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The bondage endurable by an oral poet is to be estimated only by a very skilful oral poet, but it appears safe to assume that no sustained narrative in rhyme could be composed without extreme difficulty, even in a language of many terminal inflections.
Assonance seems nearly as severe a curb, although in a celebrated passage William of Malmesbury declares that A Song Of Roland was intoned before the battle commenced at Hastings.
The Anglo-Saxon alliterative line and the Homeric hexameter probably imposed less of a restraint ; ;
the verse of Beowulf or of The Iliad and The Odyssey was not easy to create but was not impossible for poets who had developed their talents perforce in earning a livelihood.
Yet certain aids were valuable and quite credibly necessary for reciting long stretches of verse without a pause.
The poet in a written tradition who generally never blots a line may once in a while pause and polish without incurring blame.
But the oral poet cannot pause ; ;
he must improvise continuously with no apparent effort.
Even though the bondage of his verse is not so great as the writing poet can manage, it is still great enough for him often to be seriously impeded unless he has aids to facilitate rapid composition.
The Germanic poet had such aids in the kennings, which provided for the difficulties of alliteration ; ;
the Homeric poet had epithets, which provided for recurring needs in the hexameter.
Either poet could quickly and easily select words or phrases to supply his immediate requirements as he chanted out his lines, because the kennings and the epithets made possible the construction of systems of numerous synonyms for the chief common and proper nouns.
Other synonyms could of course serve the same function, and for the sake of ease I shall speak of kennings and epithets in the widest and loosest possible sense, and name, for example, Gar-Dene a kenning for the Danes.
Verbal and adverbial elements too participated in each epic diction, but it is for the present sufficient to mark the large nominal and adjectival supply of semantic near-equivalents, and to designate the members of any system of equivalents as basic formulas of the poetic language.
Limited to a few thousand lines of heroic verse in Anglo-Saxon as in the other Germanic dialects, we cannot say how frequently the kennings in Beowulf recurred in contemporary epic on the same soil.
But we can say that since a writing poet, with leisure before him, would seem unlikely to invent a technique based upon frequent and substantial circumlocution, the kennings like the epithets must reasonably be ascribed to an oral tradition.

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