#philologist

“I do not really think that I am frightfully important. I wrote the Trilogy as a personal satisfaction, driven to it by the scarcity of literature of the sort that I wanted to read.”

— John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973)

Tolkien’s remarks on his contribution to the preparation of The Jerusalem Bible: 

"Naming me among the 'principal collaborators' was an undeserved courtesy on the part of the editor of the Jerusalem Bible. I was consulted on one or two points of style, and criticized some contributions of others. I was originally assigned a large amount of text to translate, but after doing some necessary preliminary work I was obliged to resign owing to pressure of other work, and only completed 'Jonah', one of the shortest books."

(extract from Tolkien Letter #294, to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer) 

Well, another word for a sack is a bag, and the bottom of a bag is like its end, so…

Wait a minute.

On 13th August 1867 Sir William Craigie, the Scottish lexicographer, was born.

One thing you cannae say about Sir William Craigie is, “He was a man of few words.” In fact, he was a man of many words; easily hundreds of thousands of words; more likely millions of words. In his day, Sir William was regarded as the foremost – nay, the most eminent – lexicographer, but he was also described as a language and literature scholar, and a philologist.

Isn’t it funny that us Scots started some of the most famous English establishments, like William Paterson who gave them The Bank of England, it took a Scotsman from Dundee to put the English language into a decent semblance of order, after he was engaged to work on what was then called the ‘New English Dictionary’ and which is now commonly referred to as the ‘Oxford Dictionary’ or the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’. He was editor of the dictionary for over 30 years.

He was also keen to promote the Scots language and pioneered a Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. Craigie also worked on an Oxford edition of Hans Christian Andersen tales.Not content with sorting out the Scots and English words, Craigie went to the United States to work on the ‘Dictionary of American English’, Cragie also lectured on lexicography at the University of Chicago, where he taught many 20th Century American lexicographers of note.

With all this going on his pet project the Scots dictionary in was put on the back burner until 1921, when he began to make significant inroads towards producing ‘A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue; From the Twelfth Century to the End of the Seventeenth’. Despite continued research into the Scots language, from a first publication in 1931 up until the end of his life, Craigie never managed to complete that work, however, the project he pioneered has been completed. Since 2004, thanks to the charitable organization, Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd., twelve volumes are available, free to search, via the Internet at the bottom of this post.

Cragie’s brainchild is now known as ‘DOST’ and covers the language from the era of ‘pre-literary’ Scots, when there was a very meagre, extant literary output (literally nothing more than Barbour’s ‘Brus’ and the ‘Legends of the Saints’), through that of ‘early’ Scots (1375 to 1450), to ‘middle’ Scots (up to 1700). The dictionary was intended to present the entire Older Scottish vocabulary as it was preserved in literary, documentary and other records.

Sir William Alexander Craigie died at the age of ninety years and one month, in Watlington, Oxfordshire, on the 2nd of September, 1957.