IN THE INTRODUCTION, I referred to Mark Griffith's excellent article “The Register of Divine Speech in Genesis A.” In this article, Griffith makes several important observations about God's discourse in Genesis A, including the fact that God's speeches are crafted with more extra alliteration and heavy verses than the speech of other characters, and also that almost all of the poem's hypermetric lines occur in or around God's speech. One of the things that makes Griffith's article so valuable is that it includes both statistical and contextualized analyses of Genesis A's speeches, so that the author is able to give both a general statistical overview and more nuanced discussions of passages in context. As I outlined in the introduction, I have undertaken a similar approach in this book, recording all instances of sonic effects (including extra alliteration, rhyme, compound diction, and prosodic effects) in all speeches of Genesis A, Christ C, and Guthlac A. Rather than giving statistics and context in the same place, I have found it beneficial and more appropriate to the scale of a book-length study to distinguish the two. A primary reason for doing so is that, when taken together, the data from all three poems allow us to see some trends within each poem and trends across all three. Between these three poems, there are 5988 poetic effects across 1,150 lines of direct speech, which is a significant sample size in terms of drawing some general conclusions which are of utility not only to these three poems but also to other works in the Old English poetic corpus. Therefore, in this chapter, I discuss the results of these numerical findings, in addition to the value and the limitations of the results in terms of understanding supernatural discourse.

Genesis A

The findings for Genesis A's speeches are given first in Table 1. This chart ranks all the speeches of Genesis A in terms of pattern density and lists the figures for extra alliteration, rhyme, compounds, and prosodic effects. For these four categories, the number of effects is listed first, and then the average of such effects per line is given in parentheses. Under the “Total” column, I give the total number of effects in the speech over the total number of lines in the speech, and then the “Mean” column gives the quotient of the “Total” column's fraction.