Philology illuminated the Dark Ages. Certainly, when it comes to Gothic chieftains, J. B. Bury’s revised edition of Gibbon (in 1896) proceeds with a new caution! But the essential point – it is a point which Tolkien’s academic predecessors had signally failed to grasp, with consequent ruin for their subject – lies in the immense stretch of the philological imagination. At one extreme scholars were drawing conclusions from the very letters of a language: they had little hesitation in ascribing texts to Gothic or Lombardic authors, to West Saxons or Kentishmen or Northumbrians, on the evidence of sound-changes recorded in spelling. At the other extreme they were prepared to pronounce categorically on the existence or otherwise of nations and empires on the basis of poetic tradition or linguistic spread. They found information, and romance, in songs and fragments everywhere. The Lex Burgundionum of King Gundobad opened, as had been known for centuries, with a list of royal ancestors, Gibica, Gundomar, Gislaharius, Gundaharius. It took philology to equate nos. 1, 3 and 4 with the Gifica, Gíslhere and Gúthhere of Old English poems, nos. 1 and 4 with the Gibeche and Gunther of the Germans’ epic, the Nibelungenlied. Simultaneously it became apparent that the epic had a kernel of truth: the Huns had wiped out a Burgundian king and army in the 430s (as Gibbon had vaguely noted), some of the names were authentic, there had been a continuing tradition of poetry from fifth to twelfth centuries, even if it had all vanished and never been written down. Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont, indeed mentioned the Burgundians’ songs with distaste in a sixth-century lyric. ‘The learned and eloquent Sidonius’, Gibbon calls him. ‘How gladly would we now give all his verses for ten lines of the songs in which these “long-haired seven-foot high, onion-eating barbarians” celebrated, it may be, the open-handedness of Gibica, or perhaps told how, in that last terrible battle, their fathers had fallen fighting round Gundahari’, wrote R. W. Chambers more sourly.18 The change of viewpoint marks an enormous if temporary shift of poetic and literary interest from Classical to native. It also shows how philology could seem, to some, the ‘noblest of sciences’, the key to ‘spiritual life’, certainly ‘something much greater than a misfit combination of language plus literature’.
‘Asterisk-Reality’
Nevertheless Sidonius’s poems had survived, and the Burgundian epics hadn’t. There was an image forming in many men’s minds of the days when an enormous Germanic empire had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, only to go down before the Huns and disperse into settlements everywhere from Sweden to Spain – but the image remained tantalisingly on the edge of sight. ‘The ill-grace of fate has saved hardly anything … of the poetry possessed by the eighth, seventh and earlier centuries’, lamented Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm.19 ‘It grieves me to say it’, said Axel Olrik, ‘the old Biarkamál, the most beloved and most honoured of songs in all the North, is not known to us in the form it had.’20 ‘Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets’, wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf (‘Monsters’, p. 271). Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the ‘field of Northern scholarship’ as ‘a vast plain, filled with dry bones’, up and down which there walked ‘a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead’.21 But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go; old languages could be understood, old stories edited and annotated, but living speakers could not be found. Nor were the poems left usually the poems most ardently desired.
That is why the characteristic activity of the philologist came, in the end, to be ‘reconstruction’. This might be no more than verbal. From the circumstance that English and German both change the vowel of ‘man’ in the plural to ‘men’ or Männer, you could infer that Primitive Germanic, of which not one word has ever been recorded, would have said *manniz, producing as usual ‘i-mutation’. The * is the sign of the reconstructed form, proposed by August Schleicher in the 1860s and used widely ever since. On a higher level you might reconstruct a language. Schleicher indeed wrote a little fable in ‘Indo-European’, that ‘common source’ for Sanskrit, Latin and Greek which Sir William Jones had suggested. Avis, jasmin varna na a ast, dadarka akvams, it began, ‘A sheep, which had no wool on it, saw a horse …’ Schleicher’s colleagues were not much impressed, and indeed the researches of Verner, Brugmann and de Saussure in the 1870s prompted H. Hirt to offer a corrected version of it some years later; no language changed as quickly in the 1870s as Primitive Indo-European, ran the philological joke.22 But the method itself was not seriously questioned, only the answer reached. In between these two extremes an editor might find himself rewriting a poem. Eorl sceal on éos boge, worod sceal getrume rídan, says the Old English poem Maxims I, ‘earl shall on horse’s back, warband (worod) ride in a body’. Most warbands in Old English history marched on their feet; and anyway worod fails to keep up the poetic alliteration. Éored is the proper word here, say the editors, and it means ‘a troop of cavalry’, being related to the word eoh, ‘horse’, cp. Latin equus. It’s true that the word is used by itself only twice elsewhere in Old English, and only once correctly – the word and idea must have become unfamiliar. But that is no deterrent. The post-philological editor can assume he knows more, indeed knows better than the native speaker or scribe, if not the original poet – another reason, be it said, for beliefs like Tolkien’s, that he had a cultivated sympathy with the authors of Beowulf or Sir Gawain or ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ which even the poet’s contemporaries had not and which would certainly never be reached by straight ‘literary criticism’.
Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely: it is impossible to avoid mentioning the fact that the very core and kernel of Beowulf criticism in the last hundred years has been the story of ‘the fall of the house of the Scyldings’, which, as it happens, neither the poet nor any other ancient writer ever got round to explaining, but which was ‘reconstructed’ in great and (to my mind) totally convincing detail by a succession of scholars up to R. W. Chambers. But the vital points to grasp are these:
(1) The thousands of pages of ‘dry as dust’ theorems about language-change, sound-shifts and ablaut-gradations were, in the minds of most philologists, an essential and natural basis for the 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. You could not have, you would never have got the one without the other.
(2) In spite of the subject’s apparent schizophrenia and the determination of its practitioners to make nothing easy, philology was, for a time, the cutting edge of all the ‘soft’ or ‘behavioural’ sciences, literature, history, sociology and anthropology at once. That is why it attracted such a following and why Jacob Grimm, for instance, could hope to sell his dictionary, the Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, to a mass-audience as something designed for entertainment.
(3) In this entire process the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality. The whole of their science conditioned them to the acceptance of what one might call ‘*-’ or ‘asterisk-reality’, that which no longer existed but could with 100 per cent certainty be inferred.
(4) In a sense, the non-existence of the most desired objects of study created a