Few nations honour the work of individuals from another country with one of their postage stamps, but one such person was recently the subject of a commemorative issue by An Post: Johann Caspar Zeuss, the man who made the study of Celtic philology respectable.
In fact, with the publication in 1853 of his great work Grammatica Celtica, he could be said to have invented the subject as a field of modern scientific research; the scholars who came after him only followed the lines he had laid down.
Zeuss seems a most unlikely pioneer of Irish studies. Born on July 22nd, 1806 in Vogtendorf, near Kronach, in Bavaria, he was a precocious youngster, with a gift for languages. He matriculated at the University of Wurzburg in the autumn of that year, then transferred to the newly-opened University of Munich in 1826. There he came under the influence of Johann Andreas Schmeller, creator of the Bayerisches Worterbuch ("Dictionary of Bavarian"), foundation-stone of all later scientific dialect studies.
Zeuss, in fact, sampled everything that was on offer in Munich: anatomy and astronomy, chemistry and mineralogie, physiology and physics. Above all, though, he devoted himself to the study of ancient languages, especially comparative philology and ancient history. Before long he had mastered Greek and Latin, as well as Sanskrit, Arabic, and Hebrew, the Slavic languages and Lithuanian.
Zeuss supported himself by giving private instruction to the children of the well-to-do, which provided a comfortable, if frugal, existence (he never married). He spent more on books and research trips than on his daily living, and devoted his every waking hour to an almost ascetic regime of study. Rather surprisingly, however, for one whose reputation was to be as a scholar of languages, Zeuss's initial interest was in history, and he exploded on the German scholarly world in 1837 with his first book, Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstamme ("The Germans and the neighbouring peoples"), which he published at his own expense. Unfortunately, despite widespread scholarly acclaim for the book, and the award of a doctorate on foot of it without all the usual formalities, the hoped-for professorship of German Philology at either Munich or Erlangen failed to materialise (apparently for political reasons), and a similar position at Berlin was closed to him by his Catholic origins.
Eventually, however, he obtained a position at Speyer, in the Palatinate, and in August 1839 he published a brief, 58-page study entitled Die Herkunft der Baiern von den Markomannen ("The derivation of the Bavarians from the Marcomanni"), which caused a great stir, as it completely upset the traditional view of Bavarian origins. It was during his seven happy years in Speyer that Zeuss first began to show a keen interest in the Celtic sources of early German history, and began a regular routine of weekend and holiday research trips to Karlsruhe and Wurzburg in German, Milan and Turin in Italy, St Gallen in Switzerland, and London and Oxford in England.
Strange to say, he never came to Ireland, nor did he ever meet an Irish speaker. His single-minded interest was in the many manuscript books brought by Irishmen to the continent - the famous "Wandering Scholars" - between AD 600 and 850, and which lived on after them in the libraries of every country in Europe. Most important of all, from Zeuss's point of view, were those containing Latin texts (biblical commentaries, Latin grammars, computistical handbooks) that had been glossed by the Irish scholars in their native tongue; these were the oldest known manuscript witnesses to the Irish language. In a few years Zeuss had meticulously transcribed all the Old Irish glosses he had found (many of them written in tiny script, often almost indecipherable). All this he did in his spare time from teaching; he had no one to help or guide him, and no books to show him the way (Old Irish scholarship in Ireland was still in its infancy). The task of transcription in itself was a heroic one; that Zeuss then, on foot of his researches, mastered the intricacies of the older Irish language is nothing short of incredible.
In the middle of all this work, out of the blue he received the "call" to a chair in Munich that he had so long desired. Sadly, the triumph was to be a bitter-sweet one. Munich was in turmoil following the arrival there in October 1846 of the notorious Lola Montez (born in Limerick), who had smitten the aging King Ludwig of Bavaria, and through him exercised a mesmeric effect on the politics of the south-German kingdom. A démarche between Ludwig and his ministers resulted in political crisis: either Lola had to go or they would. Zeuss was offered a chair made vacant by the dismissal of one of the dissident university professors; it would have been an unenviable dilemma for him to be faced with at any time; in the highly-charged atmosphere of the day, his appointment turned out to be disastrous. The unfortunate circumstances, combined with Munich's damp climate, Zeuss's delicate health and the effects of a serious speech impediment soon combined to force a temporary abandonment of his teaching duties. In September 1847 he moved to Bamberg, where he recovered his health sufficiently to be able to complete his researches on the Celtic languages.
The publication in 1853 of his monumental two-volume Grammatica Celtica was a bolt from the blue: no one had any idea that he had been working on it; he had given no hint of its existence in any of his published works, and the world knew nothing of it until it appeared, in Homeric fashion, "fully armed, from the brow of Zeus". At once the book placed Zeuss in the front rank of German philological scholars such as Franz Bopp and Jakob Grimm - the founding fathers of comparative philology in the modern era. In recognition of that fact, shortly before he died, he was invited to Dublin to be made an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Sadly, it was not to be. He was to survive the publication of his landmark book by only three years. Exhausted by ill-health and the labours of his ceaseless travels, Zeuss died on November 10th, 1856 in his sister's house in his native Vogtendorf. In 1956, on the occasion of the centenary of his death, a modern scholar of Old Irish, Prof Francis Shaw SJ of UCD remarked: "He was a great man. No other has ever done or will ever do so much to bring honour and recognition to the Irish language as Zeuss did".