Barfield and Tolkien on Time Travel: BTS

 This is the tip of an iceberg, and moves about as fast. But just recently, the pace picked up on my work on how Owen Barfield and JRR Tolkien achieved what appear to be experiences of other consciousnesses.

With Tolkien, this meant *reality, the world experienced in the extrapolation or re- [or sub-] creation of the language just at the threshold of the oldest extant written records. For Barfield, this lined up roughly with a stage of human consciousness he called original participation.

 The last year and a half, for reasons unknown even to myself, I picked up the thread of this again. I've read a pile of great work, by and about the two. I'll be presenting my work to-date in November at a conference, and have written almost 12,000 words. That'll get tightened down to 15 minutes of talking - 3,000 words if I talk really fast.

The long version I'll improve on with any feedback from the conference.

The thing is, the deeper I get into this - the more I read, the more conclusions I make - the less certain everything looks. That's why there should always be a section/chapter on objections. I've got the outline for that:

1. Did they in fact follow a method?

2. Did they follow the method I enumerated?

3. If Yes to 1 and 2, then did the method work?

4. Does the method explain the results? What are the results to be explained - literary output?

5. We can’t all be philologists: how to explain the dependence on the OED

     a. Isn’t this a marker of the especially (and exclusively/idiosyncratically) 19th century British                     environment these two men stewed in?

          i. That doesn’t explain what kind of stew they turned out

     b. The OED is itself a fallible authority of a single language

6. What do others think of Tolkien’s claim to have ‘broke through the veil’?

These I'll at least list, at the end of the presentation. But they're big questions, and given my limited familiarity with the academic literature, and my freshman understanding of linguistics, the experts might point out exactly where and why my researches are wrong.

In the meantime, I'm both excited and perplexed: real time travel? Or really making a mountain out of a molehill? Why isn't anyone else writing about this? Because I'm making things up, or because it's too obvious, or so inconsequential?

I don't know.