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Tips for Poets ~ Norse Alliterative Poetry Workshop Now how is alliteration actually employed in a poem? That depends on the
poetic meter. In this course, we will cover the two best-known, and easiest, meters: Alliterative rules were and are broken for various reasons, ranging from a wish for variety and poetic license to incompetence. For the purposes of learning this meter, we will all try to stick as close to the rules as possible. You can always break them later :-). If you catch me breaking them, tell me. As long as we follow the Old Norse meters, it does not matter that we do it in modern English instead of Old Norse. Those of you that are learning Old Norse or Old English can apply the rules you learn here to these languages as well, or to any other language of the world for that matter. During its evolution as a language, Old Norse lost weak (unemphasized) word syllables, thus becoming very short and terse in itself. The beat is on the root syllable. Both make Old Norse ideally suited to the meters that were developed for it. Other languages with dissimilar properties may be less ideally suited, and more challenging.
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