Elizabeth Taylor's connection to the Inklings

As we all know, Elizabeth Taylor died yesterday, perhaps a good time to remember her connection with one of the Inklings.

Richard Jenkins won a scholarship to the University of Oxford at just 16; he adopted his teacher's surname (Phillip Burton) and made his first stage performance in Oxford as an extra, scrubbing steps. Soon Burton's extraordinary stage presence - one of his famous trademarks - was said to distract the audience from the Shakespearean play! However, his studies at Oxford lasted only six months 1942-3.

Much later in his career, Burton co-directed (along with Inkling Neville Coghill) a labour of love that records a performance given by Burton at Oxford University in 1966 of Christopher Marlowe's 400-year-old verse play. Burton plays Faust, a medieval doctor who sells his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for mastering all human knowledge. The Devil tempts Faust at every turn by confronting him with the seven deadly sins, and with Helen of Troy (Elizabeth Taylor), who appears throughout the film in various stages of undress.

The production was filmed in Rome, with the majority of the cast amateur actors from the University of Oxford. (I understand that a video of the movie can still be obtained).

Very interesting man Coghill...

JRRT to Christopher Tolkien

[Image: Paul Nash]

10 April 1944

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days - quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil - historically considered. But the historic version is, of course, not the only one. All things and all deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their "causes" and "effects." No man can estimate what is really happening sub specie aeternitatis. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labors with vast power and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.

- from "The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien"

Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin

My father said more than once that "The Fall of Gondolin" was the first of the tales of the First Age to be composed, and there is no evidence to set against his recollection. In a letter of 1964 he declared that he wrote it "'out of my head' during sick-leave from the army in 1917," and at other times he gave the date as 1916 or 1916-17. In a letter to me written in 1944 he said: "I first began to write [The Silmarillion] in army huts, crowded, filled with the noise of gramophones": and indeed some lines of verse in which appear the Seven Names of Gondolin are scribbled on the back of a piece of paper setting out "the chain of responsibility in a battalion." The earliest manuscript is still in existence, filling two small school exercise-books; it was written rapidly in pencil, and then, for much of its course, overlaid with writing in ink, and heavily emended. On the basis of this text my mother, apparently in 1917, wrote out a fair copy; but this in turn was further substantially emended, at some time that I cannot determine, but probably in 1919-20, when my father was in Oxford on the staff of the then still uncompleted Dictionary. In the spring of 1920 he was invited to read a paper to the Essay Club of his college (Exeter); and he read "The Fall of Gondolin." The notes of what he intended to say by way of introduction of his "essay" still survive. In these he apologised for not having been able to produce a critical paper, and went on: "Therefore I must read something already written, and in desperation I have fallen back on this Tale. It has of course never seen the light before... . A complete cycle of events in an Elfinesse of my own imagining has for some time past grown up (rather, has been constructed) in my mind. Some of the episodes have been scribbled down... . This tale is not the best of them, but it is the only one that has so far been revised at all and that, insufficient as that revision has been, I dare read aloud."

The tale of Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin (as "The Fall of Gondolin" is entitled in the early MSS) remained untouched for many years, though my father at some stage, probably between 1926 and 1930, wrote a brief, compressed version of the story to stand as part of The Silmarillion (a title which, incidentally, first appeared in his letter to The Observer of 20 February 1938); and this was changed subsequently to bring it into harmony with altered conceptions in other parts of the book. Much later he began work on an entirely refashioned account, entitled "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin." It seems very likely that this was written in 1951, when The Lord of the Rings was finished but its publication doubtful. Deeply changed in style and bearings, yet retaining many of the essentials of the story written in his youth, "Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin" would have given in fine detail the which legend that constitutes the brief 23rd chapter of the published Silmarillion, but, grievously, he went no further than the coming of Tuor and Voronwë to the last gate and Tuor's sight of Gondolin across the plain of Tumladen. To his reasons for abandoning it there is no clue.

It is thus the remarkable fact that the only full account that my father ever wrote of the story of Tuor's sojourn in Gondolin, his union with Idril Celebrindal, the birth of Eärendil, the treachery of Maeglin, the sack of the city, and the escape of the fugitives - a story that was a central element in his imagination of the First Age - was the narrative composed in his youth.

Christopher Tolkien (1961) Preface to The Book of Lost Tales 2
Harper Collins

'One who dreams alone'

A pale, drawn man sits in a convalescent bed of a wartime hospital. He takes up a school exercise book and writes on its cover, with a calligraphic flourish: 'Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin'. Then he pauses, lets out a long sigh between the teeth clenched around his pipe, and mutters, 'No, that won't do anymore.' He crosses out the title and writes (without the flourish): 'A Subaltern on the Somme'.

That is not what happened, of course. Tolkien produced a mythology, not a trench memoir. Middle-earth contradicts the prevalent view of literary history, that the Great War finished off the epic and heroic traditions in any serious form. This postscript will argue that despite its unorthodoxy - and quite contrary to its undeserved reputation as escapism - Tolkien's writing reflects the impact of the war; furthermore, that his maverick voice expresses aspects of the war experience neglected by his contemporaries. This is not to say that his mythology was a response to the poetry and prose of his contemporaries, but that they represent widely divergent responses to the same traumatic epoch.

Literature hit a crisis point in 1916, in the assessment of critic Samuel Hynes: 'a "dead spot" at the centre of the war' when 'creative energies seemed to sink to a low point' among British writers. G. B. Smith and his poetry were both languishing on the Somme; 'sheer vacancy is destroying me', he said. A very different writer, Ford Madox Ford, was in a similar rut at Ypres, asking himself 'why I can write nothing - why I cannot even think anything that to myself seems worth thinking'.

John Garth
Tolkien and the Great War
Harper Collins (2003)

Venus, from 'The Planets'

Venus voyages... but my voice falters;
Rude rime-making wrongs her beauty,
Whose breasts and brow, and her breath's sweetness
Bewitch the worlds. Wide-spread the reign
Of her secret sceptre, in the sea's caverns,
In grass growing, and grain bursting,
Flower unfolding, and flesh longing,
And shower falling sharp in April.
The metal copper in the mine reddens
With muffled brightness, like muted gold,
By her fingers form'd. Far beyond her
The heaven's highway hums and trembles,
Drums and dindles, to the driv'n thunder

C. S. Lewis, The Planets (1937)

Saturn, from 'The Planets'

Goes SATURN silent in the seventh region,
The skirts of the sky. Scant grows the light,
Sickly, uncertain (the Sun's finger
Daunted with darkness). Distance hurts us,
And the vault severe of vast silence;
Where fancy fails us, and fair language,
And love leaves us, and light fails us
And Mars fails us, and the mirth of Jove
Is as tin tinkling. In tattered garment,
Weak with winters, he walks forever
A weary way, wide round the heav'n,
Stoop'd and stumbling, with staff groping,
The lord of lead. He is the last planet
Old and ugly. His eye fathers
Pale pestilence, pain of envy,
Remorse and murder. Melancholy drink
(For bane or blessing) of bitter wisdom
He pours out for his people, a perilous draught
That the lip loves not. We leave all things
To reach the rim of the round welkin,
Heaven's heritage, high and lonely.

C. S. Lewis, The Planets (1937)

Saturn, whose name in the heavens is Lurga, stood in the Blue Room. His spirit lay upon the house, or even on the whole Earth, with a cold pressure such as might flatten the very orb of Tellus to a wafer. Matched against the lead-like burden of his antiquity the other gods themselves perhaps felt young and ephemeral. It was a mountain of centuries sloping up from the highest antiquity we can conceive, up and up like a mountain whose summit never comes into sight, not to eternity where the thought can rest, but into more and still more time, into freezing wastes and silence of unnameable numbers. It was also strong like a mountain; its age was no mere morass of time where imagination can sink in reverie, but a living, self-remembering duration which repelled lighter intelligences from its structure as granite flings back waves, itself unwithered and undecayed but able to wither any who approach it unadvised. ...

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, Chapter 15: Descent of the Gods (1945)

Jupiter, from 'The Planets'

In February 2003, Revd Dr Michael Ward, Chaplain of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge was reading the section of “The Planets” that deals with Jove, or Jupiter, when he was struck by its resonance with “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”. The poem speaks of “winter passed / And guilt forgiven” and goes on to give what is, Ward opines, ‘essentially a plot summary’ of the first book in the Narnia Chronicles:

Joy and jubilee. It is JOVE's orbit,
Filled and festal, faster turning
With arc ampler. From the Isles of Tin
Tyrian traders, in trouble steering
Came with his cargoes; the Cornish treasure
That his ray ripens. Of wrath ended
And woes mended, of winter passed
And guilt forgiven, and good fortune
Jove is master; and of jocund revel,
Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted,
The myriad-minded, men like the gods,
Helps and heroes, helms of nations
Just and gentle, are Jove's children,
Work his wonders. On his white forehead
Calm and kingly, no care darkens
Nor wrath wrinkles: but righteous power
And leisure and largess their loose splendours
Have wrapped around him--a rich mantle
Of ease and empire. Up far beyond.

C. S. Lewis, The Planets (1937)

Silly Adventure Stories

Dear Phyllida,

Thanks for your most interesting cards. How do you get the gold so good? Whenever I tried to use it, however golden it looked on the shell, it always looked only like rough brown on the paper. Is it that you have some trick with the brush that I never learned, or that gold paint is better now than when I was a boy! [...]

I'm not quite sure what you meant about "silly adventure stories without my point". If they are silly, then having a point won't save them. But if they are good in themselves, and if by a "point" you mean some truth about the real world which which one can take out of the story, I'm not sure that I agree. At least, I think that looking for a "point" in that sense may prevent one sometimes from getting the real effect of the story in itself - like listening too hard for the words in singing which isn't meant to be listened to that way (like an anthem in a chorus). I'm not at all sure about all this, mind you: only thinking as I go along.

We have two American boys in the house at present, aged 8 and 6 1/2. Very nice. They seem to use much longer words than English boys of that age would: not showing off, but just because they don't seem to know the short words. But they haven't as good table manners as English boys of the same sort would. [...]

yours,
C.S. Lewis

Letters to Children (letter of Dec 18 1953)

C.S. Lewis by Owen Barfield (In Verse)

[Owen Barfield]

A year after Lewis' death, one of the lesser members (to many) of the Inklings,

Owen Barfield, memorialised his friend in the following:

You came to him: when will you come to me?
He knows what matters from what matters not.
I hurry to and fro and seem to be.
New tasks, new faces . . . (tiny sir, so hot?
As though there were a future for success?
He knows what matters from what matters not).
I catch sight of your unaverted face
Between two eager places . . . thus the day
Is punctuated by the silences
With which you answer every time I say:--
You came to him; when will you come to me?
O time! O night! O sun's recurring ray!
I shall forget again, as I'd forgot,
Before I crossed the Campus yesterday:--
He knows what matters now, what matters not.

Charles Williams in "Looking for the King" (II)

"What is this Holy Grail we hear so much about?" asked Williams, pacing back and forth so rapidly that Tom could hear keys or coins clinking in his pocket. "Is the Grail the holy chalice used by Jesus on the night of the Last Supper? Is it a cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught drops of Christ's blood as he was stretched out on the cross?" Again, Williams peered into individual faces, speaking to over a hundred people, but giving each one the impression he was talking just to him. "Or perhaps you favor the Loomis school: the Grail is a bit of 'faded mythology', a Celtic cauldron of plenty that somehow got lugged into Arthurian lore?"

Williams paced back and forth some more, throwing his hands into the air, as if to say, who can answer all these imponderable questions? Then he plunged in again: "There is no shortage of texts on the subject. Let's start with Chretien de Troyes: Percival, or the Story of the Grail, written sometime in the 1180s. This is the first known account of the Grail. The young knight Percival sits at banquet at the castle Carbonek and sees an eerie procession—a young man carrying a bleeding lance, two boys with gold candelabra, then finally a fair maid with a jeweled grail, a platter bearing the wafer of the Holy Mass. Percival doesn't ask what it all means and thereby brings a curse upon himself and on the land." Williams surveyed the crowd again, as if waiting for someone to stand and explain all this to him. The room was silent as a church at midnight, so Williams went on, listing all the famous medieval texts and their retellings of the Grail legend, noting how their dates clustered around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

"So much for the literary versions", he continued. "But what is this Grail really"? What lies behind the texts? Some describe it as a cup or bowl, some as a stone, some as a platter. The word grail, by the way, comes from the Latin gradalis, more like a shallow dish, or a paten, than a chalice." After another strategic pause, Williams exclaimed, almost in a shout, "How extraordinary! Here we have what some would call the holiest relic in Christendom, and no one seems to know what it looks like."

Pacing some more, as if trying to work off an excess of agitation and intellectual energy, Williams went back to the lectern and leaned on it heavily...

David C. Downing
Looking for the King (Chapter 3)
Ignatius Press 2010

Charles Williams from "Looking for the King" (I)

"Tom crossed the quad, following others through a large wooden door and into a narrow passageway that led to the Divinity School. Emerging from the dark corridor in to the lecture hall, Tom instantly changed his mind about the Bodleian. Entering the Divinity School room was like moving from darkness to light, from confinement to liberation, from all that weighs down the spirit to all that makes it soar. The whole room was suffused with an amber glow, the afternoon sun warming the cream-colored walls, which seemed to radiate a light all their own.

The whole interior commanded Tom to look up. The floor was unadorned flagstone covered with rows of wooden chairs. But the lofty arched windows with delicate tracery carried his eyes upward toward the ceiling, where he saw rows of ornately carved pendants, hanging like lanterns, each one radiating fan-shaped curves, like shafts of light chiseled in stone. The plain stone floor and the portable chairs, crouching humbly under that magnificent vaulted ceiling, seemed to suggest that all the richness and gladness of life comes not from the plane on which we live and walk but from higher planes of intellect, imagination, learning, and faith.

The chairs in the lecture hall began filling quickly, even as Tom was admiring the room. He had wondered what sort of audience a publisher's editor would attract, and he soon had his answer. He found a seat near the center, about five rows back, before every seat was taken as the clock neared three. There were a few men who looked like dons scattered around the room, but most of the listeners were about Tom's age, with more women in the crowd than he had seen in any one place since arriving at Oxford.

Precisely at three o'clock, Mr. Charles Williams stepped briskly to the lectern. He was a tall man in his fifties with wavy hair, wearing a black gown and gold-rimmed spectacles. Tom was not accustomed to lecturers wearing academic gowns, so his first sight of Williams made him think of a priest or wizard. Williams briefly surveyed his listeners and smiled. The furrows on his cheeks ran all the way down to his jaw, giving the impression that someone had placed his mouth in parentheses. Tom heard someone in the row behind him whisper the word ugly, but that was not quite accurate. There was a look of energetic intelligence in Williams' face, the owlish eyes and simian jaw giving a sense of endearing homeliness, not mere coarseness.

Williams set down his notes and hardly glanced at them again for the next hour. "Did any of you buy a newspaper this morning?" he began. There was a hint of Cockney in his voice, an accent that certainly wouldn't impress the person who had whispered the word ugly. Abandoning the lectern, Williams paced back and forth in front of the room, looking into individual faces for the answer to his question. Several nodded that they had, and Williams smiled to see his hypothesis confirmed. "You offered a coin and received a newspaper in return. A mutually satisfactory transaction. That is the life of the city. Exchange." Williams paced briskly back toward the lectern and continued: "And thus you took one step closer to the Holy Grail." Pausing to let this comment have its effect, Williams came out toward his listeners again and asked, "Did any of you hold a door open for someone today? Did you help someone who'd dropped an armful of books?" Seeing a few nods in the audience, Williams smiled again and continued: "Giving your effort, your labor, for someone else, perhaps a stranger—courtesy, yes. But also substitution. Another step in your quest for the Grail."

David C. Downing
Looking for the King (Chapter 3)
Ignatius Press 2010

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)

Under the Mercy

The grave of Charles Williams in Holywell Cemetery (also known as St. Cross Churchyard), Oxford is marked by a stone bearing his name and the terse description: Poet, followed by the words, Under the Mercy.

Under the Mercy is a phrase that appears frequently in his writings, as it did in his conversation. He liked to refer to the Divinity by Its Attributes: the Mercy, the Protection, the Omnipotence. In his personal life he seemed always to be clinging to the faith that, balanced as he was upon the knife-edge of his Christian allegiance in the world of myth and magic that his passion-inflamed imagination had conjured up, he would find at last, in death if by no other route, the stillness of the Love of God. It was his wife, Michal, in one of those sudden flashes of crystal-clear insight of which she was not infrequently capable, who chose the inscription on the stone. Nothing could have been more appropriate.

Lois Lang-Sims: "Letters to Lalange – The Letters of Charles Williams to Lois Lang-Sims", page 16

Looking for the King - A Review

A classic tale of how not to amalgamate two books. The first a thriller set in 1940s England, visiting some of the key Authurian sites searching for a lost relic. The second… and no doubt the reason for the sub-title ‘An Inklings Novel’… introduces us to Lewis, Tolkien and Williams. I enjoyed the second book, although all the time I kept asking myself why it was part of the first.

The ‘Inklings’ passages are interesting, and the Williams’ lecture (described at length and drawing closely from Lewis description of Charles Williams’ famous Divinity School lecture, really captures the spirit of that ‘difficult’ writer (I write as a long-term member of the Charles Williams Society). BUT, in a novel?

As I started to read I really wanted to be impressed and enthralled by this book. David Downing is obviously a gifted scholar, especially in Inklings studies. But as another reviewer has put it, “If we wanted presentations of the Inklings, there are biographies and letters, and Warnie Lewis’ diary in which he very vividly describes his friends.” I know, several of Warnie’s books are in my personal ‘Inklings’ library.

Certainly ‘Looking for the King’ is a nice concept, and blends supposed historical fact with some nice geographical and cultural background into a story that draws the reader along. But the ‘Inklings’ passages seem somehow to intrude on the thrust of the plot. All in all, I think it was a good try, but it just fell too short of the mark for me, maybe another 100 pages would have allowed the author to really do his interesting concept justice.

There are some questions about the language that I have written about in my ‘first view’ below in this weblog, and the ‘villains’ turn out to be rather weak and hardly terrifying either.

One question that really bothered me: how did Tom and Laura manage to get the petrol coupons to travel just so far on a motorcycle and sidecar. In early 1940s England, immersed as it was in a draconian rationing regime, how did visiting Americans manage quite to travel quite so easily?

A final point. Any plot that turns on the dreams of the one of the protagonists has simply got to be risible. The dénouement was unsatisfactory and left me wishing Downing had found a way to play the plot line out into a farther reaching story with more at stake.

Did I enjoy it? The Williams passages, yes. The rest, well I have read worse.

‘Looking for the King’ is published in the United States by Ignatius Press, San Francisco.

'Looking for the King' - first thoughts

Ignatius Press is based in California, David C. Downing is an English professor in Pennsylvania, and the English used in ‘Looking for the King’ certainly betrays the book’s origins. To an English, Oxford University Alumni (i.e. me), the language used throughout the book is very much ‘American English’. We simply do not talk (or write) like that. Page after page was spoiled for me by language that simply will not do in the pages of a novel set in 1940 war-time England.

It is unlikely however that its intended American readership would not even notice the incongruities… but for an international market, the book needs rewriting.

Some examples? We do not ‘write’ people, we write to them... a ‘sedan’ would not be seen outside Blackwells, a car might... Blackwells is not a ‘bookstore’ it is a bookshop... we do not have a ‘clerk’ at a shop’s till, we have a shop assistant. I could go on and on and on. I laughed at the scene in the Eagle and Child where JRRT’s waistcoat is described as a 'vest', and again later where Tom tore his 'pants'. Without doubt Tollers, Charles and most particularly Jack Lewis, would have roared with laughter. Why? Vest and pants are shall we say, are more intimate parts of the male apparel outside North America.

As another reviewer has succinctly put it, but in a different context: "I wish someone had challenged the author to do at least one more rewrite on the manuscript, to improve everything. I have no problem with the plot outline, but the author doesn't deliver on it."

I hope that "Looking for the King" reaches a wide audience, not the least as its portrayal of Charles Williams (in particular) is excellent. But is that what the book is actually seeks to achieve?

But read Sheldon Vanauken’s “A Severe Mercy” – albeit not a novel – if you really want to be introduced to the ‘real’ C.S. Lewis, and be immersed in the Oxford of 60 years ago.

I'll seek to comment on the plot in my next posting...

Looking for the King

It is 1940, and American Tom McCord, a 23-year-old aspiring doctoral candidate, is in England researching the historical evidence for the legendary King Arthur. There he meets perky and intuitive Laura Hartman, a fellow American staying with her aunt in Oxford, and the two of them team up for an even more ambitious and dangerous quest.

Aided by the Inklings - that illustrious circle of scholars and writers made famous by its two most prolific members, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien - Tom and Laura begin to suspect that the fabled Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced the side of Christ on the cross, is hidden somewhere in England.

Tom discovers that Laura has been having mysterious dreams, which seem to be related to the subject of his research, and, though doubtful of her visions, he hires her as an assistant. Heeding the insights and advice of the Inklings, while becoming aware of being shadowed by powerful and secretive foes who would claim the spear as their own, Tom and Laura end up on a thrilling treasure hunt that crisscrosses the English countryside and leads beyond a search for the elusive relics of Camelot into the depths of the human heart and soul.

Looking for the King

(David C Downing) Ignatius Press (2010)

(from the Amazon.com review)

In future postings I will post both extracts and my own review of the novel.

'What the Bird Said Early in the Year'

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.

Did the ‘powers that be’ in Magdalen College at the time of the memorial stone, not know the original – and to many eyes – superior version of the poem? Seems very odd to this Oxford University Alumni, particularly the clumsy final line when line 10 of the original is so much more satisfying?

There has, of course, been much controversy over the years since the stone was unveiled, but no answers.

An Addison's controversy?

The monument described below by Rev. Dr. Michael Ward might make "What the Bird Said Early in the Year" Lewis's most famous poem. Mr. Ward did not mention the fact that this 12-line version of Lewis's 14-line poem was never published until after Lewis's death. Lewis titled his original poem "Chanson D'Aventure" and published it in The Oxford Magazine on 10 February 1938:

Chanson D'Adventure

I heard in Addison's Walk a bird sing clear
'This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

'Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

'This year time's nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

'This summer will not lead you round and back
To autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.

'Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
The gates of good adventure swing apart.

'This time, this time, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.'

I said, 'This might prove truer than a bird can know;
And yet your singing will not make it so.'

(Next post... the poem recorded on the monument)

Why is Addison's Walk so famous?

Just before 3 am on the Sunday morning of the 20th September, 1931 J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and another friend, Hugo Dyson, took a stroll along the Cherwell in the grounds of Magdalen College. All the previous evening the three of them had been discussing their lifelong fascination with myths. It was sad, Lewis declared, to think that classic tales of courage, beauty, sacrifice and virtue are all untrue and ultimately worthless.

Tolkien stopped his sceptical friend cold by forcefully arguing: No, they are not lies. Myths contain great spiritual truths.

This is how Lewis remembered it two days later in his letter to Arthur Greeves:

He (Dyson) stayed the night with me in College -I sleeping in in order to be able to talk far into the night as one cd… Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning: and after seeing him out by the little postern on Magdalen bridge Dyson and I found still more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4, It was really a memorable talk. We began (in Addison's walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth --interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot: then discussed the difference between love and friendship - then finally drifted back to poetry and books.

On Sunday he came out here for lunch and Maureen and Minto and I (and Tykes) all motored him (Dyson –taught English at Reading University) to Reading - a very delightful drive with some lovely villages, and the autumn colours are here now.

I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris again. I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso - that I don't think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except ‘Love is Enough’ where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy, - this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality ~ these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris's world that desire cannot be satisfied.

The Macdonald conception of death - or, to speak more correctly, St Paul's - is really the answer to Morris: but I don't think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you… to go further.

(Lewis’ letter to Greeves dated Sept 22nd 1931)

A note on Addison's Walk

Addison's Walk (originally called Water Walk) is a picturesque footpath around a small island in the River Cherwell in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, England. There are good views of Magdalen Tower and Magdalen Bridge from along the walk.

The Walk is named after Joseph Addison (1672–1719), a Fellow of the College from 1698 to 1711, who enjoyed walking there and wrote articles in The Spectator about landscape gardening. The path most likely dates from the 16th century, although the name "Addison's Walk" has only been in use since the 19th century. Addison's Walk originally finished at Dover Pier, an old Civil War gun position on the River Cherwell. It was made into a circular walk in the 19th century.

The Lewis Stone

'Magdalen College Chapel was packed to overflowing for a special Evensong on May 13th 1998, prior to the unveiling of the Lewis stone in Addison's Walk. The Magdalen Choir sang as an introit 'Veni Sancte Spiritus', the opening music of Richard Attenborough's 'Shadowlands'. (The composer, George Fenton, happened, by a fortunate coincidence, to be present to hear it. He was at Magdalen to supervise the Choir's recording of some new music for his most recent soundtrack.) During the service, lessons were read by Lewis's godson, Laurence Harwood, and by Lady Freud, who was an evacuee at The Kilns during the war. The Dean of Divinity, the Revd. Dr. Michael Piret, in his prayers quoted from Lewis's works and gave thanks for Lewis's life. He also prayed for peace in Lewis's native Northern Ireland. (Dr Piret is a former President of the Oxford Lewis Society.) After the service was over, the congregation adjourned to Addison's Walk, which was looking especially beautiful in the evening sunlight, - though only a few weeks previously it had been completely under water in the April floods.

The commemorative tablet is a circle of Westmorland green slate about three feet in diameter, designed by stonemason Alec Peever, and erected a stone's throw from Lewis's rooms in the New Building. Michael Ward, the Centenary Secretary of the Oxford Lewis Society, welcomed everyone and spoke for a few minutes about the place Addison's Walk held in Lewis's life and about the poem, 'What the Bird Said Early in the Year', which has been inscribed on the tablet.

The President of Magdalen, Mr Anthony Smith, then unveiled the stone, and Walter Hooper, Lewis's biographer, recited the poem to the gathering. Among the eighty or so invited guests were former pupils of Lewis such as Francis Warner (now a don at St Peter's College, Oxford) and Martin Moynihan (editor of Lewis's Latin letters). A drinks reception in the President's Lodgings brought the evening's events to their conclusion.'

Michael Ward (Now best knwn as the author of 'Planet Narnia')

The Father Christmas letters

Every December an envelope bearing a stamp from the North Pole would arrive for J.R.R.Tolkien’s children. Inside would be a letter in strange spidery handwriting and a beautiful coloured drawing or some sketches. The letters were from Father Christmas.

They told wonderful tales of life at the North Pole: how all the reindeer got loose and scattered presents all over the place; how the accident-prone Polar Bear climbed the North Pole and fell through the roof of Father Christmas’s house into the dining-room; how he broke the Moon into four pieces and made the Man in it fall into the back garden; how there were wars with the troublesome horde of goblins who lived in the caves beneath the house!

Sometimes the Polar Bear would scrawl a note, and sometimes Ilbereth the Elf would write in his elegant flowing script, adding yet more life and humour to the stories. No reader, young or old, can fail to be charmed by the inventiveness and ‘authenticity’ of Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas. Seek out a copy!

Pattern

[Image - Eddie Bairstow]

Some believe the slumber
Of trees is in December
When timber's naked under sky
And squirrel keeps his chamber.

But I believe their fibres
Awake to life and labour
When turbulence comes roaring up
The land in loud October,

And plunders, strips, and sunders
And sends the leaves to wander
And undisguises prickly shapes
Beneath the golden splendour.

Then form returns. In warmer,
Seductive days, disarming
Its firmer will, the wood grew soft
And put forth dreams to murmur.

Into earnest winter
With spirit alert it enters;
The hunter wind and the hound frost
Have quelled the green enchanter.

Poems - C.S. Lewis (1964)

Born to write?

I am sure that some are born to write as trees are born to bear leaves: for these, writing is a necessary mode of their own development. If the impulse to write survives the hope of success, then one is among these. If not, then the impulse was at best only pardonable vanity, and it will certainly disappear when the hope is withdrawn.
C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, The Letters of C.S. Lewis, (28 August 1930)

The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or right the readers will most certainly go into it.
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, "Cross-Examination" (1963)

Returning to work on an interrupted story is not like returning to work on a scholarly article. Fact, however long the scholar has left them untouched in his notebook, will still prove the same conclusions; he has only to start the engine running again. But the story is an organism: it goes on surreptitiously growing or decaying while your back is turned. If it decays, the resumption of work is like trying to coax back to life an almost extinguished fire, or to recapture the confidence of a shy animal which you had only partially tamed at your last visit.
C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, bk III.I (1954)

Mere Theology (II)

While we are on the subject of 'Mere Theology', mention must be made of Will Vaus's book of the same name, but much more intimately involved with Jack Lewis than Alister McGrath's intends to be.

What did C. S. Lewis believe about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, heaven, hell, creation, the Fall, the forgiveness of sins, marriage and divorce, war and peace, the church and sacraments, masculinity and femininity?

Lewis was not a professional theologian, but anyone who has read his writings--whether fiction or nonfiction, essays or correspondence--knows that profoundly Christian convictions permeate them all. The more one reads, the more it becomes clear that Lewis could write with charity and simplicity while preserving theological accuracy because he was well informed and thoroughly grounded in the Christian faith.

Will Vaus has masterfully brought together Lewis's thought from throughout his voluminous writings to provide us a full-orbed look into his beliefs on twenty-five Christian themes. This book gives us not only a comprehensive view of Lewis's theological convictions but also guidance and encouragement for our own spiritual journeys toward the God whom Lewis found so real, personal and present.

Follow the link to Will's website on the left hand side of this page.

Mere Theology

From my post on the 1st December:
"And now the world has changed. Could we imagine a book called "Mere Christianity" having such an impact in 2011? The post-war, church-schooled audience isn't there any more. What would a modern-day Lewis write, and how would he capture the minds of this generation?"

Lewis for today? Society has changed of course, but I would propose Alister McGrath. His latest book 'Mere Theology' is fun:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mcgrath/

But there are many (many) other books from which to choose! His gift is to make complex things 'simple' (a la Lewis) and to gradually lead the reader into more technical areas step-by-step. (i.e. starting with Alister in the wrong place can be disastrous)!

---oOo---

In 2006, the movement now widely, if inaccurately, known as she "new atheism’ exploded on the cultural scene. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006), Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006), and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great (2007) created a media fascination with religion and its discontents. Public interest in the God-question soared. I found myself regularly being called upon to speak and write on these themes, and debate with leading atheists in public: Richard Dawkins in Oxford, Daniel Dennett in London, and Christopher Hitchens in Washington. Although I much prefer seminar rooms to debating chambers, there is no doubt that the issues being contested were a matter of general, not just academic, interest. To my surprise, I found that I had become a public intellectual.

Debate often centred on the rationality of faith, and the coherence of the Christian vision of reality. For the new atheists, Christianity represents an antiquated way of explaining things that can be pensioned off in the modern scientific age. In one of the wonderfully unsubstantiated assertions that make up so much of his case against religion, Christopher Hitchens tells us that, since the invention of the telescope and microscope, religion ‘no longer offers an explanation of anything important’. It's a nice soundbite which, when placed alongside many other equally unsubstantiated soundbites, almost manages to create the semblance of an evidence-based argument. But is it anything more than that?

In his brilliantly argued critique of the new atheism, Terry Eagleton ridicules those who treat religion as a purely explanatory entity, 'Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It's rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster, we can forget about Chekhov.’ Believing that religion Is a 'botched attempt to explain the world' is on the same intellectual level as ‘seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus’.

Eagleton is surely right here. There is far more to Christianity than an attempt to make sense of things. The New Testament is primarily concerned with the transformation of human existence through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The gospel is thus not so much about explanation as about salvation - the transformation of the human situation. Yet while the emphasis of the Christian proclamation may not be on explaining the world, it nevertheless also offers a distinctive way of looking at things which, at least in principle, enables us to see those things in different ways, and thus leads us to act in ways consistent with this. Christianity involves believing that certain things are true, that they may he relied upon, and that they illuminate our perceptions,, decisions and actions.

Alister McGrath
Mere Theology (2010)
(The introduction to the book)

Happy Birthday?

I'm sure you knew it, but November 29th was the anniversary of C. S. Lewis's birth (to call it his "birthday" is surely pushing the bounds of good taste).

112 years is not a significant anniversary, but Lewis is current because of the imminent release of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third Narnia movie, following the deeply disappointing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Prince Caspian, which I avoided in case it was equally dismal. The production company Walden Media bought the rights to Narnia with the stated aim of producing "wholesome" films, which seemed to equate in this case to "po-faced". However new owners Fox have apparently sacked them, so there may be hope for The Dawn Treader.

I loved Narnia as a child, and honestly, I still do. As an adult reader one becomes sensitive to Lewis's rather strong opinions forcing themselves into the narrative, but what right-minded person would not want to live the life of Narnia, to fight for justice and Aslan, and to go to his country when they die? Of course, some people don't, but that is precisely the point. Narnia beautifully illustrates Lewis's genius for conveying profound truths with imagination, clarity, and pure style.

I use the word "genius" intentionally. Lewis had a rare gift. He was a scholar, master wordsmith, and a true-hearted friend. But his genius lay in that ability to communicate his thoughtful faith in a way that seized the imagination of not just his generation, but of successive generations. Not only his children's stories, but almost all his books were deeply influential on the thinking and faith of countless readers.

Lewis so shaped the idea of Christian literature that, for the last 50 years, every Christian writer has wanted to be him. The "Christian" publishing industry has churned out thousands of metaphorical children's adventures, humorous reflections on the Christian life, and worldly-wise apologetics. A few of these have been successful, most have been rubbish. But no-one has really conquered the territory in the way that he did.

And now the world has changed. Could we imagine a book called "Mere Christianity" having such an impact in 2011? The post-war, church-schooled audience isn't there any more. What would a modern-day Lewis write, and how would he capture the minds of this generation?

Re-posted from "Always Hope - Life, faith (and hope) in Cornwall" : http://charliepeer.blogspot.com/

"Gil-galad was an Elven-king"

Weathertop Hollow New Zealand

(Sung by Sam to the company on Weathertop before the attack of the Nazgül)

Gil-galad was an Elven-king.
Of him the harpers sadly sing:
the last whose realm was fair and free
between the Mountains and the Sea.

His sword was long, his lance was keen,
his shining helm afar was seen;
the countless stars of heaven's field
were mirrored in his silver shield.

But long ago he rode away,
and where he dwelleth none can say;
for into darkness fell his star
in Mordor where the shadows are.

"That's all I know," stammered Sam, blushing.
"I learned it from Mr. Bilbo when I was a lad."

J.R.R. Tolkien – Fellowship of the Ring

Will Vaus' Oxford Visit

[Will on the bridge across the Isis with Port Meadow in the background]

Long term readers of this blog will have 'clicked through' to Will Vaus' Blog from time to time (see 'Other Inklings Site' to the left.

Will has been in the UK visiting Oxford, and his blog has some quite wonderfully atmospheric photos of the visit. It is almost a conducted tour of 'Inklings' sites in the city.

The URL is : http://willvaus.blogspot.com/

Additionally have a look at his 'Aslan to England' site here: http://aslantoengland.blogspot.com/

Happy reading...

Sweet?

"More to be desired are they than gold, yea than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb" (Psalm 19).

One can well understand this being said of God's mercies, God's visitations, His attributes. But what the poet is actually talking about is God's law, His commands; His "ruling" as Dr. Moffatt well translates in verse 9 (for "judgements" here plainly means decisions about conduct). What is being compared to gold and honey is those "statutes" (in the Latin version "decrees") which, we are told, "rejoice the heart". For the whole poem is about the Law, not about "Judgement" in the sense to which Chapter I was devoted.

This was to me at first very mysterious. "Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery" - I can understand that a man can, and must, respect these "statutes", and try to obey them, and assent to them in his heart. But it is very hard to find how they could be, so to speak, delicious, how they exhilarate. If this is difficult at any time, it is doubly so when obedience to either is opposed to some strong, and perhaps in itself innocent, desire. A man held back by his unfortunate previous marriage to some lunatic or criminal who never dies from some woman whom he faithfully loves, or a hungry man left alone, without money, in a shop filled with he smell and sight of new bread, roasting coffee, or fresh strawberries - can these find the prohibition of adultery or of theft at all like honey? They may obey, they may still respect the "statute", but surely it could be more aptly compared to the dentists's forceps or the front line than to anything enjoyable and sweet.

C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms

Chapter VI "Sweeter Than Honey" (1955)

C.S. Lewis at the BBC (II)

Assessing Lewis as a broadcaster
Lewis made the connection with the audience as strongly as he could in this first broadcast. He insists that he is not preaching, and in common failings such as broken promises and excuses for bad behaviour he is no different to anyone else. He ends by saying that we can't shake off the idea that we know how to behave but in practice don't do so. We break the Law of Nature, realising this is in fact the basis for all clear thinking.

The first talk set the tone for the remainder of the series, Lewis had found a style that suited him and the listener. It was direct, colloquial and intellectually challenging. Only one recording survives of a single talk from Lewis's eventual four series for the BBC. There is a simple explanation for this. Live broadcasts offered a number of critical advantages over pre-recorded talks. First, a live talk has an immediacy and direct conversational approach that a pre-recorded broadcast can seldom match.

Second, once cleared by the censor, a talk could be broadcast without delay. A pre-recorded talk might need to be re-recorded if circumstances had changed between the recording and broadcast.

Third, recording was an expensive process - All recordings were made on twelve-inch metal discs with a coating of cellulose acetate. A steel needle cut the sound track into the disc, producing four minutes of airtime. With metal a costly and scarce resource, recordings were not made of studio broadcasts unless there was a special justification such as historic interest. Reporters in the field had to rely on discs entirely however to record the sounds of war.

Justin Phillips
C.S. Lewis at the BBC
(HarperCollins) 2002

C.S. Lewis at the BBC

Content of the first broadcast
The first talk sets out the theme for the whole series. Lewis's very first sentence and what follows is what journalists would call a 'grabber'. It engages you right away.

“Every one has heard people quarrelling… 'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' - 'Why should you shove me in first?' - 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' - 'Come on, you promised’.”

The point Lewis makes is that each of us appeals to or falls back upon a standard of behaviour to which we hold others to account. We may call it lots of things, decency or fair-play, or even morality. The point of a quarrel is to prove someone else is wrong and you are right. This makes no sense unless both sides have some agree¬ment of what is right and what is wrong, just as a foul in football, for instance, means nothing unless both sides are playing to the same rules.

The rest of the talk follows in the same vein, probing and clarifying,, using plenty of illustrations that would ring true. He underlines the assumption we make that the human idea of decent behaviour is universal. If not, then all that is said about the war is nonsense: 'What is the sense in saying the enemy are in the wrong unless right is a real thing which the Germans at bottom know as well as we do and ought to practise?' This sentence, written at the height of the war, is simply put into the past tense when published in Mere Christianity. The ideas that Lewis explores on natural law do not date with the passage of time. One of the keys to Lewis's appeal was his willingness to identify wholly with the listener and to reject any sense of preaching or speaking down to people. He says that none of us succeeds in keeping the law of nature. 'If there are any exceptions among you', he tells the listener, 'I apologise to them. They'd better switch on to another station, for nothing I'm going to say concerns them.' It takes a brave broadcaster to invite listeners to switch off. Lewis could take the risk because he knew that no listeners would consider themselves to be morally perfect, certainly not in August 1941.

Justin Phillips
C.S. Lewis at the BBC
(HarperCollins) 2002

A Foreword

I dedicate the book to all admirers of Bilbo, but especially to my sons and daughter, and to my friends the Inklings. To the Inklings, because they have already listened to it with a patience, and indeed with an interest, that almost leads me to suspect that they have hobbit-blood in their venerable ancestry. To my sons and my daughter for the same reason, and also because they have all helped me in the labours of composition. If composition is a just word ...'

From the Foreword to the 1954 first edition of The Fellowship Of The Ring, replaced for the second edition in 1966.

A Prologue

This tale is drawn from the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, preserved for the most part in the Great Red Book of Samwise. It has been written during many years for those who were interested in the account of the great Adventure of Bilbo, and especially for my friends, the Inklings (in whose veins, I suspect, a good deal of hobbit blood still runs), and for my sons and daughter.

'But since my children and others of their age, who first heard of the finding of the Ring, have grown older with the years, this tale speaks more clearly of those darker things which lurked only on the borders of the other tale, but which have troubled the world in all its history.

'To the Inklings I dedicate this book, since they have already endured it with patience - my only reason for supposing that they have a hobbit-strain in their venerable ancestry: otherwise it would be hard to account for their interest in the history and geography of those long-past days, between the end of the Dominion of Elves and the beginning of the Dominion of Men, when for a brief time the Hobbits played a supreme part in the movements of the world.

'For the Inklings I add this note, since they are men of lore, and curious in such matters. It is said that Hobbits spoke a language, or languages, very similar to ours ... [manuscript continues into a discussion of the languages of Middle Earth and their translation in the published book]

From the first draft of what became the Prologue to The Lord Of The Rings, as published in The Peoples Of Middle Earth, Christopher Tolkien, 1996.

Eternal Love?

[Image: The Plains of Heaven - John Martin (Tate Gallery)]

Theologians have sometimes asked whether we shall "know one another" in Heaven, and whether the particular love-relations worked out on earth would then continue to have any significance. It seems reasonable to reply: "It may depend what kind of love it had become, or was becoming, on earth." For, surely, to meet in the eternal world someone for whom your love in this, however strong, had been merely natural, would not be (on that ground) even interesting.

Would it not be like meeting in adult life someone who had seemed to be a great friend at your preparatory school solely because of common interest and occupations? If there was nothing more, if he was not a kindred soul, he will now be a total stranger. Neither of you now plays conkers. You no longer want to swop your help with his French exercise for his help with your arithmetic.

In Heaven I suspect, a love that had never embodied Love Himself would be equally irrelevant. For Nature has passed away. All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves: Charity (1960)

Deception

Iron will eat the world's old beauty up.
Girder and grid and gantry will arise,
Iron forest of engines will arise,
Criss-cross of iron crotchet. For your eyes
No green or growth. Over all, the skies
Scribbled from end to end with boasts and lies.
(When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, Thou
Saw'st beyond death the resurrection of the dead.)

Clamour shall clean put out the voice of wisdom,
The printing-presses with their clapping wings,
Fouling your nourishment. Harpy wings,
Filling your minds all day with foolish things,
Will tame the eagle Thought: till she sings
Parrot-like in her cage to please dark kings.
(When Israel descended into Egypt, Thou
Didst purpose both the bondage and the coming out.)

The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,
And fools crying, Because it has begun
It will continue as it has begun!
The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run
Faster for ever. The old age is done,
We have new lights and see without the sun.
(Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,
Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

C.S. Lewis

Poems (Geoffrey Bles, 1964)

Charles Williams Society Conference

To being to an end this series of readings from and about Charles Williams, a note reminding readers of an event this weekend.

On Saturday 23rd October from 10:45am there will be a Day Conference of the Charles Williams Society. Held in the 'Concord Room' or St. Matthew's Church, Great Peter Street in Westminster, the programme will include a paper from Dr. Josh Bradbury on his recently completed doctoral dissertation on Williams. If you are in London this weekend, you will receive a very warm welcome at this event.

All Hallows Eve

The hate seemed to swell in a nightmare bubble within the rose which was forming round them, cloud in cloud, overlying like petals. Simon made a quick half-spring as if to overleap it, and so did they; but he failed and fell back, and so did they. The smell of the rose was changing to the smell of his last act, to the smell of blood. He looked down; he saw below him the depth of the rose.

A sudden fresh blast of rain fell on him and drove him deeper, and so those others. It flashed past him in an infinity of drops, as of points falling-at first crystal, then of all colours, from those almost too dark to be seen through to those almost too bright to be seen. They fell continuously between him and those other faces, in which he could now see those waves passing which his devotee had seen in his own face. The bright showers of the hallows flashed, and beyond him he could see only his multiplied self; and all he could do against them was only done to himself.

Charles Williams - All Hallows Eve

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."

T.S. Eliot

Introduction to All Hallow's Eve (extract)

Williams on Evelyn Underhill

It was in October 1937 that I met her first--invited to tea with her in her Campden Hill Square house. She had just had one of her bad illnesses. The door of the room into which I was shown was directly behind the big arm-chair in which she was sitting facing a glowing fire. As I entered she got up and turned round, looking so fragile as though 'a puff of wind might blow her away' might be literally true in her case, but light simply streamed from her face illuminated with a radiant smile. . . . One could not but feel consciously there and then (not on subsequent recognition or reflection) that one was in the presence of the extension of the Mystery of our Lord's Transfiguration in one of the members of His Mystical Body. I myself never saw it repeated on any later meeting though others have probably seen the same thing at other times. It told one not only of herself, but more of God and of the Mystical Body than all her work put together."

Such an outpouring of light has been observed elsewhere-in certain great men (such as, I think, Leonardo) and by lovers in lovers. It is as if the physical flesh itself had become, or at least had
seemed to become, its unfallen self; as if that Original which was seen in the Transfiguration chose at certain moments to exhibit something of its glory in its created derivations. That such a phenomenon was observed in her is credible enough; it was her reward, and (after the proper heavenly manner) it was given to others.

From CW's introduction to
Letters of Evelyn Underhill

A supernatural moral law?

"... where Williams differs from (other) writers... is in his portrayal of a world of supernatural moral law governing the interaction between two levels of states of being. For him the living and the dead exist within a single spiritual realm.

The basic premise is made clear in the second chapter of Descent into Hell. Here a London suburban estate is presented as multi-dimensional, time being contained within space, time occupying space, so that within this particular spot the present, the past, and the future are seen to be co-terminous. Whereas a similar concept can be presented materialistically (as in Alan Garner's novel Red Shift [1973]) Charles Williams uses this concept of relativity in a theological context: the living and the dead influence each other in an eternal dimension to which both belong and of which the physical world is the sacrament. Accordingly in this particular book the moral suicide of a distinguished military historian chimes, as it were, with the physical suicide of one of the workmen who built the house in which he lives. So too the fear endured by a young woman who is subject to the visitations of a Doppelgänger is both shared with, and supportive of, the fear suffered by a sixteenth century ancestor, a victim of religious persecution. In each case the fate of an individual is related to a timeless spiritual process. Williams's vision is essentially theological.

He describes his supernatural world with extraordinary particularity. Instead of obtruding the ghostly element upon the life of everyday, he assumes that life into the supernatural dimension: it is thus impossible to banish his phantoms from our own world, because we find ourselves inhabiting theirs, and subject to its laws."

Glen Cavaliero - 'The Novels of Charles Williams'

War in Heaven (II)

They went from the dining-room to a small room next to Gregory's bedroom, which he unlocked with a key he carried on his own chain. There appeared in it only a cabinet in one corner, two or three cushions dropped beside it, and a low pedestal of wood in the centre on which lay an oblong slab of stone. On this slab stood two candlesticks, around the pedestal, at a good distance, had been drawn a white circle, in which at one point was a small gap. Before he entered the room Gregory had fetched the Graal from its corner; he passed through the gap, set it upright on the slab between the candlesticks, and turned to Sir Giles.

"You'd better sit down at once," he said, "and I should recommend you to keep within the circle. There are curious forces released sometimes on these occasions."

"I know all about that," Sir Giles said, as he brought two of the cushions into the circle, also taking care to pass through the gap. "I saw a man once in Ispahan who looked as if he'd been unable to breathe once he got outside. Atmospheric disturbances, but why? Why does your purely subjective industry disturb the air? Well, never mind. I won't say a word more." He settled himself comfortably on his cushions over against one of the shorter sides of the pedestal. Gregory went over to the cabinet, and there first changed from the clothes he was wearing into a white cassock, marked with esoteric signs. He then brought from it an antique vessel, from which he poured what was apparently wine into the Graal till it all but brimmed. He brought also a short rod and laid it on the slab in front of the Graal; he arranged and lit at what appeared to be the back of the altar a chafing-dish containing herbs and powders, scattered other powders upon it, and came back to the front of the altar. Lastly, with great care, he brought to it from the cabinet a parchment inscribed with names and writings, and a small paper from which he let fall on to the wine in the Graal what appeared to Sir Giles to be a few short hairs.

He considered the arrangements, went back and closed the cabinet, re-entered the circle, took the rod from the altar, and, bending down, with a strong concentration of countenance, closed the gap, drawing the rod slowly as if with an effort against the path of the sun. He came to the front of the altar, and immersed himself in a profound silence.

Sir Giles, curled upon the cushions, watched him intently, noting every change in his face and the growing remoteness of his eyes. Almost an hour had passed before those eyes, seeming to stir of their own volition, lowered themselves from the darkness of the room to the Graal standing in the steady light of the two candles. Very slowly he stretched his hands over the chalice and began to speak. Sir Giles, straining his ears, caught only an occasional phrase.

Charles Williams
War In Heaven - Chapter 7 “Adrian”

In Charles Williams’ supernatural thriller War in Heaven, an exquisitely constructed story pits three good characters against three evil ones in the protection and attempted destruction, respectively, of the Holy Graal (old spelling of Grail), discovered in the English village of Fardles, or Castra Parvulorum, the Camp of the Children. Caught in the center of this drama is a generic family: a worried father and husband; a cheerful mother and wife; their innocent four-year-old son.

As a prologue to this battle between Heaven and Hell, set in the inter-war years of Williams’ present day, we are introduced to a murder, a publishing house, and the murderer himself, with a nod to the conventions of the English mystery. The first line of the Prelude reads, with its underlying humor:

“The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.”

Soon, however, the characters gather around the body and we see into their souls, and the war begins.

(Christine Sutherland)

A Requiem Mass

In September 1973, Father John Tolkien celebrated a Requiem Mass for his father at the Church of St. Anthony of Padua, in Oxford. JRR Tolkien was buried next to his wife Edith in a Catholic cemetery just outside Oxford at Wolvercote. He may have penned his own epitaph in 1956, shortly after The Lord of the Rings was published, when he wrote: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a long defeat — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

This sense of exile was present in The Lord of the Rings. At the end of the story many of the heroes travel, quietly and alone, to the Grey Havens, a harbour containing ships to take passengers on a one-way voyage away from Middle-Earth. Against all odds good has triumphed, but at a cost. Some of the travellers are scarred by evil, others by sorrow. The boat slips anchor and fades into the darkness, leaving in its wake a glimmer of light, which in turn disappears. A sense of melancholy prevails.