Campbell’s “Art of Parallelism” in Old English poetry: A Reappraisal Rory McTurk professor emeritus; University of Leeds, UK ABSTRACT: The paper illustrates with examples the ten types of parallel expression identified by Campbell (1962) as characteristic of “the art of parallelism” in Old English poetry. It is found that, while the types are for the most part easily distinguishable, Type 2, the partial parallel, the function of which, in Campbell’s terms, is “to parallel only part of an expression, and to add something new to replace what is omitted,” runs the risk of confusion with type 6, the expansion of a preceding word or phrase, since the adding of “something new” is itself an expansion. Given that Campbell describes the partial parallel as the “simplest variation upon” Type 1, the balanced parallel, “where an element generally double is repeated by one syntactically equivalent and of approximately equal bulk,” it is suggested that a partial parallel may be identified as such if its first element corresponds syntactically to one or other of the elements in a balanced parallel. It is thus necessary to identify all instances of the balanced parallel in the Old English poetic corpus before instances of the partial parallel can be safely identified. KEYWORDS: Parallelism; variation; apposition; balanced parallel; partial parallel In this paper I wish to discuss certain aspects of “the art of parallelism” in Old English poetry as described by Alistair Campbell (1962: 20–22). Since Campbell does not define “the art of parallelism,” I venture to do so here, on the basis of a close study of his examples: parallelism may be defined as the use in poetry of two or more equivalent expressions, the second and any subsequent ones of which could be removed without detriment to the syntax or the essential meaning of the passage in which they occur. It may be noticed that this definition corresponds very closely to the definition given by Walther Paetzel (1913: 3–4) of what he calls, in German, Variation, and identifies as characteristic of early Germanic alliterative poetry in general. His definition has been adapted from German to English by Daniel G. Calder (1979: 35) as follows: “Variation occurs when a concept, already sufficiently characterized for understanding, is brought to the attention of the listener or reader once again, often with interruption of the
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