[Q] From Marty Robinson: “Last week you quoted Sir Christopher Wren as referring to ‘The Ailes, from whence arise Bows or Flying Buttresses to the Walls of the Navis.’ I’m sorry to learn that Sir Christopher used the redundancy from whence.”
[A] This is another of those grammatical shibboleths, like avoiding a plural verb with none or not splitting one’s infinitives, that are open to linguistic debate, to put it mildly. The argument against this form is that whence already includes the idea of coming from some place, so that including from makes it tautological.
The debate is complicated by the fact that whence is not that common a word these days, being rather literary; I had trouble finding a modern example that wasn’t prefixed by from. This is from Newsday of 11 November 2004: “He is a legendary figure in his native England, whence I have just returned.” That’s a good example of the “proper” use.
