Evolution of Middle English Alliterative Phrases in 15th-Century Scottish Poetry: New Forms and Functions

Abstract

Alliterative phrases, along with traditional poetic words and substantivized epithets, are considered to be a typical feature of the diction of alliterative revival in England and Scotland, a special marker of this tradition. Formulaic alliterative phrases are quite a different phenomenon than traditional oral poetic formulas; their formulaic character is expressed in potential variation of their elements provided that the semantics and the alliteration scheme are preserved, which allows poets to create individual author variants on the basis of traditional phrases. The paper discusses the use of formulaic alliterative phrases as illustrated by two alliterative Scottish poems that were written nearly at the same time (second half of the 15th century) and belong to the same tradition, but to different genres: the romance Golagros and Gawain and the allegorical poem The Buke of the Howlat. Golagros and Gawain is a poem composed in the decline of the genre of romance, which glorifies the virtues of chivalry and the heroic world becoming a thing of the past. A characteristic feature of the poem is the extensive use of variation between the elements of set phrases typical of the tradition of alliterative revival. A large number of alliterative phrases in Golagros and Gawain are individual author variants describing an ideal chivalric hero. In The Buke of the Howlat, on the contrary, most phrases are fixed and stereotyped. The author of this poem prefers to exploit formulas as a satiric device, putting typical phrases in an unusual context and thus altering their meaning.