HE MAY HAVE been responsible for making the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyámthe blockbuster bestseller of the 19th century, and he certainly was recognised as "the chief and head" of Celtic learning at his passing. Those and his other monumental achievements were celebrated at a conference in Cambridge in recent months to mark the centenary of his death. Born in Dublin on February 28th, 1830, Whitley Stokes was the eldest son of William Stokes, the most eminent medical man in Ireland in his time, writes DAIBHI O'CROININ
Whitley entered Trinity College Dublin in the revolutionary year of 1848, and graduated in 1852. Called to the Bar in 1853, he removed shortly thereafter to London, where he practised as an equity draughtsman and conveyancer. During the years that followed he came under the influence of Rudolf Siegfried, who had studied with the great Franz Bopp (universally acknowledged as the man who founded the science of comparative linguistics). Siegfried had been invited to Dublin by the Provost of Trinity College Dublin, James Henthorn Todd, and subsequently occupied the TCD chair of Sanskrit and comparative philology. The master-pupil relationship between Siegfried and Stokes became a life-long friendship. In 1862, however, Whitley was sent to India, to a position as secretary to the legal department, and in 1877 he became law member of the Council of the Governor-General of India, a post he held until his retirement in 1882, when he returned to England.
In the years before his departure for London, Stokes had established friendly contacts with two of the greatest native Irish scholars of Irish antiquities, Eugene O’Curry and John O’Donovan, and even after he left Ireland in 1856 he kept up a correspondence with them. In a letter of April 30th, 1857, O’Donovan referred to his younger friend as representative of “the rising generation (Young Ireland!)”, and looked forward to the time when Whitley and his contemporaries would “completely throw us into the shade in the philosophical pursuit of Irish studies”. Before that, however, there was India.
It is no exaggeration to say that Whitley Stokes was responsible for codifying almost the entire body of Anglo-Indian laws. From the time he arrived until his departure from India 20 years later, hardly a year passed in which he did not make some substantial contribution to that massive undertaking. It is hard to believe that during all these years, in whatever time he could spare from his official duties, Stokes was carving out a reputation for himself as the foremost scholar of Celtic studies in these islands. In a steady stream of books and articles (several of them published in Calcutta or Simla!) he demonstrated his complete mastery of Irish, Welsh, Breton and Cornish, and his extraordinary appetite for original manuscript research. He was fortunate, in that he had been present at the birth of Celtic studies, so to speak: in 1853, when he was just 23, the great Johann Caspar Zeuss published his Grammatica Celtica, a work that, at a stroke, freed the study of Early Irish language and literature from the clutches of "Celtomaniacs" and Ossianic dilettantes, establishing it for the first time as a field of respectable scientific study. Stokes took to this "new philology" with gusto, and soon his name was being mentioned in the same breath with Zeuss's.
The number of Stokes’s publications on texts in the various Celtic languages down to 1882 runs to over 100; the bibliography of all his writings that appeared shortly after his death numbers an astonishing 400 items in total, ranging from youthful essays on Danish folksongs and Serbian and Croat literature to short articles in Celtic journals, and multi-volume editions of some of the most important texts in all the Celtic literatures – all this as a sideline to his “official” labours on the Anglo-Indian law-codes.
His scholarly output is astonishing (and an eloquent rebuke to present-day scholars), but it came at a price: Stokes was fiercely belligerent in pointing out the failings (as he saw them) of others working in the same field, and many of the friendships that he had fashioned in his early years were fatally damaged by his frequently acerbic remarks.
Family acquaintances from his early days in Dublin, such as Samuel Ferguson and George Petrie, remained true to the end; Celtic scholars such as Kuno Meyer in Liverpool and Ernst Windisch in Leipzig, Graziadio Ascoli and Count Constantino Nigra in Italy, Henri d’Arbois de Joubainville and Henri Gaidoz in France, also survived Stokes’s occasional blasts and remained friends, but others, such as Standish Hayes O’Grady and the redoubtable Heinrich Zimmer in Germany, eventually fell out with him.
Stokes’s irascibility may have been the combined consequence of his scholarly isolation and the effects of personal misfortune. In November 1881 his wife died in India, a victim of the frequent outbreaks of plague and cholera that struck down many of the colonial population there; his daughter Maeve barely survived the same outbreak. His retirement shortly thereafter, in 1882, may have been as a result of those tragic events. Once back in London, however, he devoted himself with even more single-mindedness to his Celtic studies, and the fruits of his researches were a formidable catalogue of further publications (over 200 items in all) that continued to appear until the day of his death, on April 13th 1909.
The recent discovery of all his working Celtic notebooks in the University Library in Leipzig (150 in total) has revealed the astonishing industry of those later years. Even half a century before his death he was described by Percy Ellen Frederick Smythe, eighth Viscount Strangford (no mean linguist himself), as “Mr Whitley Stokes, the greatest of living Celtic philologists, whom the common voice of the Continent would declare to be the greatest philologist native of these isles”.
So he is remembered in Ireland, but in India, it is as the man who codified the great body of Anglo-Indian laws that he is honoured. We do well to celebrate his many achievements, as a lawyer, a linguist, a scholar, and a great Irishman.
Galway Archaeological and Historical Society is running Whitley Stokes: Recovered Leipzig Notebooks,a talk by Prof Dáibhí Ó Cróinín at the Harbour Hotel, Dock Road, Galway, tonight at 8pm.