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Studies of literary formulism in Old English poetry continue apace. Sometimes, because a "formula" is a repeated pattern within a voluminous corpus, the studies call on computer assistance.' And however they implement it, the studies commonly use either an extrinsic approach, applying to Old English practice what they can learn from other practitioners, or an intrinsic approach, deducing from the Old English product what they can discern about the poetic process behind it. This paper uses an inductive approach and computer assistance so as to supplement the results obtained by the other approaches. The paper studies a literary formula that, though well-assimilated and widely practiced in Old English poetry, has apparently received no study hitherto. The formula is the three-word a-verse (X Y Z) in which the first and last words (X, Z) are alliterating content-words and the second word (Y) is a preposition. Niles, studying the "formulas and formulaic systems" of Beowulf lines 1-25, identified weox under wolcnum (8) as formulaic because it has affinities with 651, 714, 1119, 1374, 1631, and 1770, but he did not notice that all seven half-lines are a-verses, an oversight he repeated when he came to geong in geardum (13; cf. 265, 1138, 2459). Of folce tofrofre (14), consequently, he commented only "non-formulaic, but cf. haelerum to helpe 1709a, 1961a."2 As this paper will show, however, folce to frofre is indeed formulaic.