That is why the characteristic activity of the philologist came, in the end, to be ‘reconstruction’. This might be no more than verbal. From the circumstance that English and German both change the vowel of ‘man’ in the plural to ‘men’ or Männer, you could infer that Primitive Germanic, of which not one word has ever been recorded, would have said *manniz, producing as usual ‘i-mutation’. The * is the sign of the reconstructed form, proposed by August Schleicher in the 1860s and used widely ever since. On a higher level you might reconstruct a language. Schleicher indeed wrote a little fable in ‘Indo-European’, that ‘common source’ for Sanskrit, Latin and Greek which Sir William Jones had suggested. Avis, jasmin varna na a ast, dadarka akvams, it began, ‘A sheep, which had no wool on it, saw a horse …’ Schleicher’s colleagues were not much impressed, and indeed the researches of Verner, Brugmann and de Saussure in the 1870s prompted H. Hirt to offer a corrected version of it some years later; no language changed as quickly in the 1870s as Primitive Indo-European, ran the philological joke.22 But the method itself was not seriously questioned, only the answer reached. In between these two extremes an editor might find himself rewriting a poem. Eorl sceal on éos boge, worod sceal getrume rídan, says the Old English poem Maxims I, ‘earl shall on horse’s back, warband (worod) ride in a body’. Most warbands in Old English history marched on their feet; and anyway worod fails to keep up the poetic alliteration. Éored is the proper word here, say the editors, and it means ‘a troop of cavalry’, being related to the word eoh, ‘horse’, cp. Latin equus. It’s true that the word is used by itself only twice elsewhere in Old English, and only once correctly – the word and idea must have become unfamiliar. But that is no deterrent. The post-philological editor can assume he knows more, indeed knows better than the native speaker or scribe, if not the original poet – another reason, be it said, for beliefs like Tolkien’s, that he had a cultivated sympathy with the authors of Beowulf or Sir Gawain or ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ which even the poet’s contemporaries had not and which would certainly never be reached by straight ‘literary criticism’.
Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely: it is impossible to avoid mentioning the fact that the very core and kernel of Beowulf criticism in the last hundred years has been the story of ‘the fall of the house of the Scyldings’, which, as it happens, neither the poet nor any other ancient writer ever got round to explaining, but which was ‘reconstructed’ in great and (to my mind) totally convincing detail by a succession of scholars up to R. W. Chambers. But the vital points to grasp are these:
(1) The thousands of pages of ‘dry as dust’ theorems about language-change, sound-shifts and ablaut-gradations were, in the minds of most philologists, an essential and natural basis for the far more exciting speculations about the wide plains of ‘Gothia’ and the hidden, secret trade routes across the primitive forests of the North, Myrkviðr inn ókunni, ‘the pathless Mirkwood’ itself. You could not have, you would never have got the one without the other.
(2) In spite of the subject’s apparent schizophrenia and the determination of its practitioners to make nothing easy, philology was, for a time, the cutting edge of all the ‘soft’ or ‘behavioural’ sciences, literature, history, sociology and anthropology at once. That is why it attracted such a following and why Jacob Grimm, for instance, could hope to sell his dictionary, the Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, to a mass-audience as something designed for entertainment.
(3) In this entire process the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality. The whole of their science conditioned them to the acceptance of what one might call ‘*-’ or ‘asterisk-reality’, that which no longer existed but could with 100 per cent certainty be inferred.
(4) In a sense, the non-existence of the most desired objects of study created a romance of its own. If we had the lost Gothic ‘Ermanaric-lays’ we might think little of them, but find them lame, crude or brutal; quite likely, the very first version of the Nibelungenlied (composed in the ashes of the Burgundian kingdom) was just an attempt by the poet to cheer himself up. But the fact that these things do not exist, hover forever on the fringe of sight, makes them more tantalising and the references to them more thrilling. There is a book by R. M. Wilson called The Lost Literature of Medieval England, which Tolkien must often have read – see note 24. The Lost Literature of Dark-Age Europe, however, would be a title almost too painful for words. Still, it would cover plenty of material. The best lines about King Arthur are not the long explicit descriptions of the later medieval romances, but those in the almost deliberately uninformative Welsh triads, e.g. from the Black Book of Carmarthen:
Bet y March, bet y Guythur,
bet y Gugaun Cledyfrut;
anoeth bid bet y Arthur
‘There is a grave for March, a grave for Gwythur,
a grave for Gwgawn Red-sword;
the world’s wonder a grave for Arthur.’23
As for Old English, my guess is that the most stirring lines to Tolkien must have come, not even from Beowulf, but from the fragment Waldere, where an unknown speaker reminds the hero that his sword was given by Theodoric to Widia ‘because Wayland’s child let him out of captivity, hurried him out of the hands of the monsters’. Somewhere in the Dark Ages, this seems to suggest, there must have been a legend, a story of how the Gothic king *Thiudoreiks was stolen away to the land of giants, to be rescued after long adventures by his faithful retainers Widia and Hildebrand. Why did the giants take him, where and how did they live, what were their relations with humanity? Once upon a time many people must have known the answers: the story survives in a decadent form in the medieval German romances of Das Eckenlied, Sigenot, Laurin and others, while there is an intensely irritating scrap of a Middle English poem on the subject tucked into a dull sermon on humility:
Summe sende ylues, and summe sende nadderes:
summe sende nikeres, the bi den watere wunien.
Nister man nenne, bute Ildebrand onne.