The earliest English verse, like early Germanic verse generally, is
based on the recurrence of strong accents, and is composed of a long
line made up of two short lines, or half-lines, which are bound together
by alliteration. As to the number of accents to be counted in the line,
there are two theories, the "two-accent" and the "four-accent."
According to the first, we should count two accents to the half-line,
and four to the long line; according to the second, we should count four
to the half-line and eight to the long line. The distinction is not so
marked, however, as would appear at first thought; for the two-accent
theorists recognize a considerable number of secondary accents in
addition to the principal ones, while the four-accent theorists
recognize half the accents as being commonly weaker than the other half.
The four-accent theory is that of Lachmann, represented chiefly in
more recent scholarship by ten Brink and Kaluza. Lachmann took, as
the typical Germanic line, such a verse as this from the
_Hildebrandlied_,--
"Garutun se iro guðhama: gurtun sih iro suert ana;"
but admitted that the Anglo-Saxon line was a departure from the
type in the direction of fewer accents. Ten Brink, however, found
the full number of accents in the typical Anglo-Saxon line. "It is
based upon a measure which belonged to the antiquity of all
Germanic races, namely, the line with eight emphatic syllables,
divided into equal parts by the cesura." (_English Literature_,
trans. Kennedy, vol. i. pp. 21, 22.) The principal representative
of the two-accent theory is Sievers, whose conclusions have been
pretty generally accepted by English and American scholars. He
admits that very many, perhaps most, Anglo-Saxon lines can be read
with eight accents, but shows that there is still a large
proportion (some eleven hundred in _Beowulf_) which cannot be so
read without wrenching the natural reading. On this subject, see
Westphal's _Allgemeine Metrik_, Sievers's _Altgermanische Metrik_,
Kaluza's _Der Altenglische Vers_, and the articles by Sievers,
Luick, and ten Brink in Paul's _Grundriss der Germanische
Philologie_.
Aside from the two-part structure of the long line, the number of
accents, and the alliteration, Anglo-Saxon verse is marked by the usual
coincidence of the principal accents with long syllables. The unaccented
parts of the line vary in both the number and length of the syllables.
In general, each half-line is divided into two feet, or measures; and,
according to the structure of these feet, the ordinary half-lines of
Anglo-Saxon verse have been reduced by Sievers to five fundamental
types.