The World of Silver Leaves: The Relationship Between Myth and Language in Tolkien, Star Trek, and Game of Thrones

This is a piece I wrote in 2016 while taking a class for my MA on Language Invention through Tolkien from Signum U. The class was great fun, and it allowed me to engage with Tolkien the Language Creator, a side to his creative genius which I think is largely misunderstood by the proliferation of books on "how to speak Elvish" and so forth.

My impetus for putting it here, as a blog post, has to do with a comment I recently came across on one of the many Tolkien message boards out there on the World Wide Web. The comment argued, in part, that the real genius of Tolkien's language creation was that it was "window dressing" and "didn't get in the way of the story."

Well, that's half-right. Tolkien's language creation doesn't "get in the way of the story." But in this case, half-right is all-wrong. I offer this short essay primarily as a rebuttal to this point of view.

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1. Flieger’s Bumper-sticker

“…language cannot be forgotten. Mythology is language and language is mythology.” J.R.R. Tolkien penned these words in a 1939 draft of the lecture which would eventually be published as the essay “On Fairy Stories.” Noted Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger has emphasized the importance of these words to our understanding of Tolkien as a sub-creator:

If I ever put a bumper sticker on my car, it’s going to say that. No modifiers, no explanations, just seven words that convey Tolkien’s bedrock belief about words and what they do… the whole text of “On Fairy-stories” is an extended gloss on that statement. (Flieger 242) 

It is perhaps appropriate, then, that these seven words are about as cryptic as the notoriously weighty essay they represent. To understand what Tolkien means by them, we must understand the context in which they are framed. After this statement of his “bedrock belief,’ he elaborates:

The mind, the tongue, and the tale are coeval. The human mind was endowed with powers of "abstraction", of not only seeing green grass and discriminating it from other things, or of finding it good to look upon, but of seeing that it was green - as well as grass and hence of inventing a words green... In fact many of these enchantments that are from a fairy tale are closely related in the mind to the very linguistic power that could invent all of those and set them free. When we can take green from grass and paint the sky or man's face with it, or blue from heaven and red from blood we have already an enchanter's power: the world of silver leaves and that fleece of gold and the blue moon appear. Such fantasy is a new form, in which man is become a creator or sub-creator. (TOFS 181)

“Coeval” is the key word in this paragraph: man’s ability to make words is inseparable from his power to tell stories. Thus, Tolkien believed, they began at the same time and in the same way, and to know the history of one is to experience the other. By extension, sub-creation—which Tolkien sees as having as its goal the “inner consistency of reality” (TOFS 59)—must reflect this. “On Fairy-stories” thus suggests a test by which invented languages—whether Tolkien’s or those popularized by successful multi-media franchises—may be evaluated.

2. An Illusion of Historicity

As a philologist, Tolkien was deeply familiar with the ways languages changed and evolved over time. His languages were thus “deduced scientifically from a common origin” in order to give them a character of “cohesion” and “consistency of linguistic style and an illusion of historicity.” Rather than creating a snapshot of a language at a single point in time, he worked out the philological processes by which that language would have, were it living, changed from its ancestor tongue. Tolkien’s process, according to his son Christopher, was to devise new words “from within the historical structure, proceeding from the ‘bases’ or primitive stems, adding suffix or prefix or forming compounds…following it through the regular changes of form that it would thus have undergone…” (LR 242)

But historical sound shifts would not, in and of themselves, satisfy the criteria laid out by Tolkien in “On Fairy-stories.” Language cannot stand alone any more than mythology. [1] To meet his test, changes in language must be coeval with events in the story. They must exist at the same time, and each must exist for the purpose of the other.

In the long and complicated internal and external histories of Tolkien’s Eldarin languages,  we find that their phonological development is always accompanies events in the mythology. Tolkien revised these events as often as he did the languages, and the result is a rich sampling of case studies in the relationship between language and mythology. For the purposes of this essay, two examples will suffice: the first from the earlier days of Tolkien’s mythopoeic endeavors, the second from their twilight years.

3. The Deep Sundering of Their Speech

In the years 1914-16, Tolkien worked on “Qenya,” the first of his Eldarin [2] tongues. In 1917, he began work on Gnomish, an Eldarin tongue related to Qenya. In addition to a lexicon of Gnomish words, he developed an outline of how Qenya and Gnomish had both descended from a common proto-Eldarin language. The sounds of Gnomish were “harder” by comparison, with a shift towards stops or plosives at the ends of words, and other consonants mutating following a pattern found in the Celtic languages. Thus Qenya “Manwe” became “Manweg” in Gnomish, and Qenya “Makar” became Gnomish “Magron.” (Weiner and Marshall 82, 92)

These consonantal mutations gave Gnomish a very different soundscape from Qenya, one which parallels the development of the Gnomish people in Tolkien’s fiction. For at the same time he was developing the historical links between Qenya and Gnomish, he was also making a myth about how they had become estranged:

‘Aye’, said Rumil, ‘for there is that tongue to which the Noldoli cling yet…and as I hold ‘twas but the long wandering of the Noldoli about the Earth and the black ages of their thraldom while their kin dwelt yet in Valinor that caused the deep sundering of their speech. Akin nonetheless be assuredly Gnome speech and Elfin of the Eldar, as my lore-masters teach me. (BLT 43)

From the beginning, Gnomish was the language of exiles. This aspect of the language, as well as its basic differences from the other main branch of the Eldarin tongues, would remain intact as Tolkien changed the name of the language from Gnomish to Noldorin in 1920, and continued its development up until the writing of The Lord of the Rings. But by the 1950’s, Noldorin had become Sindarin, and the reason for its differences from Quenya had changed. Now, the cause was the long separation of the Sindar, the Grey Elves, who did not complete their journey to Aman [3], and their speech became the lingua franca of the elves of Middle-earth for political reasons [4]. But through every change--whether through sorrow and exile, the will of an Elven-king, or the pride of the greatest craftsman to ever live [5] -- the development of Tolkien’s languages went hand-in-hand with the development of his mythology. There is no sense of either the languages or the stories existing as mere window-dressing for the other. They are truly coeval. The history of the development of Tolkien’s mythology is as much a history of words and sounds as it is of characters and events.

Weiner and Marhsall, writing in “Tolkien’s Invented Languages”, sum it up this way:

‘If there are two purposes for invented language - communication and art - Tolkien is (so far) the master of the art-form…Reading Tolkien’s major works is like looking at a painting in which a beautiful garden actually exists, having been planted the artist before the picture was painted. Tolkien created a self-consistent and technically convincing group of languages…Though they appear in their narrative context as perfectly contrived atmospheric devices, it is their pre-existence that ensures their success. (Weiner and Marshall 107-108)

Tolkien’s success as both author and language inventor set a precedent for imaginative fiction. With the rise of the commercial success of such multi-media franchises as Star Trek and Game of Thrones, invented languages are currently enjoying something of a heyday in the cultural mainstream. But the relationships of Klingon and Dothraki to their respective fictional worlds differs widely from Tolkien’s Eldarin tongues.

4. The Final Frontier

Klingon was created when linguist Marc Okrand was hired to create dialogue for an alien race in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). In creating Klingon, Okrand had to work to incorporate a few lines of dialogue created by actor James Doohan for the original Star Trek film. “The plan, at this point, was not to create a ‘full’ language, but only what was necessary for the film—that is, just enough vocabulary and grammar for the lines marked as being in Klingon.” (Okrand et. al. 112-115) Although Okrand would go on to develop a sizeable vocabulary and grammar for Klingon, its early stages were not grown along historical principles, but rather to fill the needs of the franchise. (Okrand et. al. 124)

Of the languages associated with the Game of Thrones franchise, Dothraki, the language of a martial nomadic horse culture first introduced in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is probably the best-known. In the books, Dothraki consists of a mere handful of words invented by Martin to have a specifically “harsh” or “alien” sound-sense. When the production of the Game of Thrones HBO series began, producers wanted a more fully-developed language so that Dothraki dialogue could be filmed. Mirroring the genesis of Klingon, linguist David Peterson was hired to create a more-fully developed Dothraki grammar and vocabulary. (Peterson 89)

Although there are many other commercially created art-langs [6], Klingon and Dothraki are probably the most widely known. Both are used both used as aids to verisimilitude and viewer immersion, and both have active communities of fans who interact with their creators. In these respects they are highly successful as artistic languages. But Klingon and Dothraki began as sub-creative afterthoughts, added on as narrative garnish for the benefit of an audience which had come increasingly to expect invented languages as a necessary piece of world-building. They are “perfectly contrived atmospheric devices,” but they do not have the deep relationship with their worlds which Tolkien’s languages have by nature of being coeval with his mythology.

Not everyone need take Tolkien’s approach; not everyone will be capable of doing so. It requires a great investment of time to organically interweave complex stories and languages,  and perhaps such an approach is not well-suited to the deadlines of blockbuster movies and hit HBO series. But its merits are evident in the rich linguistic landscape of Middle-earth, where mind, the tongue, and the tale are coeval.

5. The Speech of the Stars

 As I set out to write this essay, I spent the three months working on developing an invented language, “Treian,” to accompany a set of myths I was working on for an interconnected mythology of my own. This mythology already has several other invented languages, however I had never attempted the creation of a historical grammar for one of the languages beyond outline. This I now attempted to create, with the major sound shifts corresponding with major crisis in the mythology.

For example, the collapse of the ablauting vowel series “a e o” into a single vowel “a” accompanied the “fall” of certain stars of the Western sky (sentient and ensoulled beings in this universe) as a mixed reward and punishment for their standing aloof from a cosmic rebellion (paralleling one of the medieval theories about the origin of the Elves—that they were angels who tried to remain neutral during Lucifer’s rebellion). Also accompanying this fall were a number of consonantal changes, generally representing the simplification of aspirated and non-aspirated consonants into either non-aspirated consonants or parallel fricatives. An additional set of rules acted on the liquid semi-vowels, changing r > u and l > [r u] under certain conditions. Thus:

Proto-Treian *ohur > Treian ahur “ice”
PT. *emh > Tr. amh “water”
PT. *phehel > Tr. fāl “to shine”
PT. *pheheln > Tr. fāla “bright
PT. *kʰohanh > Tr. kānh “to dig, to delve”
PT. *kʰerl > Tr. kaur “country, land”

This project led to the composition of a somewhat lengthy historical grammar (now well over 20 typed pages) and a vocabulary of about 250 words derived from a smaller list of proto roots, to say nothing of about 60 typed pages of the associated myths.

Although this project has become far too involved to summarize in an essay of this length, I have come to have an understanding of just how much effort and patience is required for Tolkienian language invention. I have also found it to be an immensely satisfying experience, one which I will continue beyond this class. It has been eminently worthwhile for its own sake, and does not need the promise of publication or the eagerness of fans to bring joy to a patient and willing sub-creator. This aspect of joy is, I think, a key element which must be experienced to be known, but which cannot be overlooked if we are to properly understand Tolkien’s language invention.

[1] “As one suggestion, I might fling out the view that for perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant…because the making of language and mythology are related functions (coeval and congenital, not related as disease to health, or as by-product to main manufacture)…” (MC 210-211)

[2] For the purposes of this essay, “Eldarin” is used to refer to whole family of Tolkien’s Elvish languages at their various stages of conception.

[3] But note that Tolkien did not necessarily consider time itself to be sufficient reason for Elvish language change. In the early 1950’s, Tolkien dealt with this question at length in The Dangweth Pengoloð. See The Peoples of Middle Earth 397.

[4] King Thingol of Doriath bans the use of the tongue of the Noldor (Quenya) among his subjects in Beleriand after he learns of the death of his kin in the Kinslaying of Alqualonde. “And it came to pass even as Thingol had spoken; for the Sindar heard his word, and thereafter throughout Beleriand they refused the tongue of the Noldor, and shunned those that spoke it aloud; but the Exiles took the Sindarin tongue in all their daily uses, and the High Speech of the West was spoken only by the lords of the Noldor among themselves. Yet that speech lived ever as a language of lore, wherever any of that people dwelt.” (TS 129)

[5] “The Shibboleth of Feanor” is a fascinating example of Tolkien’s powers of retcon. To address an apparent inconsistency in sound changes, he makes it part of the political strife within the Noldor caused by the polarizing personality of Feanor before the Noldor went into exile. See The Peoples of Middle Earth 331.  

[6] Peterson’s “High Valyrian” (also created for Game of Thrones) and “Irathient” (created for the SyFy show Defiance) to name just two.

Currently reading: The Stripping of the Altars

Current audio book: The Return of the King

Currently translating: The Dream of the Rood

VII. Tolkien and the Great Rood Screen

I shared this story briefly in my previous post, but as I continue my meditations on a Language of Beauty I thought it would be worth considering further here, since, with a few well-chosen words, Tolkien perfectly encapsulates a complex idea which I have been wrestling with. 

The setting is a conversation, early on in their friendship, between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Like most good friends they had their ins and outs, their ups and downs, and like most men they came to certain boundaries within their relationship--certain rivers over which lay deeper intimacy, but beyond which one or the other were not able to cross. 

Both men were Christians, of course. Lewis was Church of England, neither as Anglo-Catholic as Anglo-Catholics would like to claim, nor nearly as Evangelical as Evangelicals would like to claim.* For Lewis, the Middle Ages held a great deal of beauty and attraction, but there seem to have been certain medieval ideas and practices with which he was willing to intellectually engage, but into which he was never able to fully enter. 

The veneration of the saints seems to have been the biggest of these objections, especially in the early years after his conversion (or rather, reversion) to Christianity. Tolkien, on the other hand, was a fairly traditional Roman Catholic in every sense. For him, the faith of the Middle Ages seems to have been still a vibrant, living thing, and therefore not something which could be dissected piecemeal without killing it. This was the subject of one of Tolkien's earliest conflicts with Lewis, the first one of those "rivers" which could not be crossed. I will here quote a rather lengthy passage from Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings, since some context is important lest I seem to paint too bleak a picture of their friendship:

‘We were coming down the steps from Magdalen hall,’ Tolkien recalled, ‘long ago in the days of our unclouded association, before there was anything, as it seemed, that must be withheld or passed over in silence. I said that I had a special devotion to St John. Lewis stiffened, his head went back, and he said in the brusque harsh tones which I was later to hear him use again when dismissing something he disapproved of: “I can’t imagine any two persons more dissimilar.” We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby little Catholic caught by the eye of an “Evangelical clergyman of good family”1 taking holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. Never now should I be able to say in his presence:

Bot Crystes mersy and Mary and Jon,
Thise am the grounde of alle my blysse
– The Pearl, 383-4;

and suppose that I was sharing anything of my vision of a great rood-screen through which one could see the Holy of Holies.’

Tolkien wrote this thirty years later, when other events had soured his recollections. In the early days of the friendship such moments were rare, and for the most part he was profoundly grateful for Lewis’s conversion. In October 1933 he wrote in his diary that friendship with Lewis, ‘besides giving constant pleasure and comfort, has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord’.

Embedded within this somewhat painful recollection of Tolkien's is what I believe to be one of his most profound ideas, too often overlooked: the idea of the Pearl poem (which, according to Carpenter, Lewis especially disliked) and by extension the whole world of medieval language and literature to which it belonged as a kind of "rood-screen" through which one could glimpse a vision of holiness. 

15th-century rood screen from the chapel of St Fiacre at Le Faouet Morbihan. Note the saints beneath the cross.

In mulling over this metaphor of Tolkien's, I've conceived a sort of three-way (i.e. triangular) relationship between the rood-screen, the veneration of the saints, and medieval literature.**

Medieval art and literature*** seems to assume a world paradoxically characterized by what Lewis called the 'thick' and the 'clear':

We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. ...Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock)

Medieval Christianity is full of both, in a way which truly must be experienced in order to be understood fully. It is why a theological titan like St Ambrose or St Augustine could compose hymns to jubilantly celebrate the miraculous finding of a martyr's relics, something I suspect most modern "theologians" would be too sober to do. It is why it was precisely the people who lived the 'clearest' existence--the hermits, stylites, and monks--who defended the 'thick' uses of incense, liturgical arts, and the veneration of the holy icons. It was a world that had rejected the extremes both of paganism and Platonism not because either was too much of something but because both were not enough of anything. 

In the nave of even the smallest medieval church, the altar--where the holy oblation was offered up day-in and day-out through the brightest days and darkest nights of the world--was the focal point of the whole building just as the elevation and sacring was the focal point of the Mass. But at the same time, the nave of even the smallest medieval church was full of beads and images, candles and whispered prayers--a whole world of personal and para-liturgical devotion, all oriented toward the altar and yet organic and growing, like the undergrowth of a great forest, in a way which the Reformation and Enlightenment would find unsanitary and chaotic. 

St Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral, Washington DC

It is a world in some sense crowded, just as medieval frescoes or illuminations are too busy for modern eyes or the interlaced plot of your average Arthurian legend has too many changes of character and story for the modern attention span to track. But its inhabitants did not find it crowded--they found it full. Full--but with plenty of corners which still needed filling in. They saw very little difficulty in telling and retelling their favorite stories (be it Arthurian legends, hagiographies, or the Romance of Alexander) with an attitude towards authorship which would curl the toes of a modern Intellectual Property lawyer. Whole worlds of the old pagan undergrowth could be repurposed as in Beowulf or the Prose Edda, just as the high philosophy of the Classical world could be reinterpreted for the local idiom as in the Anglo-Saxon Boethius. So too The Divine Comedy is likely to offend the modern reader by its 'thickness' and its 'clarity' all at once.

Lower screen detail from St Michael's Church, Barton Turf

This world might seem chaotic the way a great forest seems chaotic. And yet there is a logic--a grammar, a syntax, a musical leit motif--that underlies it all. Like the procession around the walls of the parish at the Paschal vigil, there is a clear order and goal to it all--and yet also a kind of organic pulse as sleepy children move about and people press and throng and try to keep up with the crowd. In short, this is what it looks like when something is alive.

This sense of a heaven--of a world--which was full, and always becoming more full, undergirds Dante's Paradisio, which manages to have both endless space and upward dimension in the blessedness of the saints, but which at the same time is radically centered around the Beatific Vision of the Holy Trinity, of Christ. These two things are not opposites; indeed, it is difficult to imagine a version of Paradisio which merely skips to the final canto, as various modern egalitarian theologies might suggest.

I have already made some stumbling attempts to discuss how the iconography--and particularly the iconostasis--of the Eastern Orthodox temple conveys this sense of fullness. In the medieval west--and, it seems, for Tolkien--the rood screen served a similar role. Historian Eamon Duffy describes it this way:

The screens were first and foremost Christological images, proclaiming the centrality of Christ's atoning death. The early sixteenth-century Rood-screen rail at Compsal near Doncaster had an inscription along it which hammered the point home:

Let fal down thyn ne & lift up thy hart
Behold thy maker on yon
Remembir his woundis that for the did smart
Gotyn without syn and on a virgin bor.
Al his hed percid with a crowne of thorn
Alas man thy hart ought to brast in two
Bewar of the dwyl whan he blawis his horn
And pray thy gode aungel convey thee fro.

These familiar facts are worth insisting upon when considering the saints painted on the dados or loft-fronts of Rood-screens, for they represent a powerful iconic and liturgical gloss on the perception of the role of the saints... The saints stood, in the most literal sense, under the cross, and their presence on the screen spoke of their dependence on and mediation of the benefits of Christ's Passion, and their role as intercessors for their clients not merely here and and now but at the last day. The whole screen was therefore a complex icon of the heavenly hierarchy, and many screens where clearly designed to underline this symbolism... representing... a sense of being surrounded and assisted by the "whole company of heaven."

Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 158

For Tolkien, medieval art and literature seems to have served this purpose--to place the heart, the imagination, in a world that was full to overflowing with wonders and glories, the ultimate purpose of which was to reveal the Source of wonder and glory--to veil and therefore reveal as holy that which takes place beyond the rood-screen or iconostasis, where the Singer enters the tale--where the great Story unfolds.

Rood-screen of Croyland Abbey

*There is strong evidence to suggest that Lewis became more of a high churchman after his encounter with Fr Walter Adams, an Anglo-Catholic priest who served as Lewis's father-confessor and spiritual director from 1940-1952.  Adams convinced Lewis of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and discipled Lewis in a love of liturgy, the Daily Office, and the monthly recitation of the Psalter. Lewis also subscribed to a certain understanding of the doctrine of Purgatory, though there are some nuances regarding that issue regarding which I'm not really qualified to speak.

**We should not forget that far and away the most popular genre of literature in the Middle Ages was hagiography, though these saints lives (some of which immensely fantastic, evocative, and entertaining; others of which are downright gory) now rarely catch the notice of modern readers.

***As though one could speak in any kind of an accurate, general way about a thousand-year period of human history.

IV. Beauty and the Kingdom of Heaven

In my previous post, I concluded by setting myself this question to answer:

"The second difference is an artistic question of how--if Christ is the icon of the Father, and therefore the only reliable means by which we can know and commune with the God who is Beauty--all of the other arts (particularly those which are non-liturgical or not specifically religious) can be arranged so as to be transfigured by the Light of Tabor."

In the many weeks which have transpired since writing that post, I have had time to contemplate the salutary phrase "the artistic question of how..." For it is exactly a question of art--"the art remaining with the artist." Here I am not so much interested in the question of art as a "thing" ("but is it art?!") as I am in ars as craft, such as "the art of cheesemaking" or "the art of storytelling" or "the art of Iconography." I am enough of a traditionalist to insist that while cheesemaking, storytelling, and iconography each have their own distinct associated skills and techniques (the combination of which defines the "art" of the thing), yet too they each have a capacity to which they can (according to their kind) be integrated into a world which is not merely fallen, but which has been redeemed.

The best pattern for understanding the arts is that of the hierarchy. All the arts contain a hierarchy within themselves, relate to each other in terms of a hierarchy, and produce artifacts which move the human person towards a specific place in a hierarchy. We may think of a hierarchy in terms of a mountain--as St Gregory of Nyssa understands the progression of the human person toward God in The Life of Moses. We may also think of it in terms of a king's court, or of the Ptolemaic model of the universe (concerning which, more later)--Dante uses all of these models in The Divine Comedy.

Some of us may find the notion of hierarchy repulsive, for any number of reasons which point to any number of disorders in the human condition. Some of us have been wronged by evil hierarchies, some others of us have spent so much time staring at inverted hierarchies that they have begun to look normal to us--thus the Inferno is always the most popular book of The Divine Comedy with any audience, with interest waning as Dante purges more and more of his sin and comes closer and closer to God. I have never believed the fault lay with Dante's genius.

Still others of us have been formed by habits of thought, culture, and education to explicitly reject traditional hierarchies, having become oblivious to those present within our own society which we accept without question. Once, beginning a long-running study on the books of the "Kingdoms" (1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, 1 & 2 Chronicles) I asked a room full of evangelical adults what sort of government or society best mirrored or imaged Heaven (these are the sorts of unfair, troublesome questions which young and arrogant teachers like to use to break the ice). The answer, given nearly unanimously and without hesitation, was "democracy" (though one clever person suggested a "representative republic" instead). This, despite the fact that Christ has very little to say about "the Democracy of Heaven." Like most Evangelicals, they considered themselves "people of the book," but they had always been taught that the American model of government was the most inherently biblical and therefore the most like Heaven.

I am of course neither interested in nor qualified to set out any kind of political theory. The fact that congregationalists equate democracy with the Divine order is not really a comment which requires much consideration, nor am I keen on the idea of elevating any of our current political leaders to the status of absolute monarch. Much more important to the Fathers of the Church--and in my view, much more immediate to us--is the fact that each of us contains, as human persons, a microcosm--a whole cosmos in miniature--within ourselves. This microcosm, because it images the Divine, is inherently hierarchical. Learning to perceive beauty requires the restoration of this hierarchy to its proper order (which is the goal of asceticism).

There is of course the danger that you have already tuned me out due to the repeated use in this post of words such as "hierarchy" and "tradition," all of which we have been taught to think of as stale, dead, and irreparably corrupt. Over the course of the next four posts, I will attempt to show how when we engage with and participate in these things we find them living and breathing, dynamic and attractive. For true hierarchies are not static things--rather, they are processions, or parades: as stately as a coronation; as ecstatic as David dancing before the Ark; as festal as any triumphus through the streets of the Eternal City.

We will consider four works of art: two visual, one poetic, and one literary. The artistic hierarchies I intend to examine are, in order:

1. The Multi-Dimensional Iconography of the Orthodox temple
2. Rogier van der Weyden’s Seven Sacraments
3. The Divine Comedy
4. The Silmarillion

Currently reading: The Person in the Orthodox Tradition, Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

Current audio book: Bread, Water, Wine, and Oil: An Orthodox Experience of God, Meletios Weber