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that cellar door is “beautiful”, especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful’ (*The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 190). He continued, concerning Welsh, the language which influenced his Elvish language Sindarin (*Languages, Invented): ‘In Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant’ (The Monsters and the Critics, pp. 190–1). He wrote in his letter to Auden of discovering Finnish, which influenced his Elvish language Quenya, that ‘it was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me …’ (Letters, p. 214).

      Tolkien also described to Auden how he developed his interest in languages while still at school:

      I went to King Edward’s School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English …. I learned Anglo-Saxon at school (also Gothic, but that was an accident quite unconnected with the curriculum though decisive – I discovered in it not only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and scientific side, but for the first time the study of language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the ‘vehicle of a literature’). [Letters, p. 213]

      According to Humphrey Carpenter, *Robert Cary Gilson, the Head Master at King Edward’s School,

      encouraged his pupils to explore the byways of learning and to be expert in everything that came their way: an example that made a great impression on Ronald Tolkien. But though he was discursive, Gilson also encouraged his pupils to make a detailed study of classical linguistics. This was entirely in keeping with Tolkien’s inclinations; and, partly as a result of Gilson’s teaching, he began to develop an interest in the general principles of language.

      It was one thing to know Latin, Greek, French and German; it was another to understand why they were what they were. Tolkien had started to look for the bones, the elements that were common to them all: he had begun, in fact, to study philology, the science of words. [Biography, p. 34]

      To assist his studies he began to buy books on Philology, including a copy of Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary in which he noted in February 1973: ‘This book was the beginning of my interest in Germanic Philology (& Philol. in general’ (Life and Legend, p. 16). At Oxford Tolkien took Comparative Philology as a special subject for Honour Moderations, then abandoned Classics for the Language side of the English School.

      As Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925–45) he was required to teach not only literary aspects of works such as *Beowulf, but also the philological aspects of Old English. He gave lectures on such subjects as Old English Dialects, The Common Germanic Consonant-Changes, and Old English Historical Grammar (Inflexions). That he had a deep interest in such matters is shown in the languages he himself devised, especially Quenya and Sindarin, which underwent shifts and changes similar to those of real world languages, which could be ‘traced’ back to a common and original ‘Quendian’ tongue and developed in different branches according to events explained in *‘The Silmarillion’.

      Although words and language remained of prime importance to him, Tolkien thought the divide between Language and Literature unfortunate and unnatural, and as a teacher at *Leeds and Oxford he tried to bridge it in the English syllabi. In his application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford he promised ‘to advance … the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies, which can never be enemies except by misunderstanding or without loss to both …’ (27 June 1925, Letters, p. 13). In his lecture *Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics he objected to critics who mined Beowulf for miscellaneous information, historical as well as philological, and did not study it for itself, as a work of literature. In a draft letter to a Mr Thompson on 14 January 1956 he described himself as ‘a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language)’ (Letters, p. 231).

      But he was also interested in Philology for the light it could shed on the darker, forgotten corners of history and the peoples who had spoken earlier forms of languages, and whose stories and legends had been mainly lost. He gave lectures on subjects such as ‘Legends of the Goths’ and ‘The Historical and Legendary Traditions in Beowulf and Other Old English Poems’. In a letter written to his son *Christopher after hearing him lecture on ‘Barbarians and Citizens’, Tolkien said that he had

      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 [diminutive of Gothic atta ‘father’]. Without those syllables the whole great drama both of history and legend loses savour for me – or would. [21 February 1958, Letters, p. 264]

      Tolkien also had an associated interest in place-names. He joined the English Place-Name Society (*Societies and clubs) at its inception on 27 April 1923 and remained a member until his death. *The Name ‘Nodens’, which he wrote as an appendix to the Report of the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (1932), discusses not only philological aspects of the word but also history, legend, and mythology. The story *Farmer Giles of Ham, purporting to explain the names of some of the places near Oxford that Tolkien and his family used to visit, not only provides an ‘historical’ source for Thame and Worminghall but also explains why those names are not pronounced as written.

      Tolkien’s grandson, Michael George, commented in a lecture given to the University of St Andrews Science Fiction and Fantasy Society on 2 May 1989 that for Tolkien ‘words were a commodity to be used with care and reverence …. He was for me a philologist not just in the technical sense but in the almost physical sense of feeling that words have a special kind of animation to be pondered and savoured and to be probed’. Michael George remembers

      family occasions, usually meals with cross-currents of conversation … he seemed to have the art of carrying on several dialogues at once, including a kind of sotto voce monologue or soliloquy if something linguistic needed calculating …. Consciously or unconsciously he quickly assumed in my imagination the role of an ultimate authority on such matters as the origins of names and the vagaries of words in their use and abuse. He loved to explode or expose common assumptions: he did this so enthusiastically and rapidly and overwhelmingly that one was compelled to listen and agree.

      But he also respected words that were perplexing and he rather delighted in their elusiveness …. I think his disciplined, academic training gave him a great advantage (as well as adding to his frustrated impatience) in making people face up to the loose way they used words and phrases. [‘Lecture on J.R.R. Tolkien Given to the University of St. Andrews Science Fiction and Fantasy Society on 2nd May, 1989’]

      In a discussion of Tolkien’s medieval scholarship, Michael D.C. Drout argued that

      there is a decreased confidence in philology and an increased confidence in the significance and authority of manuscripts that now, with hindsight, seems to be composed partly of legitimate doubts and partly of cant. I think that there is no doubt that medievalists today know much less philology than did Tolkien and his contemporaries, and they have more access to manuscripts via inexpensive air travel, electronic reproductions, and microfilms; thus it is certainly possible to read the development of the criticism as a way of shifting the debate onto grounds in which the newer generation of scholars is more comfortable. Large, theoretical objections to philology (scribes are more accurate, manuscript-readings are sacrosanct, emendations are suspect) have gone hand in hand with a diminution in the ability to do philology. [‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and Its Significance’, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), p. 124]

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