J.R.R. Tolkien's "Homecoming" and Modern Alliterative Metre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” is a modern English alliterative verse drama written in the metre of Old English poetry and demonstrating his interest in versification and his skill in writing original alliterative verse in new and versatile ways. Tolkien’s originality also lies in his use of alliterative metre in a play, a genre not written by the early English; in fact, “The Homecoming” is Tolkien’s only published drama as well as historical fiction. While Tolkien bases this work on historical events recounted in the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,” he also uses his drama to illustrate some of his scholarly theories about Old English alliterative poetry and poetic tradition and to imagine how “The Battle of Maldon” came to be written. Our examination of his careful handling of the play’s verses as well as his detailed study of alliterative metre, evident in his unpublished manuscripts and in his essay on the topic, shows how he creates various styles in modern English alliterative verse, from colloquial and conversational passages to highly styled set pieces. Our discussion includes consideration of the two characters in the play and their views on and use of alliterative poetry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".