I sincerely hope that a gap of just over three years prevents this from counting as a double posting, although it probably doesn't. In my defence, this bumping was not prompted solely by the desire to revive my own thread. It seemed the easiest way of reviving three threads at once (one of which happens to be one that I wanted to be more successful than it was); and I have always been fond of multiple avicide with a single stone.
Tolkien's introduction to his weighty article on Chaucer's northernisms [1] is typical of him: learned, playful and to the point. It is also typical in that it begins with an apology for its lateness, which was caused (again typically) by his trying to do more than the occasion strictly demanded of him. I have footnoted the Chaucerian references for the benefit of those who know his works less intimately than did Tolkien's original audience.
Quote:
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One may suspect that Chaucer, surveying from the Galaxye our literary and philological antics upon the litel erthe that heer us . . . so ful of torment and of harde grace [2], would prefer the Philological Society to the Royal Society of Literature, and an editor of the English Dictionary to a poet laureate. Not that Chaucer redivivus would be a phonologist or lexicographer rather than a popular writer - the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne![3] But certainly as far as treatment of himself goes (and he had a well-formed opinion of the value of his own work), of all the words and ink posterity has spent or spilt over his entertaining writings, he would chiefly esteem the efforts to recover the detail of what he wrote, even (indeed particularly), down to forms and spellings, to recapture an idea of what it sounded like, to make certain what it meant. Let the source-hunter have his swink to him reserved[4]. For Chaucer was interested in "language", and in the forms of his own tongue.
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[1] 'Chaucer as a Philologist:
The Reeve's Tale'.
Transactions of the Philological Society 1934, 9-70.
[2]
The Parliament of Fowls, ll. 57-65.
[3]
Ibid. l. 1
[4] "Upon a book in cloistre alwey to poure,
Or swinken with his handes, and laboure,
As Austin bit? How shal the world be served?
Lat Austin have his
swink to him reserved."
The Canterbury Tales, prologue, ll. 185-8.