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translation given above, where “s” is used). This pattern of alliteration thus joins the two verses, or half-lines, into a whole line. (In this system, vowels can alliterate as well as consonants.) Moreover, the verses and whole lines do not follow the kinds of meter we are accustomed to in later poetry—for example, in that of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and many others. They employ instead stress patterns, with alliterating syllables typically receiving strong stresses, and also marking the most important points in the meaning of the line: here, that Beowulf is identified as a son. As long ago as 1885, the great scholar Eduard Sievers described the various patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in this poetry, and despite several attempts to provide new models, the patterns worked out by Sievers are still fundamental for any study of Old English versification.
    Less technical, but also more apparent to most readers, are the kinds of poetic figures commonly used in the poem. The figure that is perhaps most characteristic of this poetry is the kenning. A kenning is typically a compound of two nouns, with the qualities of each now united to create a new metaphor. Examples include “whale’s road” or “swan’s road” for the sea, “heath-stepper” for a stag, “battle-flasher” for a sword, and “sea-garment” for the sail “worn” by a ship. On the other hand, something like “blade-biter,” though certainly a poetic figure, would not be a kenning, since the blade is literally the part of the sword that makes it a sword in the first place. Kennings abound in Beowulf and throughout Old English poetry, making creative use of one of the resources of Germanic languages, the almost endless possibilities for joining words in compounds. Some are traditional and formulaic, though others seem more puzzling, perhaps as a sign of the Northern people’s love for puzzles as a form of entertainment.
    Litotes is another figure that Old English shares with other Northern literatures. The characteristic quality of litotes is understatement, generally ironic and sometimes even humorous, using negatives or double-negatives. We may hear in one case that a warrior is “unready for fighting” when we know that he is actually sleeping, or that a monster is “not unused to ravaging the people.” Readers of Old Icelandic sagas will recognize such instances of understatement as a common feature in the Northern imagination. Yet even more pervasive is the use of metonymy. While a metaphor designates something that literally does not exist, a metonym works by association, so that an object can be linked to another object or person and comes to stand for that other object or person. Thus, a king can be “the shield of the people,” and we will recognize that what is being designated is the king, even if he is not mentioned in so many words. Throughout Beowulf, warriors are associated in this way with weapons, rulers with the gifts they give loyal followers, and monsters with such lairs as the mere or the hoard. Indeed, metonymy is so pervasive that it is tempting to extend the usual sense of the poetic figure to a principle of composition, as in the larger and smaller narrative structures we looked at in the previous section.
    The last feature of style that we shall explore here is rooted in the grammatical structures of the poem, what linguists usually call parataxis (literally, placing one thing alongside another) or what is called coordination (versus subordination) in traditional grammar classes. Parataxis entails a series of parallel constructions strung together, one after another, by the use of a coordinating conjunction such as “and ” Thus, what we hear is a series of actions—“Beowulf did X, and then Beowulf did Y, and then Beowulf did Z”—without making one action subordinate to another, as “When Beowulf did X, he was forced to do Y, because he had already done Z.” (Such subordination is technically