Words

from The Philosophy of Tolkien [Peter J.Kreeft, Ignatius Press (2005)]:

“Words were important to Tolkien, not just instrumentally, through their power and effect on life, but metaphysically... Tolkien discovered that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong... 'Greek mythology depends far more on the marvelous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize' [Tolkien's Letters, no. 180, p. 231]...

“The words of much of The Lord of the Rings and all of The Silmarillion are vertical, and heavy, as Max Picard says of Hebrew: 'The architecture of the language was vertical. Each word sank down vertically, column-wise, into the sentence. In languages today we have lost the static quality of the ancient tongues. The sentence has become dynamic; every word and every sentence speeds on to the next... each word comes more from the preceding word than from silence...' [Max Picard, The World of Silence, pp. 44-45]

“Each word in the Silmarillion seems like a thunderbolt from Heaven, a miracle. There are many capital letters, in contrast with the fashion of our leveling, reductionistic age to trim, to decapitalize, to decapitate. And there are many nouns, both common and proper. It is the Anglo-Saxon style. The words are solid, like mountains; heavy and slow, like a glacier. The sense of height and weight of words suggests the sense of ontological height and weight, a verticality, a supernaturalism. The reader is lifted up out of himself..." (pp. 154-156)

This “static quality of the ancient tongues” corresponds with my still-minimal experience with Hebrew. The individual words are of utmost importance, “solid, like mountains.” Yet it is precisely in this solidity that the relations between the words become important. “The LORD is my Shepherd” -- in Hebrew, this is just two words: “LORD – my Shepherd.” And this simple juxtaposition is enough to carry one through the “valley of the shadow of death.”