John Richardson

Old Papers About Old English: Some Odd Ramblings of an Old-Style Philologist John Richardson

The essays in this little volume, with the exception of the poetic translation of "The Ruin" - which first appeared in a short-lived literary magazine in Edmonton - and two previously unpublished pieces, were originally printed in peer-reviewed scholarly publications over a period of about twenty years from 1983, when I was still an undergraduate just out of my teens, to 2001, when I had long-since left formal academia behind for the "real" world of business and parenthood. These papers are the product of of my philologist magpie habits of mind and of the tremendous privilege I have enjoyed to pursue my own interests wherever they may lead. And they are more than anything else, the product of a time of less hasty thought and speech than seems to prevail today. This "Philology" to which I refer has for some time been something of a runt of the academic litter, particularly with the rise to dominance of Literary Theory (over actually reading the poetry) and Post-Modernism (over pretty much everything). In 1997 Roberta Frank, in her delightful, and delightfully titled "The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Philologist" (Journal of English and Germanic Philology 96 [1997], 486-513)., while chronicling the decades of obituaries spoken and published concerning Philology, reminds us that to fully understand literature, particularly the literature of the past, we need to know and understand the full context in which the words we read were assembled. Professor Frank writes, "the past is not the girl next door" (p. 500). No, the past is far more distant, unfamiliar, unknowable, mysterious, exotic, and, perhaps, at times more beautiful, than the everyday world of the present. When philologists run off to the library to try to find the meaning of a single word, they end up getting gloriously lost, diverted by unexpected echoes and detours, crossroads of meaning, and a confusion of learned dwarfs. They discover that no word is so small that it cannot be seen to overshadow mountains if they pay attention to it for a long time and close up.(p.498) And, I think most importantly, when philologists run off to the library, they do it out of the absolute meaning of "Philology" the love of human thought as expressed in words. Professor Frank continues: A tolerance for pedantry, for the obscure, esoteric, and devious, characterizes Philology still. Doors are not shut until the last tiniest fragments of a text's preceding and surrounding world are fully extracted, listed, restored, and conserved. Even before Foucault, philologists recognized the pastness of the past, its mysterious difference.(p. 500) I can get behind that. I hope you can, too.-- from the author's introduction