The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

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СКАЧАТЬ answered – had Tolkien not been an Oxford Professor’ (p. 48). Tolkien ‘would have had more academic impact if he had produced his edition earlier, without unnecessary detail, and with a substantial supporting apparatus’ (p. 49).

      Useful introductions to Ancrene Riwle and related texts are Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse, ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (rev. edn. 1992), and Yoko Wada, ed., A Companion to Ancrene Wisse (2003). See also Arne Zettersten, ‘The AB Language Lives’ in The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull (2006); and ch. 16 (‘The AB Language: A Unique Discovery’) in Zettersten, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life (2011).

       Ancrene Wisse see Ancrene Riwle

Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. Essay, published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 14 (1929), pp. 104–26. See further, Descriptive Bibliography B12.

      SYNOPSIS

      Tolkien argues that the language of Ancrene Wisse (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 402, see *Ancrene Riwle) is ‘either a faithful transcript of some actual dialect of nearly unmixed descent [from Old English, unadulterated by the effects of the Norman conquest], or a “standard” language based on one’ (p. 106). It is self-consistent and individual, and ‘identical, even down to minute and therefore significant details, with the language of MS. Bodley 34’ (p. 107) which contains the texts of the *Katherine Group, Hali Meiðhad (an appreciation of ‘holy maidenhood’ or virginity) among them. (Tolkien’s essay may be a development of one he listed as forthcoming in his June 1925 application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, The Second Weak Conjugation in the Ancren Riwle and the Katherine-Group.)

      Tolkien theorizes that ‘the (English) originals of these works were in [a common] language (AB), they both belonged to nearly the same time, one not far removed from that of the actual manuscripts’ under consideration, ‘and they both belonged to the same (small) area)’, which he localizes to Herefordshire (p. 114). ‘Language (AB)’, usually termed by others the ‘AB language’, is so called after the standard sigla for the two manuscripts in question.

      To support his argument, Tolkien intended to provide ‘a sample of a minute comparison’ of the texts, but this proved ‘impossible of satisfactory accomplishment within a very little space’. Instead he analyzes the manuscripts in regard to their treatment of ‘the verbs belonging to the 3rd or “regular” weak class, descended from O[ld] E[nglish] verbs with infinitive in -ian, or conjugated on this model’ (p. 117).

      CRITICISM

      In ‘Tolkien as Editor’, in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee (2014) Tom Shippey describes Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad as

      a breakthrough in academic studies. … What Tolkien had noticed, and then proved to the hilt, is that two manuscripts, one of the Ancrene Wisse and one of Hali Meiðhad (and several associated female saints’ lives), were written in exactly the same dialect but by different handwriting. In medieval conditions, this could not have come about by accident or coincidence. The two scribes had been taught to write the same way. There was, then, even in the era of Norman-French dominance, a holdout area of England where English was still not just spoken, but written, and written as taught in a school of some kind. This holdout area … was moreover in the West Midlands, very close to what Tolkien regarded as home, and was linguistically continuous with Old English from the same area. [pp. 47–8]

      In his Road to Middle-earth Shippey calls the essay ‘the most perfect though not the best-known of [Tolkien’s] academic pieces’, which ‘rested in classic philological style on an observation of the utmost tininess’ (2nd edn. 1992, pp. 36–7). But in a long comment on Tolkien’s scholarly influence aided by his rhetorical skills (‘Tolkien’s Two Views of Beowulf: One Hailed, One Ignored; But Did We Get This Right?’, ‘Scholars Forum’, The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza website, 25 July 2010) Shippey also wrote:

      Tolkien’s 1929 essay on the language of Ancrene Wisse and its associated texts was so convincing that it all but stopped the study of Middle English dialects in its tracks. People reckoned that without a consistent shared and standardised dialect of the kind Tolkien discovered, one could come to no conclusions about authorial or scribal dialect at all, because they were bound to be Mischprachen, jumbled by copying. It was not till 1986, when the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English came out, edited by Angus McIntosh and his team, that the view was refuted, and dialect study revived.

      See also Shippey, ‘Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now’, in his Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (2007).

      Tolkien’s essay is still considered seminal, but his conclusions have been modified or refined by other scholars, perhaps most notably *E.J. Dobson, who have more closely localized the ‘AB language’, held different views than Tolkien on scribal practice, and enlarged the scope of the investigation by examining the ‘AB’ manuscripts next to others of the period. Michael D.C. Drout has commented (‘J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and Its Significance’, Tolkien Studies 4 (2007), p. 122) that

      some of Tolkien’s discussion of the AB language has come in for criticism …, and there is less confidence in contemporary scholarship about the complete regularity of the AB standard; in particular, there is now some argument that the A and B texts actually do differ from each other …, challenging some of Tolkien’s conclusions. However, the broader argument about the persistence of Old English in the West Midlands remains accepted even if all of Tolkien’s conclusions about the AB texts are not.

      See further, Richard Dance, ‘The AB Language: The Recluse, the Gossip, and the Language Historian’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (2003). Dance comments, among other points, that medieval scribes sometimes did ‘translate’ between written dialects, which would diminish Tolkien’s argument for a scribal community of the ‘AB language’. Also see comments by Drout on philological criticism in our essay on *Chaucer as a Philogist: The Reeve’s Tale.

       Angles and Britons see English and Welsh

Annals of Aman see Annals of Valinor

Annals of Beleriand. The Annals of Beleriand exist in three versions. The first two, the ‘earliest’ Annals from the early 1930s, published with commentary and notes in *The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986), pp. 294–341, and the ‘later’ Annals from the mid-1930s, published with commentary in *The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987), pp. 124–54, chronicle events in Tolkien’s mythology (*‘The Silmarillion’) east of the Sea from the first appearance of the Sun and Moon to the end of the First Age. The Grey Annals from c. 1951, published with commentary and notes in *The War of the Jewels (1994), pp. 3–170, include events which happened in Middle-earth before the appearance of the Sun and Moon until the release of Húrin, at which point Tolkien left the manuscript unfinished.

      In the internal context of the mythology the Annals of Beleriand (and the *Annals of Valinor) ‘were written by Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin, before its fall, and after at Sirion’s Haven, and at Tavrobel in Tol Eressëa after his return unto the West, and there seen and translated by Eriol of Leithien, that is Ælfwine of the Angelcynn’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 263; see *Eriol and Ælfwine); while the Grey Annals ‘were made by the Sindar, the Grey Elves of Doriath and the Havens, and enlarged from the records and memories of the remnant of the Noldor of Nargothrond and Gondolin at the Mouths of the Sirion, whence they СКАЧАТЬ