Language and Human Nature

Language and Human Nature was a joint literature project between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Their publisher had announced that the book was to be published in 1950 but it was never completed.

In 2009, Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Texas State University Department of Communication Studies, Steven A. Beebe, discovered the beginning pages of the manuscript in the Oxford University Bodleian Library. The next year he edited the text for the scholarly journal SEVEN, in Volume 27.

According to Beebe "the manuscript includes some of Lewis’s best and most precise statements about the nature of language and meaning. Both Lewis and Tolkien wrote separately about language, communication, and meaning, but they published nothing collaboratively."