Since my teenage years, one of my favorite authors has been the writer and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, and he remains one of my favorite writers to this very day. No doubt this is in part due to Lewis' evident gift as an imaginative writer in such works as The Chronicles of Narnia and his robust intellectual defense of the Christian faith. However, recently I realized I had another reason to appreciate Lewis--he is the only writer I am aware of who made a linguist the hero in several of his works. As somewhat whose graduate-level studies were in the field of linguistics, this gives me yet another reason to be a fan of Lewis!
The hero in question is Dr. Elwin Ransom, who appears in all three books of Lewis' science fiction trilogy--Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. In That Hideous Strength, he is described as a philologist and the author of book titled Dialect and Semantics. It is interesting that Ransom is described as a philologist, since that term has essentially been replaced in modern English with the word linguist, used to identify someone engaged in the scholarly study of human language. As British linguist Geoffrey Sampson explains in his Schools of Linguistics, "in modern English usage linguistics normally means linguistics in the twentieth-century style--therefore primarily synchronistic linguistics [the study of languages as they exist in the present]--while philology, if used at all, refers (often slightly patronizingly) to historical linguistics as practiced in the nineteenth century" (p. 243). Whether Lewis was aware of such a distinction or not, I am not sure.
To summarize for the benefit of those not familiar with Lewis' trilogy, in Out of the Silent Planet, Dr. Ransom is kidnapped by the villains Weston and Devine and taken by spacecraft to the planet Malacandra, that is, Mars. After encountering the exotic inhabitants of the planet and experiencing a number of adventures, he is able to return safely to Earth. In Perelandra, Ransom is transported to Perelandra, the planet Venus. There he confronts his one-time kidnapper Weston and is able to prevent Weston (who is now possessed by a demon) from drawing the "Eve" of Perelandra, the Green Lady, into sin. In That Hideous Strength, Ransom serves as the leader of a small group of Christians opposing the activities of the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments, ostensibly a government-sponsored research institute, which in reality is under the control of demonic powers intent on taking control of Britain.
I am not quite sure why Lewis chose to make the hero of his trilogy a linguist (or philologist). I suppose that from a practical standpoint it made sense, since in the first two books of the trilogy, Ransom has to be able to communicate with the inhabitants of Mars and Venus in their own language, which is referred to as "Old Solar." Lewis presumably decided it would be unrealistic for the inhabitants of other worlds to speak English, and for whatever reason did not think of some other device, like a universal communicator (a la Star Trek), for Ransom to use as his means of communicating with "the natives." Perhaps Lewis, like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, was intrigued by the idea of creating an imaginary language for his characters to use. Of course, Lewis himself was not a linguist, so Ransom presumably was not based on himself (in that respect, at least), but as a literary scholar and student of language, he certainly had a sophisticated understanding of and appreciation for language.
Whatever Lewis' reason for making Dr. Ransom a linguist, it is indisputable that all three novels in Lewis' "space trilogy" are well worth reading, whether you are a Lewis fan, a fan of science fiction, or both, and I would strongly encourage readers of my blog to seek them out if they are not familiar with them.
Image of C.S. Lewis from Wikimedia Commons