Recent criticism has done a great deal to illuminate W. H. Auden's medievalism, and especially his Anglo-Saxonism. (1) Auden's revival and adaptation of the alliterative meter of Old and Middle English (and Old Norse) poetry is one of the most striking instances of his debt to medieval literature. Discussions of Auden's alliterative poetry have, however, treated it as an isolated and idiosyncratic phenomenon; the aim of this article is to contextualize Auden's use of alliterative meter by comparing it with alliterative verse by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Nevill Coghill, three members of an informal group of academics and writers called the "Inklings," who met regularly in C. S. Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford, to read and discuss their work. (2)

Nevill Coghill was Auden's tutor while he was reading English Literature at Oxford University, and they remained lifelong friends, with Auden writing a eulogy to Coghill on his retirement in 1966. (3) Tolkien and Auden also became friends and wrote poems in each other's honor. (4) In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Auden recalled encountering Old English alliterative poetry in one of Tolkien's lectures:

I remember one [lecture] I attended, delivered by Professor Tolkien. I do not remember a single word he said but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spellbound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish. I became willing, therefore, to work at Anglo-Saxon because, unless I did, I should never be able to read this poetry. I learned enough to read it, however sloppily, and Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences. (5)

It was evidently the sound of Old English poetry that first attracted Auden, quite independently of its meaning, and we shall see that Auden revives and adapts the Old English poetic form in texts that have little or no relation to the antiquarian or fantastic subject matter with which it is associated in alliterative verse by Lewis and Tolkien.

Old English poetry uses a single metrical form known as alliterative meter because, unlike most post-Conquest English poetry, it employs alliteration for structural rather than merely decorative or rhetorical purposes. The meter is accentual; a fixed number of stressed syllables are arranged in relation to a variable number of unstressed syllables according to one of a limited number of metrical patterns. Similarly structured poetry survives in other Germanic languages: Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German. Both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien published accounts of Old English alliterative meter. (6) The key metrical features are described in the following extracts from Tolkien's account:

The Old English line was composed of two opposed word-groups or "halves." Each half was an example, or variation, of one of six basic patterns. The patterns were made of strong and weak elements, which may be called "lifts" and "dips." The standard lift was a long...