While some would consider him primarily a metrist, R.D. Fulk has more accurately been described as a philologist: his major work does not focus exclusively on meter but rather uses meter to explore other topics, such as textual editing, the dating of poetry, and dialectal features. In a recent interview, Fulk summed up the philological approach as “the study of the extralinguistic contexts of linguistic data, or the relation between contexts and data” (Fulk 2014: 366). This paper employs that methodology by using metrical data from two sample texts, Beowulf and Maxims II, to provide a stylistic analysis and literary interpretation of The Fortunes of Men. Specifically, I examine metrical and discursive shifts in the poem to argue that the poet wrote a clear and traditional wisdom poem while punctuating it with narrative vignettes that add a greater emotional weight than is to be found in most gnomic poetry.

In the study of Old English poetics, scholars tend to look at the meter of the tradition, or sometimes a given poem, as a whole unit. With the exception of lines that have words stressed in an unusual position to provide emphasis, individual lines or sections are rarely isolated to demonstrate the importance of the metrical patterning. The lack of attention is generally justifiable: Old English poets mix different verse types as a rule, actively avoiding excess repetition. The constant variety makes it difficult to say that a given type-D pattern in the midst of other types holds any significance; the poet might be trying to add weightiness to a statement by choosing a verse that contains secondary stress, or he might just not have used one for a while and thought it was time.

While stylistic import may be difficult to identify at the level of the verse, some broader compositional styles can be identified: Thomas Cable (1991) and Thomas Bredehoft (2005) have discussed the metrical differences of early versus late poetry and I (2014, forthcoming) have discussed some unique metrical qualities in gnomic poetry. Such scholarship that looks at variant stylistic choices within the tradition at large reveals a degree of flexibility that may have been available to poets. This flexibility can be limited because Old English poets typically maintain a single stylistic norm throughout each poem. In The Fortunes of Men, however, the poet changes his metrical patterning as he changes his discursive strategies.