Where's the beef?

I'm re-reading Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light. You can see my review of her book there at Amazon - posted in 1998 (jeebus - was Amazon really around that long ago?!) - in which I enthuse about all three: Tolkien, Barfield, and Flieger. I still do. Flieger's book is really essential reading for Tolkien and Barfield students.

I'm surprised, then, that I proposed a paper topic for an upcoming conference that seems to simply rehearse Flieger's main thesis in Splintered Light. Am I a shameless plagiarist, or a lazy scholar? I don't want to be either, so I either have to re-work my paper topic completely, or get clear on just what I intend to discuss in a paper entitled "Barfield, Tolkien, and the Language of Original Participation."

Here's what I intend: To look at how two different individuals both dealt with language as if it could be a vehicle for a world view much different than any contemporary worldview, but how differently they did so.

'Original participation' is Barfield's term. By it, he meant 'experience and perception, prevalent in human antiquity (the mists of time would get closer to describing the time period in question), that made no, or no important, distinctions where contemporary experience and perception makes many, and many absolute, distinctions.'

Wow - that was difficult to write. I wonder if the difficulties I was having were akin to Tolkien's experience of being just about to say something to his students regarding ancient language but stopping before doing so because he saw and understood the implications of Barfield's claims. There are certain things one can't say, certain ways of phrasing things, that one can't use anymore, after getting a glimpse of that ancient world as Barfield saw it.

That was Barfield's approach to the language of original participation: he showed us where to find it, and how to get inside it.

What did Tolkien do? He created some of his own originally participatory language. He wrote in the spirit and - as Flieger shows so well - the letter of Barfield's insights. Tolkien wrote a new ancient text from scratch - from the ground up, out of thin air.

The difference between the works of the two men - one a roadmap, the other a story - I think isn't in Flieger's book, and will be the focus of my paper.