Reading and Writing Electronic Texts - Week 06
- Mar 13
- 2 min read
Assignment 02:
For this assignment I chose to study the old English meter. It was based mostly on the book Old English Metre an Introduction by Jun Teraswa.
I thought it would be interesting to explore how the alliteration, rhythm and stress of this genre famous for epic poems could be manifested when using a different source to produce the strings. I used a text file of a book from the Guthenberg Project called The Book of Household Management by Mrs. Beeton, A Victorian book of cooking and household management. I was curious to explore how I can manipulate the mundane to be epic. I imagined this book will also contain some aggressive verbs and nouns that are kitchen related and draw a link between the mundane and the Old english metre genre.
The book mentioned above present the rules of the Genre that is mainly a combination of Alliteration - changing the first consonant (or glottal stop), and a verse and of verse structure. It also involves stress and lifts where every line is divided to two half lines. a very common pattern of the stress in every line is AA AB. the stress is on the alliteration, and in the end of the second half of the verse theres a pause and the alliteration changes.
This is from Beowulf:
I tried simplifying it to the consonants and then to add new random words in between after and before some lifts.
I wrote the code so the same consonant is being picked with samples randomly from a dictionary of initials.
I also wanted learned that sometimes the first verse can start exceptionally with a structure of AA AA.
I ran a test for this and I kind of liked the random result:
I also wanted to control the number of syllables of each half verse so it is random between 4 and 12 but failed doing so.
I decided that with the coding abillities I have I would stick to randomizing the initials in a specific structure and spice it up with random words with no alliteration.
I belive I should have done this with a for loop randomizing the sample but was struggling to do so so I wrote different alliterations samples and gave them variables so I can later structure the poem the way I wanted to and print it.
I didn't reach the result I wanted and it is still a WIP. some of the genre rules I learned about like having a noun before an adjective to fix the syllable count were to difficult for me to grasp in code, and also random creation of compounds that exist for same reason, same as treating glottal stops as a consonant. I did Learn a lot about how dictionaries work from hands-on trial and error, but there is still a long way to go, some words repeat themselves to many times. I realized that I like it when it happens two times it creates intersting results such as "Jaws joint, joint not" or this one:
This is a documentation of the evolution of the final output:
There is still to much none sense and cleanup to do, but I hope I was able to mimic some of the structure.
This is a URL for the code:
