Eleven Hidden Gems in the Works of the Inklings: The "Music of Iluvatar" in the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield

by Eugene Terekhin

Tolkien’s Middle-earth started with a name—the author came across a strangely-sounding name of Earendel when reading a piece of old Anglo-Saxon literature. On reading the first few lines of a poem, he felt " a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words.” This encounter with the sound of a name was a call from beyond the veil of the world, which Tolkien later described as the primary reality. The stories of his legendarium were crafted around that name. For Tolkien, the narrative was a secondary reality, a sub-creation. The Name was primary.

There is a secret literary theory behind the fantasy worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield who believed that when words are spoken aright, they invoke the invisible reality from behind the veil of the world.
Words effect what they name.

For the Inklings, words are NOT primarily communication tools. They are not the “things” we use to convey a message. Strictly speaking, the message doesn’t come THROUGH words; rather, words are the incarnation of the message—provided they are Spirit-breathed. This seems to be the overarching sentiment and a source of inspiration for all the Inklings—for them, the world is Music, a Sound condenced into matter. It is the Music of Iluvatar clad in stone, water, and grass. It is the Name breathed into a Story. It is Poetry incarnated in the pattering of rain. In modern-day movies and stories based on the works of the Inklings, this "call" from beyond the curtain of the world is often missing. We see a linear narrative that draws us in by its incessant action, but we feel that something is amiss. These movies are made to entertain, but they don’t do even that.

Tolkien's stories are entertaining in a different way—it’s not the story that matters, but the Name behind it. Not "what happens," but "who" it happens to. The Name is the primary reality—a summons from behind the veil of the world. Unless the storyteller gets the “mind” of the Inklings, they will create parody. Modern writers tend to use language and storytelling as communication tools. With this approach, the only purpose of using words is to get the message across. As a result, the choice of words becomes message-driven. Words are used to get the reader to move on from one word to the next one horizontally—to bring them to the message as quickly as possible.

Peter Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College, pointed out that in modern writing, words have lost their vertical, static

"Each word comes more from the preceding word rather than from the silence. It moves on to the next word in front of it rather than to the silence."

For the Inklings, language is not a communication tool but rather a portal into being—the invisible reality summoned into our world by the shape and sound of words. Properly speaking, words are incantations.

Have you ever heard words that make you stop breathing for a moment or two? If you have, you know why the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and other Inklings are so peculiar.

They use words vertically—not to speed the reader on but to allure them to the music of the silence around the words.
As Treebeard

"Don’t be hasty, Master Meriadoc."

This book has eleven chapters corresponding to the eleven hidden gems scattered throughout the works of J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield. Like ancient Silmarils, they illumine our present darkness with their magic light and allow us to peep through the curtain of the world.

And then, suddenly, "the grey rain-curtain... is rolled back, and we behold white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise."

Paperback

Published October 3, 2022

Reviews

[Eugene Terekhin · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a secret literary theory behind the fantasy worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield who believed that when words are spoken aright, they invoke the invisible reality from behind the veil of the world.
Words effect what they name.
In his 1925 fairy-tale The Silver Trumpet, Owen Barfield, “the first and the last Inkling,” coined a metaphor of the silver trumpet to capture the idea of the ultimate mystical experience that produces a tectonic shift of consciousness in a human being.
The Inklings called this ultimate mystical experience “poetic imagination.”
Owen Barfield’s “Silver Trumpet” seems to represent a perfect doorway into the invisible realm — a shift of consciousness produced by an encounter with a Sound.
It is a mystical vision which, according to Chesterton, illumines everything by the “blaze of its own victorious invisibility.”
True knowledge is a relationship. It’s participatory at its core. According to Owen Barfield, we need to stop taking images (the visible world) literally and start seeing them as signposts pointing to a larger reality.
We must see the world mystically and mythically. Like true art, the world always means more than it says!
The Silver Trumpet is Owen Barfield’s metaphor for a tectonic shift of consciousness that happens to a person when he or she is awakened from the spell of unconsciousness by the Music from the invisible realm.
This magical Sound breaks into this world through some physical medium — an image — but the transformed consciousness goes beyond images, saves them, and communes with the Music of the spheres.
This encounter with The Sound is a call from beyond the veil of the world, which Tolkien described as the primary reality.

[Wendy Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful!