I thought of doing George MacDonald’s Phantastes in July, but it struck me that that’s a good tale for fall (it’s shorter, so we can do it in one meeting, and then do a William’s novel for October), and so instead, for July and August, we’ll do History in English Words by Owen Barfield in two installments, and I think it will be a gentler foray into his thought than was Study in Idolatry (as I said at one of those meetings, it’s only on this second time reading it for me that I felt like I got what he was really doing).
At the final meeting on Lord of the Rings, one of our regular crowd very thoughtfully brought in the small book of the actual languages that Tolkien invented. And a friend at the YMCA once told me I’m a “word nerd” (rolling her eyes when I beamed, “yes I am!”). I think Barfield’s use of the history of individual words as his way in to talking about the relationship between the history of language/words and the history of culture will help: The national history and the histories of the individual words are very engaging in themselves (I, for one, never knew “panic” comes from the Greek god Pan), and then one can process his underlying thought at one’s own pace without feeling completely lost at sea if one doesn’t find a way on the first go through the thick hedge with which he surrounds his central point (again, even after doctoral work in the very same topic as Study in Idolatry, it took me two readings to get his basic idea).
So, for July, we’ll do the whole first part (“The English Nation”) and then the first chapter, “Myth,” of the second part (“The Western Outlook”). This gives us his idea of a key turning point in Western (specifically English) history and then the way humans thought before it. When we do the rest in August, he uses histories of individual words to move through a variety of what we now, in the modern world (after that turning point), think of as distinct and different ways of (indeed) thinking.
I thought I would get this up now while I’m thinking of it so that people can look into the book and see if it interests them. I know there is a Kindle edition, and possibly other free avenues of access to digital online (another of our regulars is much more adept at the range of helpful things on the internets than am I and says she’s often able to find access through the public/library site/systems)
