On Philological Scholarship

'Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets,' wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poetisum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the 'field of Northern scholarship' as 'a vast plain, filled with dry bones,' up and down which there walked 'a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead.' But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go.

-T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth