lethargic_man | Book: "The Road to Middle-Earth" (Reply)

I've just read The Road to Middle-Earth by Tom Shipley, which is about the philological background behind Tolkien's writing. Philology, the book explains, was out of favour in Tolkien's day; "lit." in the ascendant and dismissive of "lang.". Tolkien came down thoroughly in the latter camp (as do I, rather).

Much of the book involves a picking apart the fine philological details of Tolkien's works, but the part that got me the most excited (though little to do with Tolkien per se) was the overview of philology and its achievements in the first two chapters:

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 Yenisey 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.' Yet of their rule no traces remain other than linguistic ones.

Philology could be used to reconstruct whole empires from just a few words and phrases; Shipley talks about how philologists postulated a "Gothic Empire" stretching across Europe east of the Roman Empire in the fourth century -- and then goes on to say:

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 [from the Crimea] 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.

There were lots of other similarly fascinating tidbits. For example, in talking about how the postulated Gothic Empire was destroyed by the Huns invading from the east, it emerged that the Huns' leader, Attila, actually bore a Gothic name:

'Attila' is the diminutive form of the Gothic word for father [...] and 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 civlisation!

Also other fascinating tidbits relating to Tolkien's writing. For example, the Rohirrim in The Lord of the Rings refer to their country as the Mark. Where did Tolkien get this name from? It turns out "Mark", though unrecorded in that form, was "certainly" the name used for their country by the inhabitants of the realm known to us by the Latinised name Mercia.

Another interesting tidbit: All the names in Théoden's pedigree from Thengel back to Brego, saving only Déor and Gram, are Old English word for "king". This surprised me a bit, seeing as how there was a perfectly respectable Indo-European term, I thought, for "king", turning up in as widely spread contexts as "rex" (Latin, and English "reign", etc), "rix" (Old Celtic, as in Vercingetorix), "raja" (Sanskrit), "reich" (German), etc. (The term "king", I already knew, derived from Old English "cynyng", meaning "of the [royal] kin".)

Well, I looked up this term in my first edition OED (the errors in which the book happily points out); and it turns out the Germanic versions of this term ("reich", "rijk", etc) aren't derived from a proto-Indo-European stem, but borrowed from the Celtic form. (Which makes sense, because when the Germans first appeared in history, they were associated with, possibly even dominated by (in a reversal of what would come to pass a millennium later), the Celts.) This stem does still exist in English, but it has changed its meaning; the descendant term in modern English is "rich".

It is this change of meaning which resulted, then, in these other terms for "king" entering the English language (though why there were so many of them I don't know).

The book also has lots of other information about stuff I would never have seen in Tolkien's writings of my own accord; and also about references and resonances to Christianity in the writings, likewise. (Some of the Biblical resonances in The Silmarillion were indeed obvious to me, but other ones, such as the take on the Fall and Redemption of mankind pretty opaque to me, as things which my own religion does not lay as heavy an emphasis on as Tolkien's own Catholicism.)