Kaluza's Law, The Dating of Beowulf, and the Old English Poetic Tradition

B. R. Hutcheson

In A History of Old English Meter, R. D. Fulk argues that Kaluza's law provides a reliable basis for dating Beowulf to approximately the year 725 or earlier. Formulated towards the end of the nineteenth century, Kaluza's law asserts that certain types of inflectional endings—the so-called short endings—are prone to metrical resolution, while other types—the so-called long endings—resist resolution. Kaluza thought that those endings that resisted resolution carried secondary accent (Nebenton), while Fulk argues that the long endings are mostly the result of the last vestiges of a circumflex accent that the endings carried in Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. The vowels that carried this circumflex accent, according to Fulk, were realized as long vowels during the early Old English period. Fulk further argues that, since the rate of adherence to Kaluza's law is so high in Beowulf, these long vowels must have still been long when the poem was composed, and that furthermore, since these vowels could not have remained long much past the first quarter of the eighth century, the poem could not have been composed any later than approximately the year 725.