Songs for the Philologists
Songs for the Philologists, subtitled Mál-rúnar skaltu kunna, is a collection of songs written and written in Leeds between 1920 and 1924 by JRR Tolkien , Eric Valentine Gorden and others 1936 at University College in London was printed. There are essentially 30 Old Norse drinking songs and chants in Old English , Gothic or Latin .
background
In Leeds, Tolkien and Gordon founded the student association “Viking Club”, which specialized in reading old Norse legends and indulged in beer. For this club, Tolkien and Gordon originally wrote their songs for the philologists . They produced a number of typescripts , which they reproduced and in which they merged a mixture of traditional songs or English melodies and original verses from Old English, Old Norse and Gothic.
In 1935 or 1936, Dr. Smith, a former student from Leeds, took one of those copies to a group of students to print as an exercise at University College's print shop. A few copies were initially made there. However, since Smith had not obtained permission from Tolkien or Gordon, the finished brochures were not distributed. Most of these proofs were also destroyed in a fire, only a few surviving that might have been taken away by the students who made them. It can be assumed that there were no more than 14 brochures.
content
The first few pages contain short poems or lyrics. The titles are Fara með Vikingum , Ja, lattu gamminn , Rokkvisa , Bjort mey og Hrein , Syx mynet (melody "I Love Sixpence") and Olafur Liljuros , short rhymes usually with six or eight lines per verse.
Bagme Bloma is written in the Gothic language with a meter in simple regular bars and is about the birch . the melody here is the song O Lazy sheep! specified. A later reprint with a modern translation as Flower of the Trees was, like some other songs, reprinted in The Road to Middle-earth ("The way to Middle-earth"). There is also a grammatical analysis of this text by Luzius Thöny.
| Bagme Bloma | Flower of trees |
|---|---|
Brunaim bairiþ Bairka bogum |
The birch bears |
Eadig beo þu is also one of these and is specified as Good Luck to You ("Good luck for you") to the melody Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star .
Bi, bi og Blaga consists of two short four-line stanzas, Guþ let vinber vaxa belongs to the melody Laus Deo ("Praise the Lords!"), Followed by Gomul Kynni and Su Klukka Heljar's song The Bells of Hell ("The bells of hell" ). Next, a text comes in English Bring us in good ale ( Bring us good beer in ) and two Latin Salve or Grace ( Hail ) and the student song Gaudeamus . The next From one to five , again in English, includes the melody Three Wise Men of Gotham .
The Ruddoc Hana goes with Who Killed Cock Robin and Daddy Neptune is given for Ides Ælfscyne , Elf-fair Lady (“Elbenschöne Frau”) . Ofer widne garsecg , Across the Broad Ocean ( via the great ocean ) belongs to the tune of The Mermaid , the following three Icelandic song , La Huru and Natura Apis to O'Reilly . The Carrion Crow is the melody to I sat upon a bench ("I sat on a bench"), followed by Gubben Noach .
The Root of the Boot has strong similarities with the troll poem that was later published in a revised form in Lord of the Rings and the adventures of Tom Bombadil as the stone troll . It's about a troll nibbling on a human leg. A man named Tom comes to this and asks if it is his uncle John's leg. After a battle of words, Tom gives the troll a kick and has been lame since the troll was as hard as rock, but in the end he steals the missing leg from his uncle. The accompanying melody comes from the song The Fox Went Out .
This is followed by a rather macabre song Hwan ic beo dead ("When I'm dead"), a small rhyme printed in several language variants. Then the Visur Islendinga , the Frenchmen Froth to the melody The Vicar of Bray and finally Two Little Schemes or LIT 'AND LANG' (“Lütt und Lang”) a song of praise to philology. The German translation does not quite reproduce this parable, since lit ' here means literature and Lang' means language and characterizes the competition between literary scholars and philologists.
| LIT 'AND LANG' | Lütt and Lang |
|---|---|
Once there were two little groups, called |
Once there were two small groups, |
Specialty
The original 1936 edition is privately owned by the English Department of University College London. It is the first and only edition, printed with a light blue cover and bound with staples. The texts are printed in English and Anglo-Saxon and in Roman and Anglo-Saxon types respectively . Commissioned by G. Tillotson, AH Smith, B. Pattison and other members of the English Department, University College, London, SUNY-Buffalo and Oxford University. It is only available through OCLC .
literature
-
Thomas Alan Shippey : The Road to Middle-earth . Allen & Unwin, London 1982; Expanded edition: Houghton Mifflin, Boston 2003, ISBN 0-618-25760-8 .
- German The way to Middle Earth , translated from the English by Helmut W. Pesch . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-608-93601-8 .
Web links
- The Inklings Inside: Songs for Philologists. on oxfordinklings.blogspot.de
- Songs for the Philologists by JRR Tolkien, EV Gordon & Others. on tolkienlibrary.com
- Songs for the Philologists by JRR Tolkien. on vikingrune.com
Individual evidence
- ^ Songs for the Philologists. from tolkienlibrary.com, accessed January 29, 2013.
- ↑ Luzius Thöny: Bagme Bloma: Grammatical Analysis. (PDF; 101 kB) at swanrad.ch, accessed on January 29, 2013.
- ↑ Bagme Bloma on jrrvf.com, accessed January 29, 2013. (Original text and English translation)
- ↑ Eadig beo þu. from jrrvf.com, accessed January 29, 2013. (Original text and English translation)
- ↑ Ides Ælfscyne. from jrrvf.com, accessed January 29, 2013. (Original text and English translation)
- ↑ Ofer widne garsecg. from jrrvf.com, accessed January 29, 2013. (Original text and English translation)
- ↑ Jane Chance: Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England. on books.google.de, accessed January 29, 2013. (Chapter 1. The Critic As Monster. Note 3.)