An analysis of stress patterns in Old English poetry addresses conflicting theories of and lack of uniformity in scansion and proposes that this problem is due primarily to scansion of a given half-line by somewhat arbitrary assignment to one of five types, with no rule-governed word stress principles upon which to base its scansion. It is recommended that for correct and uniform scansion of a given half-line, word stress rules be determined first and then applied to the words constituting the half-line, and finally, the resulting linguistic stress pattern should be matched to a verse type. The analysis provides (1) traditional accounts from handbooks of word stress patterns, based on metrical evidence, and (2) the corresponding grid-based analysis of Old English stress rules. (MSE)