ABSTRACT
The main reason why the language of oral poetry can be described as "eine Sprache, die fur dich dichtet und denkt," is doubtless its formulaic nature. There is, however, no agreement in the many studies devoted to formulaic style and diction on what is to count as a formula. A case in point is Old English. Serious scholarship on the formulaic nature of Old Germanic poetry began in 1889 with the publication by R. M. Meyer of a collection of "formelhafte Elemente" in Old Norse, Old English, and Old High German poetry, running to over 500 pages.2 Today, one hundred years later, our notion of the formula has been sharpened and Meyer’s all-inclusive use of the concept has been discarded. But even so, the work of the various scholars who have done research on the formulaic character of Old English poetry embodies widely diverging and sometimes mutually contradictory views.3 Despite disagreement and controversy, most scholars today will concede, however, that their
1Nilsson 1933: 202. 2
point of departure is Milman Parry’s definition of the formula with regard to the Homeric epics, and that this definition should indeed be the basis for any definition of the formula, however much a particular tradition might call for adjustment and refinement. According to Parry, a formula is defined as "a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea."4 For Parry the metrical conditions governing the "group of words" were those of the Greek hexameter, just as they are those of the South Slavic deseterac for Lord or those of the alliterative line for scholars in the field of Old Germanic poetry.5
