Dealing Dooms: Alliteration in the Old Frisian Laws

Abstract

The medieval corpus of Frisian laws has attracted scholarly attention for many centuries, first for their intrinsic value, but since the Romantic period also for their style. Jacob Grimm was the first of a long line of scholars who was intrigued by the frequent use of alliteration in these law texts, and suggested that before literacy came to the Frisians these laws had been handed down orally. Later scholars, such as Moritz Heyne and Rudolf Kögel, even claimed that Old Frisian laws had once been recited as Germanic alliterative verse. With some mitigation, this claim has persisted to well into the twentieth century. This chapter seeks to demonstrate by an analysis of some selected text passages that alliteration in the Frisian laws was as much inspired by Latin literacy, whether ecclesiastical or administrative, as by native orality. The conclusion is drawn that alliteration in the Frisian laws is a sign of a nascent stylistic phenomenon rather than the dying end of a formerly fully developed indigenous tradition. The availability, however, of time-honoured alliterative collocations, many of which are also found in the related Germanic dialects, such as Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German and Old Norse, contributed to the shaping of this remarkable aspect of the Old Frisian legal diction. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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