Columns:: Worth repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::November 11, 2002

Worth repeating

St. Louis University’s T.A. Shippey, a distinguished scholar of Old English literature, delivered a lecture earlier this month dealing with J.R.R. Tolkien. He especially focused on the relationship between Tolkien’s philological expertise and the names and languages in his Lord of the Rings, as well as the 20th-century scholarly battle over philology itself. An excerpt:
“Those of you who have read at all widely in Tolkien’s works will be aware that they concern, in large part, the story of a bitter war full of dark deeds ending in catastrophic defeat. I refer, however, not to the war of the dwarves and the goblins. . . . It was, in fact, the war of the philologists and the critics, or, to put it another way, the war between language and literature fought out with the utmost bitterness in English departments all over the world during the 20th century and ending with the utter rout of the philologists, Tolkien’s side and my own. . . .
“As a professional philologist, Tolkien lost badly, definitively in fact. There is, of course, a powerful irony in the fact that when he turned his philology to the amateurish pastime of writing fiction, he won, even more definitively. In fact, let me put this point to you. I’m told that the best-selling work in the whole of German literature, apart from the Bible, is Grimm’s Fairy Tales. We can never get any exact figures on this, but very nearly the best-selling work in the whole of English literature, the Bible apart, is Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. So it seems to me that’s something like two out of two for the leading philologists of the 19th and 20th centuries respectively. So maybe they did know something after all, and not just about philology.”

--Beth Roberts

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