Robert Macfarlane on The Lost Words
The Lost Words aiming to conjure creatures back
A dictionary is like a barometer
— it just tells us the pressures in our culture, and what these omissions are telling us is that nature and the names of nature were leaving us.
The Lost Words Robert Macfarlane Illustrated by Jackie Morris House of Anansi
LONDON The uproar began in 2007 when the editors of the renowned Oxford Junior Dictionary decided that kingfishers and dandelions no longer exist.
Or at least they didn’t exist in the world of your average child. So these words vanished from the dictionary along with such other victims as otter, bluebell, acorn, willow and wren.
They were replaced by words such as attachment, blog, chatroom, MP3 and voicemail. This was in adherence to the dictionary’s guidelines requiring that its contents reflect “the current frequency of words in the daily language of children.”
Writer Robert Macfarlane, a devoted chronicler of Britain’s landscape, jokes that he’s surprised the dictionary’s editors didn’t go so far as to replace “blackberry” with “Blackberry.” But in truth, the dictionary’s culling of the natural world was no joking matter as far as he was concerned.
What Macfarlane didn’t expect, when he joined a mounting protest movement against the dictionary’s exclusion of the natural world from its pages, was that he would become a key player in the creation of a rival book that Britain’s Guardian newspaper calls “a cultural phenomenon.”
That’s putting it mildly. The Lost Words, an exquisitely produced volume combining Macfarlane’s magical word spells with illustrator Jackie Morris’s lavish nature paintings, has now been published in Canada. In Britain, where it first appeared last year, it has triggered an extraordinary response.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Macfarlane says from his home in Cambridge, U.K. “And I don’t think I ever will again. It’s become a catalyst for change. It started with people just sending photographs or videos of their children reading the book or having it read to them.”
More than 30 grassroots campaigns are now underway to place a copy of The Lost Words in every primary school, hospice and care home in the country. A short film that Macfarlane and Morris made for BBC’S Newsnight has triggered three million online viewings so far.
“And the book has led to more public performances than I can think of,” Macfarlane says. He cites a new folk-music album, a touring theatre performance and the creation of a children’s choral work that will première next year in Manchester.
Morris, an artist who lives surrounded by nature in rural Wales, says she is overwhelmed by the success of a volume that now has more than 150,000 copies in print in the U.K. alone and has already made the short list as one of Britain’s all-time favourite books on the natural world.
“It’s been astonishing,” she says. “You learn about a two-year-old boy who’s asking for it every day and you think — my God, it’s speaking to two-year-olds. And then you hear about people reading it to their 96-year-old father who’s dealing with dementia and has spoken for the first time in months. When you hear that, it’s very humbling in the true sense of the word.”
Their book was a response to a controversy that would not go away. By 2015, both Macfarlane and Morris were joining Canada’s Margaret Atwood, former British poet laureate Andrew Motion and other cultural heavyweights in signing an open letter of protest to dictionary editors. For Macfarlane, winner of several awards for his writings on the natural world, a “basic literacy of landscape” was in jeopardy.
“My initial reaction to the new dictionary was disbelief and shock — and then a resolution to do something about it in the most hopeful way possible,” he says. “I should say that this is not the dictionary’s fault. A dictionary is like a barometer — it just tells us the pressures in our culture, and what these omissions are telling us is that nature and the names of nature were leaving us.”
The book that he and Morris have created deals with only 20 species but, Macfarlane emphasizes, many of them are in “drastic” decline. The skylark population has dropped 59 per cent since 1966 and starlings are down 60 per cent in Britain alone — “so it’s no surprise that children and adults should no longer know the names of creatures who are slipping from our landscape. So we’re bringing the names back, hoping that in some way we can ‘conjure’ the creatures back, too.”
It was Morris, one of Britain’s leading book illustrators, who initially contacted Macfarlane and suggested an “alphabet” of lost words in which he would contribute an introduction to her paintings. But Macfarlane came up with a bolder scenario: “I went back to her about three months later and said, ‘I think we might be able to grow something bigger and stranger from this.’ And we did. Jackie paints things so beautifully that you want to eat them or pick them from the page.”
Macfarlane’s idea was to embrace the ancient arts by taking 20 vanished words from the natural world and to conjure them back to life through a series of acrostic “spell” verses that would usher in Morris’s spectacular paintings.
“We call the book a ‘spell’ book,” Macfarlane says. “We wanted to imagine magically that these words and creatures might be summoned back through a book that is meant to be read aloud. And that’s what’s happening because of the book’s success.”
The spells seek to invoke the spirit of their subject. Hence, Macfarlane’s Magpie Manifesto goes like this: “Argue Every Toss!/ Gossip, Bicker, Yak and Snicker All Day Long!”
Morris admits that the book was a challenge. “I went back to the drawing board a lot. I live where there are a lot of ravens, and I thought, nothing he writes will change the way I paint the raven. So I painted it and then he sent me the raven spell and I thought, damn, I’ll have to paint it again.”
Morris enjoyed painting a newt most of all. She at first thought it would be impossible to do a “tiny, tiny water dragon” and rejected an editor’s suggestion that she simply make it bigger. “Then I suddenly realized that, of course, I can paint things bigger than they really are — which is really stupid coming to me after 47 years of painting!”
She’ll be quite happy if readers, both adults and children, feel they’re entering a dreamscape with this book.
“Whenever I paint anything, even a blade of grass, I’m trying to catch its soul,” she says simply. “What’s lovely for me is that people were so surprised by the book. We kept it under wraps for quite a while. So it came as a shock to people — which is good, I think.”
It started with people just sending photographs or videos of their children reading the book or having it read to them.