Nelson Goering

Prosody in Medieval English and Norse. British Academy Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2023)

‘Gothic.’ With Ryan Sandell. In A Handbook of Ancient Indo-European Grammars. Ed. G. Keydana, S. Dalpedri, and S. Skopeteas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; by invitation. (Forthcoming)

'Metre and clitics in Old English and Old Saxon.' Glossa, 10 1 (2025).

‘Atlakviða, reversal, and theories of Germanic alliterative metre.’ Filologia Germanica – Germanic Philology, 15 1/4 (2023: special issue ‘Meter and Rhythm’): 67–93.

‘Did Old English verse have a “morphological” metre?’ Neophilologus, 108 (2023): 69-87.

‘Kaluza’s law and secondary stress.’ Transactions of the Philological Society, 119.1 (2021): 55–82.

‘Phonological evidence for resolution in Early Middle English.’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 120.4 (2021): 465–489.

‘(Proto-)Germanic alliterative verse: Linguistic limits on a cultural phenomenon.’ In Interrogating the ‘Germanic’. Ed. J.M. Harland, M. Friedrich, and N. Gunn (2021): 241–250.

‘The emendation Eorle “Heruli” in Beowulf line 6a: Setting the poem in “The named lands of the North”.’ With Michael D. C. Drout. Modern Philology 117.3 (2020): 285–300.

‘The terrible bite of fire: Metre, sound change, and emendation in Beowulf 1122.’ English Studies 101.8 (2020): 909-920.

‘Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanische Metrik 125 years on.’ In Of ye Olde Englisch Language and Textes: New perspectives on Old and Middle English Language and Literature. Ed. P. Rodríguez-Puente, R. Pérez-Lorido, and C. Prado-
Alonso (2020): 139–161

‘Old Saxon unmet, Genesis B 313b ungemet, and unmetrical scribal forms in Germanic alliterative verse.’ Studia Neophilologica, 93.1 (2020).

‘Metrics, scribes, and Beowulf : A response to Neidorf (2017), The transmission of Beowulf.’ Neophilologus 103.1 (2019): 115-127.

‘Early Old English foot structure.’ Transactions of the Philological Society 114.2 (2016): 171-197.

‘Old Mercian: From Beowulf to Tolkien’s Rohan.’ In Tolkien Among Scholars. Ed. N. Kuijpers, R. Vink, and C. van Zon (2016): 105-117.

‘Lŷg and leuca: “Elven-Latin,” archaic languages, and the philology of Britain.’ Tolkien Studies 11 (2014): 67-76.

• Cossio, Andoni & Goering, Nelson (2026). J. R. R. Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward : A critical edition of his unpublished translation of the early Middle English homily Sawles Warde. Review of English Studies. ISSN 0034-6551. doi: 10.1093/res/hgag038. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Amongst the myriad academic papers of J. R. R. Tolkien held at the Bodleian Library, there is a typescript of a translation of the early thirteenth-century Middle English prose homily Sawles Warde. This translation, titled by Tolkien Soul’s Ward, is the culmination of his extensive work studying and teaching this text and builds on a now-lost critical edition of the three medieval manuscript versions of Sawles Warde prepared by Tolkien. The publication of this translation allows for a clearer understanding of Tolkien’s knowledge and interpretation of Sawles Warde and can furthermore serve as a gateway to the medieval text for general readers, much as his other translations have done. In order to make the translation as accessible as possible to both Middle English specialists and a general audience, this critical edition of Soul’s Ward provides the history of the translation, a contextualization of Tolkien’s relationship with the Middle English texts and their language, the dating of Tolkien’s extant typescript and related manuscripts, and the final emended and annotated version of Soul’s Ward.

• Goering, Nelson (2025). A sound change that never was: h-loss and vowel lengthening in Old English. English Language and Linguistics. ISSN 1360-6743. p. 1–21. doi: 10.1017/s1360674325000164. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In the 1880s, Sievers proposed that in Old English words such as * feorhes , the loss of the post-consonantal * h caused compensatory lengthening of the vowel: fēores. Since there are no unambiguous traces of this sound change in later English, widespread analogical restitution of the short vowels was assumed (e.g. from feorh ). The evidence for this lengthening is largely metrical. I argue that while Sievers is correct that words like <feores> often need to scan with a heavy initial syllable, this need not be explained by a general lengthening in the language at large. Indeed, the distribution of where heavy scansions are required in verse is typical for metrical archaisms : late prehistoric metrical values of words preserved for poetic convenience. Just as wundor ‘marvel’ can continue to be scanned as monosyllabic * wundr , or contracted hēan can scan as disyllabic * hēahan , so can light-syllabled feores continue to scan as heavy * feorhes. The same sets of poems that prefer non-epenthesized or non-contracted forms also prefer the heavy scansions of feores -type words. If heavy scansions of feores -words are seen as a matter of poetic convention, then the hypothesis of compensatory lengthening in the language generally is left without evidence and should be rejected.

• Goering, Nelson (2025). Metre and clitics in Old English and Old Saxon. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. 10(1), p. 1–32. doi: 10.16995/glossa.20156. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article attempts to extract prosodic information from Germanic (here, Old English and Old Saxon) alliterative poetry by integrating multiple theoretical frameworks. The metrical theories of Sievers (1893), particularly in the revised version of Russom (2022), provide an initial assessment of low-stress elements in verse. The quadripartite clitic analysis of Anderson (2005) is used to provide a phonological interpretation of these distinctions. It is argued that prepositions are typically PWord enclitics, prefixes are Affixal proclitics, and demonstratives show a shift from PWord clitics to Free clitics, corresponding to their development into definite articles.

View all works in NVA