Eleanor Hull, in A Text Book of Irish Literature, also says in Vol. 1, p. 95, that there are few verse poems in the earlier Táin Bó Cualnge, most of the poetry being usually in declamatory prose style known as rosg, while in the later version long verse poems are frequent.
The earliest Teutonic verse was rather rhythmical prose, with some alliteration. It is often hard to distinguish Anglo-Saxon prose from Anglo-Saxon verse. Ælfric, who is regarded by many as one of the fathers of English prose, wrote his Lives of the Saints in rhythmical prose, arranged in irregular lines just like our modern free verse. The reader may consult Professor Skeat's edition. This arrangement, needless to say, did not make poetry of it. But free verse, as we see, was written in England in 1000 A.D.
Dr. Edwin Guest, in his History of English Rhythms, says that the Anglo-Saxon writers sometimes gave a very definite rhythm to their prose, and he cites a few passages characterizing King William, from the Chronicle attributed to Wulfstan in the latter part of the eleventh
century. Dr. Guest adds that in his opinion this rhythmical prose was one of the instruments in breaking up the alliterative system of the Anglo-Saxons. The passage he cites, however, is no more rhythmical than many passages in modern English prose. Anglo-Saxon prose, then, often was rhythmical, and even arranged like free verse, but it became genuine poetry only when the element of ecstasy was present. Even the middle-English impassioned alliterative prose poem, The Wooing of Our Lord, of the thirteenth century, does not differ much from Anglo-Saxon verse.
The earliest Teutonic poetry was emotional prose, and only later did definite rules bind it. The author of Beowulf, though the first English verse poet, is not the oldest Teutonic poet; he had predecessors in rhythmic prose. "When we consider primitive Teutonic verse closely," says Gosse in his article in the Britannica on Verse, "we see that it did not begin with any conscious art, but as Vigfussen had said, 'was simply excited and emphatic prose' uttered with the repetition of catch words and letters. The use of these was presently regulated." English poetry, then, began in the use of excited and emphatic prose. One of the best pieces of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry is the Sermon to the English on the ravages of the Dane by Archbishop Wulfstan of York in the early part of the eleventh century. It reads like Anglo-Saxon verse. One sees the unconscious influence of Anglo-Saxon prose poetry as late as Drummond's The Cypress Grove (1623), an ecstatic prose poem against death.
The fact that the Sagas, the earliest literature of Iceland, were written in perfect prose has puzzled those who claim that the early literature of all nations is verse poetry, and that prose is a later development. The events which
the Sagas celebrate took place in the tenth century, and the following century was the period of their narration. They were written down in the present form chiefly in the thirteenth century. Ari Frodi (1067-1148) is considered by many the first inventor of classic Norse prose. The most famous of the Greater Sagas is the Njala written about the middle of the thirteenth century and celebrating events of the beginning of the eleventh century.
Earlier Icelandic verse poetry did exist, but it does not belong to Iceland proper. The great strength of real Iceland poetry was in the Sagas, which Morris calls "unversified poetry." Some of these existed as early as the first part of the tenth century. It seems anomalous to the literary historian that a nation should at the very beginning of its literary history have developed prose before verse, that it should have celebrated its heroes in prose instead of verse song. All stories among ancient people were, however, originally told in prose; the first expression was always in rhythmical poetical prose.
It is not true, then, that verse is the first form in which a nation's poetry is written, or that prose developed from verse. Prose was the original language of poetry, and to prose it should return. The pattern was a gradual development.