayers, and political assemblies to musings on wind and weather. For instance, from Diana L. Paxson (p. 139):
Summer shrinks streamlets, swift horses seek water,
Wild hair of the heather and white bog-down lengthens, ...
Revivalists have also used alliterative structure in novel, and sometimes incongruous or humorous, ways. For example, from Fred Chappell (p. 370):
Here Susan and I saw it, come
to this wood, wicker basket and wool blanket
swung between us, in sweet June
on picnic. Prattling like parakeets
we smoothed out for our meal-place the mild meadow grasses
and spread our sandwiches in the sunlit greensward.
The anthology includes parodies, such as Avram Davidson's “Lines Written By, or To, or For, or Maybe Against, That Ignoble Old Viking, Harald Hardass, King of the Coney and Orkney Islands,” comic pieces such as “Lutefisk and Yams” by John Ruble, and even “An Alliterative Acrostic Poem” by Beth Morris Tanner. Modern topics emerge, for instance in “Spacepoem 3: Off Course” by former Poet Laureate of Scotland Edwin Morgan, and Tentchoff's “The Song of the Dragon-Prowed Ships,” which describes an encounter with star-faring aliens. More bizarrely, “The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane” by John Myers Myers recounts the Siege of the Alamo, and Paul Edwin Zimmer's “Logan,” retells the story of Cayuga diplomat and war leader Logan the Orator during the Yellow Creek Massacre and Lord Dunmore's War of 1774 (Wise, says that “Zimmer’s poem might be considered a denunciation of such sentimentalized texts as Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha” [p. 110]).
“Logan” is not atypical in its length, however, clocking in at 655 lines, including its invocation and the prayer that closes it. “The Nameless Isle” by Lewis hits 742 lines, Ron Snow's “Blardrengir Saga (The Saga of the Blue Warriors)” is 500 lines, Jere Fleck's “Dream Ode in Long Lines (Draumdrápa hrynhend)” is 240 lines, and Tanner's “Olaf Kunungr’s Drápa” also 240. Reading such narratives invokes their origins in oral performance, and in the daily grind of human life, in the collective discipline and shared rhythm of weaving, of marching, of the long-row, and planting. In an especially illuminating end note (p. 210), Sandra B. Straubhaar explains that her “Baltimore Harbor: Rower’s Chant” stemmed from her time rowing a longship replica coupled with her understanding from Professor Björn Sigfússon of the University of Iceland that stanzas of dróttkvætt (a specific poetic form, roughly akin to an ode) were originally used to help rowers keep the beat. Most of all, traditional OE poetry and its Germanic equivalents belonged to everyone, even where scops and skalds were specialists. This poetry marked life-cycle events, whereas in modern society we have outsourced celebratory and elegiac verse to commercial greeting card companies. This poetry insists on crowd engagement, call and response, the spoken word with its deliberate placing of breath (rendered as the caesura on the page); it is the old Germanic counterpart to the poetry slam and the rap battle, the ancestor of filking and dramatic readings at SFF cons.
Which brings me to Wise's most powerful insights, regarding the importance of the demotic in the revival of alliterative and other traditional poetic forms. Drawing on the distinction between “literary” and “popular” strands made by Jamie Williamson (in The Evolution of Modern Fantasy [2015]), Wise then collapses the division: “By dividing the Modern Revival into two branches [ “University,” “Demotic”], I imply nothing about either branch’s respective literary merits” (p. 15). He uses one of the Society for Creative Anachronism poets, Jere Fleck, as an exemplar. Contrasting the amateur Fleck with another author in the anthology, P.K. Page (a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada), Wise writes:
For sheer linguistic dexterity, brilliance, and humor, none of Fleck’s nearly one hundred stanzas in dróttkvætt meter come close to matching a single stanza from Page’s “The Crow’s Nest.” Yet this is the wrong way to approach Fleck’s work.
Wise proceeds to make a strong case that the purpose and goals of Fleck's efforts to master a complicated archaic form, and its expression of a living communal ethos, should count for as much as scholastic virtuosity (and he recruits none other than Ursula K. Le Guin to his cause, deploying a powerful quote from her Always Coming Home [1985]). Put another way, Wise suggests that units of critical measure or aesthetic standard may be on separate axes, sometimes convergent and sometimes not. With his picks for the anthology, Wise shows us how swathes of cultural ferment exist beyond the notice of the academy and professional marketers—similar to how hip-hop mixtapes being sold at house parties or country & western cassettes being sold at truck stops meant that Billboard missed the importance of those genres for years because it focused on sales at record stores in college towns.
Wise's expansive view of what poetry can be, and how it can be judged, deserves a wide audience, both among those who read speculative literature and those who don't. His approach should not be controversial, as it accords with that of the many recent anthologists who have opted to reject Procrustean regimes. For instance, here is Elaine Equi explaining her selection rubric for The Best American Poetry 2023 (co-edited for Scribner with David Lehman): “I understood best to mean the most engaging, most original, most stimulating work I came across. I didn’t overthink it. For my purposes, “best” would be a mutable word, not a canonical one.”
Wise’s commentary could be put into fruitful conversation with, for example, Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (2008), Gary K. Wolfe's Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (2011), John Guillory's Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993), James Longenbach's The Virtues of Poetry (2013), and Gérard Genette’s Paratexts (1987). The revival of an ancient poetic structure—with its evolution of the form and presentation of new themes—also chimes with the work of prize-winning modern poets utilizing other old forms, for example Terrance Hayes with the sonnet or A. E. Stallings with both the villanelle and the sonnet.
Most of all, the emphasis on the demotic is a reminder that much of the source material was very much of, by, and for regular folk back in the day, centuries before it was run through scholarly mills. Wise's anthology resonates with Maria Dahvana Headley's much-discussed 2020 translation of Beowulf (the one that starts with “Bro! Tell me we still know how to / talk about kings!”), which also channels how the original performances of the work most likely sounded. That is, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival challenges a lazy equation of “demotic” and “amateur” with “dilettante” or “lacking dedication.” On the contrary, the amateur revivalists are ferocious in their desire to learn, in many cases going so far as to teach themselves OE and other languages with remarkably skillful results (as someone who struggled with Old Norse in a formal class setting, I can only bow in admiration). Consider that Sir Walter Scott knew little or no Scots Gaelic, and W. B. Yeats next to no Irish Gaelic, yet we rightly honor both for their pivotal roles in the literary revival of those languages. James Joyce was an amateur when he taught himself Norwegian in order to read Ibsen in the original, and so was Basil Bunting when he taught himself Farsi so he could produce his pathbreaking translations of the Shahnameh and other classics of Persian literature. Wise's inclusion of so many autodidacts is a forceful reminder that canons are about institutional boundaries as much as aesthetic realities. Who is in and who is out reflect debates about authority, authenticity, appropriation, and the acceptable uses of the tradition in question.
Traditions are, of course, mercurial, with many claimants. Wise is well aware of the malevolent uses to which north Germanic traditions have been put in modern times. The poets included in Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival are positive, inclusive, apolitical; their work is an antidote and corrective to the abuse and misuse of the traditions. In discussing various groups with self-described traditional goals to which some of the anthologized poets belong, Wise writes:
Their membership is open to anyone regardless of personal ancestry or sexual orientation with spiritual experience with a Germanic Heathen tradition. This inclusivity helps distinguish The Troth from other groups such as the Asatru Folk Assembly, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has categorized as a “neo-Völkisch” or white supremacist hate group. In 2016 The Troth, as an affirmation of its ideals, signed onto Declaration 127 asserting the “complete denunciation of, and disassociation from, the Asatru Folk Assembly [and similar groups]” (“Declaration”). Many independent Asatru communities have signed this declaration as well. (p. 35)
To emphasize this point to the non-specialists who are the most likely readership for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, Wise might have referred to—among many others—Mary Dockray-Miller's “Old English Has a Serious Image Problem”, Mary Rambaran-Olm's “Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting 'Anglo-Saxon' Studies”, and Carolyne Larrington's The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think (2023).
Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, at 407 pages, is already a capacious “Wunderhorn,” so I cannot tax Wise with obligations beyond his stated scope. As the best works do, the anthology prompts more questions than it could reasonably answer—food for further reading and research. For instance, I wonder if women played a role in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ first stirrings of interest in OE alliteration. Wise discusses the usual litany of Tolkien's precursors (Manley Hopkins, Morris, Eddison, et al.), but I suggest future editions might benefit from referencing Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2008) and Medusa’s Daughters: Magic and Monstrosity from Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle (2020), both by Theodora Goss. I missed mention of significant mid-and late-twentieth-century British poets whose work was, in varying degrees, influenced by the OE heritage, including Geoffrey Hill, Peter Bennet, Martin Malone, Giles Goodland, Bill Griffiths, and George Mackay Brown. Running parallel, and possibly overlapping at times, is the Nordic folk revival of the past half-century, including not least the work of the Norwegian band Wardruna and the Dano-German-Norwegian group Heilung, both of whom are known for their meticulous adherence to what archaeology and the archives tell us. Finally, I would love for Wise and/or other writers to delve ever more deeply into modern speculative fiction for other traces of the alliterative revival. I suspect close reading of the many poems scattered across the Malazan books by Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont would yield some evidence, likewise the prose of Greer Gilman, or T. Kingfisher, or that of Susanna Clarke. I bet other readers of Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival could think of examples as well. If we ask him, I imagine that Wise—cunning craftsman that he is—would answer.