My review of a Mark Vernon's new book about Barfield, A Secret History of Christianity, is on A Pilgrim in Narnia. But I've been doing some background reading while I was working on that...
A number of people recommended that the place to start reading Barfield is with his History in English Words, so I duly read it after his Saving the Appearances, Poetic Diction, and lots of the essays available on the website dedicated to his work. History is a little more accessible--still forbiddingly erudite and fruitily British, a combination which won't be for everyone, but there is a wealth of interesting connections to marvel at if you can get into it. The foreword by Auden, which speaks of a "battle between civilization and barbarism," and the footnotes about the use of the term Aryan are still a little off-putting, and by the end of the book, I wasn't quite clear about what the ramifications of the study of philology were supposed to be. Is it for the benefit of the individual or the society to think a little harder about the language? I wasn't sure what I was being asked to do with all this, aside from taking Barfield up on his suggestions for further reading (OED, Max Muller, Pearsall Smith, Bradley, Weekly, Skeat).
As far as Tolkien scholarship, two of the most well-regarded books to come out in recent years are Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth, and Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History, by Dimitra Fimi. The one is a biography, the other a survey of fairy-elements, and so while there is some overlap, they're really complementary, and well deserve their de facto status as required reading. Both highlight some of the lesser-known sources of Tolkien's inspiration: Chesterton, MacDonald, and Peter Pan, but also William Morris, whose romances were widely read at the front, and Francis Thomspon, about whom Tolkien said revealingly in an early essay:
one must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being's harmony.
Both approach the topic of racial overtones with much more circumspection than Barfield. Fimi gives more attention to Tolkien's languages, though Garth does deal with them illustratively enough without digging in quite as much--in each, the integral role they play in Tolkien's thought comes through, and so it's clear how Barfield's musings would have been of significance to him. Still more with respect to Tolkien's own beliefs about what he was up to: recovering a lost truth through his stories. In Garth, copious research is brought forth to trace the role of WWI and his friendships with the members of the TCBS in developing Tolkien's philosophy, whereas Carpenter's earlier biographies understandably focused on the Inklings; in Fimi, a balanced background of myth, popular culture, linguistics, and sociology is fused in a compelling context for Tolkien's activity. Stirring stuff for the aspiring or amateur scholar, to be sure.
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