Language of Magic/Quotes

I had a professor in college who read Anglo-Saxon like he'd grown up with it. This was the language of "Beowulf", a rolling, singsong way of speaking, full of portent. Like thunder, rumbling for miles over a windswept plain. After the passage of time, this professor explained, ancient languages become the language of magic, the meanings forgotten but the power of them remembered. The Catholic Church could chant Latin, and it didn't matter that no one knew what the words meant a thousand years later. He'd been speaking metaphorically. But he was right.

—Kitty Goes to War