Today, written notes are such a large part of a Western musical education that the word “music” has often come to mean exactly that: sheet music or a printed score. Musicians and their teachers set great store by literacy: by the ability not only to read and write music but also to sight-read a score in real time, in the same way that we read and write words and numbers. But it hasn’t always been this way. It’s time now to take a closer look at music at an important moment of transition, to see how some of its very earliest written forms might play into the history and prehistory of performance.
Since time immemorial, people in Europe had been playing and transmitting songs and tunes, lyrics and melodies, from memory. But about ten centuries ago, as the people of Schleswig were tuning up their bone flutes, something new happened. For some people the oral tradition no longer seemed sufficient, and instead they began to visualize ways of writing down tunes. On the written page, verses came to be annotated with sequences of undulating lines and dots, in which the direction of the text, from left to right, indicated the passage of musical time, and the up-and-down motions of the pen represented the rise and fall of the melody. They were the first experiments in the analog representation of sound signals in real time.
Teeming with alliteration and assonance, and overflowing with cryptic references and metaphors…the two poems are like two peas from the same pod.
Back in the ninth and tenth centuries, monkish scholars in the British Isles and continental Europe began to write down traditional stories from their remembered past, and they left us some wonderful material in a variety of European languages. Our challenge today is to work out how they were meant to be read.
The most famous of their early medieval narratives in Old English is the tale of Beowulf. The version of the story that survives was composed at around the end of the ninth century and consists mostly of plain text, handwritten in ink on faintly ruled white parchment, the pages subsequently stitched together in a leather-bound volume. Today the lines look like prose, forming a continuous text with no hint of structure in the layout and no telltale end rhymes to interrupt the flow. But when you read them out loud a pattern begins to emerge. They are lines of verse.
Unlike verses of later ballad traditions, collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Old English poets rarely used any kind of rhyme and appear not to have followed a regular meter or rhythm. Instead they’ve relied on alliteration and assonance, and shifting patterns of stress. Modern scholars have usually read them silently or, if reading aloud, declaimed them in a more or less theatrical manner. They’ve seen patterns of stress but nothing that could be described as metronomic. This conservative approach has been encouraged in part by the blank verse, but also by a traditional reticence of scholars to take liberties with the evidence. On the whole this is no bad thing, but it makes no allowance for hidden depths. Might there have been more to it than the medium is capable of preserving? Occasionally we come across some curious anomaly that disturbs old assumptions, and one of them is to be seen in another heroic poem not dissimilar to Beowulf.
Beowulf is generally agreed to be the grandest and most complete of the surviving early Germanic poems. But it isn’t the only one. Heliand is the work of an anonymous poet composing in the Old Saxon language during the early years of the ninth century. Heliand means The Savior, and it’s a retelling of the story of Jesus. Expressed in much the same alliterative style and meter as Beowulf, it’s an adaptation of the story to appeal to the experience and tastes of the newly converted but still uncertain Christians of northern Germany. In the poet’s hands, Jesus has become a great warrior hero and war leader. The text even looks similar to Beowulf on the page, and when it’s rearranged into lines and half-lines in modern editions its poetic character becomes equally clear. Teeming with alliteration and assonance, and overflowing with cryptic references and metaphors—known to scholars as kennings—the two poems are like two peas from the same pod. Neither shows any sign of a regular meter or end-rhymes, so the challenge for any would-be performer is broadly the same, except for one barely noticeable detail. Heliand exists in several copies to Beowulf’s one, and in one of the two most complete versions, now preserved in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, there’s something unparalleled in the whole repertoire of alliterative verse. Above the words of three short passages there are symbols that resemble an early form of musical notation.
The notes are known as neumes. The annotated passages precede the Nativity, where the poet rehearses Joseph’s inner debate about Mary’s unexpected pregnancy. Why these sections have been singled out for annotation is a mystery, given that there are more dramatic and more obviously lyrical moments elsewhere in the poem. The first two passages concern the threat to Mary’s life posed, it’s said, by Jewish law and custom; the third describes Mary and Joseph’s arrival in Bethlehem. But in any case, the symbols are neumes, which is to say attempts to represent something of the shape of the music, and are part of a system that would lead in time to the graphic staff notations that musicians use today.
In the late eighth century, monkish writers had been thinking about musical theory and experimenting with methods of notation. Their main concern was undoubtedly religious: they needed to find practical ways of ensuring the uniformity of the chants that were being sung in churches. It was important to the early medieval church that different communities around Christendom should be singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak. Their sudden burst of ingenuity resulted in a number of alternative systems. Some were quite simple, shorthand symbols. Others were more complex, and could be very precise. These are called heighted neumes because the dots representing the individual notes rise and fall as precisely as if they are laid on an invisible grid. Among the most elaborate were the neumes developed at the monasteries of St. Gallen in Switzerland, Benevento in southern Italy and Metz in northern France. Easy to read, it wasn’t long before they began to be applied to the preservation and sharing of popular tunes sung to while away leisure hours in monastic communities or on journeys. Probably the most famous are the Latin and Middle High German poems preserved in the Carmina Burana, which are the work of goliards—wandering clerics and university students. Another preserved manuscript contains the so-called Cambridge Songs. In each collection only a selection of poems has been annotated, which seems somehow significant. Was it because the others were too familiar to need explaining?
Heliand and the evidence of Beowulf hold a clear message, that just because we recognize a text to be poetic doesn’t mean there wasn’t more going on beneath the surface.
During the ninth and tenth centuries, notation methods would become more and more refined and come to look more like the written music of today, to the extent that we can decipher and perform them with confidence. It’s true that the neumes of the Munich Heliand are not of this sort. The symbols floating above the text are more like shorthand. They have shapes to them, for sure, some resembling ticks, some an inverted U, while others look like the alphabetical letters v and p. But even if we don’t yet know how to make sense of them, they still have something important to tell us. They make it clear that one writer at least considered that early vernacular literature could have a musical dimension. It could be sung.
It’s a drawing together of words and music that has support from the poems themselves. The poets are by no means averse to referring to their own kind, and among archaeologists and performers alike, there’s been growing awareness of a connection between their recitations and one particular stringed instrument. The vernacular poets call it hearpe or harpa, among other names; cithara in Latin. In Beowulf, we see it in the hands of another poet, the scóp or gléoman (meaning shaper and glee-man) at the reflective heart of the drama, rehearsing past heroic deeds before the king and his warriors in the feasting hall. From the cumulative weight of archaeological evidence it seems increasingly likely to be some kind of lyre, an instrument whose traditional purpose in many cultures is specifically to accompany song. And indeed, the Old English verb that’s used to describe the way the verse is delivered by the glee-man is singan, to sing. So Heliand and the evidence of Beowulf hold a clear message, that just because we recognize a text to be poetic doesn’t mean there wasn’t more going on beneath the surface.
One of the most distinguished exponents of Beowulf as live performance today is the American singer Benjamin Bagby, who’s made the lyre an indispensable part of his act. For him there’s no practical objection to adapting alliterative verse either to the lyre or to a regular meter. The synthesis he achieves is amazing. To listen to him sing Beowulf before a live audience is to be transported back to a time when performers didn’t necessarily think of poetry and music as separate entities.
And with the question of meter comes something else too. In an anonymous contemporary account of one tenth-century player and performer, St. Dunstan of Canterbury, there’s a description of a ring dance. It’s true that it’s being sung and danced by angels in a vision, but the writer adds (with an unexpectedly human touch) that they are dancing exactly as young women do. So if ancient poems like Beowulf and Heliand were being sung, and could be sung to a regular beat, perhaps they could also be danced to.
Now, there’s a thought.
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From Sound Tracks: An Archaeological Journey Through Our Musical Past by Graeme Lawson. Copyright © 2026. Available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.