From Day of St. Matthew to Bilbo's and Frodo's Birthday

Creation vs. Evolution: From Day of St. Matthew to Bilbo's and Frodo's Birthday · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Were Old Texts Very Clouded by Figurative Language as Opposed to Literal? — No.

Yesterday was the feast of an Apostle and an Evangelist, who before that had been a Levite and therefore a trained scribe. And then misused the competence as a tax collector. It was when he was forgiven and paid back that he was made a disciple, chosen among the twelve, became a witness to the Resurrection that evening when St. Thomas was lacking and one of the first bishops having authority to forgive sins by sacramental absolution. Within the following decade he composed a Gospel which was described as "a collection of the Lord's sayings" and which has therefore been denied identity with the Gospel we have. I have rebutted this by observing, even if the Gospel contains so much action that one would spontaneously feel that the words of Our Lord were just 25 % of the Gospel (my initial expectation), if you actually use word documents to do word counts, first full text of each chapter, then omitting everything that's not from Our Lord's mouth, it adds up to the sayings being 56 % of the Gospel. The text we have pretty well matches the description by Papias, except the Hebrew original is lost.

Today is Hobbit Day. One September 22 in Hobbiton, Bilbo was eleventy-one years old and Frodo 33 years old. They held a long-expected party which I found so boring at the first reading that I had to restart the Lord of the Rings once again at age 13. I probably wouldn't have if I hadn't around age 9 restarted Karl May's Winnetou I* since at first reading I found the details about the author persona** acting as Geodesist for a railway company near Apache country boring. I mean, in that chapter we have no Apaches, no fights, no danger, no nothing ... I returned to the book and didn't regret it, and I repeated the operation with the Long Expected Party. In case some are not aware or are not aware that I am aware, the Lord of the Rings is a novel. It is fiction.

The use of the Gospel is pure truth. On every level. And truths necessary for salvation, some parts are universally necessary for salvation, other parts are recurringly necessary for some, though not for others. The use of a novel is entertainment, and if any level of truth, that's limited to moral, but not complete historic truth, and in this case not any historic truth at all.***

Is it appropriate? I think it is. Once truth is revealed and we have a firm measure on how to assess moral truth in the Gospel and in Church Tradition, we can allow ourselves to play around with moral truth in purely fictional settings. Peter Pan belongs to the world of Peter, not to the world of Pan. Not that Kensington Gardens is the equivalent of Hobbiton. But this freedom is relatively safe (if exercised by Christians and Tolkien was a better one than James Barrie, he made some indirectly somewhat wry remarks on Peter Pan), if, and only if, we first have a truthful guide to morality. I wouldn't trust George Lucas to invent a correct one. I don't trust Siddharta Gautama with having done so, any more than Epicure. Homer and Virgil are better, since they deal with real events (at least important parts of the epics), though they saw them in the light of false gods. But they aren't adequate.

Now, truth in one sense came when God became Man. But in another sense is far older than that. St. Matthew traces the genealogy of the Godman back to at least Genesis 12 or the last few verses of Genesis 11. St. Luke, following a different line (the genealogies are not both at the same time patrilinear and biological, but by convention adoptions and inlaws could be expressed as patrilinear filiation) traces it back to Genesis 5 and therefore to Genesis 2, with a fairly clear identification of the Adam of Genesis 2 with the man of Genesis 1.

Some have suggested, as a serious° theological proposal, that we should take Genesis 1 through 11 as edification without facthood. As "allegory, much like Lord of the Rings" (which precisely isn't an allegory, and well did Tolkien know that, and clearly did he tell). Once someone has stated such a thing, he need not be taken seriously on literary matters ever again. But I also don't think he deserves any respect in theology. You see, the problem of the Pharisees rejecting Jesus was not lacking a moral guide, the problem was having and heavily misapplying one. Moses. Whose work begins at the very beginning, which is a very good place to start. I e, Genesis 1 through 11 is part of the moral guide that already existed in Jesus' time.

That is a very excellent reason to deny the suggestion it is pious and edifying but nevertheless fiction. Simeon and Anna, Joseph and the doctors in the Temple already had a guide before recognising Jesus. Indeed, Abraham had a guide before recognising the voice of God, the very same person. That guide consisted (at least in important part) of the factual accounts given by Adam and Eve, of Noah and his son Shem, of Heber in the time of Babel, of the genealogists who told their ancestry to their children, in other words, Abraham's revelation didn't start totally from scratch, it started with a moral guide which was also sound history, and still is. Enjoy Tolkien, but don't take James and Matthew or even Moses for James Matthew Barrie! Or even for John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
XVIII Lord's Day after Pentecost
22.IX.2024

* The Winnetou novels so titled are three. A volume called sometimes Winnetou IV is now best known as Winnetous Erben (Winnetou's heirs).
** Who certainly is implied as carrying the name Karl May, as being the later on writer in his earlier years, but isn't the actual life of Karl May.
*** Or very little. It would seem that archaeologically there was a time when the British Isles were not separate from the Continent, there was no English Channel, perhaps not even any North Sea, and as we have no historic records from this part of the world from then, any society able to make such would be one lost to us. Tolkien provides more than just one such lost society. From his imagination. And without the usual "prehistoric men led tough lives that must be depicted as incessant labour" schmuck one finds in so many prehistory novels.
° On their view.

What Can Tolkien's Vision Tell Us About Old Earth Compromise?

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica: Laketown, but not Esgaroth · Did Sth Like Quenya Exist? · Creation vs. Evolution: What Can Tolkien's Vision Tell Us About Old Earth Compromise?

I was just watching

The Blue Wizards and the East | Tolkien Explained
12th Dec. 2020 | Nerd of the Rings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ckCj7UguUw

Part of the deal is Tolkien putting the Blue Wizards as supporting men who rebelled against ... devilworship.

With very long ages, it seems Tolkien had one particular idea on why the genealogies are so short - same reason why four generations are left out of Matthew, these being evil generations.

Now, suppose mankind had existed for some 40 to 60 000 years. Suppose also, good generations are preserved in the genealogies, evil ones are left out. This would explain the shortness of generation add up in Genesis 5 and 11 between first men and Abraham. But only if mankind for most of the time had been in very utter darkness, if idolatry and cannibalism were thousands of years older than Abraham.

That there can have been pre-Flood cannibalism, I agree.

But I do not agree with the idea of a human history dominated by cannibalism, magic, idol worship and in which only rare glimpses of truth were preserved only regionally, and this not just from Abraham on, but for millennia before him.

Whether or not you believe Dei Verbum is from a real council, here is a paragraph saner than that:

3. God, who through the Word creates all things (see John 1:3) and keeps them in existence, gives men an enduring witness to Himself in created realities (see Rom. 1:19-20). Planning to make known the way of heavenly salvation, He went further and from the start manifested Himself to our first parents. Then after their fall His promise of redemption aroused in them the hope of being saved (see Gen. 3:15) and from that time on He ceaselessly kept the human race in His care, to give eternal life to those who perseveringly do good in search of salvation (see Rom. 2:6-7). Then, at the time He had appointed He called Abraham in order to make of him a great nation (see Gen. 12:2). Through the patriarchs, and after them through Moses and the prophets, He taught this people to acknowledge Himself the one living and true God, provident father and just judge, and to wait for the Savior promised by Him, and in this manner prepared the way for the Gospel down through the centuries.

Note, it says "the human race" and not small islands with shifting configurations like Hebrews but in other parts before Abraham. The one predecessor of Hebrews was the entire human race ... and if Noah had become one of a small remnant, this remnant was not based on nations before the Flood, as both Seth and Cain contributed to the Ark. The evil before the Flood may have involved some worship of fallen spirits, but this was not as far as I can see, a state religion in most places - it was just highly fashionable.

And after the Flood, idolatry doesn't resurge, but get invented in the time of Sarug, with Nachor and Thare getting involved in it, but not enough generations to completely hide the truth from Abraham. Serug 663 – 993, Abraham 942 – 1117 counted in years after the Flood. He could know a great-grandfather who was never idolater, and who, like a François de Thonon could tell his son François de Sales he had seen Calvinism born, so also could tell his great-grandson Abraham he had seen idolatry born.

But if we accept Old Earth, we get human sacrifice in Ur 500 years before Abraham, and that not even the start of idolatry:

NYT : At Ur, Ritual Deaths That Were Anything but Serene
By John Noble Wilford, Oct. 26, 2009
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/science/27ur.html

The exact kind of thing Tolkien was envisaging ... in other words, he paid a price for his episcopate (Catholic Bishops of England and Wales) accepting Old Earth compromise while he was alive.

His vision is intensely poetic, but fortunately it is also wrong. I do not mean fictional, that's a matter of course, but as to the general background that his fiction is supposed to flesh out.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Maurilius of Angers
13.IX.2021

Let's Not Silmarillionise the Genesis, Shan't We?

Or is it "shall we?" Anyway, let's not.

What do I mean by this phrase ...? Well, some good Christians, including good Catholics, I hope, have considered that as The Silmarillion (Ainulindale, Valaquenta, Quenta Silmarillion, Akallabêth, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age) are not factual history, but do contain spiritual truth, so one could drop the claim Genesis is factually true and stick to its spiritual truth.

Now, the reason they just might not be as good Catholics as all that, after all, is, no, this is not how the Church has viewed Genesis.

Before I converted, I had been a very staunch Young Earth Creationist. I did not reevaluate that during the thought process leading up to my conversion process. Only at Catechesis (in US I think they call it RCIA), I was told that this was not needed. Note, back in 1987-1988, Antipope and then pseudo-Cardinal Ratzinger had not yet signed the Anti-Fundamentalist papers, which very anachronistically described the essence of Fundamentalism as rejection of spiritual senses, notably allegorical sense, but which very clearly actually went after the inerrancy of the literal sense as factual truth, especially factual history. When this happened, I was already "out of there" as adherent to trads like Le Barroux and Fraternity of St. Pius X (in that order) and I felt no need whatsoever to obey those new instructions. They came from "the occupied Church".

But back to when I converted, when I was told that, I did not drop literal belief in Genesis, I had most definitely not been told it was a heresy, and I was wary of new permissions (fasting too), but on the other hand, I had lived under a very constant strain in Sweden, socially, due to my Young Earth Creationism. So, I took time off. Laid the question aside.

A few years later, I was most definitely not buying the standard Evolutionist view, but I was willing to consider things like Cuvier and Hörbiger:

It was also claimed that Earth had had several satellites before it acquired the Moon; they began as planets in orbits of their own, but over long spans of time were captured one by one and slowly spiralled in towards Earth until they disintegrated and their debris became part of Earth's structure. One can supposedly identify the rock strata of several geological eras with the impacts of these satellites. It was believed that the destruction of earlier ice-moons were responsible for The Flood.[1]

The last such impact, of the "Tertiary" or "Cenozoic Moon" and the capture of our present Moon, is supposedly remembered through myths and legends. This was worked out in detail by Hörbiger's English follower Hans Schindler Bellamy; Bellamy recounted how as a child he would often dream about a large moon that would spiral closer and closer in until it burst, making the ground beneath roll and pitch, awakening him and giving him a very sick feeling. When he looked at the Moon's surface through a telescope, he found its surface looking troublingly familiar. When he learned of Hörbiger's idea in 1921, he found it a description of his dream. He explained the mythological support he found in such books as Moons, Myths, and Man, In the Beginning God, and The Book of Revelation is History. It was believed that our current Moon was the sixth since Earth began and that a new collision was inevitable. Believers argued that the great flood described in the Bible and the destruction of Atlantis were caused by the fall of previous moons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre

In such a scenario, whether there was more space between Adam and the Flood of Noah or whether there were once pre-Adamites, and not yet attending the consequences in soteriology or Biblical epistomology (human side, not inspirational), I considered that ages of men not recorded in Genesis could have been confirmed by the findings of Hörbiger, and could have been approximated as to their real histories by things like The Silmarillion or King Kull and Conan the Barbarian. I think if you take into account that Nimrod lived longer than men do today and then put Rahan and Conan the Conqueror together*, you can get a fair approximation of Nimrod's carreer. But back then I was more thinking in terms of getting periods of history that the Bible does not record.

When so many were Silmarillionising the Genesis, I was semi-Genesising (not attributing inerrancy!) The Silmarillion. By now, I'd be more modest : Akallabêth is, like The Last Battle, a good meditation on the Apocalypse, but not that close to real history.

Fortunately for my writing carreer, this mistake was past, after reading De Civitate Dei in Swedish translation, before I took up writing on the internet about a month or a month and a half after 20 years ago. The irony is, back then I thought Cuvier, since French, was a Catholic, now I know that he was a Protestant and all Catholics in his time, up to 1830, would have frowned on his work.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Epiphany Vigil
5.I.2021

* Or Rahan, Ramayana (Nimrod featuring as Hanuman), and then Conan.

Himalayas, bis ... and Pyrenees

Himalayas ... how fast did they rise? · Himalayas, bis ... and Pyrenees · ter · quater · quinquies ... double-checked

I was tired yesterday, and counted a day as 12 hours - which is correct in the sense where day is opposed to night. We are dealing with day in the sense of day and night:

6 115 mm : 365.2425 days = 16.742 mm / day = 0.698 mm / hour (if 8848 at Exodus);
9 393 mm : 365.2425 days = 25.717 mm / day = 1.072 mm / hour (if 8848 at Birth of Abraham);
22 065 mm : 365.2425 days = 60.412 mm / day = 2.517 mm / hour (if 8848 at that of Peleg, 401 after the Flood).

Other thing, in discussing with a friend I found Mt. Everest is still growing:

Quora : Why is the height of Mt.Everest increasing every year?
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-height-of-Mt-Everest-increasing-every-year

So, now it is 8850 m.

Obviously, this is lots slower than needed immediately after the Flood, if it started growing then.

9 393 mm : 4 mm = 2348.25 times slower
22 065 mm : 4 mm = 5516.25 times slower

Actually, CMI wrote about it back in 1990:

Everest is still rising

Mount Everest is nearly half a metre (1.5 feet) higher than when New Zealand mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary climbed it in May 1953.

... conclusion given:

Everest’s height has been awkward to precisely measure because of the difficulty of determining mean sea-level under the mountain. Yet if the figure given in this report is correct, half an inch growth each year with no erosion puts Everest’s beginning at 697,872 years ago—not 10 million. This is using evolutionary (uniformitarian) assumptions and assuming the ground was flat to begin with. This gives no support to evolutionists’ claims that Everest is millions of years old.

From:

Focus: News of interest about creation and evolution
This article is from Creation 13(1):5–8, December 1990
https://creation.com/focus-131

Now, I put Soanian culture in pre-Flood and cited Patu industry in Nepal as early post-Flood human settlement. The book by Dupuis (2nd edition 1972), cites Burzahom in Kashmir as pre-neolithic settlement.

Carbon dating established that the Neolithic culture of this site was traceable to the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest occupation at the site was dated to before 2,357 BC.

Burzahom archaeological site : Period I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burzahom_archaeological_site#Period_I

As Abraham was born in 2015 BC, this looks earlier than Abraham, but is in fact later : Abraham at about 80, in 1935 BC, fought at Sodom (Genesis 14), with events involving evacuation of treasures from Asason-Tamar or En-Geddi, which are carbon dated to 3500 BC. Joseph in Egypt would have, at c. 1700 BC have had Djoser as Pharao, since Egyptians recall him as Imhotep, and this gives a carbon date of 2600 or 2800 BC (I think 2800 is straight carbon and 2600 calibration, or based on king lists), meaning, Kashmir was settled as late as during the Israelites' stay in Egypt. Kot Diji style refers to an origin in Pakistan, outside Himalaya.

So, a very agitated Himalaya is feasible for early post-Flood centuries, since no men lived there. It would have had much less seismological impact than an equal speed now, since a huge part of the uplift would have started before full solidifying. When sediments and magma were muddy rather than solid.

The discrepancy I found as to procedure in the footnote, yesterday, will have to wait, it might be a bug.

I nearly forgot, Pyrenees was one purported reason given against universal Flood back among certain 19th C Catholics in France. Pyrenees are, supposedly, "much older" than Himalaya, and Pyrenees are also sufficiently high to have present quantities of water not cover all of the globe, if they had existed back then, which they concluded that they did. The idea was, all mountains started out like Alps, Himalayas, Andes, then some had more time to erode than others. I generally find John Ronald Reuel Tolkien a very intelligent man (for an Old Earth Creationist), but the most stupid words he wrote when describing a very old uchronia, set in pre-Biblical times, were, arguably : "when the mountains were higher and more pointed than now" ... nope, Pyrenees and Ural* never looked like Alps or Himalaya.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Ist Saturday of Pentecost Novena
23.V.2020

* Possibly Grey Mountains were meant as Ural back when they were like the Alps, according to this wrong theory.

PS, a correction on the maths upcoming, 4 mm / year seems to be wrong, but computer time is up now./HGL (27.V.2020)

Elves and Adam

Human Language Revisited · Elves and Adam · Back to Picq · Off the Bat

I was reading an article by Jon Mentxakatorre Odriozola - J. R. R. Tolkien : The Philosophical Basis for Sub-Creative Words - where I noted the difference between elves in Cuivienen and Adam before and in Eden. Author brought up the former, my benefactor Borgehammar the latter : Adam naming the animals.

The elves first saw and first named stars (before sun and moon were there, or even the two trees). Their first naming of a thing was also their first word. And "el" suspiciously resembles a Hebrew word of God, but in proto-eldarin it is supposed to mean "star" and "speak". Because looking up at the stars was the first topic they ever spoke a single word about.

Adam also named things, in the real story. Animals. But before he did that, he had spoken a lot with God, who had told him to do so.

The Silmarillion was published posthumously, and includes material written after the publishing of Lord of the Rings and also after ... Humani Generis. An encyclical of which we know Tolkien's reception was obedient and obedient to an excessively pro-evolutionary interpretation - basically : we are free to believe Adam's body evolved, as long as we believe Adam's soul was a direct and primary creation of God*. In other words, Tolkien was considering himself free to disregard facthood of entire account as it stands in Genesis. A man so interested in languages as he must have asked himself what Adam's acquisition of language may have been like, if it was not a direct gift from God (leaving only animal names to Adam).

Somehow, what he said directly of elves in Cuivienen may have been similar to what he thought of man.

Now, the difference is a bit like the difference between a Catholic and a Liberal Protestant view of the origin of the Church.

In a Catholic view, God founded mankind as well as Church with one clear start to which all the rest is connected, whether it be by sexual propagation of humanity (along with, usually, sin) or sacramental propagation of episcopal succession making the seven sacraments possible. If your valid Communion comes from a valid Mass said by a priest validly ordained by a bishop validly consecrated in a series going back to the Twelve, so does your Y-chromosome (if you are a man) come from Adam and your mitochondriae from Eve, and your ability to speak started with Adam and Eve, just as your ability to get saved started with Christ's work on Calvary and among the twelve.

In a Liberal Protestant view, sacraments were gradually emerging in the Church, the narrative material of the Gospels were added to, and Church unity was also slow before Nicaea. Church didn't "magically" start with God and the Apostles - and mankind didn't "magically" start with God along with Adam and Eve.

Of which one consequence is, speech would not have started as a direct gift from God, it would have been something for which man had a capacity and gradually developed. Perhaps by Adam between being born of irrational parents with himself a rational soul and meeting God and getting Eve - on the kind of conservative reading Tolkien would no doubt have preferred even within the liberties of* Humani Generis. How this may have - if this scenario had been possible - taken place is a study for Cuivienen chapter in Silmarillion.** Adam would have one night been astonished at the beauty of the stars ... like the elves in Cuivienen. This way, the existence of the elven kind, in Tolkien, does not start with a direct and conscious contact with God, their speech is a reaction to surroundings : an unfallen reaction, a very aesthetic reaction, a reaction worthy of saints as well as very talented men, but still a natural reaction : having the God-given capacity to speech, they develop it.

In Adam's case, as the Bible has it, which is the truth, Adam has the God-given capacity for speech and God also provides, for free, Hebrew grammar and a near complete Hebrew*** lexicon, lacking however words for animals, which Adam then provides. After already knowing how to speak.

I believe Tolkien's version of elves in Cuivienen is wrong and inferior to the Bible. But I also believe both theories are superior to Pascal Picq, Bernard Victorri and Jean-Louis Dessalles - against whose book I wrote back seven weeks ago. Pascal Picq got a link to it, via FB. He hasn't answered and if he transmitted the link to the other two, they didn't bother to answer either.

One more, Tolkien's Cuivienen scene as well as the "Narnia awake" scene in The Magician's Nephew leave out the trauma it would have involved if Adam had been born of non-human parents who could not cope with his humanity. Or of him not sharing it with them. Elves are - like Adam in the Bible - created adults. And created rational. Talking beasts are created as non-talking beasts at first, but first generation such. This makes, for those who love these books, the "liberal Humani Generis" take on Adam even more mysterious and ominous. Even Tolkien and Lewis could not deal with that aspect of the theory some have defended "as Catholics" since 1950, and in Paris since 1947.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Margerite Audoux Library
St. Rufinus of Assisi°
30.VII.2019

* Humani Generis actually doesn't state anyone is free to believe that Adam was born of non-human parents or even as a non-human before God changed him into a human, it only states both options can be defended by people who are both "expertes" in exegesis and in natural sciences. In Latin, "expers" does not primarily mean a formal and accredited "expert", it means someone having experience in the matter. However, it does state very definitely that Adam's soul was a direct creation of God, not a development, and this must be believed.

** Of the Coming of the Elves.

*** The Bible doesn't state what language spoke, directly, but certain traits in the naming of things - Adam and Eve, for instance - suggest it was Hebrew or a very closely related language, which could have been considered as Hebrew as well by non-Hebrews who weren't specialists : the second best candidate after Hebrew being Aramaic; Our Lord's primary language.

° Not identic to Ruffino Niccacci, but his patron saint.

Did Tolkien make real langages?

When someone is concerned about something I said or wrote, I hate it when he prays for me to get a hint about his point of view instead of communicating his point of view to me directly. It forces me to live as a hermit, without wanting to, rather than as a man among men.

Nevertheless, I have learned to take certain coincidences as hints from God's providence about what other people are concerned about.

Like, I have twice or rather more times but in two contexts argued from the fact that Tolkien created languages. Once for God's ability to replace the old language with a new one in each of the nations that dispersed from Babel in each person. And once in connexion with a demon's ability to write a book in a constructed language and communicate that language to Joseph Smith.

Even more, some idiots may think that Tolkien himself got his languages Quenya and Sindarin from demons inventing and communicating them. I think his Father confessor might have had such a suspicion at least in passing, and this might be one reason why Tolkien translated Our Father and Hail Mary and Glory to the Father into Quenya and Sindarin. Unless it was himself who wanted to make sure. Unless, once again, his desire to hallow his languages was totally unconnected with such suspicions, and he would have wanted it anyway - he was after all a pious Catholic.

Now, came to my attention a few things that are of import in the context. Appropriately enough - the Quenya text is from Genesis. I think all words in chapter one are by Tolkien himself, while one word in chapter two Helge Fauskanger preferred transliterating the tetragrammaton into Quenya phonology rather than using Tolkien's word for "lord" in the context of translating O Kυριος as The Lord.

The following links are, however, Helge Kåre Fauskanger, Norwegian Bible translator, his homepage about Tolkien's languages, followed by two youtubes with reading his translations of the first two chapters of Genesis into Quenya

Ardalambion
Of the Tongues of Arda, the invented world of J.R.R. Tolkien
http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/

Lucia Deetz : I Yessessë (reciting of first Chapter of Genesis in Quenya)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMLeim0tu9Q

Lucia Deetz : Genesis - Chapter 2 (Quenya language)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOlQ6WDGX5M

I can say that Tolkien's Arda is not an invented world in the sense of Narnia or Elidor or Tower of Geburah. It is as much and as little connected to our own real Europe as the Russian folktale's world where Ivan Czarevich rides "through twenty-nine kingdoms and thirty lands" is connected to the real Russia of Czars and before them.

But the point is made: Tolkien, who every Christian will acknowledge was just a man, has accomplished the creation of languages. He is not alone among his colleagues. Schleicher had created more than one version of Proto-Indo-European before he was even born. It was meant to be based on evidence from Indo-European languages, but was nevertheless a language that Schleicher created or constructed, as much as Zamenhof had created Esperanto, although the purpose was different. In all three cases - internationalist, reconstructive AND "purely artistic". Actually Tolkien had partly a reconstructive purpose with Quenya and Sindarin too - for the language spoken in Northern Europe before Indo-European and Fenno-Ugrian.

And of course, what a mere man can do, also angels and demons can do and obviously God Himself can do. Therefore Babel is possible.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
St Fabian, Pope and
Martyr under Decius
20-I-2014