calling all teachers

[frodosampippinmerry]

Are there any english teachers on this site who have studied Tolkien and his philology... or better yet any philologists. I see a lot of opinions. These opinions seem to be worlds apart from the opinions of teachers who have studied Tolkien in terms of his philological expertise. According to a teacher I've had in class, Tolkien was trying to resurrect the lost mythology of England. King Arthur, he felt had been destroyed, just like the anglo-saxon mythology, by French influences. He was trying to recover the lost mythology through philology. By studying word origins, you can actiually date how old a language is. For example, the word hammer in almost every language of Indo European descent comes from root words that mean "stone" According to my teacher, this indicates that Indo-european is so old that it was spoken at a time when people used stone tools. Extrapolating on that point, Tolkien also found that there are indications a huge and much feared forest once dominated parts of central Europe, much like the Fictional Mirkwood of Tolkien's stories. Don't get me wrong, the teacher was not implying thatr Mirkwood really existed, but only that Tolkien's concept of Mirkwood seems to be based on distant memories of a place like that that once existed, now ony recoverable through a pile of word origins. This is what philology can do-recover lost history and mythology through word origins. Are there any philologists here? Last I heard they were an endangered species. Is there no one left who studies languages the way Tolkien did?