Kemble's insults

I know, you're probably tired of hearing about John Mitchell Kemble.  But I had so much fun running across his various insults that I thought I would compile them for your (ok, my) amusement.  He didn't pull any punches, as you'll see.


On 18th-century attempts to get rid of strong verbs:
These truly original and groundforms of the language having been called irregular, a logical fallacy suggested to the purists that what was irregular must be wrong…the wind blew and the cock crew no longer, -- they now blowed and crowed.  In short, these masters and doctors, though grammarians and lexicographers, knowed a thing or two less than they ought.
[Footnote in unpublished review of Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik, p. 38]


On interpreting Old English based on Old Norse:
I beg once and for all to say that Norse forms have nothing whatever to do with Anglo-Saxon inscriptions.  It was by trusting to Norse forms that Thorkelin misread every line and mistranslated nearly every word of Beowulf.  It is by trusting to Norse forms that Dr. Repp has plunged himself into his ludicrous Christ-basin, and that Finn Magnusen has recorded his own rashness throughout 105 of the most adventurous pages I ever remember to have read.
[Anglo-Saxon Runes p. 56]


On other scholars' work on the Ruthwell Cross:
It is enough to say, that no such language ever existed as they find on this stone...[Magnusen invents] a new language, in which he says the inscription is written, and a people, by whom he says the language was spoken.
[Anglo-Saxon Runes p. 41, 47]


On a former student who published something from his collection without his permission:
I had the pleasure of seeing my views travestied, my collections ill-used, and the whole subject on which I have long been working most groundedly and seriously, taken out of my hands, and miserably ill-treated in a flippant, superficial, wretched style, by a man who has not a thought on the subject but what he has picked up from me…He is a literary pirate, and as ignorant as he is impudent.
[Correspondence with Jakob Grimm, p. 112, 152]


On the Antiquarian Society's new committee:
Rather amusing that, is it not?  A Saxon committee of which not one single member understands a word of Saxon.
[Correspondence with Jakob Grimm, p. 191]


On scholars clinging to old-fashioned and unnecessary Gothic typefaces: 
It will be some time before the bibliomaniacal foppery of using these types ceases.
[Review of Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, p. 393]


On the most commonly-used Anglo-Saxon dictionary:
If ever a book was calculated to do harm, to retard the progress of study, to perplex and fill with trouble the mind of the learner, Lye’s Dictionary is assuredly that book.
[Review of Analecta Anglo-Saxonica p. 392]


On an anticipated new dictionary:
It will be a pitiful performance, for the man is as devoid of philology, as an ox of milk.
[Correspondence with Jakob Grimm, p. 57]


On the origin of Anglo-Saxon (aka Old English):
To suppose the Anglo-Saxon derived from a mixture of Old Saxon and Danish, is at once to stamp oneself ignorant both of Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Anglo-Saxon, and to declare one's incompetency to pass a judgment on the subject.
[Preface to Beowulf, p. xxii]


On the British Anglo-Saxonist establishment:
We could mention, were we so inclined, Doctors, yea, Professors of Anglo-Saxon, whose doings in the way of false concords, false etymology, and ignorance of declension, conjugation and syntax, would, if perpetrated by a boy in the second form of a public school, have richly merited and been duly repaid by a liberal application of ferula or direr birch.
[Review of Analecta Anglo-Saxonica]


The Oxford men have been railing at me, and at you too worse than the frogs at Latona: you will say as I do [Greek] which in plain English is, they may kiss mine A.
[Correspondence with Jakob Grimm, p. 90]


On the author of nasty letters to the editor about Kemble:
I know not whether he has filled, does fill, or means to fill the Saxon Chair in [Oxford]; but from the specimen of his ability which he has supplied in these letters, I can assure him that he is worthy to take his place in the long list of illustrious obscures who have already enjoyed that cheap dignity.
[Letter on Oxford Professors of Anglo-Saxon, p. 605]

A weekend jaunt

After my last post, I met my friend Heather for lunch and hopped on a train to Exeter, about 2 1/2 hours from London, in the southwest of England.  I had enough daylight left to wander around town and see the old city wall (you can see the bottom stones laid by Romans!) and the outside of the old Norman castle (William the Conqueror was here!).  History nerdiness spiked, let me tell you.  The next morning, I reported to my conference -- which turned out to be pretty small and mostly made up of grad students.  The upside of this was that everyone got a chance to meet each other over the two days, and we all heard everyone's papers.

I gave my paper in the last session, so Heather was able to come and hear it.  I'm delighted to say that I was very pleased with the paper I finally gave, though I'd been tinkering with it until the night before.  By necessity, it didn't include everything I learned about Kemble over the summer, but I think I told a neat, clean story.  And since, as I'd guessed, hardly anyone had even heard of him, I was safe as the Kemble expert of that particular conference.

The next day, we set out on a weekend tour of southwestern England.  First up was Dartmoor National Park; I wanted to go since it was so close to Exeter.  Sadly, without a car and without bus services that only run on weekends, the best we could do was go to Okehampton (on the northwest border) and rent bicycles to go along the edge.  Still, we took a little hike at one point just to see some wilder-looking countryside.

On Day 2 of our excursion, we headed east to Dorchester, the town on which Thomas Hardy based Casterbridge (see The Mayor of Casterbridge).  This was because Heather is a Hardy fan and writing a chapter of her dissertation on his architecture.  Therefore, we absolutely had to visit the house he designed and lived in.  (Did you know he originally trained as an architect?  I didn't.)  We also stopped by the cottage where he was born and grew up.

On our last day, we hit two ancient sites.  First, and most giggle-inducing, was the Cerne Abbas Giant. (Pronounce that "Sern Abbas.")  It's a figure drawn in a hillside just a bit north of Dorchester, just by scraping off the grass to reveal the chalk underneath -- and it's, well, anatomically correct.  Read more about it here.  We took a short hike up and around the field he's in, but (understandably) he's fenced off, so we couldn't get a good look at the drawing up close, just a sideways view of some squiggly lines.


Last stop was Stonehenge.  I had heard that it's fairly disappointing and all fenced off, but it's really not, at least if you've paid admission.  In fact, the path gets quite close in certain spots.  There was also a handy audio tour to explain the different sets of construction that happened over a few thousand years (what a timescale!).  Of course, it was a bit hard to concentrate on some of it, because we got drenched in a little downpour.  We were actually pretty lucky that we didn't get rained on until this point in the trip, and it was over pretty quickly.  Plus, it gave us dramatic skies to make Stonehenge look even more mysterious.

We wrapped up by catching the tail end of evensong in Salisbury cathedral (love boys'/men's choirs!) and treating ourselves to a hearty and delicious meal at The Haunch of Venison, a restaurant that dates to at least 1320, when it was serving construction workers for the cathedral.  That's crazy!  All in all, a perfect weekend that went much, much more smoothly than our last outing.

Back in the UK

Hello again everyone, this time from England.

Yes, those two weeks have elapsed, somehow.  Hmm, how did I spend them?  I picked up my new raincoat, which Marmot kindly replaced for me since my old one was losing its lining and therefore its waterproof nature. It's awesome that they provide that level of service, but I have to admit that part of me was sad to lose the jacket I wore nearly every day of my first year at Cambridge.  I finished (or at least gave up on) my Kemble paper.  I ate out at favorite restaurants and got in one day of quilting, which I haven't done in a year.  And let's not forget watching Stanford's football team mop the floor with San Jose State, 57-3.  That was a good last day in town.

On Sunday, I had a flawless travel day, which it's important to remember does happen sometimes.  My flight from San Jose to Chicago was early leaving and had a tailwind, giving me plenty of time to mosey down to the next gate, and then we were nearly an hour early getting into London!  Oh, and FYI: on Sunday of Labor Day weekend, a small airport like SJC has no one in it.  There was literally no one behind me in the security line the entire time.  When I arrived in London, I made my way to a hostel I like and met up with a couple friends for dinner.  Then I managed to stay awake until a decent hour before crashing.

It's now morning, and I'm sitting in the hostel lounge looking out at the rain, wondering whether I should make an effort to go see/do something before taking a train to Exeter.  I gotta say, the weather is not helping soften the blow of leaving home...  Hopefully, a good week of conference and travel will cheer me up.