Abstract

As is well known, the concept of the formula in Old English poetry is indebted to Milman Parry's classic definition: “The formula in the Homeric poems may be defined as a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea.” The history of Old English formulaic studies has been long and controversial, but the efforts of scholars to isolate the characteristics of the formula within the Old English, rather than the Homeric, poetic tradition still continues. This paper extends that effort by examining the meanings of traditional thematic formulas in context. In the process it proposes some new definitions of old concepts and introduces a new concept, the “set.”