English and Welsh

by Jonh Ronald Ruel Tolkien

  But if we leave such terms as Celtic and Teutonic (or Germanic) aside, reserving them for their only useful purpose, linguistic classification, it remains an evident conclusion from history that apart from language the inhabitants of Britain are made of the same 'racial' ingredients, though the mixing of these has not been uniform. It is still patchy. The observable differences are, however, difficult or impossible to relate to language.

  The eastern region, especially in the south-east (where the breach with the Continent is narrowest), is the area where the newer layers lie thicker and the older things are thinner and more submerged. So it must have been for many ages, since this island achieved more or less its present peculiar shape. So, if these parts arc now considered the most English, or the most Danish, they must once have been the most Celtic, or British, or Belgic. There still endures the ancient pre-English, pre-Roman name of Kent.

  For neither Celtic nor Germanic forms of speech belong in origin to these islands. They arc both invaders, and by similar routes. The bearers of these languages have clearly never extirpated the peoples of other language that they found before them. This, however, is, I think, an interesting point to note, when we consider the present position (that is, all that has followed since the fifth century a.d.): there is no evidence at all for the survival in the areas which we now call England and Wales of any pre-Celtic speech. [4] In place-names we may find fragments of long-forgotten Neolithic or Bronze Age tongues, celticized, romanized, anglicized, ground down by the wear of time. It is likely enough. For if pre-English names, especially of mountains or rivers, survived the coming of the North Sea pirates, they may as well have survived the coming of the Celtic Iron Age warriors. Yet when the place-names expert hazards a pre-Celtic origin, it in fact only means that from our defective material he cannot devise any etymology fit to print.

  This eradication of pre-Indo-European language is interesting, even if its cause or causes remain uncertain. It might be thought to reflect a natural superiority of Indo-European kinds of language; so that the first bringers of that type of speech were eventually completely successful linguistically, while successors bringing languages of the same order, contesting with their linguistic peers, were less so. But even if one admits that languages (like other art-forms or styles) have a virtue of their own, independent of their immediate inheritors – a thing which I believe – one has to admit that other factors than linguistic excellence contribute to their propagation. Weapons, for instance. While the completion of a process may be due simply to the fact that it has gone on for a very long time.

  But whatever the success of the imported languages, the inhabitants of Britain, during recorded history, must have been in large part neither Celtic nor Germanic: that is, not derived physically from the original speakers of those varieties of language, nor even from the already racially more mixed invaders who planted them in Britain.

  In that case they arc and were not either 'Celts' or 'Teutons' according to the modern myth that still holds such an attraction for many minds. In this legend Celts and Teutons are primeval and immutable creatures, like a triceratops and a stegosaurus (bigger than a rhinoceros and more pugnacious, as popular palaeontologists depict them), fixed not only in shape but in innate and mutual hostility, and endowed even in the mists of antiquity, as ever since, with the peculiarities of mind and temper which can be still observed in the Irish or the Welsh on the one hand and the English on the other: the wild incalculable poetic Celt, full of vague and misty imaginations, and the Saxon, solid and practical when not under the influence of beer. Unlike most myths this myth seems to have no value at all.

  According to such a view Beowulf, though in English, must, I should say, be far more Celtic – being full of dark and twilight, and laden with sorrow and regret – than most things that I have met written in a Celtic language.

  Should you wish to describe the riding to hunt of the Lord of the Underworld in Celtic* fashion (according to this view of the word), you would have to employ an Anglo-Saxon poet. It is easy to imagine how he would have managed it: ominous, colourless, with the wind blowing, and a wóma in the distance, as the half-seen hounds came baying in the gloom, huge shadows pursuing shadows to the brink of a bottomless pool. We have, alas! no Welsh of a like age to compare with it; but we may glance none the less at the White Book of Rhydderch (containing the so-called Mabinogion). This manuscript, though its date is of the early fourteenth century, no doubt contains matter composed long before, much of which had come down to the author from times still more remote. In it at the beginning of the mabinogi of Pwyll Prince of Dyfed we read how Pwyll set out to hunt in Glyn Cuch:

  And he sounded his horn and began to muster the hunt, and followed after the dogs and lost his companions; and while he was listening to the cry of the pack, he could hear the cry of another pack, but they had not the same cry and were coming to meet his own pack.

  And he could see a clearing in the wood as of a level field, and as his pack reached the edge of the clearing he could see a stag in front of the other pack. And towards the middle of the clearing lo! the pack that was pursuing it overtaking it and bringing it to the ground. And then he looked at the colour of the pack, without troubling to look at the stag; and of all the hounds he had seen in the world he had seen no dogs the same colour as these. The colour that was on them was a brilliant shining white, and their ears red; and as the exceeding whiteness of the dogs glittered so glittered the exceeding redness of their cars. And he came to the dogs and drove away the dogs that had killed the stag, and baited his own pack upon it.

  But these dogs that the prince had driven off were the hounds of Arawn, King of Annwn, Lord of the Underworld.

  A very practical man, with a keen feeling for bright colour, was this Pwyll, or the writer who described him. Can he have been a 'Celt'? He had never heard of the word, we may feel sure; but he spoke and wrote with skill what we now classify as a Celtic language: Cymraeg, which we call Welsh.

  That is all that I have to say at this time about the confusion between language (and nomenclature) and 'race'; and the romantic misapplication of the terms Celtic and Teutonic (or Germanic). Even so I have spent too long on these points for the narrow limits of my theme and time; and my excuse must be that, though the dogs that I have been beating may seem to most of those who are listening to me dead, they are still alive and barking in this land at large.

  I will turn now to the Celtic language in Britain. But even if I were fully qualified, I should not now be giving a sketch of Celtic philology. I am trying only to indicate some of the points in which this study may offer special attraction to the speakers of English, points which have specially attracted me. So I will pass over 'P and Q': I mean the difficult and absorbing problems that are presented by the linguistic and archaeological evidence concerning the immigrations from the European mainland, connected or supposed to be connected with the coming of different varieties of Celtic speech to Britain and Ireland. I am concerned in any case only with 'P-Celts' and among those with the speech-ancestors of the Welsh.

  The first point that I think should be considered is this: the antiquity in Britain of Celtic language. Part of Britain we now call England, the land of the Angles; and yet all the days of the English in it, from Hengest to Elizabeth II, are short on an archaeological scale, short even on a Celtic scale. When our speech-ancestors began their effective linguistic conquests – no doubt much later than their first tentative settlements in such regions as the Sussex coast – in the fifth century a.d. the Celtic occupation had probably some thousand years behind it: a length of time as long as that which separates us from King Alfred.

  The English adventure was interrupted and modified, after hardly more than 300 years, by the intrusion of a new element, a different though related variety of Germanic coming from Scandinavia. This is a complication which occurred in historically documented times, and we know a good deal about it. But similar things, historically and linguistically undocumented, though conjec
tured by archaeology, must have occurred in the course of the celticizing of Britain. The result may be capable of a fairly simple generalization: that the whole of Britain south of the Forth-Clyde line by the first century a.d. shared a British or 'Brittonic' civilization, 'which so far as language goes formed a single linguistic province from Dumbarton and Edinburgh to Cornwall and Kent'. [5] But the processes by which this linguistic state was achieved were no doubt as complicated, differing in pace, mode, and effect, in different areas, as were those of the subsequent process, which has at length achieved a result which 2,000 years hence might be generalized in almost the same terms, though referring to the spread not of 'Brittonic' but of English. (But parts of Wales would have still to be excepted.)

  For instance, I do not know what linguistic complications were introduced, or may be thought to have been introduced, by the' Belgic' invasion, interrupted by Julius Caesar's ill-considered and deservedly ill-fated incursion; but they could, I suppose, have involved dialectal differences within Celtic as considerable as those which divided ninth-century Norse from the older Germanic layer which we now call 'Anglo-Saxon' [6]. But 2, 000 years hence those differences which now appear marked and important to English philologists may be insignificant or unrecognizable.

  None the less, far off and now obscure as the Celtic adventures may seem, their surviving linguistic traces should be to us, who live here in this coveted and much-contested island, of deep interest, as long as antiquity continues to attract the minds of men. Through them we may catch a glimpse or echo of the past which archaeology alone cannot supply, the past of the land which we call our home.

  Of this I may perhaps give an illustration, though it is well known. There stands still in what is now England the ruinous fragment of an ancient monument that we have long called in our English fashion Stonehenge, 'the suspended stones', remembering nothing of its history. Archaeologists with the aid of geologists may record the astonishing fact that some of its stones must certainly have been brought from Pembrokeshire, and we may ponder what this great feat of transport must imply: whether in veneration of the site, or in numbers of the population, or in organization of so-called primitive peoples long ago. But when we find 'Celtic' legend, presumably without the aid of precise geological knowledge, recording in its fashion the carrying of stones from Pembroke to Stonehenge, then we must also ponder what that must imply: in the absorption by Celtic-speakers of the traditions of predecessors, and the echoes of ancient things that can still be heard in the seemingly wild and distorted tales that survive enshrined in Celtic tongues.

  The variety of Celtic language that we are at present concerned with was one whose development went on at about the same pace as that of spoken Latin – with which it was ultimately related. The distance between the two was greater, of course, than that separating even the most divergent forms of Germanic speech; but the language of southern Britain would appear to have been one whose sounds and words were capable of representation more Romano in Latin letters less unsatisfactorily than those of other languages with which the Romans came in contact.

  It had entered Britain – and this seems to me an important point – in an archaic state. This requires some closer definition. The languages of Indo-European kind in Europe do not, of course, all shift at the same pace, either throughout their organization or in any given department (such as phonetic structure). But there is none the less a general and similar movement of change that achieves successively similar stages or modes.

  Of the primitive modes of the major branches – the hypothetical common Indo-European wholly escapes us – we have now no records. But we may use 'archaic' with reference to the states of those languages that arc earliest recorded. If we say that classical Latin, substantially the form of that language just before the beginning of our present era, is still an example of the European archaic mode, we may call it an 'old' language. Gothic, though it is recorded later, still qualifies for that title. It is still an example of 'Old Germanic'.

  That even so limited a record is preserved, at this stage, of any Germanic language, even of one comparatively well advanced in change, [7] is of great importance to Germanic philology. [8] Anything comparable that represented, say, even one of the dialects of Gaul would have profound effects on Celtic philology.

  Unfortunately, for departmental convenience in classifying the periods of the individual languages of later times, we obscure this point by our use of 'old' for the earliest period of effective records. Old Welsh is used for the scanty records of a time roughly equivalent to that of the documents of Anglo-Saxon; and this we call Old English.

  But Old English and Old Welsh were not on a European basis old at all. English certainly, even when we first meet it in the eighth century, is a 'middle' speech, well advanced into the second stage, though its temporary elevation as a learned and cultured language retarded for a time its movement towards a third. [9] The same might be said for Old Welsh, no doubt, if we had enough of it. Though the movement of Welsh was naturally not the same as that of English. It resembled far more closely the movement of the Romance languages – for example, in the loss of a neuter gender; the early disappearance of declensions contrasted with the preservation in verbs of distinct personal inflexions and a fairly elaborate system of tenses and their moods.

  More than 200 years passed in the dark between the beginning of the linguistic invasion of Britain by English and our first records of its form. Records of the fifth and early sixth centuries would certainly produce some surprises in detail for philologists (as no doubt would those of Welsh for a like period); yet the evidence seems to me clear that already in the days of Hengest and Horsa, at the moment of its first entry, English was in the 'middle' stage.

  On the other hand, British forms of language had entered Britain in an archaic state; indeed, if we place their first arrival some centuries before the beginning of our era, in a mode far more archaic than that of the earliest Latin. The whole of its transformation, therefore, from a language of very ancient mode, an elaborately inflected and recognizable dialect of western Indo-European, to a middle and a modern speech has gone on in this island. It has, and had long ago, become, as it were, acclimatized to and naturalized in Britain; so that it belonged to the land in a way with which English could not compete, and «till belongs to it with a seniority which we cannot overtake. In that sense we may call it an 'old' tongue: old in this island. It had become already virtually 'indigenous' when English first came to disturb its possession.

  Changes in a language arc largely conditioned by its own patterns of sound and function. Even after loosening or loss of former contacts, it may continue to change according to trends already in evidence before migration. So 'Celts' in their new situations in Britain, no doubt, continued for some time to change their language along the same lines as their kinsmen on the Continent. But separation from them, even if not complete, would tend to halt some changes already initiated, and to hasten others; while the adoption of Celtic by aliens might set up new and unprecedented movements. Celtic dialects in this island, as compared with their nearest kin overseas, would slowly become British and peculiar. How far and in what ways that was true in the days of the coming of the English we can only guess, in the absence of records from this side and of connected texts of known meaning in any Celtic dialect of the Continent. The pre-Roman languages of Gaul have for all practical purposes disastrously perished. We may, however, compare the Welsh treatment of the numerous Latin words that it adopted with the Gallo-Roman treatment of the same words on their way to French. Or the Gallo-Roman and French treatment of Celtic words and names may be compared with their treatment in Britain. Such comparisons certainly indicate that British was divergent and in some respects conservative.

  The Latin reflected by the Welsh loan-words is one that remains far closer to classical Latin than to the spoken Latin of the Continent, especially that of Gaul. For example: in the preservation of с and g as stops before all vowels; of v (u̮) as distinc
t from medial b (ƀ); or of quantitative distinctions in vowels, so that Latin ă, ĭ are in Welsh treated quite differently from ā, ē. [10] This conservatism of the Latin clement may of course be, at least in part, due to the fact that we are looking at words that were early removed from a Latin context to a British, so that certain features later altered in spoken Latin were fossilized in the British dialects of the West. Since the spoken Latin of southern Britain perished and did not have time to develop into a Romance language, we do not know how it would have continued to develop. The probability is, however, that it would have been very different from that of Gaul.

  In a similar way the early English loan-words from French preserve, for instance in ch and ge (as in change), consonantal values of Old French since altered in France. Spoken French also eventually died out in England, and we do not know how it would have developed down to the present day, if it had survived as an independent dialect; though the probability is that it would have shown many of the features revealed in the English loan-words.

  In the treatment of Celtic material there was, in any case, wide divergence between Gaul and Britain. For example the Gallo-Roman Rotomagus, on its way to Rouen, is represented in late Old English as Rothem; but in Old Welsh it would have been written *Rotmag, and later *Rodva, *Rhodfa.

  English was well set in its own, and in many respects (from a general Germanic point of view) divergent, directions of change at the time of its arrival, and it has changed greatly since. Yet in some points it has remained conservative. It has preserved, for instance, the Germanic consonants þ (now written th) and w. No other Germanic dialect preserves them both, and þ is in fact otherwise preserved only in Icelandic. It may at least be noted that Welsh also makes abundant use of these two sounds. [11] It is a natural question to ask: how did these two languages, the long-settled British and the new-come English, affect one another, if at all; and what at any rate were their relations?