                     THE ABERDEEN OLD ENGLISH METRE RESOURCES



This deposit contains files and programs created for the investigations

reported first in O.D. Macrae-Gibson and J.R. Lishman "Computer Assistance in

the Analysis of Old English Metre: Methods and Results - A Provisional Report"

in _Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C.B.

Hieatt_, ed. M.J.  Toswell (U. of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 102-116

("Provisional Report"), and more fully in _ib_  "Variety of Old English

Metrical Usage", NM xcix (1998), pp. 139-171 ("Variety").



Some at least may be of use or interest to other scholars. The copyright

belongs to the authors, but the material may be used freely for all purposes

of scholarship.  It was all originally prepared for the authors' use only.

Some attempt has been made to make it more generally understandable by

comments incorporated in the programs and the header files provided here, but

we recognise that this has been nothing like a thorough job. Please ask us

about obscurities.



The items are:



(1) ASPR.ANAL  A complete metrical and syntactic scansion of the verse printed

in _Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records_ and available as an electronic text from the

Oxford Text Archive (email: info@ota.ahds.ac.uk,  web: http://ota.ahds.ac.uk).

Its principles and codings are described in "Variety", expecially Appendix 2,

but the stress codings are also given in (2) below, with some further

discussion of principles and problems. The syntactic ones are as in (4).



(2) ANAL.header



(3) ASPR.roots  A listing, in principle complete, of all word-roots that

appear in the corpus, with attached codings of their grammatical status. It is

unusually ordered, to suit the needs of the investigation. Its principles and

codings are described in (4) below.



(4) roots.header



(5) analyse.c  The program which created the "raw" form of ASPR.ANAL. It

requires input in the form used in the electronic text of the _Records_, and

access to ASPR.roots. Like (6) and (7) below it is written in the language "C",

and must be compiled before use. It is described in "commented out" panels at

the top, again like (6) and (7).



(6) compare.c  Compares the metrical practice evidenced in any two texts which

have been analysed in the form which appears in ASPR.ANAL. They may exist in

separate files, or may be specified by reference to ASPR.ANAL itself.



(7) equivalence.c  Examines the effect, if any, of any pair of interchangeable

elements of a metrical/syntactic scansion code on the metrical use made of the

variant types of half-line thus coded, with a view to demonstrating how

important the distinction was to poets.



The authors will be glad to hear from anyone who has made use of any of these 

resources, and of any detections of the dubious matter or downright errors

which they will certainly still contain. Contact the first named by e-mail as

macg@abdn.ac.uk, or by snail at the Department of English, Kings College, Old

Aberdeen AB24 2UB, Scotland.





O.D. Macrae-Gibson,  J.R. Lishman.

