The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Read Online Free PDF Page B

guiding his studies and inviting him to Sunday afternoon teas. Wright’s is one of the great Cinderella stories in the annals of English philology. Born in Yorkshire, the son of a charwoman and a miner who drank himself to death, he went to work in Blake’s dark Satanic mills at the age of seven, changing bobbins on spinning frames and, in his spare time, selling horse manure. A lifetime of illiteracy and drudgery beckoned, but—like Mabel Tolkien—Wright resisted fate, in his case successfully. When he was fifteen, a fellow mill worker taught him to read and write, using the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress for texts. Wright followed up by teaching himself Latin, French, and German through grammars purchased from his paltry income. Then he added Welsh, Greek, Lithuanian, Anglo-Saxon, Old Saxon, Old Bulgarian, and Old High German to his repertoire, acquiring a doctorate in the process at Heidelberg University. At thirty-three, he published his Middle High German Primer and later edited the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary . He became, upon the death of Max M ü ller, England’s leading philologist, and was named professor of comparative philology at Oxford. In his breathtaking ability to master new languages, “Old Joe,” as Tolkien referred to him, served as an inspiring professional model; in his moral goodness, fortitude, and kindness, combined with his rough Yorkshire ways, he was a prototype for Tolkien’s Hobbits. When Wright died, Tolkien declared that “it was your works, that came into my hands by chance as a schoolboy, that first revealed to me the philology I love.”
    What was this discipline that so entranced the young Tolkien? Philology, defined by C. S. Lewis as “the love and knowledge of words,” may also be usefully described as the zone where history, linguistics, and literature meet. The field began to take its modern form in 1786, when William Jones, a.k.a. “Asiatic” Jones, “Oriental” Jones, and “Persian” Jones, an Anglo-Welsh judge in the supreme court of Bengal and a linguistic prodigy of the first order—he mastered more than two dozen languages during his brief life—announced to the Asiatic Society of Bengal and to the world his discovery that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin share a common ancestry. Further progress came through two significant, far-ranging nineteenth-century enterprises: the application of linguistic analysis to Biblical studies and the ongoing decipherment of ancient tongues, including Assyrian and Egyptian. Behind these practical studies lay powerful, intertwined, and potentially contradictory beliefs: that language provides a key to the rational, scientific understanding of the world and that language is more than human speech, that it claims a divine origin and is the means by which God created the cosmos and Adam named the beasts. As we will see, both ideas strongly influenced the Inklings, whose leading members wrote many words about the nature of words. For Owen Barfield, language is the fossil record of the history and evolution of human consciousness; for C. S. Lewis, it is a mundane tool that “exists to communicate whatever it can communicate” but also, as in That Hideous Strength , an essential part of our metaphysical makeup for good or ill; for Charles Williams, language is power, a field of force for the magician, a vehicle of prayer for the believing Christian; for Tolkien, language is a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift ( “O felix peccatum Babel!” he exclaimed in his essay “English and Welsh”), a supreme art, and, as “Word,” a name for God.
    Tolkien experienced words as a maddening liquor, a phonic ambrosia, tastes of an exquisite, rapturous, higher world. The sound of words affected him as colors or music do others; he complained to his aunt Jane, in later life, of adults who fail to hear the music of words but only grasp their meaning, and he recommended that when encountering a new word—for example,