[Today, we sit down with poet and author Adam Bolivar. Here, he discusses his newest collection, Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls; alliterative verse and its history; and his upcoming projects.]

Forests Haunted By Holiness: Your newest poetry collection, Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls, is due to be released soon by Jackanapes Press. Congratulations! Is this a sequel or in some way connected to your previous collections, or does it stand alone? 

Adam Bolivar: Thank you! Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls is a standalone collection, but it is in the same vein as my previous collection of alliterative verse, A Wheel of Ravens, and has many of the same themes. The main difference between the two is that I have achieved a higher level of knowledge about the form, and the poems in this new collection are more precisely crafted according to the traditional rules. The two books make a natural pairing, of course.

FHBH: Alliterative verse can be a difficult form to learn. What draws you to this style of poetry? What do you find so compelling about it?

AB: I have always been drawn to formal verse. For many years, I wrote poems in ballad meter, which has a brisk, galloping pace well suited for telling stories. Far from restricting, I find rhyme and meter inspiring — they instill a poem with an enchantment that, if wrought well, has the power to captivate the listener.

When I was first introduced to alliterative verse four years ago, I realized that it was a particularly ancient and potent form of magic, and became obsessed with learning how to compose it myself. It turned out to be a far greater task than I had imagined!

FHBH: The rules for alliterative verse come from Old English, which has quite different rules regarding syntax and grammar (among other things). How did you go about adapting those rules to modern English? Or even adapting modern English to fit those rules?

AB: The rules of alliterative verse are very complex and indeed better suited to the grammar and syntax of Old English, so it may seem a fool’s errand to apply them strictly to Modern English. Nearly all other poets who write alliterative verse settle for a loose or modified version of the OE rules for this reason. Dennis Wise, my first mentor,  suggested a one to ten scale, on which one is “purist” — a rigorous adherence to the traditional form — and ten is “impressionist” — giving the surface impression of AV, but with no real metrical rules. Most alliterative poets fall somewhere in the middle of this scale, but I strive to come as close to one as I can.

Perhaps because of my background as a formal poet, I am able to tease Modern English into conforming to the Old English rules. After all, one doesn’t naturally speak in the iambic meter of ballads and sonnets — it takes practice to compose metrical verse which doesn’t sound forced. It’s like learning a musical instrument — you have to learn the chords before you can play music, and practice brings reward. Likewise, Wóden only shares the mead of poetry with those who dedicate themselves to the craft.

FHBH: Which poem in Told by Firelight was the most difficult, but ultimately most satisfying, for you to write?

AB: The most difficult poem to write was also the longest, “The Lay of Lúca.” There is a Faroese ballad, “Loka Táttur” (“The Tale of Loki”), collected in 1822 by a Danish botanist and believed to date to the Middle Ages, in which a farmer prays to the gods to save his son from a giant. It is a rare story in which Loki is portrayed positively — his guile and ingenuity succeed where the other gods fail, and allow him to defeat the giant and rescue the boy. The tale makes me wonder if Loki was once a culture-hero like Jack rather than the villain he is portrayed as in the Eddas. In my own storytelling, I have made Jack his son. Symbolically, at least, this is surely the case.

If “Loka Táttur” truly has pagan roots, it must have once been an alliterative lay, so I set myself the task of restoring the poem to its original form. This proved to be much more difficult than I anticipated, at first because of my lack of skill, and then because of the demands of translating the details of a story from one form into another. Many times I abandoned the attempt and shelved the poem. But I kept returning to it, chipping away at the problem and applying new-learned techniques, until at last it was complete.

FHBH: Many of the poems draw on or reference the trickster-hero Jack. While the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk is the most well-known, there are many stories about him. Which is your favorite, and why?

AB: My fascination with Jack is long-standing, and I can’t help but incorporate him in almost everything I do. Among his many stories, the one I keep coming back to is “Jack the Giant-Killer,” which is epic in scope, and forms a template for Jack as a guile-hero besting a series of supernatural adversaries with his wits and a saucy tongue. In the eighteenth century, this story was hugely popular, a cultural phenomenon like Star Wars or the Marvel movies, but now it is almost completely forgotten (although perhaps some of Jack’s essential features live on in the character of the Doctor from Doctor Who).

FHBH: A number of the poems also (re)tell the adventures of Luca and Thunor (or Loki and Thor). Most surviving myths about these Gods hail from Scandinavia or northern continental Europe, not Anglo-Saxon England. Why did you decide to focus on their Anglo-Saxon forms?

AB: Norse mythology is a branch of a wider Germanic pagan tradition that was once practiced in northern continental Europe, Scandinavia and, beginning in the 5th century A.D., in Britain, brought by migrating tribes of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who settled in what is now England. Almost all we know of their gods’ stories comes from the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, written in Iceland in the 13th century in Old Norse, and as such, the Norse names for the gods — Odin, Thor, Loki, etc. —have become ingrained in our culture.

However, the pre-Christian English and continental Germanic tribes (which included Frisians, Franks, Lombards, and Goths) had their own variations of these names, and since I am attempting to revive an Old English tradition, I have chosen to use the Anglo-Saxon names. Some of these names are attested — Tyr’s name was Tíw, Odin was called Wóden,  and Thor was known as Thunor. These names are preserved in the days of the week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday — Fríg’s day, the OE equivalent of Frigg or Freyja, who were probably once the same goddess. Some names simply have no record, so I had to rely on reconstructions formed using Old English cognates of the Old Norse names. Lúca, for example, is a possible Old English name for Loki, deriving from the Proto-Germanic luka, suggestive of tangling.

My mother’s family is of English descent, so I feel an ancestral connection to these particular versions of the gods, which gives me the zeal to reclaim them. Why shouldn’t I call them by the same names as my forebears?

FHBH: In addition to Luca and Thunor, Ing and Iden and Woden and other deities also appear in your poems. Do these works draw on surviving stories, or are they your own creation, or a mixture of both? 

AB: It is a mixture of both. Since the Icelandic Eddas are virtually the only versions of the stories we have, I had to draw from them for the broad strokes, but there are many other sources I was able to use to embellish them: accounts from historians, archaeological evidence, folklore (including Jack tales), and my own imagination. The 13th-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus provides some interesting variations of these myths. In Saxo’s account, Hoder avenges his sister Nanna, whom Balder (far from being an all-loved paragon) spied on while she bathed in the woods. To kill the invulnerable god, Hoder wins an irresistible sword called Mistletoe, rather than slaying him with the actual shrub by that name.

FHBH: For anyone who is interested in learning to compose alliterative verse, which poems, manuals, essays, sites, or other resources do you recommend?

AB: My greatest obstacle in learning how to compose alliterative verse was the lack of comprehensive instruction on the subject. As I have mentioned, I was lucky to have mentors with a doctoral level of knowledge who were generous enough with their time to answer my endless questions and correct my journeyman attempts at composition. 

Because of the difficulties I faced, my new collection, Told by Firelight in Timbered Halls, includes an afterword, “A Brief Guide to Alliterative Verse,” in which I lay out as simply and completely as I can everything I know about the rules of the form, from the basics to the finer points. I hope it will serve as a resource for any other poets who wish to learn scopcræft, and that it will make their path easier than mine was.

Another excellent resource is the Forgotten Ground Regained, run by Paul Deane, a long-time alliteration enthusiast and an alliterative poet himself.

The pioneers of writing Modern English alliterative verse according to Old English rules were none other than J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, both of whom had a profound interest in the subject. Tolkien wrote an epic alliterative poem called The Fall of Arthur, which was extremely useful to me as a model for my own poetry, as well as Lewis’s The Nameless Isle. Lewis’s essay, “The Alliterative Metre” and Tolkien’s “On Translating Beowulf” are also invaluable guides.

FHBH: Which book fairs, conventions, or other events do you hope to attend in the foreseeable future?

AB: On September 1, I will be attending an alliterative verse conference at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where I will be giving a reading. Later in the same month I will be haunting the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon, where I am frequently a guest.

FHBH: What other projects are you working on?

AB: In addition to being a poet, I also write and stage marionette shows. I am currently working on a new show, which I will perform this Halloween, called Jack and the Green Ettin, my retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Ironically perhaps, since Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written in a late-medieval form of alliteration, I have composed my play in rhyme. As far as I know, no one has ever written an alliterative puppet show — maybe I’ll attempt that next.