środa, 18 maja 2011

O byciu filologiem (v)

Tym razem cytat z profesora Toma Shippeya – and, Chris, that's something for you, since you called me romantic when I started learning Sanskrit! Fragment pochodzi z 'Fighting the Long Defeat: Philology in Tolkien's Life and Fiction'. Podkreślenie Shippeya, nie moje.

(…) [T]hat is how philologists worked: subjunctives and the classes of strong verbs were bound in their heads with (in Bilbo's phrase, Hobbit, 7) “dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows' sons.” And they (or some of them) saw no discrepancy between the two. But this is what they failed to make clear. In the end, and in the hands of duller scholars than Tolkien, the strong verbs and the sound-shifts and the pedantic (but vital) details lost contact with the poems and the romances and the myths and the stories, to the detriment of both sides of the subject. This was the start of “the long defeat”, the exile of the subject (comparative philology, and especially comparative Germanic philology) from all but a very few university departments of English, which the early philologists themselves had been instrumental in founding. Yet one of the great advantages of comparative philology was that it could wake romance from almost anything, even from a single word – as said very clearly by Tolkien himself.

Brak komentarzy:

Prześlij komentarz