Brothers and Friends

[Jack and Warnie as boys in Northern Ireland]

Warnie has been home since before Christmas and is now retired... He has become a permanent member of our household and I hope we shall pass the rest of our lives together.  He has settled down as easily as a man settles into a chair, and what between his reading and working in the garden finds himself busy from morning till night.  He and I are making a path through the lower wood - first along the shore of the pond and then turning away from it up through the birch trees and rejoining at the top the ordinary track up the hill.  It is very odd and delightful to be engaged on this sort of thing together: the last time we tried to make a path together was in the field at Little Lea when he was at Malvern and I was at Cherbourg.  We both have a feeling that 'the wheel has come full circuit', that the period of wanderings is over, and that everything which has happened between 1914 and 1932 was an interruption: tho' not without a consciousness that it is dangerous for mere mortals to expect anything of the future with confidence.  We make a very contented family together.

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume II

Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 4, 1933)

Of Puffins and Hobbits

From a letter to Rayner Unwin

10 December 1960

 [Puffin Books had offered to publish a paperback edition of The Hobbit.]

Thank you for your news of the 'Puffin' offer, and your advice.  I may safely leave the decision to your own wisdom.  The chances of profit or loss, in cash or otherwise, are evidently neatly balanced.  If you wish to know my personal feelings: I am no longer able to ignore cash-profit, even to the odd £100, but I do share your reluctance to cheapen the old Hobbit.  Unless the profit or advantage is clear, I would much rather leave him to amble along; and he still shows a good walking-pace.  And I am not fond of Puffins or Penguins or other soft-shelled fowl: they eat other birds' eggs, and are better left to vacated nests.

The Search for the House

He sat back, lit a cigarette, and turned to other work, till, somewhere about half-past eight, Pewitt also rang up. Pewitt was a young fellow who was being tried on the mere mechanics of this kind of work, and he had been sent up to the Finchley Road not more than two hours earlier, having been engaged on another job for most of the day. His voice now sounded depressed and worried.

"Pewitt speaking," he said, when the Commissioner had announced himself. "I'm--I'm in rather a hole, sir. I--we--can't find the house."

"Can't what ?" his chief asked.

"Can't find the house, sir," Pewitt repeated. "I know it sounds silly, but it's the simple truth. It doesn't seem to be there."

The Assistant Commissioner blinked at the telephone. "Are you mad or merely idiotic, Pewitt?" he asked. "I did think you'd got the brains of a peewit, anyhow, if not much more. Have you lost the address I gave you or what?"

"No, sir," Pewitt said, "I've got the address all right--Lord Mayor's Street. It was a chemist's, you said. But there doesn't seem to be a chemist's there. Of course, the fog makes it difficult, but still, I don't think it is there."

"The fog?" the Commissioner said.

"It's very thick up here in North London," Pewitt answered, "very thick indeed."

"Are you sure you're in the right street?" his chief asked.

"Certain, sir. The constable on duty is here too. He seems to remember the shop, sir, but he can't find it, either. All we can find, sir, is--"

"Stop a minute," the Commissioner interrupted. He rang his bell and sent for a Directory; then, having found it, he went on. "Now go ahead. Where do you begin?"

"George Giddings, grocer."

"Right."

"Samuel Murchison, confectioner."

"Right."

"Mrs. Thorogood, apartments."

"Damn it, man," the Commissioner exploded, "you've just gone straight over it. Dimitri Lavrodopoulos, chemist."

"But it isn't, sir," Pewitt said unhappily. "The fog's very thick, but we couldn't have missed a whole shop."

"But Colonel Conyers has been there," the Commissioner shouted, "been there and talked with this infernal fellow. Good God above, it must be there! You're drunk, Pewitt."

"I feel as if I was, sir," the mournful voice said, "groping about in this, but I'm not. I've looked at the Directory myself, sir, and it's all right there. But it's not all right here. The house has simply disappeared."

Charles Williams

War in Heaven (1930)

Planet Narnia

Secret theme behind Narnia Chronicles is based upon the stars, says new research

The hidden theme behind CS Lewis' Narnia books has finally been uncovered, according to a BBC documentary [But read my postings on this Weblog from July/August 2006]

Each of the seven children's chronicles is based on one of the seven planets that comprised the heavens in medieval astrology, says a scholar whose theory is examined in the programme.  The explanation comes after more than five decades of literary and theological debate over whether Lewis devised the fantasies with a pattern in mind or created characters and events at random.

It is put forward by Reverend Dr Michael Ward, in his book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of CS Lewis.

Norman Stone, director and producer of The Narnia Code, to be screened on BBC2 at Easter, says the theory is the "best explanation yet" for the chimerical nature of the books.

The Chronicles of Narnia have sold over 120m copies in 41 languages since their first publication in the early 1950s first of the books, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, was turned into a film starring Tilda Swinton and James McAvoy in 2005.

The books are already known to work on two levels: the fantasy narrative enjoyed by generations of children, and the Christian allegory in which the lion Aslan represents Christ.  However, Lewis never revealed the hidden key behind the series.

Dr Ward made his discovery in 2003 after reading The Planets, a poem by Lewis which refers to the influence of Jupiter in "winter passed / And guilt forgiv'n" – a theme echoed in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

He claims Lewis' knowledge of medieval history, of which he was one of the leading scholars, made him familiar with the characteristics attributed to the seven planets during the period.  Each of these planets gives one of the books its theme.  Prince Caspian, for example, is a story ruled by Mars, who is manifested by soldiery and battle, while The Voyage of the Dawn Treader focuses on the Sun, with its light and gold themes.  In The Horse and His Boy, based on Mercury, the planet that rules the star sign Gemini and is associated with the power of communication, the characters include twins and a talking horse. 

Mr Stone said: "This isn't the first theory on Narnia and I don't suppose it will be the last but this is the best explanation yet.

"Critics of Lewis said his writing was sloppy - Tolkein, for example, said the characters were a mish-mash - but this third level of meaning shows the books were not simplistic.  In fact, writing such a complex set of notions into a novel must have been like three-dimensional chess.  "Lewis was a great medievalist - a real expert on the period.  He was also interested in astrology.  He loved the medieval view of the world.  His view of faith was also that if it is to be anything it must be cosmic."

He added: "This will help change the view of Lewis.  It will help elevate Lewis to a different level and make him the equal of Tolkien - both as a writer and thinker.  He felt that we have been blinded by facts, but he loved hiding things.  He loved the idea that people learnt more by discovering things themselves, especially hidden things.  A lot of the meaning of God is after all hidden."

Sunday Telegraph (London) – 30 November 2008 

To Charles Williams

On this day in 1945, C. S. Lewis' friend, fellow Inkling and author, Charles Williams, died suddenly at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford.

TO  CHARLES  WILLIAMS

Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard

To see plainly or record truly. The new light imposes change,

Re-adjusts all a life-landscape as it thrusts down its probe from the sky,

To create shadows, to reveal waters, to erect hills and deepen glens.

The slant alters. I can't see the old contours. It's a larger world

Than I once thought it. I wince, caught in the bleak air that blows on the ridge.

Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning? Or the cold of spring?

A hard question and worth talking a whole night on.

But with whom? Of whom now can I ask guidance? With what friend concerning your death

Is it worth while to exchange thoughts unless—oh unless it were you?

CS Lewis

Poems (Bles 1964)

Lay of the Children of Húrin

Tolkien loved archaic language, in which he often used far beyond the tolerance of the modern reader, when he wrote alliterative verse. He sometimes succumbed to all the temptations the alliterative form offers to a literary scholar: the opportunity to use archaic words to meet the alliterative requirements, the temptation to distort the syntax to meet the rhythmic demands of Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter, and various other sins less besetting, such as the temptation to include filler material for the sake of the meter. However, once tuned into Tolkien's world, the difficulties fall away in a plethora of wonderful, and often terrifying images:

Then Thalion was thrust to Thangorodrim,
that mountain that meets the misty skies
on high o'er the hills that Hithlum sees
blackly brooding on the borders of the north,
To a stool of stone on its steepest peak
they bound him in bonds, an unbreakable chain,
and the Lord of Woe there laughing stood,
then cursed him for ever and his kin and seed
with a doom of dread, of death and horror.
There the mighty man unmoved sat;
but unveiled was his vision, that he viewed afar
all earthly things with his eyes enchanted
that fell on his folk- a fiend's torment. 

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lays of Beleriand*
(The Lay of the Children of Húrin, lines 92-104)

*If I might interpose a comment (which is VERY unusual for me), I believe that in "The Lays of Beleriand" one is closer to Tolkien's sub-creation than in any other of his works.  (Roger R.)

Grasping at... what?

Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more - food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else more.

Most of us find it very difficult to want "Heaven" at all - except in so far as "Heaven" means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognise it. Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise (...) There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.

C.S. Lewis

Mere Christianity Chapter 10 (1952)

A (Video) interview with JRRT (1968)

Some great archival footage just released from BBC on Tolkien that was first aired in 1968. 

http://good-report.com/5861/just-released-from-the-bbc-a-rare-1968-interview-with-j-r-r-tolkien-video

from "The Triumph Of The Angelicals"

She was where he had left her, but dreadful change was coming over her.  Her body was writhing into curves and knots where she lay, as if cramps convulsed her. Her mouth was open but she could not scream: her hands were clutching at her twisted throat.  In her wild eyes there was now no malice, only an agony, and gradually all her body and head were drawn up backwards from the floor by an invisible force, so that from her hips she remained rigidly upright and her legs lay stretched straight out behind her up on the ground, as if a serpent in human shape raised itself before him.  The sight drove him backwards; he turned his face away, and prayed with all his strength to the Maker of the Celestials.  From that refuge he looked again, and saw her convulsed and convulsed with spasms of anguish.  But now the very colour of her skin was changing; it became blotched and blurred with black and yellow and green; not only that but it seemed distended about her. Her face rounded out till it was perfectly smooth, with no hollows or depressions, and from her nostrils and her mouth something was thrusting out.  In and out of her neck and hands another skin was forming over or under her own?  He could not distinguish which, but growing through it, here a coating. there an underveiling.  Another and an inhuman tongue was flickering out over a human lips, and the legs were twisted and thrown from side to side as if something prisoned in them were attempting to escape.  For all that lower violence her body did not fall, nor indeed, but for a slight swaying, did it much move. Her arms were interlocked in front of her, the extreme ends of her fingers touched the ground between her thighs.  But they too were drawn inwards; the stuff of her dress was rending in places; and wherever it rent and hung aside he could see that other curiously-toned skin shining behind it.  A black shadow was on her face; a huge shape was emerging from it, from her, growing larger and larger as the Domination she had invoked freed itself from the will and the mind and the body that had given it a place where it could find the earth for its immaterialization. No longer a woman but a serpent indeed surged before him in the darkening room, bursting and breaking from the woman's shape behind it. It curved and twined itself in the last achievements of liberty; there came through the silence that had accompanied that transmutation a sound as if some slight thing had dropped to the floor, and the Angelic energy was wholly free.

It was free. It glided a little forward, and its head turned lowly from side to side. Richardson stood up and faced it. The subtle eyes gazed at him, without hostility, without friendship, remote and alien. He looked back, wordlessly calling on the Maker and End of all created energies. Images poured through his brain in an unceasing riot; questions such as Anthony had recounted to him propounded themselves; there seemed to be a million things he might do, and he did none of them. He remembered the Will beyond all the makings; then with a tremendous effort he shut out even that troublesome idea of the Will--an invented word, a mortal thought--and, as far as he could, was not before what was. It had mercy on him; he saw the great snake begin to move again, and then he fainted right away.

The Place of the Lion (1933)

Charles Williams

Grief being better than estrangement

I think what you say about 'grief being better than estrangement' is very true.  I am sorry you should have had this grief but, as you describe it, one can't be sorry for the call.

I also have become much acquainted with grief now through the death of my great friend Charles Williams, my friend of friends, the comforter of all our little set, the most angelic.  The odd thing is that his death has made my faith ten tunes stronger than it was a week ago.  And I find all that talk about 'feeling he is closer to us than before' isn't just talk.  It's, just what it does feel like - I can't put it into words.

One seems at moments to be living in a new world.  Lots, lots of pain but not a particle of depression or resentment.

By the bye I've finished a selection from Geo. Macdonald (365 extracts) which will come out about Xmas: wd. you (or not) care to have it dedicated to you? I feel it is rather yours by right as you got more out of him than anyone else to whom I introduced his books.  Just let me know.

And why should you assume I'm too occupied to see you?  Friday mornings in term are bad, but alright in Vac: and Friday afternoons in both.  I shd. like a visit (with a week's notice) whenever you find one convenient.

Excuse this paper.  It may be less blotched than yours but yours did,at least begin life as a real piece of note paper!  I'm so glad Dan has got his job made permanent.

Blessings!

Collected Letters (Volume II)

From the Letter to Mary Neylan – 20^th May 1945

Charles Williams Society AGM

Where?
The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Shoe Lane, Oxford

When?
Saturday, 28th April from 12:00 noon

Programme?

The day will begin with the AGM followed by lunch -- anyone fancy a pint in the 'Bird and Baby' after visiting Charles' grave at St. Cross Cemetery?

At 2:00pm Grevel Lindop will give a talk on the progress of his biography of Charles Williams: "The Pleasure and the Pain; writing a biography of Charles Williams".

Anyone within reach of Oxford with an interest in this most important 'Inklings' poet and author would be VERY welcome.

Of Diffidence in Love

Yet sleeps she in her chamber : longer yet

I at her soul's gate will maintain the guard,

And watch beside shut casement, portals barred,

Till with the dawn her life its dreams forget.

Shall I dare sound then, lest the knocking fret

Her thoughts, much weighed with house-hold service hard ?

Or of the lit shrine break their still-regard ?

I dare : against the door my hand is set.

O soul, knock loudly, nor too greatly fear,

However them seem miserable and poor :

Estated by thine embassage art thou.

It is not meet, for  love's sake, thou shouldst bow

Too low.  O soul, knock softly, lest she hear ;

Knock softly, lest her hands undo the door.

Charles Williams

Sonnet 36

The Silver Stair (1912)

Domesticities

It was early evening when my journey began.  The train was full, but not yet uncomfortably full, of people going home.  It is important to insist - you will see why in a moment - that I was under no illusion about them.  If anyone had asked me whether I supposed them to be specially good people or specially happy or specially clever, I should have replied with a perfectly truthful No.  I knew quite well that perhaps not ten percent of the homes they were returning to would be free, even for that one night, from ill temper, jealousy, weariness, sorrow or anxiety, and yet - I could not help it - the clicking of all those garden gates, the opening of all those front doors, the unanalysable home smell in all those little halls, the hanging up of all those hats, came over my imagination with all the caress of a half-remembered bit of music.  There is an extraordinary charm in other people's domesticities.  Every lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in someone else's garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien kitchens.

C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns, "Hedonics", 1986

(1st published in Time and Tide, 16 June 1945)

from "The Coming Of The Butterflies"

There was a sudden upward sweep of green and orange through the air in front of him: he blinked and moved. As he recovered himself he saw, with startled amazement, that in the centre of the garden, almost directly above the place where he had seen the lion, there floated a butterfly. But - a butterfly! It was a terrific, colossal butterfly, it looked as if it were two feet or more across from wing-tip to wing-tip. It was tinted and coloured with every conceivable brightness; green and orange predominating. It was moving upward in spiral flutterings, upward to a certain point, from which it seemed directly to fall close to the ground, then again it began its upward sweep, and again hovered and fell.

Of the two men it seemed to be unaware; lovely and self-sufficient it went on with its complex manoeuvres in the air. Anthony, after a few astonished minutes, took his eyes from it, and looked about him, first with a general gaze at all his surroundings, then more particularly at Mr. Tighe. The little man was pressed against the gate, his mouth slightly open, his eyes full of plenary adoration, his whole being concentrated on the perfect symbol of his daily concern. Anthony saw that it was no good speaking to him.

He looked back at the marvel in time to see, from somewhere above his own head, another brilliancy - but much smaller - flash through the air, almost as if some ordinary butterfly had hurled itself towards its more gigantic image. And another followed it, and another, and as Anthony, now thoroughly roused, sprang up and aside, to see the better, he beheld the air full of them. Those of which he had caught sight were but the scattered first comers of a streaming host.

Away across the fields they came, here in thick masses, there in thinner lines, white and yellow, green and red, purple and blue and dusky black. They were sweeping round, in great curving flights; mass following after mass, he saw them driving forward from far away, but not directly, taking wide distances in their sweep, now on one side, now on another, but always and all of them speeding forward towards the gate and the garden beyond. Even as a sudden new rush of aerial loveliness reached that border he turned his head, and saw a cloud of them hanging high above the butterfly of the garden, which rushed up towards them, and then, carrying a whirl of lesser iridescent fragilities with it, precipitated itself down its steep descent; and as it swept, and hovered, and again mounted, silent and unresting, it was alone. Alone it went soaring up, alone to meet another congregation of its hastening visitors, and then again multitudinously fell, and hovered; and again alone went upward to the tryst.

Charles Williams

The Place of the Lion (1933)

Magic in LOTR

I am afraid I have been far too casual about 'magic' and especially the use of the word; though Galadriel and others show by the criticism of the 'mortal' use of the word, that the thought about it is not altogether casual. But it is a v. large question, and difficult; and a story which, as you so rightly say, is largely about motives (choice, temptations etc.) and the intentions for using whatever is found in the world, could hardly be burdened with a pseudo-philosophic disquisition! I do not intend to involve myself in any debate whether 'magic' in any sense is real or really possible in the world. But I suppose that, for the purposes of the tale, some would say that there is a latent distinction such as once was called the distinction between magia and goeteia. Galadriel speaks of the 'deceits of the Enemy'. Well enough, but magia could be, was, held good (per se), and goeteia bad. Neither is, in this tale, good or bad (per se), but only by motive or purpose or use. Both sides use both, but with different motives. The supremely bad motive is (for this tale, since it is specially about it) domination of other 'free' wills. The Enemy's operations are by no means all goetic deceits, but 'magic' that produces real effects in the physical world. But his magia he uses to bulldoze both people and things, and his goeteia to terrify and subjugate. Their magia the Elves and Gandalf use (sparingly): a magia, producing real results (like fire in a wet faggot) for specific beneficent purposes. Their goetic effects are entirely artistic and not intended to deceive: they never deceive Elves (but may deceive or bewilder unaware Men) since the difference is to them as clear as the difference to us between fiction, painting, and sculpture, and 'life'.

Both sides live mainly by 'ordinary' means. The Enemy, or those who have become like him, go in for 'machinery' – with destructive and evil effects — because 'magicians', who have become chiefly concerned to use magia for their own power, would do so (do do so). The basic motive for magia – quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work – is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the magia may not be easy to come by, and at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery (often only the same thing concealed), it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build pyramids by such means. Of course another factor then comes in, a moral or pathological one: the tyrants lose sight of objects, become cruel, and like smashing, hurting, and defiling as such. It would no doubt be possible to defend poor Lotho's introduction of more efficient mills; but not of Sharkey and Sandyman's use of them.

Anyway, a difference in the use of 'magic' in this story is that it is not to be come by by 'lore' or spells; but is in an inherent power not possessed or attainable by Men as such. Aragorn's 'healing' might be regarded as 'magical', or at least a blend of magic with pharmacy and 'hypnotic' processes. But it is (in theory) reported by hobbits who have very little notions of philosophy and science; while A. is not a pure 'Man', but at long remove one of the 'children of Luthien'.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (#155) not sent

25th September 1954

Screwtape on Humility

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility.  Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character.  Some talents, I gather, he really has.  Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be.  No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point.  The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue.  By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.  And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Conversations...

"Callers are the devil--I mean, the devil of a nuisance," the inspector remarked.

"You see, you can get rid of them," the clergyman said.  "But we have to be patient.  'Offend not one of these little ones, lest a millstone is hanged about his neck.'  Patience, sympathy, help.  A word in season bringeth forth his fruit gladly."

The air stirred about him to the question.  "And do these cause you fear?"

"Oh, not fear! by no means fear!"  Mr.  Batesby said.  "Though, of course, sometimes one has to be firm.  To pull them together.  To try and give them a backbone.  I have known some poor specimens.  I remember meeting one not far from here.  He looked almost sick and yellow, and I did what I could to hearten him up."

"Why was he looking so bad?" the inspector asked.

"Well, it was a funny story," Mr.  Batesby said, looking meditatively through the stranger, who was leaning against the inn wall, "and I didn't quite understand it all.  Of course, I saw what was wrong with him at once.  Hysteria.  I was very firm with him.  I said, 'Get a hold on yourself.'  He'd been talking to a Wesleyan."

Mr.  Batesby paused long enough for the inspector to say, with a slight frown, "I'm almost a Wesleyan myself," gave him a pleasant smile as if he had been waiting for this, and went on: "Quite, quite, and very fine preachers many of them are.  But a little unbalanced sometimes -- emotional, you know.  Too much emotion doesn't do, does it?  Like poetry and all that, not stern enough.  Thought, intelligence, brain -- that's what helps.  Well, this man had been saved -- he called it saved, and there he was as nervous as could be."

"What was he nervous about if he'd been saved?" the inspector asked idly.

Mr. Batesby smiled again.  "It seems funny to say it in cold blood," he said, "but, do you know, he was quite sure he was going to be killed?  He didn't know how, he didn't know who, he didn't know when.  He'd just been saved at a Wesleyan mission hall and he was going to be killed by the devil.  So I heartened him up."

The inspector had come together with a jerk; the young stranger was less energetic and less observable than the flowers in the inn garden behind him.

Charles Williams

War in Heaven (1930)

Chapter Thirteen “Conversations of the Youngman in grey”

On Ethics

Let us very clearly understand that, in a certain sense, it is no more possible to invent a new ethics than to place a new sun in the sky.  Some precept from traditional morality always has to be assumed.  We never start from a tabula rasa*; if we did, we should end, ethically speaking, with a tabula rasa.

C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, "On Ethics" (1943)

Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible.

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (1943)

*"blank slate" or "blank page"

Forward to "Essays presented to Charles Williams"

In this book the reader is offered the work of one professional author, two dons, a solicitor, a friar, and a retired army officer; if he feels disposed to complain of hotchpotch (which incidentally is an excellent dish; consult the NOCTES AMBROSIANAE) I must reply that the variety displayed by this little group is far too small to represent the width of Charles William's friendships. Nor are we claiming to represent it. Voices from many parts of England -- voices of people often very different from ourselves -- would justly rebuke our presumption if we did. We know that he was as much theirs as ours: not only, nor even chiefly, because of his range and versatility, great though these were, but because, in every circle that he entered, he gave the whole man. I had almost said that he was at everyone's disposal, but those words would imply a passivity on his part, and all who knew him would find the implication ludicrous. You might as well say that an Atlantic breaker on a Cornish beach is 'at the disposal' of all whom it sweeps off their feet.

If the authors of this book were to put forward any claim, it would be, and that shyly, that they were for the last few years of his life a fairly permanent nucleus among his literary friends. He read us his manuscripts and we read him ours: we smoked, talked, argued, and drank together (I must confess that with Miss Dorothy Sayers I have seen him drink only tea: but that was neither his fault nor hers). "Of many such talks this collection is not unrepresentative.

C.S. Lewis

Bombadil

[Image : Anke Katrin Eissmann]

30 November 1955

[The Lord of the Rings was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme during 1955 and 1956. Among the large cast, the pans of Gandalf and Tom Bombadil were played by the actor Norman Shelley.]

I think the book quite unsuitable for 'dramatization', and have not enjoyed the broadcasts – though they have improved. I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful — but worse still was the announcer's preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!).  Cannot people imagine things hostile to men and hobbits who prey on them without being in league with the Devil!

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

#175 to Mrs Molly Waldron

Eden's Courtesy

Such natural love twixt beast and man we find
That children all desire an animal book,
And all brutes, not perverted from their kind,
Woo us with whinny, tongue, tail, song, or look;
So much of Eden's courtesy yet remains.
But when a creature's dread, or mine, has built
A wall between, I think I feel the pains
That Adam earned and do confess my guilt.
For till I tame sly fox and timorous hare
And lording lion in my self, no peace
Can be without; but after, I shall dare
Uncage the shadowy zoo and war will cease;
Because the brutes within, I do not doubt,
Are archetypal of the brutes without.

C.S. Lewis
Poems (Bles, 1964)