Scholarship

How do you approach documents that you know are wrong?

For reasons unclear, our astronomer has recently picked up and decided to read through a book he bought years ago.  All in all, it’s a somewhat improbable book.  It’s a serious philological study of two texts in Old English, of interest (one would think) only to specialists in the field; but it has the form of a mass-market paperback.  And he found it in an English-language bookstore in Chile.  How many serious students of Old English are there in Santiago?  The explanation for this odd situation is probably that the author is J. R. R. Tolkien, well-known for his epic The Lord of the Rings, and the bookstore owner didn’t realize the actual content of this book.  (We wonder how many were actually sold, and of those, how many readers wound up confused and disappointed.)

The two texts consist of a short passage in Beowulf, alluding to a fight in the Great Hall of the Frisian King Finn; and a fragment of a poem that probably (not certainly) describes part of the same fight.  The audience of both texts (probably not readers, at first) knew the whole story of the fight.  We do not.  It’s as if someone two centuries from now came upon the line, “Just like the Tribbles revealed the hiding Klingon,” if all the original Star Trek series had been completely lost and only a few episodes of a follow-on series still existed.  And both texts are known to be corrupt; there are obvious errors in grammar, committed by either the first to set the poems in writing or later copyists, and sections that are incomprehensible as written.

What do you do in this situation?  A scientist might decide that the uncertainties are just too large to conclude much of anything, and at best make up a list of names and attributes.  Well, Tolkien does a great deal more.  He employs scholarship, by which we mean a skill distinct from the scientific process, but requiring learning and judgement as well as the gathering of disparate data.  He considers one possible emendation (correction), but since that word only occurs in one place in our whole Old English corpus and we don’t know what it means there, it wouldn’t be useful.  In another, the use of the dative plural could be a late Old English error, or a reference to a different noun.  In a third, the sense of the passage seems to require that a whole line has been left out, easy enough for a tired copyist to do.  We can’t begin to do justice to Tolkien’s magisterial skill, only outline what good scholarship looks like.

There are other scholars, of course, and sometimes they disagree.  The bickering can be unpleasant.  But Tolkien’s picture of the fight at Finn’s hall is at least plausible, and probably contains a great deal corresponding to the actual story; much more than we would have without his scholarship.

But these texts should probably not be assigned to beginning students to learn from.