What is the most forgotten language? In C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, the original universal language spoken by all rational beings is called Old Solar, or Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi.
It is not a human language — it is primordial speech shared across all the planets except the Earth, Thulcandra. Ransom explains:
“That original speech was lost on Thulcandra, our own world, when our whole tragedy took place. No human language now known in the world is descended from it.” — Perelandra
What is Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi? Lewis describes it as an ancient, pre-Fall tongue shared by angels (eldila) and rational beings. It is highly musical, highly inflected, and deeply meaningful.
How did the pre-Fall language sound? On the Earth, we have lost that unified speech. None of our languages descend from it directly. In Lewis’s imagery, the pre-Fall language was Solar — a speech originating from the Sun, as he suggests in his poem “The Birth of Language.”
In that poem, every word of the original language is infused with the careering Fires of the Sun — the Divine Logos — echoing the primordial Word: “Let there be…” Each word brings forth the reality it names. Can we glimpse that language today? Lewis suggest that the only power that can resurrect something of that essential speech is “true verse.”
Why? Because only in poetry do we return to the Divine poeisis — the primordial Speech that created the worlds. Lewis says:
Yet if true verse but lift the curse, they [words] feel in dreams their native Sun.
Every time we strike a true metaphor, words momentarily “dream” of their home — the Sun. On this side of the Fall, the only way to hear the Solar Speech is through mind-shifting poetry, the kind that lifts language back toward its unfallen state. C.S. Lewis hints at this in That Hideous Strength when he describes the descent of Mercury:
“This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth.”
For Tolkien, the most powerful metaphor for Divine Speech is… water. Water allows us to hear the Old Solar as nothing else under the sun:
“And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.” — The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë
What do we listen to when we hearken, unsated, to the pattering of rain on the windowsill? We attune to the essential speech that created the worlds. We lean into the faint resonance of the Music of Ilúvatar condensed into matter. For it is said that Ulmo — the Ainu through whose thought and song Ilúvatar shaped the waters of Arda— was “most deeply instructed by Ilúvatar in music.”
“Now to water had that Ainu, whom the Elves call Ulmo, turned his thought; and of all most deeply was he instructed by Ilúvatar in music.” — The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë
Among the Ainur, Ulmo was the one whom Ilúvatar instructed most deeply in music, and therefore in water the echo of that Music lives more than in any substance else that is in this Earth. This could be the reason why the Nazgûl and other evil creatures in Middle-earth hate and fear water — it rings with the song of Ulmo.
We all long to hear Old Solar because it is true speech — saturated with the Music of Creation from which our being arose. Though this language has long been forgotten on Earth, its life-giving presence still haunts us — in poetic utterance, in moments of heightened perception, and most vividly in the contemplation of water, which embodies that primal Speech as nothing else under the sun.
When we listen to the sound of water, we do not know for what we listen, yet we listen for it all the same — for in it we hear a fading echo of the Speech that uttered the world into existence.
