In 1970, an article by Thomas Cable, then twenty-eight years old, appeared in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology.1 An elegant meditation on the interdependence of grammatical and metrical structures in Old English verse, this inaugural work not only marked a turning point in historical metrics; it also launched the career of a scholar whose influence would shape medieval prosodical studies for the next half-century. In that article, Cable attends equally to technical problems of daunting complexity in the description and modeling of Germanic meters and to the logical constraints that bind, inform, and empower scholarly inquiry. This balance of clarity on highly specialized topics and care for the integrity of discourse as a practical culture of exchange values would become a signature of Cable’s intellectual style. In that first publication, Cable gracefully combines probing analyses of Old English adverbial and subordinate clauses with observations on prosody...
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