The metre of Genesis B

Genesis B has been almost completely ignored in studies of Old English prosody, most notably by the modern ‘schools’ of Alan Bliss and John C. Pope. Bliss regarded the work, a 617-line interpolation in the Old English Genesis, as ‘untrustworthy’ for the purpose of metrical examination, while Pope excluded it from his examination of Old English hypermetric verse ‘because it is translated from Old Saxon, and retains some of the peculiarities of the latter’. E. G. Stanley expressed similar doubts: ‘Old Saxon verse and the verse of Genesis B (which appears to be an Anglo-Saxon offshoot of it) are only with difficulty to be accommodated within any4 set of rules derived from the metrical practice of the vast majority of the Anglo-Saxon poets’. In his edition of the poem Timmer believed that a metrical comparison of lines 790–817a and the corresponding lines of the Old Saxon Genesis corroborated his view that the interpolation was the work of a continental Saxon who had transliterated the original Old English with minor adjustments, a view supported by a more recent syntactic study.