I'm going to reflect a little bit on the English language, first of all,
and then I'm going to mention a few key dates and events which I think are relevant for Tolkien's interest in old English.
And then I'm going to talk to you about old English.
How many people here have actually learnt old English or taught themselves old English?
There are some people in the room. It's always good to say. Well, I will be teaching you some old English today and that will take me down.
Page two. You can say there's some vocabulary I'm going to teach you, and and then we'll will move onto page three, onto the poetry of old English,
and we'll start looking at the old English influence on Tolkien's fiction and broaden it out into wider issues about old English.
But if we think. First of all, then, about the English language and.
Consider the fact that old English is really our language because old English is simply our language.
If you go back down the generations far enough, it's not a separate language in that sense.
But the fact of language is and people who sometimes write very indignant letters to the times, forget this.
That language is changing all the time. I can even hear my students pronouncing certain words differently.
Over the couple of decades, I've been teaching at this university.
People used to say book that nowadays some younger people pronounce it slightly differently.
Don't want to embarrass anybody here by picking on them.
How do you say book? Do you say book? And now I'm a northerner.
I mean, my dad says book, but that's irrelevant.
No, there's book and there's. But there's book that's already changing, isn't it?
If you listen to the Queen speaking English now, her accent seems to have changed ever so slightly from earlier recordings of when she was crowned.
So all sorts of things are happening, phonetic changes, but also changes in meanings of words even in the 20th century.
The shape of words has changed. Sentence structure has changed.
And the other thing is that English is a borrowing language.
It didn't used to be, and that's one of the reasons why old English looks so different among several others.
So. If we have a look now at a token and you can see here he is in his study, probably speaking out English in that very picture.
He was influenced by many things such as nature, folklore and his childhood memories of playing by his whole middle.
His first attempt to write a story.
He called it the Green Great Dragon and his mother, who was still around at the time.
So you can't actually say green, great dragon. You have to say great green dragon.
And it's got him thinking and probably turned him into a linguist and a philologist.
He was fascinated by the sea.
And before he went to university, he went on a big adventure, one of the few adventures apart from the terrible one serving in the First World War.
This was his walking expedition through the Alps.
It got into The Hobbit with the rock fall and again into the Lord of the Rings, with the falling rocks as they're crossing the mountains.
But it's interesting to look at Tolkien style and thinking about him.
Well, my reflections on language change more terrible.
Still are thunder and lightning in the mountains at night when storms come up from east and west and make war.
I say it's interesting because Tolkien was very concerned to to keep.
The history of English alive. I say English as a borrowing language.
There are political reasons for that because the royal court, after 1066, spoke French and Royal is a good example.
Royal as an adjective. But what noun does it go with?
It goes with the French. Now, why doesn't it? Because just we love where Joe my.
Well I think he pronounces well I am the king and I am William and I speak French and I've tried to learn old English, but it's too difficult for me.
And of course, so the courts was no longer promoting financing literature and culture,
and English and French became and came into the mix of culture in medieval times.
But if you look at some Tolkien style in that chapter in The Hobbit, he uses the word terrific and terrible as synonyms.
And it's a word which goes back to to French and Latin.
What else? The word war came in with the Normans.
It's the Norman French version of gear, just as William is the Norman French version of Gil.
And but most of the other words that go back to old English, if you if you read the chapter,
the king of the Golden Hall, this is really a rich mine for if you're interested in it.
Old English influences from Tolkien on Tolkien.
The King of the Golden Hall is the chapter where the three travellers Gandalf, Legolas and Gimli arrive at the Hall of the Riders of Rohan.
And but even at the level of style, and this is my main point, first of all, if I just read you the beginning of the chapter,
they rode on through sunset and snow, dusk and gathering night, when last they halted and dismounted.
Even Aragorn was stiff and weary. Gandalf only allowed them a few hours rest.
Legolas and Gimli slept and Aragorn lay flat, stretched upon his back,
but kind of stood, leaning on his staff, gazing into the darkness, east and west.
All was silent. And there was no sign or sound of living thing.
I could go on, but most of those words go back to old English, silent as from French and dismounted, I guess must be from French.
But most of those are the words of the core vocabulary of English, of old English and modern English is the same.
It's changed its spelling. It's changed its phonetic form.
But it's still with us. And the same with place names if you think of place names.
I grew up in a place called Blackburn.
Surprisingly, it might mean the Shining River or the Shining Stream rather than a dark stream, but is sitting standing now in a place called Oxford.
It used to be called Oxenford, the place where the oxen couldn't cross the river.
Most of our old names are old English, and so we're actually speaking old English all the time.
When you say you're going to Woodstock. Just change it to Woodstock and you're back in old English.
So there's that fact of of of language change.
But old English is still with us. I'd like to talk now then, about how Tolkien became interested in this early stage of English.
He went to school in Birmingham. As I'm sure you all know, King Edward School.
He and school. Schooling in those days.
Just after the Victorian period was still dominated by languages.
But the two languages that most people learnt were Greek and Latin.
And Tolkien was no exception. But he had a teacher called George Brewerton, who was very interested in English literature as well.
And he noticed Tolkien's burgeoning interest in other languages.
I'm sure if you've been to some of these other lectures,
you have heard of Tolkien's interest in and Welsh inspired by looking at railway tracks and seeing the Welsh written on the side.
George Burton encouraged Tolkien by giving him a primer.
It might even be called a primer. In those days, probably Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon primer,
or perhaps even Henry Sweet's first steps in Anglo-Saxon and which was published in 1897 and was probably still on sale in the shops.
And this. Inspired Tolkien's first interest in the language.
And it was a historical interest. It wasn't quite the aesthetic interest of Welsh,
although he did enjoy the sounds of old English and one of the features of Old English, which I'm about to show you, is that.
Even though a lot of the words and especially our everyday words go back to old English quite often.
They were a little richer in their phonology in earlier times.
So we say love or where I grew up, we say love. And the word for love in old English was love.
Nouveau. Nouveau. And too like his like and so monosyllabic words.
Some of them have come straight into English grass mint grass shape meant [INAUDIBLE].
But some of the words, you know, were two syllables.
And and so there's a certain richness to the vocabulary.
And it was a very compact language. If you want to say friend, you said friend.
And if you wanted to add a and a suffix to you, you would say friendship.
And that word, friendship is still with us. But if you wanted to say royal, you didn't borrow from a foreign language as we do nowadays.
We have you take the word king, which is cunning, and you change the ending to kin leech.
And that was enough. So you didn't have to talk about the Royal Mail.
If they had a postal service in those days, it would have been the kingly mail service.
So so there's something much more compact and and logical about the way you form words in old English.
And as a student at Oxford and.
At first Tolkien was still studying and studying the classics.
But again, he had this interest and he was an orphan by this stage.
But his aunt seems to have been a kind of a catalyst for his interest in poetry.
And he was staying at his aunt's farm in 1914, and he was reading a poem which is sometimes called Christ One from the Exeter Book.
It's also known nowadays as the Advent lyrics and one section in it begins.
Ella Arundel Angler Protest.
Hail Ere and the Brightest of Angels.
And he was fascinated by this word R and R, which is even unusual in old English and.
This is one of the ways that Tolkien worked with old English afterwards.
It inspired him to write a poem because he was concerned to work out where does this word Arundell come from?
And you can go only so far by comparing old English with other Germanic languages.
It does seem to have been a word which existed, and perhaps it meant the Morning Star.
But why does it seem so different? Is it a vestige of something much older?
This was a thought which often occurred to Tolkien in his spare moments.
I'd say not when he was publishing, has learned articles on philology, but when he was writing his poetry.
First of all, he wanted to be a poet originally. And and then later, of course, he started to write fiction.
A few years later, in fact, he started. And so Arundell became then this figure, this saviour type figure from his legends,
who sailed out into a boat and found the straight road across the sky.
And you can still see his light. The light of his.
His ship in the sky. It's them. It's the morning star and the evening stuff.
So it's this concern with with unusual words, which helped him to create his mythology, this interest in old English.
And he eventually switched her to English philology as a student and then served in the war.
He got the first, of course, when he returned from the war.
He was still wanted to be a poet, and he still wanted to carry on the work of some of his friends who died in the war.
And that was his kind of mission. His first job his first real job was as working for the Oxford English Dictionary.
He then became a reader in English language at Leeds University.
And here again, we find a poem based on a line from an old English poem.
This is number four on the handout if you wanna call the called or rapid wound.
And it's a sentence from.
From Beowulf. And you, Mona, are the men of long ago.
Gold is gold. So the gold of men, of former times, of people from former times, gold wrapper, wound and boonton is the past participle.
And it means wounds round, wounds round with magic and enchantment.
And this is the this is the the. Key moments where there was achievement at the end of of the poem is kind of.
Devalued ever so slightly payable thanks in dying to a bike and killing the dragon
dying and in the fight he nevertheless has won a great treasure for his people.
But alas, it is wound around with enchantment and it is useless and it is buried with him.
And so Tolkien wrote a poem about greed and pride, and it's inspired him and his and the themes of his fiction.
Later. In 1925, as I'm sure you all know, he became Rawlinson and Bosworth, professor of Anglo-Saxon.
So from now on, old English, if not before old English from now on, was certainly top of the agenda.
He and published in 1936 very famous lecture Beowulf, The Monsters and the Critics.
If he hadn't published much else, people would remember him.
We certainly remember him in old English studies for this lecture.
Talk a little bit more about that later. But notice it also came out just about the time of the publishing of The Hobbit.
And he was bringing up his family, telling stories, bringing his professional life home and turning it into stories for his children.
And The Hobbit is the one that he published at the time.
And then in 1939 came on fairy stories where he changed his mind slightly about the the value and the purpose of fairy stories.
And when he started, he'd already started on the sequel to The Hobbit.
He changed from writing children's fiction to writing adult fiction.
By the time it took him a long time to write that sequel, as I'm sure you know,
and 1940 and 1954, by which stage he was professor of nurse and professor of English language.
He published The Lord of the Rings. But I like to turn now from Tolkien himself and focus on old English for 5 minutes or so.
I'm going to read you Exeter Book Riddle 36.
Or at least the first part of it. I need to point out.
A couple of letters for you. If you're not familiar with old English, you can see in line to exit the riddle.
36. The word was. It has this little.
And they written together. What's that letter is called an ash. That's very straightforward.
You just pronounce it a bit like the queen pronounces a rather than a northerner like me.
But I try my best. West Routledge.
It's not very open, as you can see.
It's again in the word have have the in the next line,
which means had the verb have had and so and and penultimate line can you say have to fit through
now fit through the the letter which looks a bit like a p is a runic letter is not a P at all.
It's a t h in sound in in terms of modern English, we use a t h for this sound.
It's called a thorn. And you pronounce it the of.
So you're almost ready to to read out English. There's one more letter, and I think it appears in the next riddle.
Number eight, in the second line. Money on math.
Uh. Mandela means endless in the assembly, and it's basically the letter in the middle of that word.
There's also a t h. It is basically a D, a letter day with the the stem leaning slightly underlined through it.
Some of my students sometimes think it's it's a cross on top on top of the letter.
So it's not a cross on top of the letter. It's a basically a D with a line through it.
And D is related, of course, to the the T h if you say duh.
And then instead of stopping the the breath, let it come out through your teeth to the it's a related sound.
So so that those were the two solutions for how to adapt to the Roman alphabet so they could use it to represent English.
And basically, you old English, which was English for them, as they called it.
So I'm going to read you number seven, Riddle 36. The first line means I saw a creature travel on the wave.
Riddles were considered serious literature and Anglo-Saxon times.
I just read it to you. So you get a sense of what the language sounds like each week to yourself.
Wake up there and say was all right. Little wonder a million years would have to fail.
Would I say it on the one on two where even on richer half to 2/5 through and 12 again and six have to saga what to were.
Did you understand? The last line said Saga, what you tell me, say what it was.
What I've just described to you. If you can't do that yet, you need a crash course in old English.
So let's do that. Can you turn over the page and look at number nine?
I'm going to teach you to count and I'll take it. This is great for cocktail parties.
Can you count in Welsh? Yes. Can you do that?
Sheep counting that they use in using? Yes. Can you count in holding?
I know I can. Let's try it.
If you want to repeat after me. Feel free to do so on ten, three, four, five, six.
Six seven actor Negan. Ten and 11.
12. Hey, you're brilliant.
So you can speak English already. I'm going to do the parts of the body now.
They haven't changed that much. Body is body.
Body and head is Harvard.
Have it perfect. And I'm going to do the face now.
Hey, you know who moves era and what's.
The neck is square or decker sway or a neck.
Your back is your fridge or back?
We didn't do air, did we? Air. Air and plural as airline air and.
What's really got no shoulder is axle or shoulder.
Axle shoulder. That's through the arms.
Allen Bulger. Hand finger thumb. Allen Bulger.
Hand finger. Boom. The index finger, of course, is the shooting finger, shooter finger.
Scientist Cedar. And your stomach.
That's a French word, actually. Stomach. But the old English word was one woman.
And you can see that that's a bit of semantic change because that word has come into modern English with a slightly altered meaning.
The leg was Shankar snail as foot and fate.
So those are the numbers and there is the parts of the body.
Let's go back to Riddle 36 and see if we can now read it.
I'll help you a bit. It's with you. Saw I saw creature.
Now, that second word wished is the word WAGA.
Its. And you find it in Tolkien, don't you?
The Barrow whites. You also find it in Thomas Hardy.
It's in the Essex Dorset dialect.
A white was a person. W i g. But these g h's.
Which we have in modern English, are a reflex of the older pronunciation.
They came in with Dutch printers in the 16th century.
But it reflects the fact that the JH used to be pronounced like Scottish law and broadly so w IHT was pronounced WICT and IHT,
which has come into modern English, has an IG h t was pronounced ness.
And are there any Scottish people in the room? Do you say nicked?
And your version of Scott's. Sometimes the first person I've met who who who does very well.
I very pleased to meet you. So, yeah, so Scottish English sometimes preserves sounds, which modern English doesn't.
So it's wish this I creature soul is the translation of that on where Faron Aung Waka means on the wave.
Faron means faring travelling. It.
The creature seal was rattle. It was marvellously.
One term? YEARWOOD Yearwood means girded or equipped or equipped equipped wooden drum is its Hollywood wonder,
and it's got an ending on it because old English used case endings much more than modern English.
So one term is a data plural, if you know about that.
If you don't, don't worry. We're still at in our first lesson, aren't we?
But just believe me that it means with wonders and we're all already there.
So I. So it creates a travel on the wave. It was marvellously equipped with wonders.
And let's see if we can do the next bit translated. Have the failure of fate on the one wonder.
It had four feet. Under it stomach and act two on two and 34567207 on fridge.
MoveOn means up on its back on Rich.
After two five through it had. Two because two is a variant of Twain.
I forgot to mention that. But. But it's on the handout. Have two to feed through.
Now what could feed through mean the singular is fever.
It's related to fever. It means wings.
In this case had two wings and 12, ergo 12 eyes.
On six have to. Six heads.
Saga. What you were saying was. It was.
Have you got to know have to fail to fit on the one about four feet under its stomach and actor where you've been on average and eight on its back.
And it had two wings and 12 eyes and six heads.
Saga. What to wear. Saga. Saga.
Saga. Plural. Anyone got any ideas for this?
That's a good idea. But.
And. Why do why does a flock of birds have four feet under its stomach?
Oh, I think this is this is the great thing about riddles.
And this I'm sure this is how they used to use them in old English times.
They used them for teaching, for composing poetry and so on.
And it always creates a discussion. And some of them are more discussable than others.
And some of them, I mean, your solution very nearly works, doesn't it,
apart from that one line, four feet under this stomach face or a fate under one.
So let's do lateral thinking. What else might have wings apart from birds?
It's. Okay. Dragon.
So insects insects, insects almost face just that.
But alas, time is pressing. And unless someone has a solution in the next 5 seconds while I suck my cough.
Sweet. It's about.
With full force, full oarsmen are in it.
And of course, it's not a modern boat. It's an Anglo-Saxon boat. It has figureheads, probably dragon heads.
That explains why it has six heads. And then you can count the 12 eyes, of course.
And. And the two wings and you've got the rhythm.
Okay, well done. You. You now know some old English, and you've just read a riddle.
36. So you're making huge progress.
I'd like to talk to you about some. They'll think it's poetic language ever so briefly.
And we have to move on. Alas, we cannot linger.
But some. If you look at number 11.
And this is another kind of dinnertime conversation.
You can count to 12 and I was English and you had this a dinnertime conversation once in a college having dinner opposite him,
a novelist from Nigeria called Ben Okri.
And he said, Oh, you do old English, so you know about Canning's. Do you know what Cannings are?
The word is a Scandinavian word, because Scandinavian poetry in the early Middle Ages used a similar style of poetry.
A canning is a compound, a poetic compound.
In other words, you take two words and put them together to create a new idea.
We do it in modern English, and a very modern example is the World Wide Web.
So you put all these words together and you create an idea which is more that is not literally a web, is it?
It's a metaphor which describes something different.
This network of connections that we have in the modern world.
So that, if you like, as a modern canning. Here are some to do with the body listed in number 11.
A fail whose fail is a poetic word for life.
They also had the word lief, which meant life but failed.
House Whose is life? House and faith bold is life mansion or life dwelling place and Faith Hoard is life treasury.
These are all words for the for the for the living body, the treasure, the treasury of your soul.
Now the place where your soul dwells and leaf, bald and so on.
And Seamus Heaney, his favourite old English canning, was born whose bones house again its its canning for for the body.
Am I going to have to miss our 11 B 11 C this was one which I think Tolkien was, was very keen on it.
Some from the comments on this are taken from his commentary on Beowulf,
which is found in the recently published translation by Tolkien of Beowulf because the
commentary is taken from the lectures that he used to give on Beowulf in the 1930s.
And. The what? The word is wrong.
Right. And from IS is a kind of poor voice in Tolkien's interpretation.
There is a similar word while way while spelled h w is odd.
W h is a whale. You know, a huge mammal that swims in the sea, say and wild way means the sea.
Its the the path or the way which the whale takes.
And so. And myself included, have taken from that to mean the same thing.
Wrong means a whale. In our simple, simplistic way.
We thought that and a means road.
But no Tolkien is and was there in the 1930s to to tell us we are wrong.
He says that wrong means dolphins. Unless the members of the whale tribe playing or seeming to gallop like a ride.
A line of riders on the plains, a line of riders on the plains might be an echo of Tolkien's fiction that that is the pitch and
comparison the canning was meant to evoke because Rod looks like road comes from that verb redan,
which does mean to ride. And so Rod is the riding place rather than the road.
It's not the the street or the path as such.
It's the place where you ride the original meaning of road.
And it doesn't like the translation.
Wale Road, which suggests, he says, a sort of semi submarine steam engine running along submerged metal rails of the Atlantic.
So I'm fortunate in my in my hobby as a musician, I've written a song called Whale Road.
I don't know what I'm going to do about that. I have to think. Riddles, of course.
And and we've we've done one riddle now are written in old English in the style of Beowulf they often use Canning's
Canning's in themselves are a kind of riddle which you have to solve in order to come to the meaning of the compound.
And so whole thing is fixed.
Building is poetry, rather, is a special poetic language.
It uses specialist terms, specialist words, it uses Cannings, it uses alliteration.
It's very compact. It misses out the little words like the and R and his and her whenever it can.
And it creates these and it's very sort of compact, architectural, architectonic type of poetry.
And this is what Tolkien lectured on in his lectures and on Beowulf in the 1930s, forties, fifties.
I don't have time to go into the Bible too much, but I'm sure you know the basics already.
You may have seen some dreadful films. Well, they give you a rough idea that it's about monsters.
Two halves, according to Tolkien in his lecture. I'm looking at number 14 and 15 now on the handout.
So you can see the summary of the epic poem Beowulf.
The young man, the young hero takes on a mission to to rid a kingdom of an affliction of monsters.
Two monsters. The Grendel can Grendel and his mother.
Then the scene 50 years and 50 years go by and Beowulf is an old man and he has to fight the ultimate enemy, the dragon.
He's praised at the end, the mildest of men and the most gentle, the kindest to his people and most eager for fame.
Tolkien emphasised this dual structure.
Some critics nowadays don't agree, but they often start with Tolkien's essay.
This is a starting point for the debate. And so 15 be on the talking says that there of is essentially a balance of possession and
opposition of ends and beginnings and its themes are things like human courage in a hostile world,
youth versus age, good versus evil, ambition versus pride, a hero and a monster, a hero and the king.
Many of those themes, of course, have come into Tolkien's own fiction.
And in a way, you can say that one of the driving forces of Tolkien's fiction, when he discovered his medium,
which was the novel of creating for the modern world, an epic which draws not completely, of course, but to a certain, to a large.
Well, I don't know how. That's a debate, isn't it? Because that the person who is lecturing to you in Welsh might disagree.
But the influence of old English medieval literature on him.
I'd like to finish now by for two or 3 minutes then, and we can broaden the discussion if you like.
But how does this all this? How is it?
Evident in his fiction, The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.
I can only point out a few things because we really are pushed for time.
But if you think of the maps, I mean, if you've been to this wonderful exhibition, you must have seen some of the maps.
He drew a map of the shire after he'd finished The Hobbit. But if you look at some of the names, you get a name like book Boro.
Well, Boro is, of course, goes back to old English book, which means a fortified place now.
So it's not that Boris took Boro, isn't it? I got that right. So that's where the took family have their family mansions.
This is so. So the mapping of his world is very often drawing on old English.
There's another one. Buckland.
BUCKLAND This is where they that. The Brandy books have the family seat.
But it's also a kind of playfulness on Tolkien's part, because Buckland is a real place name in England, and it goes back to book land.
Book Land.
And Book Land was land, which was being registered and put into a charter and was written in a book so you could prove that you owned this land.
The charter is now in the book, so that is an example of how Tolkien reuses an old English word playfully.
Sometimes you have to know a bit of other things to get the joke with Tolkien.
The same goes for the King of the Golden Hall, which is the two towers.
Book three of the Lord of the Rings, chapter six. And that whole scene, the arrival at Meadows settled, which means it's an old English word.
It's a compound. It means Mead Hall.
And we're immediately in the world of Beowulf there, or Hatteras is as the precincts the area around the hall.
And again, this is an old English word, actually, in in in the old English that we mostly read.
West Saxon, southern old English. It would have been male to settled with it with an extra diff song there instead of the e eo instead of mead EOD.
So Meadows old is the old mercian form of Meadows settled.
And this is another, if you like, private. It's hard to call it a private joke,
but it's Tolkien putting a bit of his personality and his personal interests into his writing because of course he came from
the West Midlands and he admired the middle English of that region and he also like preferred old Mercian to Old West Saxon.
And so so we get that. Then in the whole scene of the King of the Golden Hall is really a translation, an adaptation of the scene in Beowulf,
where Beowulf and his men arrive at Hare at the hotel, the meat hall in Denmark, where he is going to fight the monster Grendel.
Lastly. We could.
You could probably write a whole book on Rowan and how it reflects old English culture, customs, even the way they speak the word they use.
Wimmer crafted a vocabulary they sometimes use when they're describing wizards and strange places.
Two women dying to Emma Beg Arthur lost not her, which Aragorn uses.
That goes back to an old English word, which means noble.
And in Gondor they don't use the word as unless they use the word king's foil, which is a mixture of old English kings.
And foil, comes in from French into the English language.
It's from the word V, which means a leaf, the king's leaf.
When characters introduce themselves, they say.
And by all of this, he says, there was this misnomer.
So even the word order comes into the into the English that he uses in the chapter on the king of the Golden Hall and Rolling Hammer.
His my name is, says one of the characters when he introduces himself.
Mark Atherton. This number you can now go to your dinner or your cocktail party and even introduce yourself in old English.
On that note, I do have to stop. Thank you very much.