Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale

Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale is an essay to a lecture, which the British writer and philologist J. RR Tolkien prior to the May 16, 1931 Philological Society (Philological Society) in Oxford has held. The theme was the Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and the use of dialects in the story The Reeve's Tale from the collection The Canterbury Tales , which he had written in the 14th century.

background

The Reeve's Tale is the third tale from the fragments of the Canterbury Tales that Tolkien used to delve into the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and its linguistic peculiarities. He illuminates the use of the Northern English language by Chaucer as a stylistic means for the implementation of the comedy in the story. He concludes that the poet had both a good knowledge of this dialect and a sense of how its peculiarities affected his audience in London. It is noteworthy that The Reeve's Tale was the only one of the stories to be written in this regional accent and therefore attracted interest within the academic community. In the 1930s, for example, Tolkien regarded this use as a “linguistic joke”, with which Chaucer tried to reproduce some phonological nuances that point to a dialect from the Norfork area and thus to have fun with other philologists, the normal reader remained hidden. Recent linguistic research has partially refuted this thesis and rather assume that the assignment of the dialects indicates the level of education in order to illustrate the lower class through this language deviating from the norm. Chaucer may have used this element deliberately "to mock the reeve and the characters of his tale" ("to mock the reeve and the characters of his tale").

expenditure

• JRR Tolkien: Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale . In: Transactions of the Philological Society . tape 33 , no. 1 . Wiley-Blackwell, November 1, 1934, ISSN  1467-968X , pp. 1-70 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1467-968X.1934.tb01091.x .
• JRR Tolkien: Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale . In: Douglas A. Anderson, Michael DC Drout, Verlyn Flieger (Eds.): Tolkien studies . tape V . West Virginia University Press, Morgantown 2008, ISBN 978-1-933202-38-9 , pp. 109–171 (Also contains on the connecting pages (173–183) Tolkien's version of The Reeve's Tale from 1939).

literature

• SCP Horobin: JRR Tolkien as a Philologist. A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale . In: English Studies . tape 82 , no. 2 , April 1, 2001, ISSN  0013-838X , p. 97-105 , doi : 10.1076 / enst.82.2.97.9598 .
• Michael DC Drout: JRR Tolkien Encyclopedia. Scholarship and Critical Assessment . Taylor & Francis / Routledge, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-96942-0 , pp. 93 .

Web links

Wikisource: The Reeve's Prologue and Tale  - Sources and full texts (English)

• Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales on librarius.com

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Chaucer as a Philologist. (PDF, p. 4.) on tolkien.su
2. ^ Jacqueline Cordell: The individual voice: The expression of authority through dialects, idiolects, and borrowed terminology in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. P. 10 ( scholars.unh.edu PDF).
3. ^ Sara Pons-Sanz: The Language of Early English Literature. From Cædmon to Milton . Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, ISBN 978-1-137-39387-6 , pp. 207–209 ( books.google.com - Limited Preview).