Metre and clitics in Old English and Old Saxon

This article attempts to extract prosodic information from Germanic (here, Old English and Old Saxon) alliterative poetry by integrating multiple theoretical frameworks. The metrical theories of Sievers (1893), particularly in the revised version of Russom (2022), provide an initial assessment of low-stress elements in verse. The quadripartite clitic analysis of Anderson (2005) is used to provide a phonological interpretation of these distinctions. It is argued that prepositions are typically PWord enclitics, prefixes are Affixal proclitics, and demonstratives show a shift from PWord clitics to Free clitics, corresponding to their development into definite articles.