By 1852, indeed, ‘the new philology’ had many triumphs to look back on, with several yet to come: one might pick out the prize-winning essay of Rasmus Rask in 1814, on Old Icelandic, and on the relationship of Scandinavian languages to Slavic, Celtic, Finnish and Classical ones; the enormous ‘Comparative Grammar’ or Vergleichende Grammatik of Franz Bopp in 1833–49, which covered Sanskrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic and German; the Deutsche Grammatik (1819) of Jacob Grimm, and all their many successors.11 The point which all these works brandished was the intensely systematic nature of discovery, expressed as time went on increasingly by the word ‘laws’ (see OED citation above), and on the analogy of physics or chemistry by the association of laws with discoverers: Grimm’s Law, Verner’s Law, Kuhn’s Law, Thomsen’s Law, etc. There was and still is something insidiously fascinating about the relationships these laws uncover, in such detail and such profusion. Latin pisces is the same word as Old English fisc, observed Jacob Grimm, or indeed modern English ‘fish’; pes is the same as ‘foot’ and pellis as ‘fell’ (the old word for ‘skin’). What about porcus and ‘pig’ though, where the p/f alternation breaks down? Well, there is an Old English word fearh which corresponds properly, noted Grimm, its modern descendant being ‘farrow’, again an old or dialectal word for a ‘birth’ of piglets. The mill of comparisons will not work on basic or standard or literary languages alone, but demands ever-increasing grist from older or localised or sub-standard forms. The reward it offers is first an increasing sense that everything can be worked out, given time and material, second an exciting tension between the modern meanings of words – words everyone has known all their lives – and what appear as the ancient meanings. ‘Daughter’ in modern Hindustani comes out as beti; yet there is a connection between the two languages in the word dudh, ‘milk’. In ancient days, it seems, a word like Sanskrit duhitar meant ‘the little milker’; but the job was so often given to daughters that task and relationship became fused. It ‘opens before our eyes a little idyll of the poetical and pastoral life of the early Aryans’ enthused Max Müller,12 whose lectures on comparative philology bowled over not only (or not even) the learned world in the 1860s and after, but also London’s high society. Comparison was the rage: it didn’t tell you only about words, it told you about people.
But somewhere towards the end of the nineteenth century things had begun to go wrong. As is obvious from all that Tolkien ever said about literature and about philology, he felt that he had taken over (perhaps unfairly, but possibly not) a losing position in the academic game from his predecessors. Why – he could hardly have helped wondering – was that? Why had philology so ignominiously belied its promise?
Probably the short answer is that the essence of comparative philology was slog. There is something wistful in Tolkien’s astonished praise of the ‘dull stodges’ of Leeds University (Biography, p. 111), in his insistence that at Leeds anyway ‘Philology is making headway … and there is no trace of the press-gang!’ (Letters, p. 11). For matters were different elsewhere. No science, Jacob Grimm had said of philology, was ‘prouder, nobler, more disputatious, or less merciful to error’ (my italics). All its practitioners accepted, to a degree now incredible, a philosophy of rigid accuracy, total coverage, utter right and utter wrong: in 1919 the old and massively distinguished Eduard Sievers happily put his reputation on the line when he offered to dissect a text provided unseen by Hans Lietzmann, and to show from linguistic evidence how many authors had composed it (he had already done the same thing to the Epistles of Paul). He got Lietzmann’s specimen totally wrong. But no one said the idea of the test itself was unfair.13 Further down the scale, the discoveries of Grimm and his successors as far as Ferdinand de Saussure (now famous for inventing ‘structuralism’ but before that a student of Ablaut) were communicated increasingly to students as facts, systems of facts, systems divorced from the texts they had been found in. We must have philology within English Studies, wrote F. York Powell the Icelandicist in 1887, ‘or goodbye to accuracy’.14 The claim was false – you can be accurate about other things besides sound-shifts – but after seventy years of unbroken progress for the subject it was also damningly unambitious. Looking back many years later, R. W. Chambers (the man who turned down the Chair of Anglo-Saxon which eventually went to Tolkien in 1925) summed up success and failure by observing that in 1828 ‘the comparative philologist was like Ulysses’ but ‘Scoffers may say that my parallel is all too true – that students of comparative language, like [Dante’s] Ulysses, found only the mountain of Purgatory – Grimm’s Law, Verner’s Law, Grassmann’s Law – rising in successive terraces of horror – and then were overwhelmed …’ 15 Scoffers said exactly that; their viewpoint became dominant; comparative philology seen as ‘hypothetical sound-shiftings in the primeval German forests’16 went into a decline nearly as precipitate as its rise.
This is why ‘philology’ has first the old vague sense of ‘love of learning’; then the new nineteenth century one of ‘study of texts leading to comparative study of language leading to comprehension of its evolution’; and in the twentieth century the specialised meaning, within departments of English Studies, of ‘anti-literary science kept up by pedants (like Professor Tolkien) which ought to be stopped as soon as possible’. But these interesting semantic changes leave something out: the ‘spiritual life’ waved at by Holger Pedersen, the ‘national culture’ saluted by Leonard Bloomfield – or, to put it another way, the Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
Lost Romances
For philology, after the Rask-Bopp-Grimm breakthrough, had moved in other directions beside the phonological and morphological. The mill of historical comparison called increasingly for fresh material, and one natural effect, besides the study of language in general, was the study of languages in particular. Scholars became much more interested in unread texts; they also became spectacularly better at reading them, at producing dictionaries of stone-dead languages. As Tolkien noted himself (‘Preface’, p. xii), the word hós(e) in Beowulf was never found anywhere else in Old English, so that one would have to guess at its meaning from context, were it not for the fact that philology proved it was the ‘same’ word as Old High German hansa, as in ‘Hanseatic League’, with the meaning ‘retinue’ or possibly ‘band of people connected by mutual oaths’. The dead languages furnished comparative material; the comparative material illuminated dead languages. Men learnt to read Hittite, recognised as an Indo-European language in the 1920s (with marked effect on Old Testament studies), Tokharian (another Indo-European language once spoken by steppe-nomads but now represented mostly by texts preserved accidentally in an oasis in Turkestan), more recently to decipher ‘Linear B’ (an exploration of Cretan archaeology which would have been impossible in a pre-Bopp era). Much obscurer discoveries were made. A whole nation was theorised to lie behind the tiny fragment of Kottish, a language spoken when it was investigated by only five people. Holger Pedersen said of their relatives the Yenisei that they seem to be ‘the last remnants of a powerful folk who, with the Thibetan empire as their southern neighbour, ruled over a great part of Siberia, but were at length compelled to submit to the Turks’.17 Yet of their rule no traces remain other than linguistic ones. The romance