"What really happened," or, "Was hat Ranke mit Tolkien zu tun?"

 A name I often came across when I was in school studying history and how to write it was Leopold von Ranke (1795 - 1886). Rather than try to summarize his long career as a writer and teacher of history and historiography, I'll say that he was one of those astonishing 19th century German scholars who seemed to know everything and whose days had 168 hours in them. His views on writing history were that scholars should use sources as close to the period about which they were writing as they could possibly get, and that these sources should be wide-ranging, including contemporary local documents and records not just narrative histories. The goal, Ranke believed, was to create an account of "wie es eigentlich gewesen." 

Again in the interests of brevity, I'll quote from Andreas Boldt's discussion of this phrase in Esharp's supplement from 2007. 

Many scholars have written on Ranke and analysed his understanding of history. One example of how Ranke was scrutinised is the discussion of the meaning of his most famous phrase of ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’. The book History of the Latin and Germanic Nations is known chiefly for the statement that:

Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren beygemessen: so hoher Aemter unterwindet sich gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will bloß sagen, wie es eigentlich gewesen. (Ranke, 1824, pp.v-vi).

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: It wants only to show what actually happened. (Stern, 1973, p.57, translation by Fritz Stern).

The meaning of Ranke’s aim to study the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ has been the subject of much debate among historians. A number of writers have translated the phrase as ‘what actually happened’, ‘as it really was’ or ‘simply tell how it was’ and have understood it as an endorsement of ‘colourless’ history. Historians, Ranke claimed, should stick to the facts and there should be no evidence of their views and commitments in their writing. It is only when they remove all trace of themselves that they can revive the past. More recent commentators, such as Iggers, have argued that such a translation is not accurate because it does not reveal Ranke’s ‘idealistic’ conception of history. He pointed out that the term ‘eigentlich’ does not only mean ‘actually’, but also ‘essentially’ or ‘characteristically’. Therefore Iggers preferred to translate the phrase as ‘[History] merely wants to show how, essentially, things happened’ (1988, p.67). The translation of Ranke’s quotation into English has its problems. One thing is certain, however, Ranke’s famous sentence is a conscious formula that contains a very complex meaning. The word ‘bloß’ shows Ranke’s modesty while the word ‘eigentlich’ touches on issues like ‘truth’ and ‘the greatest good’. The translation ‘happened’ describes an event or condition; it does not describe a development. The usual translation ‘how it really was’ is too short and does not describe what Ranke intended to say. As a more correct translation, I would suggest ‘how things really were’.

Very interesting, Tom, but what has Ranke to do with Tolkien? I can see the eyes rolling back in my readers' heads, like the guests at Bilbo's party when he won't shut up about his adventures. 

So here it is. Every time I read Letter 180 (p. 336) in Tolkien's Letters, I run into the following sentence:

"I have long ceased to invent (though even patronizing or sneering critics on the side praise my ‘invention’): I wait till I seem to know what really happened." (italics mine)

And when I think of "what really happened" and "wie es eigentlich gewesen," I think of Tolkien's famous rejection of allegory in the "Foreword to the Second Edition" of The Lord of the Rings (xxiv):

... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse "applicability" with "allegory"; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Andreas Boldt's apt comment on the humility in Ranke's choice of the word bloß, "only" -- "to say only how things really were" -- fits beautifully with the humility in Tolkien's preference of "the freedom of the reader" to "the purposed domination of the author."

I can't say if Tolkien knew Ranke's work firsthand, or whether the similarity of phrasing is just coincidental. Still, Ranke would have been far better known in Tolkien's day than he is today, and the phrase "wie es eigentlich gewesen" has been quoted more and more since 1900. A Google Ngram of the phrase shows that it's been on a steeply downward trend since 2017. I guess, starting in 2017, people no longer wish to know how things really are. I'll leave it in the freedom of the reader to decide what that really means.

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I was curious to see how a German translation of Tolkien's Letters rendered Tolkien's statement -- "I wait till I seem to know really happened" -- and whether it would end up echoing Ranke's original phrase. Thanks to Marcel R. Bülles, Der Tolkienist, I can quote Helmut Pesch's translation: 'Ich warte, bis mir scheint, ich wüßte, was wirklich geschehen ist.'

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In the long quotation from Andreas Boldt above, he refers to the following works: 

• Iggers, G.G. 1988. The German conception of history. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
• Ranke, Leopold von. 1824. Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1535. Leipzig: Reimer. 
• Stern, F. 1973. The varieties of history from Voltaire to the Present. New York: Vintage.