Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanische Metrik remains a foundational work for Germanic metrical research, even 125 years after its publication in 1893. His impact on the field may be roughly divided into three broad approaches: 1) the impulse for the typological categorization and labelling of verses; 2) the four-position principle as the basis for a…[Read more]

Workshop presentation about reconstruction of sounds preserved only in marginal daughter languages attested later than the earliest daughters

Discussion of recent new proposals for the reconstruction of the PIE sounds called “laryngeals”

J.R.R. Tolkien produced a considerable body of poetry in which he used the traditional alliterative metre of Old Norse and Old English to write modern English verse. This paper reviews three of his longer narrative poems, published in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Fall of Arthur, examining Tolkien’s alliterative technique in co…[Read more]

Tolkien modeled the relationship between his invented languages Quenya and Sindarin in part on that between Latin and Welsh.

Book review of The Feanorian Alphabet, Part 1; Quenya Verb Structure, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Gilson and Arden R. Smith.

Book review of Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer (2019) by John M. Bowers. Available at: https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol9/iss1/3

Book review of Tolkien and Sanskrit (2016) by Mark T. Hooker.

Book review of A Secret Vice (2016) by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins.

A defence of the emendation of eorl to Eorle ‘Heruli’ in Beowulf 6a.

Neidorf (2017), The Transmission of Beowulf, synthesizes a variety of philological approaches to propose a new ‘lexemic theory’ of Anglo-Saxon scribal behaviour. In this response article, I build on Neidorf’s arguments, suggesting ways that his theory may be adapted to account for differences between the two scribes of the Beowulf manus…[Read more]

The variable operation of high vowel deletion in Old English has long been a point of difficulty, both descriptively – a prehistoric form like *hēafudu is attested variably as hēafudu , hēafdu , and hēafod – and theoretically. Recent work, especially by Bermúdez‐Otero (2005b) and Fulk (2010), has indicated that plural forms like hēafudu ar…[Read more]