One of my most important teachers was William Alfred, from whom I learned Anglo-Saxon language and literature. He was, in certain significant ways, the American Tolkien.https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2003/04/william-alfred/ …
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Bill Alfred was the principal student of Albert Lord, who wrote the classic book on the folk-process / oral composition of Medieval epics (Tolkien’s principal concern) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lord …pic.twitter.com/2AEkV9IrEX
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Albert Lord was the principal student of Milman Parry, who first figured out how epic worked by studying the last extant tradition of bardry, in Bosnia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry …pic.twitter.com/TmC188wRa1
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Milman Parry was one of the several important students of Antoine Meillet, who suggested to him the fundamental hypothesis of epic composition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Meillet …pic.twitter.com/JhSToCWmDh
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Meillet got it from Matija Murko, who published only in barbaric Far-Eastern languages, so he didn’t get any credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matija_Murko …
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Meillet’s main teacher was Ferdinand de Saussure, who basically invented linguistics and All That French Stuff. He lectured on Gothic—a principal preoccupation of Tolkien, via Wright, whom I started with… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure …
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I can go on like this. But what I wanted to say was: This is Lineage. Lineage has enormous mythopoeic significance that modernity denies—at the same time it’s critical to modernity. It’s not about “teaching” in some propositional, rationalist sense. It is passing the flame.
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Bill Alfred’s recounting the impact of Albert Lord performing Beowulf as scēop, singing the epic and accompanying the song on the harp, affected me deeply by proxy. This is what Tolkien writes about, rather clumsily, when he describes hobbits hearing the songs of the elves.
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I drew Professor Alfred’s attention to Tolkien’s _The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth_, which he had been unaware of. I think it is Tolkien’s most important work. (But don’t read it if you are expecting more Lord of the Rings! It is ethics, not entertainment.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Homecoming_of_Beorhtnoth_Beorhthelm's_Son …
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It is possible that this is what would be most important for me to write about…. Someday, if I live long enough, which is unlikely, or else in the Dream Time, I will finish a monstrous essay notionally about _The Homecoming_, but actually about >
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about Being, and Time, and Lineage, and Myth, and the nature of the University, and Tolkien’s professional career which was mostly failed resistance against the scientificalization of philology, and his mixed feelings (and mine) about the pagan heroic vs Christian ethoi, and
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postmodernism, postmodernity, and deconstruction, and the proper function of the ruling class, and John Gardner’s _Grendel_, and Gandalf with the Balrog, and Macaulay’s _Lays of Ancient Rome_, and worlds that were, and worlds that are, and worlds that yet may be, because
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