Wright was a Yorkshireman, and had been a mill-hand, who had gone to work aged six to support his mother and two brothers (his father had gone away). He taught himself to read aged fifteen, then at night-school learnt Latin, French and German; aged twenty-one, he walked to Heidelberg to spend his savings on a term’s study at the University. After six weeks, he returned to England and spent six years as a schoolmaster, taking correspondence courses from London University, before returning to Heidelberg. This time, he stayed and took a doctorate in philology. He also studied at Leipzig and Freiberg, and edited and translated German books. He returned to England in 1888 and moved to Oxford. In 1891, aged thirty-six, he was appointed deputy to Max Müller, Professor of Comparative Philology; two years later he succeeded to the chair. Müller had been Professor since 1868, in a chair created for him after he was controversially defeated in the 1860 election to the Chair of Sanskrit; in 1875, in a fit of pique after the University offered an honorary doctorate to his successful rival for the Sanskrit chair, he wanted to resign, but was persuaded to stay on as nominal Professor with a deputy to do the actual work. Wright was the last of these deputies. Müller was notorious for describing mythology as ‘a disease of language’, a theory Tolkien later criticized;7 Müller’s 1888 Gifford Lectures, on natural religion, were described by the Provost of the Catholic cathedral in Glasgow, Mgr Alexander Munro, as ‘a crusade against divine revelation, against Jesus Christ and Christianity’. Müller’s alleged religious views (he was in fact a broad church Lutheran) had been a factor in his rejection for the Sanskrit chair in 1860.
IV – Philology
It is unlikely that anyone at a British university today will have heard of philology, let alone studied it, under that name at least. During the late nineteenth century, however, it was one of the most exciting and innovative areas of scholarship. Even today, it is a splendid intellectual adventure.
So, what is philology? It is both a prolegomenon and an essential companion to literary study. It tries to answer some basic questions: how can we discuss what a text says, what an author might have meant, unless we know as much as we can about the meaning and resonance of the words he used? But what can we know of the meaning of languages all of whose speakers are long dead, and which perhaps survive only in fragments? We can know much, philology argues, by using the comparative method. This is widely agreed to have been begun by an English polyglot, Sir William Jones, who in 1786 declared that the similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were too close and too systematic to be coincidence; they must be related to some common ancestor, from which the Germanic and Celtic languages also stemmed. During the nineteenth century, a series of tremendous (mostly German) pundits explored and systematized this observation, and discovered clear and predictable relations between almost all European languages both extant and extinct, as well as some languages of the Indian subcontinent and of places in between. There were a number of fascinating corollaries to these studies. First, the very regularity of relations between languages, which could be codified as ‘laws’, meant that words that no longer survived could be hypothesized with a high degree of accuracy; second, language itself became historical evidence.
Hypothetical word-forms, typically earlier and more ‘primitive’ than those which survive, are when written down by convention prefixed with an asterisk; the resulting language might be called an ‘asterisk language’. English father, for example, is paralleled by Latin pater (Greek πατήρ) and Sanskrit pitar, besides the German vater, Old Norse faðir, Gothic fadar and others; this suggests a ‘Common Germanic’ form *fadēr, derived from an Indo-European *pətēr. All the ‘Germanic’ forms share the same initial change of /p/ to /f/ found, for instance, also in English fish besides Latin piscis.
Now, a word always refers to something; so if, for instance, all the Germanic languages use related words for ‘birch tree’, we may reliably conclude that speakers of their hypothetical common ancestor language (‘proto-Germanic’), whoever wherever and whenever they were, lived somewhere where birch trees grew. From thousands of similar pieces of evidence, we may construct a picture of the society and culture where an unattested, but historically certain, language was spoken. An asterisk language (what Tolkien once called ‘star-spangled grammar’) thus leads to what Tom Shippey has christened an asterisk reality. Shippey explains further:
The thousands of pages of ‘dry as dust’ theorems about languagechange, sound-shifts and ablaut-gradations were, in the minds of most philologists, an essential and natural basis for far more exciting speculations about the wide plains of ‘Gothia’ and the hidden, secret trade routes across the primitive forests of the North, Myrkviðr inn ókunni, the ‘pathless Mirkwood’ itself.8
There was even, famously, a piece of synthetic literature written in Proto-Indo-European, or scholars’ then best guess at it. It was a folktale, confected in 1868 by the German philologist August Schleicher, and known as Schleicher’s Fable. In its earliest form, it ran
Avis akvāsas ka
Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vāgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhāram magham, tam, manum āku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ā vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. Akvāsas ā vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnām avisāms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnā na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram ā bhugat.
But within a few years, Schleicher’s professional colleagues and rivals had suggested various emendations and produced various revised versions. A century and a half later, it now looks like this:
Each of these means, more or less,
The sheep and the horses
[On a hill,] a sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: ‘My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.’ The horses said: ‘Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.’ Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.
In recent years, Indo-European philology of a technical stamp has become unattractively wedded to diacritics, superscripts and subscripts, and similar typographical horrors.10
Returning to Tolkien’s day, we might consider the example of Jacob Grimm, who (with his brother Wilhelm) collected and published the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (better known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales). Both Grimm brothers were distinguished academics; Jacob is, in philological circles, equally famous as the author of the monumental Deutsche Grammatik and the deviser of ‘Grimm’s Law’, which expresses the regular consonant changes that operate to mark the Germanic languages from their Indo-European cognates. He also wrote a comprehensive Deutsche Mythologie analysing the remains of pagan belief across the extant Germanic cultures, making a synthesis from hints and etymologies as much as from surviving legends. He and his brother not only collaborated on the Hausmärchen, but also began the great Deutsches Wörterbuch, a historical dictionary of the German language on so vast a scale that it was not finished until 1961. This combination of austere philological expertise with an interest in collecting and synthesizing the near-lost fragments of his ancestors’ mythology made Grimm, for Tolkien, an emblematic and inspiring figure. He is as close as anyone to a model for the sort of scholar Tolkien was to become.
The late years of the nineteenth century saw a profusion of books and articles claiming to describe the culture and beliefs of the speakers of the languages scholarship had recovered. Some of these early studies seem, now, fanciful or unrealistic; but the attempt itself remains, surely, both valuable and fascinating.11 Tolkien began to apply exactly this technique to his own invented languages; the search for a context for them was at the heart of his maturing imagined world.
All of this was in the background of Tolkien’s mind in these years, and lay behind the teaching of Joseph Wright; but we should not think that Tolkien was wholly studious; in fact, as
we have seen, he was for his first four terms at Oxford if anything rather slack. He read widely, but much of what he read was unrelated to his prescribed course of study. Notably, in his first term he found a Finnish grammar in his college library, and was immediately bowled over by the language; he described the experience as like discovering a hidden cellar full of ‘amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before’.12 He had read the Kalevala – Elias Lönnrot’s nineteenth-century epic-length synthesis of orally transmitted Finnish mythological poems – in his last year at school, in Kirby’s English version, done into what will forever be known as ‘Hiawatha metre’ (after it was used by Longfellow in his poem of that name, although it is in fact the closest English analogue to the metre of the Finnish original);13 hitherto, he had met Finnish itself only in the Kalevala’s proper names. He now lost himself in the language – ‘I at once made a wild assault on the stronghold of the original language [of the Kalevala] and was repulsed with heavy losses’;14 although he never achieved more than a slow reading knowledge of Finnish, the language – its sounds and structures – became the touchstone of his developing linguistic aesthetic. He abandoned work on ‘Naffarin’ (and also, he said years later, on ‘an “unrecorded” Germanic language’: this is ‘Gautisk’, which probably aimed at reproducing the language of the Geats of Beowulf fame15), and began to devise a ‘private language’ based on Finnish. This was eventually named Qenya. Not that all his distractions were scholarly; he was highly sociable, and took a full and lively part in the various concerts, drinks parties, dining clubs and literary societies at his college. He also spent a fortnight with King Edward’s Horse in camp near Folkestone in the summer of 1912; he enjoyed the riding, although it was on a succession of intractable horses, and the weather was foul; oral tradition claims he was a natural horseman, and was given a string of difficult mounts to break them in.16 He was also less diligent about the practice of his religion than he had been as a schoolboy. He was both living slightly beyond his means and, in fact, apart from philology, doing little more work than was absolutely required. In the Trinity Term of 1912, as we saw, the college authorities told him he must do better, or risk losing his Exhibition. He buckled down to work, eventually, but not until the new year.
In February 1913, after four terms of agreeable and educative coasting, and a month after the excitements of his reunion with Edith, Tolkien sat his first public examination, Honour Moderations, and was placed in the Second Class. This was not disastrous, but as an Exhibitioner of his college he was expected to do better. He did particularly badly in his paper on Tacitus, in Latin verse composition and in translating Virgil; whilst his Latin prose and Greek verse compositions were so scruffily written as to be almost unreadable. This suggests that, perhaps surprisingly, it was the rigorously linguistic papers (composition in and translation from the classical languages) that were his weakest point, whilst his essays on literary subjects were acceptable.17 His tutors, fortunately, were not fools; they noted he had obtained a pure alpha in his Comparative Philology paper (a combination of natural aptitude and the teaching of Joseph Wright), which in fact saved him from being placed in the Third Class (which would probably have meant the loss of his Exhibition, and thus the end of his Oxford career), and suggested he transfer to the English School (that is, begin a wholly new course of study) the following term. The college authorities generously allowed him to transfer his Exhibition, which was strictly for the study of Classics, to this new School. He resigned from King Edward’s Horse at the end of the month.18
V – English at Oxford
The Oxford English School had been founded only twenty years previously, and was still the object of disdain from the more old-fashioned proponents of more serious subjects (such as Classics). English literature, surely, was something that gentlemen read in their spare time, rather than a proper academic exercise. It was one of the strengths of the philological approach to English that it countered such critics, showing that English might involve proper rigour and discipline, rather than being an excuse for undirected chatter about novel-reading (Tolkien, indeed, never really thought contemporary writing had much place in an academic curriculum). Nevertheless, there was still an air of the comparatively unfocussed: one near contemporary, who like Tolkien came to English after reading Classics, detected in his fellow English students, in comparison with his previous peers, ‘a certain amateurishness’. The demographic of the English School was an unusual one, for Oxford at this date at any rate; the same observer noted his fellows were mostly ‘women, Indians, and Americans’.19 Women were not accepted for most of the undergraduate Schools, and English was one of the few subjects for which dedicated teaching was available; whilst the presence of ‘Indians’ may be explained in part by the decision, in 1855, made by the Indian Civil Service, the most prestigious of all Imperial careers, to include English literature amongst the subjects required for its famously demanding examinations. At another level, of course, all of these were groups excluded by sex or geography from the intensive study of the classical languages that was the enduring backbone of English schooling. Male Englishmen tended to come to the English School after (at least) Classical Moderations. At this date, the School of English Language and Literature was still only a subordinate division of the School of Modern Languages. Despite this, the School had been home to some remarkable scholars.
Its oldest professorial chair was the Rawlinsonian Chair of Anglo-Saxon, established in 1795; it was originally however held only for a fixed term of five years (much like the Professorship of Poetry, although unlike the latter it was not filled by popular election), until the election of Joseph Bosworth in 1858.
The founder of the chair, Richard Rawlinson, was a Non-Juror (one, that is, who refused to take the oath of allegiance to William of Orange and his successors after James II was deposed in 1688, and was thus barred from public office) and a man of formidable and eclectic learning, and equally formidable prejudices. He left a substantial collection of manuscripts and other materials to the Bodleian Library (the manuscripts alone ran to 5,000 items) and property to endow a chair of Anglo-Saxon, which was however not open to Irishmen or Scotsmen, to inhabitants of the Plantations (by which he meant the American and West Indian colonies) or to Fellows of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, with both of which learned bodies Rawlinson had had fallings-out. It was not until 1795, forty years after Rawlinson’s death, that the chair was first filled; for the next sixty years it was held by a series of amateurs of Anglo-Saxon studies, whose expertise in the field was not always clear and whose publications were generally meagre. Only the last of the series, John Earle, Fellow of Oriel and a prolific if unscientific editor of Old English texts, made any real contribution to Old English studies. Three others – John Josias Conybeare, Thomas Silver and James Ingram – published on the subject, but not to any especial acclaim; Conybeare’s posthumous Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, in particular, was the object of immediate and corrosive criticism.
Bosworth, a rural clergyman of private means (he added to Rawlinson’s original endowment, and also gave £10,000 to establish a comparable chair at Cambridge) and an Anglo-Saxonist of considerable achievement (his Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, albeit revised, is still a standard text), held the chair until his death in 1876, after which it was held again by John Earle. Earle held the post until his death in 1903, aged almost eighty.
Bosworth and Earle were both old-style Anglo-Saxonists, clergyman dons of varied enthusiasms with no more than amateur linguistic competence. This was very different from the approach taken by Arthur Napier, who in 1885 was the first holder of a newly created Merton Chair in English Language and Literature. Napier’s early training was in industrial chemistry (he was heir to a Lancashire cotton-spinning magnate, whose wife came from a family of Staffordshire pottery makers), but after he heard Earle and Max Müller lecture at Oxford, his studies at Göttingen had been diverted into philology under the great Anglo-Saxonist Julius Zupitza, and he
soon stood high amongst German-trained English philologists. He exemplified the German approach to the subject: thoroughly professional, strictly limited to philological technicality (excluding, that is, anything perceived as literary or historical, not as lacking interest, but as the proper field of other scholars in whose preserves he did not wish to poach), outwardly dessicate. He was unanimously elected to the new chair, despite the efforts of Henry Sweet to get the job.
Sweet, reputed model for Shaw’s Henry Higgins, was embittered by this failure. He was both chronically shy and diffident, and overweeningly confident in his own abilities (which were very considerable), and was on occasion given to impolitic bluntness: a combination designed to prevent advancement at Oxford, even for one of his obvious talent and European reputation. He developed what Shaw called ‘a Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries’. His achievements might not be denied, however: he had written several pioneering works on phonetics and language teaching, as well as producing primers and editions of texts; his famous Anglo-Saxon Reader first appeared in 1876, when Sweet was thirty-one, and, only lightly revised, remains in use as an undergraduate textbook almost a century and a half later. His first major work, an edition of the Alfredian Cura Pastoralis, appeared in 1871 when he was a (comparatively elderly) undergraduate: he had won a Balliol scholarship aged twenty-four, after five years working in an office. The edition had at once become standard, and was recognized as fundamental for the study of Old English dialect. Unlike most of his English philological contemporaries, Sweet was keen to retain intellectual independence from German scholarly trends, and sought to establish a peculiarly English school of philology; but in this, his difficult personality proved an unsurmountable barrier.
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