Copyright 1993 by the author. T his is an impressive book showing in its reference a wide familiarity with earlier writing on Old English meter. The recent books by Geoffrey Russom and Calvin B. Kendall as well as the book under review show us how much is going on in this branch of Anglo-Saxon studies, and give us a keen sense of what it is now possible for a metrist to achieve, partly through greater linguistic clarity, partly through good use of computer techniques. Then John Pope and Alan Bliss, both dependent on Sievers to some extent as everyone must be, breached the solid wall that had been built by scholars who had accepted Sievers more absolutely than Sievers himself had done. Fulk also expresses his profound debt to Sievers and to the late Ashley Crandell Amos.
Statistics underlie all serious metrical systematization.
Yet statistics imply not that a finding is a fact but the probability that a finding may be, in varying degrees of certainty, a correct weighing of the available evidence. The fact of that complexity, and the likelihood that an Anglo-Saxon poet could not have evolved the rules for it in an analysis as complicated as Sievers and those who followed him did not lead these earlier scholars to look more closely at the underlying syntax, as Kuhn did, thus opening a newer, profitable branch of the subject. Fulk's book, however, deals much more with problems, mainly phonological or morphological, to some of which Sievers himself had provided answers. There are all the complications of uncertainty when the linguistic features in some cases, but not in all, occur in formulas. The word firas occurs 50 times in the genitival form fira, once in the nominative firas.