Thus Old English itself looked very strikingly different after the philologists got hold of it – and it was they who insisted on calling it Old English instead of Anglo-Saxon to mark what they saw as an essential continuity. The story of Gothic, however, was even more dramatic. Some awareness of this language had been around from an early period. People knew that such texts as the Uppsala Codex Argenteus were in Gothic, that the Goths were an East Germanic tribe who had overrun parts of the Roman Empire from about AD 376, that they had been converted to literacy and Christianity, and become linguistically extinct some time round the eighth century. Philology shattered this picture. For one thing Gothic became suddenly more than comprehensible, it became vital: it was the earliest Germanic language recorded at any length, Germanic was the area of most philologists’ main interest (they were mostly Germans), and Gothic exhibited, in ways that Old English and Old High German did not, stages in the history of all the Germanic languages inferable from but not recorded in its cousins. So, modern English says ‘old’ but ‘elder’, Old English (in its Early West Saxon form) eald but ieldra, both say (more or less) ‘to heal’ but ‘hale (and hearty)’. For these Gothic offers respectively altheis, althiza, háiljan, háils. The common element deduced is that when an -i- or -j- followed a or ái in old Old English (this goes back to the time before Englishmen had learnt to write) speakers began to change the earlier vowel into e, ae – with similar changes affecting other vowels. Where there is a succeeding -i- in Gothic there is a change of vowel in Old (and often still in modern) English; not otherwise.
This phenomenon, known as ‘i-mutation’ became one of the most familiar horrors of university philology, but there is in it something both mysterious and satisfactory: a whole series of things which people said, and still say, without in the least knowing why, turn out to have one very old but clear, 100 per cent predictable reason. It is almost like genetics. No wonder that Grimm said Gothic was a ‘perfect’ language, Tolkien (‘EW’, p. 38) that it took him by storm. A further stage in the developing romance of ‘Gothia’ was the thought that the Goths might not be extinct. At some time in the 1560s one Ogier van Busbecq, a Fleming then acting as ambassador in Istanbul, had heard some foreigners whose speech sounded familiar. He recorded a list of words from them and printed it in 1589. They proved to be Gothic, nearly a thousand years out of place. Their interest aroused several centuries later, scholars could for a while entertain the hope that a living Gothic was still somewhere in existence, as a kind of Abominable Snowman of language. Alas, it wasn’t. But at least it became clearer how Gothic had survived, in the remote Crimea, and it became possible to piece together once again the history of a vanished people.
It is not too much to say that this language and this people haunted Tolkien all his life. As is noted by Christopher Tolkien (UT, p. 311), the names of the leaders of the Rohirrim before the dynasty of Eorl are not Old English, like everything else in the Riders’ culture, but Gothic, e.g. Vidugavia, Vidumavi, Marhwini, etc. (see LOTR, pp. 1021–2). They function there to suggest language behind language and age behind age, a phenomenon philologists so often detected. On a larger scale the Battle of the Pelennor Fields closely follows the account, in Jordanes’s Gothic History, of the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, in which also the civilisation of the West was preserved from the ‘Easterlings’ and in which the Gothic king Theodorid was trampled by his own victorious cavalry with much the same mixture of grief and glory as Tolkien’s Théoden. Perhaps the most revealing remark, however, comes in a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher after the latter had read a paper on the heroes of northern legend. In this he praised his son’s paper for the light it shed on men and on history, but added:
All the same, I suddenly realized that I am a pure philologist. I like history, and am moved by it, but its finest moments for me are those in which it throws light on words and names! Several people (and I agree) spoke to me of the art with which you made the beady-eyed Attila on his couch almost vividly present. Yet oddly, I find the thing that really thrills my nerves is the one you mentioned casually: atta, attila. Without those syllables the whole great drama both of history and legend loses savour for me. (Letters, p. 264)
The point is that Attila, though a Hun, an enemy of the Goths under Theodorid, and a byword for bloody ferocity, nevertheless does not appear to bear a barbarian name. ‘Attila’ is the diminutive form of the Gothic word for ‘father’, atta: it means ‘little father’ or even ‘dad’, and it suggests very strongly the presence of many Goths in Attila’s conquering armies who found loot and success much more attractive than any questions of saving the West, Rome or civilisation! As with duhitar, ‘little milker’, or kamy as a cognate for ‘hammer’, the word tells the story. Tolkien went on in his letter to say that in his mind that was exactly how The Lord of the Rings grew and worked. He had not constructed a design. Instead he had tried ‘to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn’ omentielmo’. Literary critics might not believe him, but philologists (if any were left) ought to know better.
Atta, Attila: what’s in a name? One answer is, a total revaluation of history. It is instructive to look at older and newer editions of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (first published 1776–88). Gibbon knew the Goths from many Roman and Greek historians, including Jordanes, but these were his only sources of information and he could not imagine another one. ‘The memory of past events’, he remarked with classically-educated superciliousness, ‘cannot long be preserved, in the frequent and remote emigrations of illiterate Barbarians’ (chapter 26). As for the great Gothic king of the fourth century, he said, ‘The name of Hermanric is almost buried in oblivion’. It did not stay buried. ‘Hermanric’ turned up in recognisable form in Beowulf (not printed till 1815) as Eormenric. The same name and man, with little stories attached, appeared also in the Old English poems Déor and Widsith. As Ermenrich he survived into the Middle High German romances of Dietrichs Flucht, Alpharts Tod, and many others. Most powerfully, Jörmunrekkr turned out to be a most prominent character in the Old Norse poems of the Elder Edda, which had lain unnoticed in an Icelandic farmhouse till the 1640s, and not been published in full till Rasmus Rask did the job in 1818. The ‘illiterate Barbarians’ were not as forgetful as Gibbon thought. They could at least remember names, and even if these had been affected by sound-changes in the same way as other words, no archaic poet produced anything as false as Gibbon’s ‘(H)ermanric’. From the joint evidence of old poems in English, Norse and German one could in fact deduce that the king’s name, though never recorded in Gothic, must have been *Aírmanareiks.
And, as with ‘Attila’, there is a thrill of old passion lurking in the name, buried though this may be in editors’ footnotes and the inferences of scholarly works. The tales of Ermanaric’s death vary. He committed suicide (round AD 375) for fear of the Huns, says an early Roman source. Jordanes tells a more complicated story of treachery, punishment and revenge. The Old Norse poems, more grisly and more personal, insist that Ermanaric was attacked by his brothers-in-law for murdering their sister, and was left after their death under a hail of Gothic stones – for on them no weapon would bite – to survive as a heimnár or ‘living corpse’, a trunk with both arms and legs cut off. This last tale seems totally unlikely. But it does preserve some agreement over names and incidents with Jordanes: maybe something peculiar and tragic did take place during the collapse of the Gothic Empire in the fourth century. To the philologist who compared these versions there was a further charm in guessing what strange chains of transmission and quirks of national bias had transformed king into villain. Had the defeated Goths cast him as a scapegoat? Had he been made a wife-murderer to gloss over the feelings of those Goths who changed sides and joined the ‘Easterlings’, calling the Hunnish king their ‘little father’? Had Crimean Goths sung lays of Ermanaric to Norsemen of the Varangian Guard in the courts of the Greek emperor? Tolkien followed these inquiries closely, buying for instance the volumes of Hermann Schneider’s Germanische Heldensage as they came