The Science That Inexorably Draws Its Practitioners To The Great Beyond

Avenue of Trees, sunset (David Zdobylak)

A philologist practicing their discipline at the turn of the 20th century did so by scientific techniques of studying all the different human languages in order to discover not only the laws of linguistic changes, but to achieve the almost certainly accurate extrapolations beyond the evidence.

These conjectures jumped two different gaps: from human history to prehistory; and from human consciousness to subconscious.

Philologists spanned the first gap with asterisk reality, extrapolations of countless single word forms from their most ancient form to that form just prior to it. From these single instances, more complicated, and meaningful, constellations of words and therefore thoughts and thereby whole cultures and worlds came to be.

So by this way Tolkien brought forth the world, peoples, languages and histories of Middle Earth, fully practicing this asterical sub-creation, filling the interstices and negative spaces of his own Anglo-Saxon history with what must surely have been.

The later 20th century linguists spanned the second gap with deep structure. Deep structure is the fundamental, and simple, not consciously directly accessible, but logically presumed universally human feature that lies beneath, or beyond, spoken and written language, which through transformation rules nurtures infinitely articulated and variegated surface linguistic worlds.

You could call Owen Barfield a deep structuralist, and his seminal work would be called History in English Words, and the transformation rules he learned from a combination of his own empirical studies, and the writings of Rudolf  Steiner. Barfield calls his own work 'co-creation'.

With Tolkien and Barfield both, by scientific engagement with the phenomena, they found and testified to worlds just beyond the eyes and the letter - beyond sight and the word.