It's been 3 busy months since my last post. A-level German is darn challenging when you have barely used the language for 18 months. Studying runes on top of that has been both fun and exhausting! As I am now allowed a moment's peace, I thought I might revisit the Aenglisc Blog and discuss something I recently read about in a linguistics group on Facebook: Philology.
Someone in the group asked the others what philology really means - whether it is a branch of linguistics or a quite different science. Though having thought of myself as a semi-amateur philologist ever since starting to learn Old English, I haven't given the term much thought before; I've always assumed that philology is a mixture of, among other things, linguistics, history and literature. I don't have a very reliable encyclopedia available, but Wikipedia seems to agree: "Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics."
Philology is nowadays, perhaps, a slightly old-fashioned term - historical and comparative linguistics covers much of what it contains. "Philology" seems to translate as "love of words" (or possibly "reason") - well, that suits me. In this situation, I can't really help but to again refer to a man I extensively talked about in my last post; J.R.R. Tolkien is one of the most famous philologists of the 20th century. He studied "comparative philology" as an undergraduate, being particularly interested in Celtic and Germanic languages. A specialist in comparative philology would most likely have to be acquainted with several languages. My runology teacher said in class this term that "there are so many rumours flying around about Tolkien, I'm not sure which ones to believe". Well, neither do I; the number of languages that Tolkien knew seems to fluctuate depending on who you ask. We know that he was skilled in Old and Middle English, Old Norse (or Old Icelandic), Latin, Greek, German and Welsh, and that he most likely had a working knowledge in Finnish, Gothic, French (which several sources claim he did not like; might the Normans have had something to do with it?), Dutch and the Scandinavian tongues. Some sources claim he was also proficient in Spanish, Italian, Russian and Old Slavonic, among others.
Am I envious? A little, maybe, but I've come to realise it's hard to measure up to such a devoted man. And let's not forget the languages he created himelf - though that would throw us off-track from the subject at hand.
The Beowulf essay I discussed in my last post is, I think, a good example of a philological study. Tolkien was, as far as I know, the first one to study Beowulf from a literary perspective and not a historical one (or "an historical one", as he often put it himself - possibly since the h is not as aspirated without stress). He talks about the dragon and what it embodies to the listeners, and the words and symbols associated with dragons in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Tolkien, however, would never want to be classed as a literary critic; oh no, that would not do at all! C.S. Lewis was a critic; part of the "literary" circle at Oxford. Tolkien was in favour of "language", and vehemently opposed to students reading modern literature on their courses. And by "modern literature", Tolkien referred to anything newer than the works of Geoffrey Chaucer...
Let's also mention philology in its "classical" sense - for "classical philology" is the study of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, and has been studied since centuries before the birth of Christ. It is often quite simply described as the study of Greek and Roman literature. Again, I believe Tolkien studied what was known as Classics at Oxford before switching to Germanic and Norse studies. A good choice, if you ask me. Then again, I never had the fortune of being offered Greek or Latin at school. I have considered taking a beginner's Latin course while writing my Bachelor's essay - it certainly helps you understand the romance languages. One thing at a time! I need to fit Icelandic into this, somewhere...
