Men without Chests

I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books. That is why I have chosen as the starting-point for these lectures a little book on English intended for 'boys and girls in the upper forms of schools'. I do not think the authors of this book (there were two of them) intended any harm, and I owe them, or their publisher, good language for sending me a complimentary copy. At the same time I shall have nothing good to say of them. Here is a pretty predicament. I do not want to pillory two modest practising schoolmasters who were doing the best they knew: but I cannot be silent about what I think the actual tendency of their work. I therefore propose to conceal their names. I shall refer to these gentlemen as Gaius and Titius and to their book as The Green Book. But I promise you there is such a book and I have it on my shelves.

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it 'sublime' and the other 'pretty'; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: 'When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually ... he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word "Sublime", or shortly, I have sublime feelings'. Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: 'This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.'

Before considering the issues really raised by this momentous little paragraph (designed, you will remember, for 'the upper forms of schools') we must eliminate one mere confusion into which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even on their own view — on any conceivable view — the man who says, This is sublime cannot mean I have sublime feelings. Even if it were granted that such qualities as sublimity were simply and solely projected into things from our own emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection are the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposites, of the qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker's feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings. If the view held by Gaius and Titius were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible feelings', in fact that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible. But we need not delay over this which is the very pons asinorum of our subject. It would be unjust to Gaius and Titius themselves to emphasize what was doubtless a mere inadvertence.

The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant. It is true that Gaius and Titius have said neither of these things in so many words. They have treated only one particular predicate of value (sublime) as a word descriptive of the speaker's emotions. The pupils are left to do for themselves the work of extending the same treatment to all predicates of value: and no slightest obstacle to such extension is placed in their way. The authors may or may not desire the extension: they may never have given the question five minutes' serious thought in their lives. I am not concerned with what they desired but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy's mind. In the same way, they have not said that judgements of value are unimportant. Their words are that we 'appear to be saying something very important' when in reality we are 'only saying something about our own feelings'. No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is 'doing' his 'English prep' and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.

C.S. Lewis
The ‘Abolition of Man’ or ‘Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools’
Chapter 1 “Men without Chests”

Love, the Pope, and C.S. Lewis

For Augustine, St. Thomas, and their followers, caritas, or charity, is the highest form of love. It is an infused theological virtue, inclining us to love God and our neighbour with an affection that is a participation in the love proper to God.

C.S. Lewis communicates the same idea in less technical language. Eros and agape (which he prefers to designate as "Need-love" and "Gift-love") can exist, he says, on either the natural or the supernatural plane. When, with God’s help, our Need-love rises to the point where we recognize our total dependence on God’s love for us, it can become a form of charity. And so likewise, when our Gift-love is so graced that it goes out to include persons who are naturally unattractive and unlovable, it deserves to be called charity in this theological sense of the word. Pope Benedict, it seems, has something similar in mind when he says that love at its most perfect combines in itself the qualities of eros and agape.

At the end of The Four Loves, Lewis makes an important statement that he does not develop at the length it deserves: Grace can arouse in us a higher kind of love than either eros or agape as he understands them. God, according to Lewis, "can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural appreciative love. This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true centre of all human and angelic life."

Earlier in the book, Lewis had drawn a helpful contrast among three forms of love: "Need-love cries out to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says ’We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’ " Corresponding to what the Scholastics called amor complacentiae, it rejoices in the consummate perfection of the divine. As Lewis’ citation from the Gloria indicates, the Church’s earthly liturgy contains anticipations of the hymns of the angels before the throne of God. They no longer seek from him anything that they do not have, nor do they intend to give him anything he might desire. They worship and praise him with loud hosannas, not because they thereby benefit either God or themselves but simply to express their love.

In Deus Caritas Est,* Pope Benedict makes no mention of appreciative love, nor does he discuss the love of the saints in heaven. Nevertheless, from his writings on the liturgy, one may suspect that he would be open to the idea that caritas tends to an eschatological fulfilment that, in the opinion of Lewis, transcends the earthly realizations of eros and agape alike.

*Pope Benedict XVI 2006 encyclical

From the article by Avery Cardinal Dulles

'First Things' January 2007

T.S. Eliot on Charles Williams

For him there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world. Had I ever to spend a night in a haunted house, I should have felt secure with Williams in my company; he was somehow protected from evil, and was himself a protection... To him the supernatural was natural, and the natural was also supernatural... Williams' understanding of Evil was profound... He is concerned, not with the Evil of conventional morality and the ordinary manifestations by which we recognize it, but with the essence of Evil; it is therefore Evil which has no power to attract us, for we see it as the repulsive thing it is, and as the despair of the damned from which we recoil…

The deeper things are there just because they belonged to the world he lived in, and he could not have kept them out. For the reader who can appreciate them, there are terrors in the pit of darkness into which he can make us look; but in the end, we are brought nearer to what another modern explorer of the darkness has called ‘the laughter at the heart of things’*.

T.S. Eliot's introduction to All Hallow's Eve (extract)

* Helen M. Luke

New Learning and New Ignorance

One thing is certain. It felt very unlike being a 'puritan' such as we meet in nineteenth-century fiction. Dickens's Mrs. Clennam, trying to expiate her early sin by a long life of voluntary gloom, was doing exactly what the first Protestants would have forbidden her to do. They would have thought her whole conception of expiation papistical. On the Protestant view one could not, and by God's mercy need not, expiate one's sins. Theologically, Protestantism was either a recovery, or a development, or an exaggeration (it is not for the literary historian to say which) of Pauline theology…

In the mind of a Tyndale or Luther, as in the mind of St. Paul himself, this theology was by no means an intellectual construction made in the interests of speculative thought. It springs directly out of a highly specialized religious experience; and all its affirmations, when separated from that context, become meaningless or else mean the opposite of what was intended. Propositions originally framed with the sole purpose of praising the Divine compassion as boundless, hardly credible, and utterly gratuitous, build up, when extrapolated and systematized, into something that sounds not unlike devil-worship.

The experience is that of catastrophic conversion. The man who has passed through it feels like one who has waked from nightmare into ecstasy. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything, to deserve such astonishing happiness. Never again can he 'crow from the dung-hill of desert'. All the initiative has been on God's side; all has been free, unbounded grace. And all will continue to be free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. 'Works' have no 'merit', though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love: he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang.

C.S. Lewis ~ English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century excluding Drama (OUP)

Lay (excerpt)

THE moonlight over Radcliffe Square,
Small sunset spires that drowse and dream,
Thin bells that ring to evening prayer.
Red willow-roots along the stream,
And perilous grey streets, that teem
With light feet wandering unaware.
And winter nights with lamps agleam,
Globed golden in the violet air ;
Odd nightmare carven things, that stare
Spell-stricken in a voiceless scream ;
The worn steps of an ancient stair,
With oaken balustrade and beam —
Such things are weightier than they seem :
These marks my branded soul must bear.
Pledges that Time cannot redeem.

And yet God knows if I shall care !

Dorothy L. Sayers ~ Oxford Poetry (1915) Blackwell

After Prayers, Lie Cold

Arise my body, my small body, we have striven
Enough, and He is merciful; we are forgiven.
Arise small body, puppet-like and pale, and go,
White as the bed-clothes into bed, and cold as snow,
Undress with small, cold fingers and put out the light,
And be alone, hush'd mortal, in the sacred night,
-A meadow whipt flat with the rain, a cup
Emptied and clean, a garment washed and folded up,
Faded in colour, thinned almost to raggedness
By dirt and by the washing of that dirtiness.
Be not too quickly warm again. Lie cold; consent
To weariness' and pardon's watery element.
Drink up the bitter water, breathe the chilly death;
Soon enough comes the riot of our blood and breath.

C.S. Lewis ~ Poems (Geoffrey Bles) 1964

True Cultivation?

What were the qualities which the good tutor would look for, instil, and cultivate in his pupil in the year 1680?

Firstly, physical courage, without which all other inherited or acquired accomplishments would be not only useless, but worse than useless, serving merely to emphasize the lack of the one essential quality. Politeness: a knowledge of the world: piety, or at worst, a scrupulous observance of the externals of religion: an open-handed carelessness, real or simulated, in money matters: conformity to a standard of good taste high enough to enable one to offer intelligent criticism of a cook, a sermon, a jewel, a play, or the layout of a friend's garden. If nature has endowed you with any brains, so much the better, for you will have the much envied gift of being able to say a good thing, or of turning out an acceptable set of drawing room verses. But otherwise, dispossession of brains is not a quality to be paraded, still less must you make a show of acquired knowledge; Chavigny, in 1705, published a conversation piece for the guidance of the would-be honnete homme which contains this significant bit of dialogue:

Q. “Is it necessary for persons of quality to understand painting, music,
and architecture?”

A. “It is a good thing that they should be instructed in these matters,
but they must not let it appear that they are skilled in them."

An affectation of amateurishness, in fact, is that which gives the final polish to the well-bred man's character.

W.H. ‘Warnie’ Lewis ~ The Sunset of the Splendid Century
(William Sloan Associates) 1955

The Clerk

The clerk sat on a stool

And added up a column,

Looking a very fool,

Staid he was and solemn.

He said :

' Nineteen and one,

Mark nought and carry two,'

And that was all that he had done

And all that he could do.

The clerk sat on his stool

And another line began :

The heroes called him fool

But God had called him man.

He said :

' Two fives are ten

And carry one along.

'The devil shuddered in his den

And Heaven broke forth in song.

Charles Williams ~ Poems of Conformity (1917) Milford-OUP

Goblin Feet

I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flittermice are flying :
A slender band of grey
It runs creepily away
And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.
The air is full of wings,
And of blundering beetle- things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming.
O ! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming !

O ! the lights : O ! the gleams : O ! the little tinkly sound
O ! the rustle of their noiseless little robes :
O ! the echo of their feet — of their little happy feet :
O ! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes.

I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone,
And where silverly they sing
In a moving moonlit ring
All a-twinkle with the jewels they have on.
They are fading round the turn
Where the glow-worms palely burn
And the echo of their padding feet is dying !
O ! it's knocking at my heart —
Let me go ! O ! let me start !
For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O ! the warmth ! O ! the hum ! O ! the colours in the dark !
O ! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies !
O ! the music of their feet — of their dancing goblin feet !
O ! the magic ! O ! the sorrow when it dies.

J.R.R. Tolkien (Exeter) ~ Oxford Poetry (1915) Blackwell

The Loss of Youth?

After tea another walk... While I was hesitating in the wet grey twilight, a corncrake started up in a field of young wheat, and no nightingale could have ravished me as did its harsh song... As I plodded home in the rain, under weather conditions themselves extraordinarily reminiscent of old days, my mind was full of pictures evoked by the corncrake: particularly of smoking cigarettes with Jack on the top of the bow of the study window, reached by climbing out of our bedroom window.

But while my thoughts are tender, I could not summon a single regret; at 52 I may be nearing the end of the race, but how infinitely preferable it is to be 52 rather than 16! It is astonishing to me that practically the whole weight of literature takes it as axiomatic that nothing can make up for the loss of youth; at least Lamb and Stevenson are the only two men I can think of at the moment who have anything to say on the other side.

Meditating as I walked, I came to the conclusion that discontent and envy made the permanent background of my youth -- envy, hopeless permanent envy of those who were good at games: of those with attractive manners: of those who got their clothes made in town and owned motorbikes: even of those who were good looking: and all coupled with that self consciousness which at 15 or 16 can be a perfect torment...

No, give me the level road of the 'fifties', and anyone who likes may sigh for the ecstasies of youth. Ecstasies there are to be sure: I remember as if it were last week the first time I walked up College with a double first: but then so do I remember the time when I was senior enough to suffer agonies at being snubbed by the head of the House.

Warren H. Lewis, Brothers and Friends:
The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis,
(ed. Clyde S. Kilby & Marjorie Lamp Mead, 1982)

The Meteorite

Among the hills a meteorite
Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,
And wind and rain with touches light
Made soft, the contours of the stone.

Thus easily can Earth digest
A cinder of sidereal fire,
And make her translunary guest
The native of an English shire.

Nor is it strange these wanderers
Find in her lap their fitting place,
For every particle that's hers
Came at the first from outer space.

All that is Earth has once been sky;
Down from the sun of old she came,
Or from some star that travelled by
Too close to his entangling flame.

Hence, if belated drops yet fall
From heaven, on these her plastic power
Still works as once it worked on all
The glad rush of the golden shower.

C.S. Lewis ~ Poems (1964)

"Dyson and Tolkien showed me..."

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all; again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself, I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god… similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant”.

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth, where the others are men’s myth: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things”. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a “description” of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God choose to (or can) appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that what God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened.

CS Lewis Collected Letters
Letter to Arthur Greeves – 18th October 1931

Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin

[Image: ‘Tuor follows Voronwë’ by Peter Xavier Price]

When the first glimmers of day filtered grey amid the mists of Dimbar they crept back into the Dry River, and soon after its course turned eastward, winding up to the very walls of the mountains; and straight before them there loomed a great precipice, rising sheer and sudden from a steep slope upon which grew a tangled thicket of thorn-trees. Into this thicket the stony channel entered, and there it was still dark as night; and they halted, for the thorns grew far down the side of the gully, and their lacing branches were a dense roof above it, so low that often Tuor and Voronwë must crawl under like beasts stealing back to their lair.

But at last, as with great labour they came to the very foot of the cliff, they found an opening, as it were the mouth of a tunnel worn in the hard rock by waters flowing from the heart of the mountains. They entered, and within there was no light, but Voronwë went steadily forward, while Tuor followed with his hand upon his shoulder, bending a little, for the roof was low. Thus for a time they went on blindly, step by step, until presently they felt the ground beneath their feet had become level and free from loose stones. Then they halted and breathed deeply, as they stood listening. The air seemed fresh and wholesome, and they were aware of a great space around and above them; but all was silent, and not even the drip of water could be heard. It seemed to Tuor that Voronwë was troubled and in doubt, and he whispered: 'Where then is the Guarded Gate? Or have we indeed now passed it?'

'Nay,' said Voronwë. 'Yet I wonder, for it is strange that any incomer should creep thus far unchallenged. I fear some stroke in the dark.'

But their whispers aroused the sleeping echoes, and they were enlarged and multiplied, and ran in the roof and the unseen walls, hissing and murmuring as the sound of many stealthy voices.

J.R.R. Tolkien ~ Unfinished Tales: The First Age

The Tarot in Williams

"It doesn't matter, anyhow," Nancy hastily said. "Aren't they fascinating? But why are they? And what do they all mean? Henry, why are you looking at them like that?"

Henry indeed was examining the first card, the juggler, with close attention, as if investigating the smallest detail. It was a man in a white tunic, but the face, tilted back, was foreshortened, and darkened by the brim of some black cap that he wore: a cap so black that something of night itself seemed to have been used in the painting. The heavy shadow and the short pointed beard hid the face from the observer. On the breast of the tunic were three embroidered circles--the first made of swords and staffs and cups and coins, balanced one on the other from the coin at the bottom to the apex of two pointing swords at the top; and within this was a circle, so far as Nancy could see, made up of rounded representations of twenty of the superior cards each in its own round; and within that was a circle containing one figure, but that was so small she couldn't make out what it was. The man was apparently supposed to be juggling; one hand was up in the air, one was low and open towards the ground, and between them, in an arch, as if tossed and caught and tossed again, were innumerable shining balls. In the top left-hand corner of the card was a complex device of curiously interwoven lines.

Henry put it down slowly as Nancy spoke and turned his eyes to her. But hers, as they looked to plunge into that other depth--ocean pouring into ocean and itself receiving ocean--found themselves thwarted. Instead of oceans they saw pools, abandoned by a tide already beyond sight: she blenched as a bather might do in the cold wind across an empty shore. "Henry!" she exclaimed.

It was, surely, no such great thing, only a momentary preoccupation. But he was already glancing again at the cards; he had already picked up another, and was scrutinizing the figure of the hierophantic woman. It had been drawn sitting on an ancient throne between two heavy pillars; a cloud of smoke rolled high above the priestly head-dress and solemn veil that she wore, and under her feet were rivers pouring out in falling cataracts. One hand was stretched out as if directing the flow of those waters; the other lay on a heavy open volume, with great clasps undone, that rested on her knees. This card also was stamped in the top left-hand corner with an involved figure of intermingled lines.

Charles Williams – “The Greater Trumps” (Chapter One – The Legacy)

Nicol Williamson's 'Hobbit'

This set of LP records include an eight-page booklet with pictures of J.R.R. Tolkein and reader Nicol Williamson; track list/synopses; notes on the recording by Argo founder Harley Usill; and essay by producer Lissa Demetriou. This rare, eight-side version of 'The Hobbit' is one of the great spoken-word recordings of the past fifty years and a must-have for all lovers of Tolkien's classic.

An anonymous reader/reviewer at Amazon's UK site wrote, "My favourite version is read by Nicol Williamson - This recording is one of the few actually authorised by Professor Tolkien. The story is well edited and Nicol Williamson's narration is brilliant. The accents he uses for the various characters are perfect: Bilbo is from the West Country; the spiders are Irish; Gollum is Welsh; and so on. The edition is a bit difficult to track down now - I wish someone would re-release it."

(Of course, this blogmaster has a copy – but you can listen to it by clicking on the link on the left hand side of this page).

The Grand Miracle

I am not referring simply to the first few hours, or the first few weeks of the Resurrection. I am talking of this whole huge pattern of descent, down, down, and then up again. What we ordinarily call the Resurrection being just, so to speak, the point at which it turns. Think what that descent is. The coming down, not only into humanity, but into those nine months which precede human birth, in which they tell us we all recapitulate strange pre-human, sub-human forms of life, and going lower still into being a corpse, a thing which, if this ascending movement had not begun, would presently have passed out of the organic altogether, and have gone back into the inorganic, as all corpses do.

One has a picture of someone going right down and dredging the sea bottom. One has a picture of a strong man trying to lift a very big, complicated burden. He stoops down and gets himself right under it so that he himself disappears; and then he straightens his back and moves off with the whole thing swaying on his shoulders. Or else one has the picture of a diver, stripping off garment after garment, making himself naked, then flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green, and warm, and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get. This thing is human nature; but, associated with it, all nature, the new universe.

C.S. Lewis, "The Grand Miracle", God in the Dock (1st preached by Lewis in St. Jude on the Hill Church, London, and afterwards published in The Guardian on April 27, 1945)

How did 'The Children of Húrin' come about?

The Children of Húrin, begun in 1918, was one of three ‘Great Tales’ J.R.R. Tolkien worked on throughout his life, though he never realised his ambition to see it published in his lifetime. Some of the text will be familiar to fans from extracts and references within other Tolkien books but this is the first time the entire story has been presented in its complete form.

As Adam Tolkien elaborated in a recent interview: ‘This is a more difficult question than it seems: As you know, versions and pieces of the story of Húrin and his descendants have been published in various works (The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales, The Lays of Beleriand, etc). The text of The Children of Húrin is in part compiled from these extant texts, and particularly that which appears in Unfinished Tales.

‘But it is a new reworking of the complete story. Many parts of the text will be – if not identical – recognizable to the knowledgeable reader, but there are also pieces that have never appeared before. Also the format of the text, as a standalone and complete text with no editorial commentary to interrupt the tale, should in itself and in my opinion considerably transform the reading experience.

‘The text as a whole can be said to be “new” as it is a recomposition of published texts and other “pieces” that weren’t published previously. The completed puzzle, in a sense.’

Christopher Tolkien has painstakingly edited together the complete work from his father’s many drafts, and this book is the culmination of a tireless thirty-year endeavour by him to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s vast body of unpublished work to a wide audience.

Christopher Tolkien says: “It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father’s long version of the legend of The Children of Húrin as an independent work, between its own covers, with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which he left some parts of it.”

Having drawn the distinctive maps for The Lord of the Rings more than 50 years ago, Christopher has also created a detailed new map for this book.

Adam continues: ‘The text of The Children of Húrin is entirely in the author’s (so J.R.R. Tolkien’s) words – apart from very minor reworkings of a grammatical and stylistic nature. Christopher’s work has been to produce a text that is a faithful rendition of his father’s writings – using many sources spaced out over decades.’

From a review of ‘Hurin’ on www.tolkienlibrary.com

Another review:
This is a tale of unrelenting tragedy. Drawn from the history of the First Age of Middle-earth, it tells of how Morgoth, the original Dark Lord to whom Sauron was but a lieutenant, wreaked appalling vengeance upon the family of the man Hurin, chiefly for his refusal to betray a great hidden city of the elves who were his allies. Readers acquainted with the story from a more summary version published three decades earlier in THE SILMARILLION will have some idea what to expect. They will also understand the part these events ultimately did play in the fall of virtually every elven kingdom in the vast land of Beleriand before it sank beneath the sea, still millennia prior to the events recounted in THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

From a review on Amazon by Edward Waters.

Tolkien and Alliterative Poetry (II)

Tolkien was never to complete the "Lay of the Children of Hurin." According to Christopher Tolkien, “… the poem was composed while my father held appointments at the University of Leeds (1920-5); he abandoned it for the Lay of Leithian at the end of that time, and never turned to it again". Were he to have completed it, the "Lay of the Children of Hurin" could well have been one of his most important works. Certainly it would have taken, and for that matter in its unfinished state does take, the study of Tolkien's work to a different (and less populous?) plane.

That being a possibility, Professor Tolkien did use his alliterative poetry skills in “The Lord of the Rings”. Here we find a beautiful example, taken from the end of "The Battle of the Pelennor Fields":

We heard of the horns in the hills ringing,
the swords shining in the South-kingdom.
Steeds went striding to the Stoningland
as wind in the morning. War was kindled.
There Theoden fell, Thengling the mighty,
to his golden halls and green pastures
in the Northern fields never returning,
high lord of the host. Harding and Guthlaf,
Dunhere and Deorwine, doughty Grimbold,
Herefara and Herubrand, Horn and Fastred,
fought and fell there in a far country:
in the Mounds of Mundburg under mould they lie
with their league-fellows, lords of Gondor.
Neither Hirluin the Fair to the hills by the sea,
nor Forlong the old to the flowering vales
ever, to Arnach, to his own country
returned in triumph; nor the tall bowmen,
Derufin and Duilin, to their dark waters,
meres of Morthlond under mountain-shadows.
Death in the morning and at day's ending
lords took and lowly. Long now they sleep
under grass in Gondor by the Great River.
Grey now as tears, gleaming silver,
red then it rolled, roaring water:
foam dyed with blood flamed at sunset;
as beacons mountains burned at evening;
red fell the dew in Rammas Echor.

From LOTR “Return of the King”

Tolkien and Alliterative Poetry (I)

The "Lay of the Children of Hurin" was among Tolkien's earlier creative works, begun while he was at the University of Leeds. One may speculate that in addition to its status as an early form of the tales that would later form The Silmarillion, the "Children of Hurin" was an attempt to capture the mood and atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon poetry in the Modern English language while being freed from the constraints of remaining faithful to the works of the Anglo-Saxon canon.

Here is a short extract from “The Lay of the Children of Hurin":

Like a throbbing thunder in the threatening deeps
of cavernous clouds, o'ercast with gloom
now swelled on a sudden a song most dire,
and their hellward hymn their home greeted;
flung from the foremost of the fierce spearmen,
who viewed mid vapours vast and sable
the threefold peaks of Thangorodrim,
it rolled rearward, rumbling darkly,
like drums in distant dungeons empty.

"Lay of the Children of Hurin" (lines 994-1002)

Alliterative Poetry and Jack

C.S. Lewis … took a special interest in alliterative poetry. He wrote an essay on alliterative meter, which makes interesting reading. ("The Alliterative Metre", in C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper.) In this essay he takes the position - shared perhaps by Auden and few other modern poets - that alliterative verse is worth taking seriously as an option for English verse. But he does not mean rough approximations; he means the real thing: the alliterative meter of Old English, the rhythms of Beowulf. The essay carefully outlines what you have to do to compose Old English alliterative verse in modern English.

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C.S. Lewis' poetry is not widely known, but he published a variety of poems in his lifetime (which can be found in his Collected Poems), and wrote four narrative poems, Dymer, Launcelot, The Nameless Isle, and The Queen of Drum, which appear in a posthumous collection, C.S. Lewis: Narrative Poems ed. by Walter Hooper. The Nameless Isle is Lewis' proof that you really can compose modern English verse in Anglo-Saxon meter. It is one of his best poems, and contains some of the most beautiful lines of alliterative verse written in the 20th century.

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When we start to read this poem, we instantly drop from time and space, and enter that world beloved of the Romantics, halfway between allegory and dream. A mariner is shipwrecked on a nameless island. He meets a woman in the wood: a figure of magic, who nourishes the beasts of the field with her own milk, and rules this wild wood as queen. But she complains of a sorceror who has stolen half the island from her sway, who offers a drink that turns all living things to stone. She urges a sword on him, asking him to go kill the wizard and rescue her daughter - daughter to her and to the wizard - before she too becomes no more than a marble statue. He accepts, and proceeds across the island. Events move with a strange unpredictability, involving a dwarf, a flute, and several metamorphoses.

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The following excerpt illustrates the rhythmic beauty that Lewis can achieve. Here we have the closing lines of the poem:

... ahead, far on
Like floor unflawed, the flood, moon-bright
Stretched forth the twinkling streets of ocean
To the rim of the world. No ripple at all
Nor foam was found, save the furrow we made,
The stir at our stern, and the strong cleaving
Of the throbbing prow. We thrust so swift,
Moved with magic, that a mighty curve
Upward arching from either bow
Rose, all rainbowed; as a rampart stood
Bright about us. As the book tells us,
Walls of water, and a way between
Were reared and rose at the Red Sea ford,
On either hand, when Israel came
Out of Egypt to their own country.

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The strength and rhythmic beauty of its lines is also the poem's chief weakness: the density of language can make the story line hard to follow, so that it is best read slowly, and savored, rather than read straight through like a novel.

Even so, it is well worth the effort: the rich prosody, powerful diction, and the story line dense with symbolism, will reward the reader who pays it close attention.

Paul Deane
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Do I detect something of "The voyage of the Dawn Treader" in these lines -- yet written by Jack in the late 1920s! (RR)