Yorkshire Almanac Tolkien on the increasing importance of language within Leeds’ English department during his readership in the early 1920s

27 June 1925: Tolkien on the increasing importance of language within Leeds’ English department during his readership in the early 1920s

J.R.R. Tolkien. 1995. To the Electors of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. New York: HarperCollins. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist. I began with five hesitant pioneers out of a School (exclusive of the first year) of about sixty members. The proportion to-day is 43 literary to 20 linguistic students. The linguists are in no way isolated or cut off from the general life and work of the department, and share in many of the literary courses and activities of the School; but since 1922 their purely linguistic work has been conducted in special classes, and examined in distinct papers of special standard and attitude. The instruction offered has been gradually extended, and now covers a large part of the field of English and Germanic philology. Courses are given on Old English heroic verse, the history of English*, various Old English and Middle English texts*, Old and Middle English philology*, introductory Germanic philology*, Gothic, Old Icelandic (a second-year* and third-year course), and Medieval Welsh*. All these courses I have from time to time given myself; those that I have given personally in the past year are marked*. During this last session a course of voluntary reading of texts not specially considered in the current syllabus has attracted more than fifteen students, not all of them from the linguistic side of the department.

Philology, indeed, appears to have lost for these students its connotations of terror if not of mystery. An active discussion-class has been conducted, on lines more familiar in schools of literature than of language, which has borne fruit in friendly rivalry and open debate with the corresponding literary assembly. A Viking Club has even been formed, by past and present students of Old Icelandic, which promises to carry on the same kind of activity independently of the staff. Old Icelandic has been a point of special development, and usually reaches a higher standard than the other special subjects, being studied for two years and in much the same detail as Anglo-Saxon….

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Something to say? Get in touch

Comment

Something to say? Get in touch

25 September 1066: The Stamford Bridge massacre by Harold Godwinson’s army of Harald Hardrada and Tostig Godwinson’s force – symbol of the end of the Viking Age

26 May 1941: Headingley’s Shire Oak falls, legendary site of Anglo-Saxon local government between Aire and Wharfe

23 March 0867: Viking mercenaries draw the Anglo-Saxons of Ælla of Northumbria into the streets of York and slaughter them

5 December 1859: Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew and the cousin of the then French emperor, has work for the Barnsley dialectologist Charles Rogers

27 March 1634: In commercial Gothic urban legend, John Bartendale, a piper, is hung and buried at York, but awakes, is rescued and pardoned, and returns to the music business

8 June 0793: Alcuin of York, a leading light of the Carolingian Renaissance, reflects in a poem on the devastation this day of Lindisfarne by Vikings

11 July 1787: Advertisement for The Commercial and Mathematical Academy, Hull

25 September 1880: Thomas Harper reveals to the Leeds Mercury’s young readers a mnemonic song of monarchs (except Oliver) used in the village school at Weldrake (York) in the 1770s

20 November 1826: “Nimrod” of London encounters The Four Alls on a pub sign in Burniston (Scarborough) while on a hunting tour

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

Comment

“Larwood” (Herman Diederik Johan van Schevichaven) and Hotten have chapter and verse:

Others have a sort of satirical humour in them, such as the well-known Four Alls, representing a king who says, “I rule all;” a priest who says, “I pray for all;” a soldier who says, “I fight for all;” and John Bull, or a farmer, who says, “I pay for all.” Sometimes a fifth is added in the shape of a lawyer, who says, “I plead for all.” It is an old and still common sign, and may even be seen swinging under the blue sky in the sunny streets of La Valette, Malta. In Holland, in the seventeenth century, it was used, but the king was left out, and a lawyer added; each person said exactly the same as on our signboards, but the farmer answered:—

“Of gy vecht, of gy bidt, of gy pleyt,
Ik ben de boer die de eyeren leyt.”

The author of “Tavern Anecdotes” observes that he used to notice in Rosemary Street, the sign of the Four Alls, but passing that way some time after, he found it altered into the Four Awls; the sign painter who renewed the picture had probably found himself not equal to a representation of the four human figures. In Ireland, a similar corruption may be observed, the four shoemaker’s awls taking the place of the four representatives of society. Although having no connexion with the Four Alls, it may be mentioned that three and four awls constitute the charges in the shoemakers’ arms of some of the continental trade societies or guilds.

This enumeration of the various performances coupled with the word all has been used in numerous different epigrams: an address to James I. in the Ashmolean MSS., No. 1730, has:—

“The Lords craved all,
The Queene graunted all,
The Ladies of honour ruled all,
The Lord-Keeper seal’d all,
The Intelligencer marred all,
The Parliament pass’d all,
He that is gone oppos’d himself to all,
The Bishops soothed all,
The Judges pardon’d all,
The Lords buy, Rome spoil’d all,
Now, Good King, mend all,
Or else the Devil will have all.”

This again seems to have been imitated from a similar description of the State of Spain in Greene’s “Spanish Masquerade,” 1589:—

“The Cardinalls solicit all,
The King grauntes all,
The Nobles confirm all,
The Pope determines all,
The Cleargie disposeth all,
The Duke of Medina hopes for all,
Alonso receives all,
The Indians minister all,
The Soldiers eat all,
The People paie all,
The Monks and friars consume all,
And the Devil at length will carry away all.”

(Larwood 1908)

See also Pepys, quoting the Duke of York:

the three great trades of the world are, the lawyers, who govern the world; the churchmen, who enjoy the world; and a sort of fools whom they call soldiers, who make it their work to defend the world.

The German travel guide writer Stein confirms Lord Darlington’s observation in Pisa (Stein 1829).

Something to say? Get in touch