The Devil's Coach Horses

The Devil's Coach-Horses is an essay by the British writer and philologist J. RR Tolkien from 1925. In this he deals with the meaning of the Middle English word "eaueres".

background

In the text The Devil's Coach-Horses: Eaueres , Tolkien considers a passage from the Hali Meiðhad , a text from the collection of five writings called the Katherine Group . It concerns the following text passage:

"Bi hwam hit iſ iwriten þus þurh þe prophete, þet ha in hare wurðinge aſ eauereſ forroteden […] þe ilke ſari wreccheſ þe i þe fule wurðinge vnwedde waleweð, beoð e de don & spureet hamitſ, wule. "

"Of whom it is written thus by the profet (sic), that they in their filth rotted like boars [...] the same sorry wretches that unwedded wallow in the foul mire are the devil's boars, who rides them and spurs them to do all he wants. "

- JRR Tolkien : The Devil's Coach-Horses: Eaueres. In: The Review of English Studies. Part 1.

The translation of the text by Frederick James Furnivall says that the devil rides boars. The word “eaueres” is translated here as Middle English “boars” , which means “boar” in German. Tolkien wrote that this translation and the derivation to the words "eofor" and "boar" seemed improbable from a phonological point of view. He saw closer to the old English “ealfara” , which means a pack horse . This word is mentioned in the Epistola Alexandri alongside draft oxen and camels. In Tolkien's opinion, it could from French “alferan” or “auferan” and thus belong to “eafor” and “afevian”, which means that transports are carried out. After further linguistic considerations, Tolkien equates “eaueres” with “aver” = horse, so that he comes to the conclusion that these are The Devil's Coach Horses , ie “the devil 's coach horses”.

Name for an insect

The black mold beetle is also known as the Devil's Coach Horse (Ocypus olens) , also (Staphylinus olens) or Cocktail Beetle .

literature

Frederick James Furnivall: Hali Meidenhad. An Alliterative Homily of the Thirteenth Century (= Early English Text Society . No. 18 ). Oxford University Press, London 1922, OCLC 375451 , pp. 18 ( quod.lib.umich.edu - first edition: 1866).
JRR Tolkien: The Devil's Coach-Horses: Eaueres . In: The Review of English Studies . tape 1 , no. 3 . Sidgwick & Jackson, July 1925, ISSN 0034-6551 , p. 331-336 , doi : 10.1093 / res / I.3.331 , JSTOR : 508893 (reprint: 1950).
JRR Tolkien: Ancrene wisse and Hali meiðhad . In: Essays and studies . tape 14 , 1929, OCLC 12232884 .
Michael DC Drout : Devil's Coach-Horses . In: JRR Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment . Taylor & Francis / Routledge, Hoboken / New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-96942-0 , pp. 125–126 ( books.google.de - reading sample).
Tom A. Shippey : The Road to Middle-earth. How JRR Tolkien created "The Lord of the Rings" . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-608-93601-8 , pp. 49 ( books.google.de - English: The Road to Middle-earth . Translated by Helmut W. Pesch ).

Individual evidence

↑ JRR Tolkien: The Devil's Coach-Horses: Eaueres. In: The Review of English Studies. Volume 1, No. 3, July 1925 JSTOR 508893 , pp. 331-336, here p. 331 above.
↑ † ever, n. In: Oxford English Dictionary . 2nd edition 1989.
^ Hans Kurath: Middle English Dictionary . University of Michigan Press, 1953, pp. 296 ( books.google.de ).
↑ Michael DC Drout: JRR Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment . Taylor & Francis, 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-96942-0 , pp. 125–126 ( books.google.de - reading sample).
↑ Devil's Coach Horse. insectidentification.org, accessed January 20, 2019 (American English).
↑ Devil's Coach Horse Beetle Guide. GrowVeg, accessed January 20, 2019 .

[1] JRR Tolkien: The Devil's Coach-Horses: Eaueres. In: The Review of English Studies. Volume 1, No. 3, July 1925 JSTOR 508893 , pp. 331-336, here p. 331 above.

[2] † ever, n. In: Oxford English Dictionary . 2nd edition 1989.

[3] Hans Kurath: Middle English Dictionary . University of Michigan Press, 1953, pp. 296 ( books.google.de ).

[4] Michael DC Drout: JRR Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment . Taylor & Francis, 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-96942-0 , pp. 125–126 ( books.google.de - reading sample).

[5] Devil's Coach Horse. insectidentification.org, accessed January 20, 2019 (American English).

[6] Devil's Coach Horse Beetle Guide. GrowVeg, accessed January 20, 2019 .


Fiction	Songs for the Philologists (1936) • The Hobbit (1937) • Blatt von Tüftler (1947) • The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (1945) • Bauer Giles von Ham (1949) • The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son (1953) • The Lord of the Rings (1954/55) • The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Poems from the Red Book (1962) • Tree and Leaf (1964) • The Tolkien Reader (1966) • The Road Goes Ever On (1967) • Smith of Wootton Major (1967)
Posthumously published fiction	Santa's Letters (1976) • The Silmarillion (1977) • News from Middle-earth (1980) • Mr. Bliss (1982) • Bilbo's Farewell Song (1990) • The History of Middle-earth (12 volumes; 1983–1996) • The Lost Road and Other Writings (Volume 5, 1987) • Roverandom (1998) • The Children of Húrin (2007) • The History of The Hobbit (2007) • The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009) • King Arthur's Fall (2013) • The Story of Kullervo (2015) • Beren and Lúthien (2017) • The Fall of Gondolin (2018)
Academic works	A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English text, 1925) • Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography (1925) • The Devil's Coach-Horses (1925) • Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad (1929) • The Name Nodens (1932) • Sigelwara Land Parts I and II, in Medium Aevum (1932–1934) • Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale (1934) • Beowulf: The Monsters and Their Critics (1936) • The Reeve's Tale: version prepared for recitation at the "summer diversions" (1939) • On Fairy-Stories (1939) • Sir Orfeo (1944) • Ofermod and Beorhtnoth's Death (1953) • Middle English "Losenger": Sketch of an etymological and semantic inquiry ( 1953) • Ancrene Wisse : The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle (1962) • English and Welsh (1963) • Introduction to Tree and Leaf (1964) • Contributions to the Jerusalem Bible (as translator and lexicographer) (1966) • Tolkien on Tolkien (autobiographical) (1966)
Posthumous academic publications	Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Pearl and Sir Orfeo (translations into modern English, 1975) • Finn and Hengest (1982) • The Monsters and the Critics (1983) • Beowulf and the Critics (2002) • Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014)