JRR Tolkien Signed Autographed 8p Letter Bible CS Lewis
| Start Price |
USD 19,500.00 |
| Current Price |
USD 19,500.00 |
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| Start Time |
Friday, October 03, 2008 |
| End Time |
Friday, October 10, 2008 |
| Location |
Chicago, Illinois |
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Description
Exceptional eight page Tolkien letter dealing with languages. Tolkien was a linguist and his works 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' are rooted in liguistics. This was written to a fellow Oxford professor. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis. Letters like this come available very rarely. Please email if you need additional images. Iinteresting single page Tolkien letters sell for $3,000, we have priced this exceptional letter substantially lower. In part: 'I always reply that I have no concern with 'correctness'--- not as an adjudicator or arbiter, which I am not; though of course I am interested in the idea of correctness, which is an important and interesting phenomenon in itself. And my advice is always: do as you please! Then if you happen to be in the coming fashion, or can make it, you will become 'correct'. If not, not. And this reply seems as a rule, sufficiently novel, even startling, to maintain my reputation for wisdom. For the idea that there is somewhere deposited a correct answer on all linguistic questions or divergences that somebody knows (if he can be induced to speak) seems deeply implanted. If the King no longer controls English then there must be a cabinet that does. And many people do me the unwanted honour of supposing that I must be a member. I am not. I am a linguistic historian, of scientific outlook in part; and for the rest a specialist in Anglo-Saxon, and Medieval English; and a poet. However, I can not ... you off with such an answer. You know all that; and err if at all rather in the other extreme, to a liberalism not without a tendency to anarchism. ... Speech you say is the conveyance of ideas by arrangements of words. That will do, * if you have first arrived at what a 'word' is. Languages have very different systems of demarcation; and the written forms of modern languages have a history, parrallel with but independent of the spoken forms, and the two do not necessarily agree in word division. * Also of course the conveyance of ideas, puer and unalloyed is a difficult, secondary and sophisticated art, attempted by the scientist and philosopher, and only then when they are trying to be scientic and philosophic. Feeling and emotion are natural language's business. And there are other elements, aesthetic and playful constantly at work. ... If there are to be innovations, it is a good thing that they will have more resistance than the easy tolerance of the average slipshod colloqial speaker. For it is easily assumed that because change in all departments of language is a universally observed fact it is necessary or necessarily good. Its reduction to a minimum is a hall-mark of a cultivated language rather than a barbaric; and ahigh degree of stability in convention, is essential to the higher uses of a language, aesthetic or intellectual. ... You may neglect their defence fr in the long run-- they have none, except the dislike of the unfamiliar and untraditional which is the most salutary of all feelings, and the one that keeps languages a communal activity, and prevents it from breaking up into an infinity of private idioms. ... I will take farewell with the observation that the next time S. Holmes tried his parrallel comparison method he will see to it that he compares the comparable... and his argument is about as much use as saying xy=xy=xy=xy=xy=xy thus xy=zy ...' A remarkable letter revealing a remarkable mind! . We are working with a collector who has an very special Tolkien collection, please email if you are a Tolkien collector. For accounts paying via Paypal we can only ship to a confirmed address. If you don't have one please contact us before bidding. We want you to be happy. Returns accepted if item is not as described, please contact us within seven days for return instructions. Shipping/insurance not refundable.
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