Philology and Language Studies: Tolkien’s Professional Work

“Goths and Romans in Tolkien’s Imagination” (Conrad-O’Briain and Hynes 19–32) is a typically sweeping and compelling Tom Shippey essay on what he elsewhere calls “calquing” in Tolkien’s creative work, the matching or overlay of an aspect of the subcreation with elements from the primary world. Shippey notes Tolkien’s interest in the Gothic linguistic corpus as the earliest surviving Germanic language and thus the closest thing we have to an ancestor of Anglo-Saxon, and Tolkien’s regret at the Goths’ abandonment of Roman Catholicism for the Arian heresy (at ca. 500 CE) as “one of the greatest disasters of European history” (27). Shippey combines this history with the observation that the Rohirrim in Middle-earth are depicted as evolving from speaking Gothic to Anglo-Saxon over a similar time span as primary-world Anglo-Saxon could have evolved from a relative of Gothic, and he proposes that the fictional history in which the Rohirrim live as faithful allies on the outskirts of Gondor is an “alternate history” or, more accurately, “parallel history” (31) of the Goths remaining faithful to Rome in the kingdom on its outskirts that they held for a while, while their language would have evolved into something resembling later Anglo-Saxon. Shippey further buttresses the idea that Tolkien had something like this is mind by noting the wistful questions on Gothic that Tolkien posed in Oxford English exams, such as one asking if Gothic verse was likely to have resembled the meter of Beowulf—unanswerable, strictly speaking, as we have no Gothic verse, but the wording of the question shows Tolkien clearly longing for it (28).

“J.R.R. Tolkien and the Ancrene Riwle, or Two Fine and Courteous Mentors to Women’s Spirit” is the only entirely new article in J. S. Ryan’s collection In the Nameless Wood (261–300). It is a loosely argued declaration that the “gracious, kindly, and peculiarly engaging” Christian spirit (274) of the Ancrene Riwle and related ca. 1200 religious homily texts were as important to Tolkien as was the “AB language” they were written in, which he studied so intensively. Ryan affiliates this with Tolkien’s own mentoring of his Catholic graduate students, particularly women. Evidence for these assertions is offered in the form of other testimony to the character of the original texts and documentary evidence that Tolkien had these students, but nothing is said of Tolkien’s feelings on either of these matters.

Andrew Eichel has produced a translation study in which Tolkien is the translator, not the author being translated. “Interpreting Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Translation and Manipulation of Audience Expectations” (Fifteenth-Century Studies 38: 41–63) contrasts Tolkien’s translation with the 2007 version by Simon Armitage, concentrating on their depictions of the Green Knight. Tolkien, aiming at preserving the air and style of the original even at the cost of comprehensibility to the modern reader, preserves archaic words from the original, particularly ones of French origin, and paints the Green Knight as a fay creature, going so far as to introduce references to Faërie that are not in the original text. Armitage, by contrast, aims at colloquial storytelling, painting the Knight as a purely human figure who speaks in slang, which Eichel, who perhaps has not read much recently published fantasy, considers to be totally inappropriate for a fairy knight.

In “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Historical Study of English” (Recording English, Researching English, Transforming English, ed. Hans Sauer and Gaby Waxenberger [Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013], 287–98), John Insley gives a brief analysis of philological ideas expressed in Tolkien’s scholarly work and then diverts to a briefer survey of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic elements in names in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Insley identifies themes in the scholarly work, including Tolkien’s interest in systematic analysis of word-fields, in comparative philology, in onomastics as a source for historical linguistics, and in historical English dialectology. Insley gently corrects Tolkien, and Tom Shippey too, on a few points where he believes subsequent research has unearthed misapprehensions...