The Year's Work in English Studies 1920-1
A cura di Sir Sidney Lee e F. S. Boas
The English Association / Oxford University Press, Londra
1922, pp. 195
Rilegato
La rivista
Pubblicato annualmente, The Year's Work in English Studies è
giunto al suo 94mo volume. Raccoglie la più importante rassegna bibliografica
dei lavori scientifici e letteratura in lingua inglese oltre ad un’immensa
panoramica dalle opere in Old English a quelle contemporanee.
La recensione ad A Middle English Vocabulary di Tolkien
Nel 1922, la Clarendon Press di Oxford pubblicò A
Middle English Vocabulary di
Tolkien, prima in volume singolo e poi inseito nel libro di Kenneth SIsam Fourteenth-Century
Verse and Prose. Inizialmente previsto per il volume di Sisam, il Glossario
di Tolkien a causa di ritardi non vu incluso nella prima edizione del 1921. In
questo numero di The Year's Work in
English Studies 1920-1, Margaret L. Lee, recensì il volume di Sisam ed
elogiò il lavoro del giovane Tolkien da poco approdato all’Università di Leeds
come Lettore di Lingua e Letteratura
Inglese. Credo sia la prima recensione al primo testo accademico di Tolkien.
Di seguito la sola parte iniziale della lunga recensione della Lee dove si presenta il libro di Sisam e il Glossario di Tolkien (pp. 41-43).
IV
MIDDLE ENGLISH
[By Margaret L. Lee]
Two general
observations may be made in regard to the year's work of this section; first,
that in the majority of cases the purpose of the modern author or editor has
been literary, social, or historical rather than linguistic; secondly, that an
unusually large proportion of the books considered deal with matter belonging
to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Mr. Sisam's
volume of extracts from fourteenth-century writers1 forbids any
narrow definition of the nature of its appeal. In it we seem to possess what
has so long been lacking to the student of late Middle English – an altogether
excellent collection of representative pieces.
Anthologies
culled from Old and Middle English literature have hitherto tended to emphasize
the philological value of the passages chosen, at the expense of literary
interest (Professor Cook’s Literary
Middle English Reader (1915) is a noteworthy exception, but has little in
the way of textual annotation.) Mr. Sisam's collection, on the contrary, is so
edited as to appeal both to linguistic and literary scholarship, and this in
itself implies a high level of attainment. The Introduction, a delightful piece
of critical prose, deals with the growth of romance and of new metrical forms
during the thirteenth century, thus leading on to a detailed study of the fourteenth
century, with its alliterative revival on the one hand, its fresh tide of
foreign influence on the other, and its development of a new literary type, the
Miracle Play. The discussion of the Middle English didactic or moral poem leads
to an interesting digression, meant to prove that the large proportion of such
poems among existing MSS. is inconclusive, since ‘up to Chaucer's day, the
greater the popularity of an English poem, the less important becomes the MS.
as a means of early transmission. To determine the relative popularity of the
longer tales in verse we need, not so much a catalogue of extant MSS. as a
census that cannot. now be taken, of the repertoires of the entertainers.'
In a
concluding section Mr. Sisam provides some hints on the Study of early
literature which should be of real benefit to students. The need for intensive plus discursive reading, and of a
'sensitive' attitude towards the writings dealt with, has seldom been so much
as referred to in the ordinary text-book, which is apt to assume a finished
scholarship on the part of the untrained student. Mr. Sisam writes as a teacher
no less than a man of letters, and his point of view is broadly humanistic.
The scheme
of the book excludes selections from Chaucer, ‘who suffers when read in
extracts . . . although without him fourteenth. century literature is a body
without a head’. The point is debateable; but if it be conceded, the choice of
pieces leaves little room for criticism. Robert Mannyng, Richard Rolle,
Langland, Mandeville, Barbour, Wiclif, Gower, Treviso, and Minot are the chief
individual authors represented, and there are plentiful extracts from the
anonymous West Midland alliterative poems, the lyrics, and the York and
Towneley plays. Each extract is introduced by a few clear paragraphs of general
information, and elucidated by several pages of notes which fulfil the double
function of exciting interest in subject-matter and in form. The volume
includes an Appendix of nearly thirty pages on the English Language in the
fourteenth century, so compact and suggestive as to constitute an altogether
admirable introduction to the study of Middle English from the linguistic point
of view; and (in the later edition) a Vocabulary, which is also issued
separately for purchasers of the book in its earlier form.2 It is
unfortunate that this separate issue is unpaged, and that it should be entitled
a Vocabulary on the cover and a Glossary within. But these small points do not
obscure the fact that Mr. Tolkien has worthily completed a piece of work which
can hardly he praised too highly by teachers whom experience has brought to
realize the underlying unity of all literary and linguistic study worthy of the
name.
Mr. Tolkien
gives 'exceptionally full treatment to what may rightly be called the backbone
of the language', eg. he devotes much space and care to the various meanings of
the prepositions to, and the various forms of the pronoun he, or the verb habben,
rather than to suggested etymologies of the rare and obscure words contained in
his texts. The result is a Vocabulary with exhaustive textual references,
having a value independent of the extracts to which it is appended – comparable
indeed in fullness and interest with Heyne’s Glossary to Beowulf and a few others like it. The treatment of convertible
symbols such as Ʒ and g, þ
and th, v, i and y, is particularly to be commended.
We hope
that future editions of Fourteenth
Century Verse and Prose will be printed on more opaque paper, on which
students could insert their own marginal annotations in ink.
1 Fourteenth-Century
Verse and Prose, ed. by K. Sisam. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921. Xxxiii +
264 + App. 27 pp. 7s. 6d. net.
2 A
Middle English Vocabulary, by J. R. R. Tolkien. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1922. (Not paged). 4 s. 6d. net.
Alla fine del testo, un elenco di libri dove compaiono i due di Sisam e Tolkien usciti nel 1922.
Alla fine del testo, un elenco di libri dove compaiono i due di Sisam e Tolkien usciti nel 1922.
Sulla prima pagina una etichetta dell'Università di Oxford.
