yole's journey in languages

Yesterday I submitted the first paper that I’ve planned to write as an extra credits essay for the Leiden Summer School. My overall goal with these essays is to demonstrate my research skills and provide an extra argument in favor of accepting me into the masters program (which is not a given, since my previous degree has nothing to do with linguistics).

The paper is a commentary on Tolkien’s “Tradition of Versification” essay, that was published this year in the “Battle of Maldon” book. “Battle of Maldon” is a poem written in Old English in the end of the 10th century, and Tolkien’s essay is primarily concerned with its stylistic differences from other Old English poems and the reasons why such differences may have arisen.

Tolkien’s essay was originally written in the 1930s, and my goal was to see whether it’s still relevant for modern Old English poetry scholarship. I’ve had to go through quite a few sources to get an overview of what the scholarship looks like, and I still worry that I missed some important references. However, from what I did gather, the general frameworks and theories are still built on the same foundation as when the essay was written, and Tolkien would have easily been able to get up to speed with modern research.

My main conclusion is that Tolkien is focused quite a bit more than most scholars on the poets who created the texts, and not just on the details of the texts themselves, and therefore his perspective is still a valuable contribution. Tolkien’s view is no doubt grounded in his own experience writing alliterative poetry in the same metre as the Old English works.

I’m really looking forward to receiving feedback from the professor on my essay, and I’ll make sure to share it here once I receive it. And now I’m preparing to work on my second essay, covering an entirely unrelated subject: preterite endings in Lycian.