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I heard that a certain priestess in California was now regularly “channeling” Inanna.

(Oh, how—in a pagan context—that la-la New Age term sets my teeth on edge.)

“Oh, good,” I replied. “I've got some questions about Sumerian grammar that I'd love to ask her.”

My skepticism—call it snarkiness, if you like—did not sit well with my friend.

Let's let Professor Tolkien demonstrate.

Take a word from Old English—English as it was spoken 1000 years ago—one that either never existed, or once existed, but didn't survive into modern times: say hol-bytla, “hole-builder.”

Ask yourself: if this word had survived into modern times, and undergone—mutatis mutandis—all the usual sound changes, what would it look like today?

Enter hobbit.

If there is a linguistic term for this process of artificial verbal aging, I for one don't know what it is. Over the years, drawing on the Greek and Latin vocabulary that linguists tend to use to describe matters linguistic, I've coined several names for the process. None were sufficiently utile (or beautiful) to linger even in the memory of the coiner.

(Yes, I could laboriously go back through my notebooks and find them again. I'll spare both you and me the results.)

Recently I asked fellow ledesman (see below) Theodsman Nick Ritter—a better linguist than me, any day of the lunar month—what he would call it.

Anglishing, he promptly fired back.

Anglish is the name given to the conlang (“constructed language”) which asks precisely this question: if the English language had never undergone the type of Frenchification (= linguistic imperialism) that overtook it after 1066, what would it look like today?

One of the foundational principles of Anglish is the avoidance of Romance/Classical vocabulary whenever possible. Hence, my abortive attempts to coin a Greco-Latin term for this process of linguistic updating, wrong-headed from the beginning.

Thanks, Nick: Anglishing it is.

(“How, then, would one Anglish 'Beowulf'?” I ask him.

Beowulf's people, the Geats, also fell out of memory, as did the hero—whose name means “bee-wolf” (i.e. bear) himself. But Nick, of course, has a ready answer.

Hail and welcome, Bolf the Yeet.)

Old English had two different words that could be translated “tribe” or “people”: théod and léod. Without a detailed study of the words in their original context, it's hard to say what the difference in denotation between the two might have been to the English-speaking ancestors.

With the demise of tribal identity among speakers of English, neither of these words survived into modern times—13th century scholars had to borrow the Latin word for the concept—but, via the wonders of Anglishing, we can say that, had they survived, we would today say thede and lede.

So, what's the difference these days? Easily told: the people writ small, and the people writ large.

Example #1: While regarding themselves primarily as Athenians, Spartans, or Corinthians, ancient Greeks would all have regarded themselves as Hellenes.

Example #2: Speakers of Anishinabe (“Ojibway”) share a larger sense of kinship with other speakers of Algonquin languages, the larger linguistic family that includes Anishinabe and various other related languages.

Example #3: Modern-day Wiccans: Witch by thede, Pagan by lede.

Lest anyone think such linguistic nativism unique to speakers of English, let me hasten to assure you that there's an entire movement out there to revive Gaulish, the extinct language of ancient Gaul.

Several decades ago, writer Paul Kingsnorth went to West Papua to document the physical and cultural genocide being perpetrated on the local Indigenous peoples by the Indonesian army.

Traveling with some men of the Lani tribe, he (and they) came to a break in the trees, where they saw

a great sweep of ancient forest rolling off towards the blue horizon. Blue, green: there was nothing else. Everything could have been here at the Creation.

Spears on shoulders, the Lani men turned and sang together, quite matter-of-factly, a song that, Kingsnorth later discovered, was a song of thanks to the forest (Kingsnorth 16).

That Song of the Forest has haunted him ever since.

His life since then—assiduously documented in yearning, visionary prose—has been a search for what those tribesmen had, a state of being which his ancestors also once had, but which has long since been lost: a living community in spiritual relationship with the Living Land.

He left environmental activism, moved his family to a remote farm in western Ireland, hooked up with the local Alexandrians. (I gather that Alexandrians are thick on the ground in Ireland.) Still missing the Song of the Forest, he left the Alexandrians, and was recently baptized into the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Well, Paul, I wish you luck in your journey, and the Sun and Moon on your path. But what would you say if I told you that I could teach you the Song of the Forest? Not the Lani Song of the Forest, but the one that our ancestors used to sing?

In truth, I can't teach that song, to him or to anyone; I don't know it either.

Yet.

But here's the thing. Kingsnorth seems to have despairingly concluded that, since it's been lost, it's lost forever. But my experience over the past five decades leads me to conclude that, though we may not know the Song now, some day we will.

No, I don't know the Song of the Forest—yet. But let me tell you some of the songs that I do know.

I know the song that you sing when you see an eagle.

I know the song that you sing when you make offerings to the Fire.

I know the song of the Mask that the Horned wears when He dances among His people at the Grand Sabbat.

Fifty years ago, I didn't know any of these songs. Now I do. For this reason, I feel confident that our Song of the Forest is on the horizon, only a matter of time.

Ten years ago, a young woman—now a friend and colleague—came to ask me to be her teacher.

Naturally, I asked the question that you always ask under such circumstances: Why me?

Because what you have is the real thing, and I want it, she replied.

On the face of it, paganism sounds pretty easy.

You pick some god or goddess from Long Ago and Far Away. You buy a statue, you light some incense. Voilà: paganism.

But, of course, that's not paganism at all. Go ahead, buy all the statues and light all the incense that you want to.

Long Ago and Far Away, statues and incense: that's not paganism. That's a cartoon of paganism. At best, it's a place to begin.

Real paganism? Oh, that's much harder.