The Middle Ages

The Germanic north kept its own way of making verse: a line of four heavy stresses, bound by alliteration rather than rhyme, and a story of a hero against a monster or a fate. Beowulf and the Old Norse lays of the Edda are its monuments. The Old French Song of Roland and the German Nibelungenlied share that world of halls, oaths and vengeance but not its metre: the Roland moves in ten-syllable lines bound by assonance, the Nibelungenlied in rhymed four-line stanzas. How far each stands from the singing is a separate question for each: Beowulf and the Eddic poems reach us in manuscripts written, by most accounts, long after the verse was made, by an interval nobody has settled, while the Roland and the Nibelungenlied are close in date to the books that carry them.

Rhyme reached the northern languages from the Latin hymns of the Church and from the troubadours of Provence. By the early fourteenth century Dante could build a hundred cantos on interlocking tercets and make Tuscan a literary language; Chaucer, who had read him, brought the ten-syllable rhyming line into English and used it for a whole society riding to Canterbury, while Langland, in the same decades, kept the old alliterative line for Piers Plowman. Read the Middle English beside the modernised text and you will hear how much of the sound survives.