293); cf. *The History of Galadriel and Celeborn and of Amroth King of Lórien in *Unfinished Tales (1980). These ‘historical-philological’ essays
are not developments and refinements of earlier versions, and they were not themselves subsequently developed and refined …. Almost all of this work was etymological in its inspiration, which to a large extent accounts for its extremely discursive nature; for in no study does one thing lead to another more rapidly than in etymology, which also of its nature leads out of itself in the attempt to find explanations beyond the purely linguistic evolution of forms. [p. 294]
Part Three, ‘Teachings of Pengoloð’, contains two works of the 1950s, the *Dangweth Pengoloð and *Of Lembas.
Part Four, ‘Unfinished Tales’, contains *The New Shadow, an aborted sequel to The Lord of the Rings begun c. late 1958, and the story *Tal-Elmar, also from the 1950s.
Perry-the-Winkle. Poem, first published in *The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), pp. 41–4.
A lonely troll, whose ‘heart is soft’, ‘smile is sweet’, and ‘cooking good enough’, leaves his home in the hills and wanders through Michel Delving in the Shire. Despite good manners, he frightens everyone he meets, except for the lad Perry-the-Winkle. The troll carries him home ‘to a fulsome tea’, which becomes a Thursday tradition. In time, Perry-the-Winkle grows ‘so fat … / his weskit bust, and never a hat / would sit upon his head’; and he becomes a great baker, though not so good as the troll.
Perry-the-Winkle is a revision of The Bumpus, one of a series of six poems called *‘Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay’ (see also *The Dragon’s Visit, which includes the place-name ‘Bumpus Head’). Three versions of The Bumpus are known. On the first manuscript Tolkien sketched the ‘Bumpus’ as a plump, smiling, lizard-like figure with an apron around its waist, but in his text left its form unclear though certainly outlandish, with a tail long enough to ‘thump’, flat, flapping feet, and a lap in which William – not yet named Perry-the-Winkle – could sit. The second version of The Bumpus was published in the expanded edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (2014), pp. 202–6. The third version, titled William and the Bumpus, began to approach its later form, though many further additions and changes were yet to be made.
Perry-the-Winkle in contrast is overtly a Hobbit poem, with references to the Shire and Bree, and in Tolkien’s preface to the Adventures of Tom Bombadil collection it is ascribed to Sam Gamgee (from *The Lord of the Rings). A typescript of Perry-the-Winkle in the Bodleian Library (MS Tolkien 19, f. 51) is headed ‘a children’s song in the Shire (attributed to Master Samwise)’.
Tolkien recorded Perry-the-Winkle in 1967 for the album Poems and Songs of Middle Earth (1967, reissued in 2001 as part of The J.R.R. Tolkien Audio Collection); see *Recordings.
‘A Philologist on Esperanto’ see Languages: Artificial
Philology. The first definition of philology given in the original *Oxford English Dictionary (section compiled c. 1906) is: ‘Love of learning and literature; the study of literature in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning’; but this is noted as ‘now rare in general sense’. The first documented use in this sense is by *Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1386. The first definition of philologist is: ‘One devoted to learning or literature; a lover of letters or scholarship; a learned or literary man; a scholar, especially a classical scholar. Now less usual.’ These remained the primary senses in the United States, but in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the words began to be more commonly used in a narrower sense: philologist as ‘a person versed in the science of language; a student of language; a linguistic scholar’ and philology as ‘the study of the structure and development of language; the science of language; linguistics. (Really one branch of sense 1).’ In the 1972–86 supplement to the OED this definition of philology was further qualified: ‘In Britain now usu[ally] restricted to the study of the development of specific languages or language families, esp[ecially] research into phonological and morphological history based on written documents …. Linguistics is now the more usual term for the study of the structure of language, and, with qualifying adjective or adjective phrase, is replacing philology even in the restricted sense.’ For comment on these and later definitions, see The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner (2006).
During the nineteenth century the discovery of similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin led to the recognition of the Aryan or Indo-European family of languages, and the rise of Comparative Philology. More detailed study of existing languages and their history followed, as philologists sought to discover relationships between languages by comparison of their forms past and present, noting regular shifts and changes in sound and spelling over the years and deducing by analogy not only earlier lost forms, but also a common ancestral language from which the Indo-European family developed. From these relationships and fragmentary memories in later writings, some attempted to throw light on the history of the speakers of the languages, in particular the dark period towards the end of the Roman Empire when Germanic and other tribes pressed against its borders.
In England this led to a greater interest in Old English and its relationship with other Germanic languages. A chair in Anglo-Saxon was established at *Oxford as early as 1795 (see *Oxford English School), but during the nineteenth century the responsibilities of its holder were gradually extended to include Old Low German dialects and the antiquities of northern Europe. German scholars played a major role in defining new philological methods, which were fostered at Oxford by the creation of a Chair of Comparative Philology for Max Müller. See further, Tom Shippey, ‘Scholars of Medieval Literature, Influence of’, in J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (2006), pp. 594–8.
The first holder of the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, established in 1885, was *A.S. Napier, who had trained as a philologist in Germany and previously occupied a chair at the University of Göttingen. There was as yet no Honour School of English at Oxford, and those who had hoped that the Merton chair would go to someone more interested in Literature than Philology were disappointed. One of the major attacks on Philology came from John Churton Collins, who wrote that
as an instrument of culture it ranks – it surely ranks – very low indeed. It certainly contributes nothing to the cultivation of the taste. It as certainly contributes nothing to the education of the emotions. The mind it neither enlarges, stimulates, nor refines. On the contrary, it too often induces or confirms that peculiar woodenness and opacity, that singular coarseness of feeling and purblindness of moral and intellectual vision, which has in all ages been the characteristic of mere philologists …. Instead of encouraging communion with the noblest manifestations of human energy, with the great deeds of history, or with the masterpieces of art and letters, it tends, as Bacon remarks, to create habits of unintelligent curiosity about trifles. It too often resembles that rustic who, after listening for several hours to Cicero’s most brilliant conversation, noticed nothing and remembered nothing but the wart on the great orator’s nose. [The Study of English Literature (1891), quoted in D.J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (1965), pp. 83–4]
A different, more moderately expressed point of view was put forward by Henry Nettleship. Philology, he wrote, ‘can never, from the nature of the case, be hostile to literature, whatever temporary misunderstandings may arise between them. I believe also that philology is a necessary adjunct to the academical study of literature; that the academical study of literature, without philology, is a phantom which
