RAHUL GUPTA explains the history and tradition of a venerable poetic form. This article was first
published in Forgotten Ground Regained, New Series, Issue 8, Fall 2025, focusing on modern English poems imitating Old Norse and Icelandic forms, and is reproduced with permission
RAHUL GUPTA holds a PhD from the University of York for a thesis on Old English and Norse poetry and the 19th-20th century mediævalist alliterative revival. His poems, prose, and translations have been published in Agenda, Acumen, Eborakon, Equinox, Molly Bloom, Spectral Realms, and Wiðowinde, among other journals, and online by British Intelligence, and The Society of Classical Poets. His main enterprise is a reinterpretation of the Arthurian legends retold as an epic in ‘the most accomplished, imaginative and technically-correct alliterative verse in Modern English since Tolkien’ (Tom Shippey), from which two excerpts have appeared hitherto, in The Long Poem Magazine, Issue 15, May 2016, and, ‘one of the truly great mythic works of our time’ (John Matthews) in The Temenos Academy Review, Issue 21, 2018. Forthcoming publications include a volume of metrically-imitative verse-translations from Old English and Norse, seeking faithfully to retain the style and versification of the originals whilst being accurate and performable aloud, from Reaktion Books