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Andrew Rabin, Hypermetric Verse in an Old English Charm Against Theft, Notes and Queries, Volume 56, Issue 4, December 2009, Pages 482–485, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp203
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THE purpose of this article is to identify three previously uncatalogued lines of Old English hypermetric verse.1 These lines, which have not been hitherto recognized as poetry, form the concluding incantation of a charm against theft preserved in three manuscripts of Old English law—Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 190 (one of the so-called ‘Commonplace Books’ of Archbishop Wulfstan2), Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 383, and Textus Roffensis (Strood, Rochester-upon-Medway Studies Centre MS DRc/R1)—as well as British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii, a collection of monastic texts.3 The omission of these verses from discussions of Old English prosody and metrics is not surprising: the extent to which metrical passages in Old English charms may be considered poems remains contested, even as critical discussion of the theft-charm itself has focused less on its form or composition than on its problematic relationship to more traditional examples of Anglo-Saxon law. The charm is not one of the twelve listed by Dobbie in volume VI of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records as possessing ‘passages of sufficient regularity to warrant their inclusion in an edition of Anglo-Saxon poetry’,4 and more recent critics have questioned whether texts such as those edited by Dobbie should be read as poetry in the traditional sense at all.5 At the same time, Patrick Wormald argues that charm is ‘not of course a legal text’ and that its inclusion in legal manuscripts is the result of scribes ‘working on auto-pilot’.6 Recognizing that the theft-charm’s concluding incantation conforms to the conventions of classical Old English hypermetric verse will therefore not only expand the catalogue of surviving Old English poetry, but it may also help resolve lingering questions regarding the charm’s own manuscript history and the place of charms generally in the Anglo-Saxon poetic canon.
