Laudator Temporis Acti

Tom Shippey, Roots and Branches. Selected Papers on Tolkien (Berne: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007), pp. 303-304 (footnote omitted):

It should come as no surprise if I remark that Tolkien was from an early age interested in rather unexpected genres. One was nursery-rhyme: he rewrote 'The Cat and the Fiddle' and 'The Man in the Moon' as independently-published poems, and reworked the latter for us in the Prancing Pony scene in The Lord of the Rings. Another was the riddle: he wrote 'Enigmata Anglo-Saxonica Nuper lnventa Duo,' or 'Two Recently Discovered Anglo-Saxon Riddles' in the 1920s, and once again reworked and expanded some of this material in The Hobbit a few years later. A third was fairy-tale: there is no need to dilate on Tolkien's scholarly and creative interest in these. And a fourth was names, both place-names and personal names. I would go so far as to say that Tolkien never stopped thinking about the latter. He could not see a signpost, or pick up a telephone directory, without pondering the etymology of what he saw, and his own readiness to invent onomastically is evident in Farmer Giles, in The Lord of the Rings, in The Silmarillion, and elsewhere — though not, as it happens, in The Hobbit.

The first question I ask is what connects these very different genres? And I answer, they are all what I call 'survivor-genres.' They exist in perfectly familiar, indeed everyday form, in the modern period. But there is every indication that they are also very old. They point, then, to a kind of continuity between the ancient and the modern world which Tolkien valued very highly, though it is a completely unscholarly one (which scholars actually rarely notice or study). In fact all these genres have become déclassé. They have sunk down, like fairy-tales and nursery-rhymes, to being the possession of children, or old wives — Jacob Grimm called the latter ammen und spinnerinnen, 'nannies and spinstresses' — or like names are felt to have lost any meaning they once had. But to some, this makes them especially valuable. Things which are known to have no value, or no meaning, are not interfered with. They are like the immensely valuable Anglo-Saxon poetry texts surviving, which were left behind in badly-run, inefficient libraries, used as bread-boards and beer-stands, and accordingly not rewritten to make them up-to-date, or thrown out by smart librarians to make room for government-authorised publications. Tolkien, like other philologists, had a keen eye for survivor-genres, and valued the information about the past which they contained, and which they continued to make relevant (one way or another) into the present.

What I want to say is that there is another survivor-genre which Tolkien valued highly, and that is the proverb, or maxim, or wise saying. These also are common knowledge — very common knowledge. They are also often as old as our knowledge of English, or older.