The First World War discredited German philology as a suspect discipline

Evidence

As late as 1918 Torrey was still worrying about American Orientalism’s overdependence on German studies. But after the war German scholarship became suspect in some quarters and the prejudice even extended to philology in general, as this was the German speciality par excellence. As J. R. R. Tolkien, an expert on medieval literature and language as well as a novelist, noted: ‘“Philology” is in some quarters treated as though it were one of the things the late war was fought to end.’ — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels how Cold War politics later reshaped area studies; Tolkien’s quip also connects to the wider anti-German intellectual swing after 1918.
• CANDY: Tolkien’s deadpan line about philology being treated as one of the things the war was fought to end is a shareable, self-contained joke.