Geoffrey Russom, The Syntax of Beowulf. Word Order, Poetic Meter, and Formulaic Technique in the Old English Verse Clause. London: Uppsala Books, 2025, pp. 416.

Geoffrey Russom’s scholarship on Old English is distinguished by its breadth, methodological rigor, and lasting impact on the study of early medieval literature, language, and poetics. Trained as both a philologist and a theorist of verse, Russom has integrated historical linguistics, comparative Germanic studies, and literary analysis to illuminate the structure and artistry of Old English texts. His most influential work concerns poetic meter, where he demonstrated that Old English verse reflects systematic interactions between language-specific stress patterns and inherited Germanic metrical traditions. By applying generative linguistic models in Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory (1987) and deepening these insights in Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre (1998), he revealed that metrical types encode grammatical and prosodic rules, offering a principled explanation for half-line variation and poetic diction.