History in English Words

"He was a very wide-ranging amateur scholar of a type that we don’t tend to have any more. Maybe because he was a solicitor for a significant part of his life, he didn’t have to genuflect before the pieties of academia and could pursue the things that interested him. He has the rigour of an academic scholar but the romantic sympathy of a creative writer. History in English Words perceives the evolution of consciousness as revealed by changes in vocabulary. My own book The Secret Life of Words is a history of words assimilated into English from other languages, and what those assimilations tell us about English and English-speaking people’s contact with other languages and cultures. One of the first things I did was to see what else had been written in this field, and one of the most neglected and remarkable books was this one by Barfield. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He sees the way that literature from the past can be understood: The meaning of the words is grasped not in the light of our current interpretation of the world, but by comprehending the way in which the world was experienced at the time when the works were written. Well, you might say, of course. But actually people are quite bad at doing that. Famously there are misunderstandings of Shakespeare based on misunderstandings about what words meant at the time he was writing. Barfield gets behind that issue. He’s partly an etymological scholar, but he also has a very sympathetic imagination. He explores the ways in which the histories of particular words can reveal changes in the ways that humans experience the world. Flowing all the way through the book is a very grand vision of the evolution of consciousness. It’s not a long book but in some ways it’s quite daunting because it’s so erudite. It would now, I’m sure, be dismissed for not having scholarly rigour but it actually does have that, as well as a very idiosyncratic approach. He looks at particular words. In the first chapter of the book, three of the words are electric, garden and quality. He looks at how the meanings of those words have changed and what that says about the past. This idea of etymology as a form of archaeology really seduced me. But he is probably most famous for the fact that CS Lewis wrote the first of his Narnia novels for his daughter! That’s right. His association with those people in a way makes it more remarkable that, particularly given his longevity, he didn’t carve out more of a place in our culture. His books are quite esoteric, I suppose, but this is one that should be better known."