Abstract: In this intimate glimpse of Hugh Nibley’s childhood, written by his daughter Zina, we read of what it was like for Hugh to grow up as a gifted child with Victorian parents and, in turn, what it was like for Zina and her siblings to grow up as a child in the home of Hugh and Phyllis. These poignant, never-before-told stories reveal why, in Zina’s words, “Hugh’s uniqueness lay as much in his inabilities as in his abilities, as much in what he refused to learn as what he refused to allow to remain unexamined.” And though it was obvious that his mind was extraordinarily sharp, we learn why “it was Hugh Nibley’s heart that made the difference. And it was a very good heart.”
[Editor’s Note: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article is reprinted here as a service to the LDS community. Original pagination and page numbers have necessarily changed, otherwise the reprint has the same content as the original.
See Zina Nibley Petersen, “Nibley’s Early Education,” in Hugh Nibley Observed, ed. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Shirley S. Ricks, and Stephen T. Whitlock (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation; Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2021), 57–76. Further information at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/hugh-nibley-observed/.]
In one of Hugh Nibley’s earliest memories, he was sitting under the dining room table while his parents discussed in hushed and horrified tones a terrible disaster they had just heard about. As he played on the Oriental rug and traced a chubby finger over the symbols that he would, in later years, learn how to read—they were the rug maker’s name in Arabic—above him, his father’s voice was saying something about how [Page 316]terrible it was. It was supposed to be invincible. It was supposed to be unsinkable. So many lives. He was telling his wife about the tragedy of the Titanic. Even in his nineties, Hugh Nibley always fully remembered feeling very saddened by his parents’ mood that day. He had just turned two years old.
My topic for tonight is the early education of Hugh Nibley. Not having been present for it, I find this daunting, but I will address it anyway. There are reasons why this topic is so intriguing. The reputation of Nibley the scholar or Nibley the man or Nibley the academic and religious savant, coupled with an awareness of how different he was, leads to a faintly voyeuristic fascination for all of us. How did he get like that? How did this begin to develop into whatever it was that we remember of Hugh Nibley? Can I answer that? Can anyone answer that?
As I grew up being his daughter, I was aware of the interest people had in him. I was aware that he was a teacher and a book writer and a defender of the gospel, but I did not share the disconnect—the sense that he was so different—until I learned it from the inside out. Here before me is an audience that, to at least some of you, sees Hugh Nibley more or less as an anomaly, as something different. But I’ve had to learn, and it has been admittedly and somewhat shamefully late, why and how he was [Page 317]an anomaly. Looking back, I think I used to assume that it was a content issue. His mind had a lot of stuff in it. The difference was one of degree but not type. I assumed that the main difference between all children, of which I was one, and all adults, of which he was one, was quantifiable.
I’m the cute one. I knew I was in the same boat with his admirers but further behind. We all knew that he thought more than we did. I knew that he had more languages in which to think. He had read more books, both to glean ideas from and to converse and engage with, than I would ever have. But, like the proverbial fish, I had no idea the water I swam in was wet. And so I absorbed his way of thinking, even as I easily dodged those languages and books and efforts that facilitated much of the...
