King James Bible: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help."
Shakespeare: "Within the gentle closure of my breast, / From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part;"
Samuel Johnson: "the place sacred to gladness of heart, from whence all fear and anxiety were irreversibly excluded."
Jane Austen: "Elizabeth was at no loss to understand from whence this deference for her authority proceeded."
Charles Dickens: "He began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine."
John Milton: "O, how unlike the place from whence they fell?"
William Wordsworth: "As Juno was unto the Theban blood,
From whence to Thebes came griefs in multitude." (He's paraphrasing Chaucer here, but the "from whence" doesn't come from Chaucer.)
On the other hand:
PostOnce: "Whence means from where."
I think I'll go with Shakespeare, Johnson, Austen, Dickens, Milton, Wordsworth, and the Bible.
Apparently Johnson's dictionary calls from whence "a vicious mode of speech", but (see above) Johnson uses the expression himself. Ah well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Speaking of which, by the way,
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today." :-)
Well, PostOnce is correct that whence DOES mean “from where”.† However, as you point out, sticking from on the front of it is not considered improper usage. If you look, you can find plenty of illustrious sources using “whence” by itself, and plenty more (such as your list) which write “from whence”. Both forms are fine.
†OED: (1) “From what place?”. (2) “gen. and transf. From what source, origin, or cause?” (3) “From which place; from or out of which.” (3b) “as compound relative: From the place in which, from where.” (4) “gen. and transf. From which source or origin (as a product); from which cause (as a result); from which fact or circumstance (as an inference).” (5) “as n. (nonce-use.) That from which something comes or arises; place of origin; source.”
I can think of no other plausible reason for PostOnce's comment than that s/he wanted to suggest that saying "from whence" is an error.
I suppose it's barely possible that the meaning was simply "you don't have to include the 'from' when you're saying 'whence', so you could have saved yourself a bit of typing", but that seems improbable.
