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Re: Splintered Light (was Re: Steg's wonderful .sig)

From:Ed Heil <edheil@...>
Date:Tuesday, November 9, 1999, 2:16
Jeffrey Henning wrote:

> In the first novel I ever wrote, the cosmology focused on The Word > First Spoken, and how the Word splintered into many words and then > many languages. My cosmology also had its own version of the Babel > Text (which I used as the Fall From Grace in this mythos), and > culminated in a Pentecost-like event, where the heroes of the time > were able to divinely speak one another's languages.
Jeffrey: As I read this, I thought, "Huh, sounds like Owen Barfield!" And I read on....
> Much of this was inspired by Owen Barfield's work. Barfield was an > Inkling and a close friend of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. Tolkien said > that Barfield had an incredible influence on his view of language
[...]
> If you haven't read Barfield, I highly recommend Poetic Diction, > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/081956026X/ . Especially if > you are working on languages close to the beginning of time in > your conworld.
I've only read _Saving the Appearances_, and I find it both very difficult and very interesting. I want to accept Barfield's ideas, if only to try them on for size and see if they fit, but they ask so much of one -- they ask one to rip out all of the assumptions that have been instilled in us by the age we live in. It requires one to muster a lot of faith and good will and imagination; perhaps more than I've got available. ------------------------------------------------- edheil@postmark.net -------------------------------------------------