Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- 1 The Romantic background
- 2 The English branch of the German tree
- 3 Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
- 4 ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’
- 5 English and German views on the conversion of the English
- 6 J.M. Kemble
- 7 The views of the founders seen through the writings of their lesser contemporaries
- 8 English views of the late nineteenth century and after
- 9 Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding Germanic antiquities in them
- 10 The gods Themselves
- 11 Wyrd
- 12 Conclusion
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
6 - J.M. Kemble
from PART I - THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the new edition, AD 2000
- Introduction to the 1975 edition of The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism
- PART I THE SEARCH FOR ANGLO-SAXON PAGANISM
- 1 The Romantic background
- 2 The English branch of the German tree
- 3 Christianity puts an end to folk-poetry
- 4 ‘Half-veiled remains of pagan poetry’
- 5 English and German views on the conversion of the English
- 6 J.M. Kemble
- 7 The views of the founders seen through the writings of their lesser contemporaries
- 8 English views of the late nineteenth century and after
- 9 Stock views disintegrating Old English poems and finding Germanic antiquities in them
- 10 The gods Themselves
- 11 Wyrd
- 12 Conclusion
- PART II ANGLO-SAXON TRIAL BY JURY
- I. Index of sources
- II. Index of scholars, critics, and authors
- III. General Index
Summary
IN THE NINETEENTH century Germany was the centre of the world of Germanic philology, including Anglo-Saxon philology. Wülker, writing the history of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, very properly divides Old English grammars up to that time into Old Grammars and New Grammars. Effectively, the old grammars begin with Hickes in the late seventeenth century. They end, pathetically, with J.L. Sisson's The Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, 1819; pathetically, because 1819 is the year when the first edition of the first volume of Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik was published. Sisson's Grammar was the feeble last descendant of a line whose founders had not been ignoble; in his ‘Advertisement’ (i.e. preface) Sisson says:
The following Pages have been compiled with a view of offering to the Public, in a compressed Form, the principal Parts of Dr. Hickes's Anglo-Saxon Grammar, a Book now seldom to be met with.
In Grimm's Grammatik linguistic learning was ranged in new, and seemingly perfect, panoply.
It is no great marvel that after the publication of Grimm's Grammatik anyone who aspired to be an Anglo-Saxon scholar had to go to Germany. Among young Englishmen who went to Germany the foremost is John Mitchell Kemble. He acquired there a sound knowledge of philology, his political views, his literary views, and his wife, of which acquisitions all but the first were unfortunate in some respects. As a link between Germany and England he is of the greatest importance in the history of Anglo-Saxon studies in the nineteenth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Imagining the Anglo-Saxon PastThe Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and Anglo-Saxon Trial by Jury, pp. 29 - 32Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000