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

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.

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             edheil@postmark.net
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