Tolkien as 'translator'
The day death died
But that moan was not only his. As if the sound released something greater than itself, another moan answered it. The silence groaned. They heard it. The supernatural mountain on which they stood shook and there went through Battle Hill itself the slightest vibration from that other quaking, so that all over it china tinkled, and papers moved, and an occasional ill-balanced ornament fell. Pauline stood still and straight. Margaret shut her eyes and sank more deeply into her pillow. The dead man felt it and was drawn back away from that window into his own world of being, where also something suffered and was free. The groan was at once dereliction of power and creation of power. In it, far off, beyond vision in the depths of all the worlds, a god, unamenable to death, awhile endured and died.
“Descent into Hell”
Chapter 7, ‘Junction of Travellers’
Providence
[Image: Ophelia by John Everett Millais]
In the play Hamlet, Ophelia climbs out on a branch overhanging a river: the branch breaks, she falls and drowns. What would you reply if someone asked, ‘Did Ophelia die because Shakespeare for poetic reasons, wanted her to die at that moment - or because the branch broke?’ I think that one would have to say ‘For both reasons.’ Every event in the play happens as a result of other events in the play, but also every event happens because the poet wants it to happen. All the events in the play are Shakespearean events; similarly, all events in the real world are providential events… ‘Providence’ and natural causation are not alternatives; both determine every event. Both are one.
.
C.S. Lewis - Miracles
Longing in Williams
With the longing and sensuality in this passage from All Hallows Eve, comes a sharp sense of tension and the macabre:
They were all now in a world of simple act. The time for thought, dispute, preparation was done. They were in the City. They were potent to act or impotent to act, but that was the only difference between any of them. The eyes of the woman who lay, incapable of act, against the abandoned chair, were also on Betty and greedy with the same murderous desire. The diseased creatures, also incapable, who lay around the circle, trembled and moaned a little with their helpless longing for the act of healing. She and they alike yearned towards act, and could not reach it. The dwarf-form was still in motion, and its motions as it forced its way on were both its own and Evelyn's - it magically drawn to its origin, she spiritually driving to her refuge. Betty felt that invisible soft mass press against her everywhere - against head and breasts, hands and thighs and legs. She gasped out to Jonathan: "Let go - you must. I may; not you. Only one of us, and I knew her." She wrenched her own hand free from his and struck it backward against him, as Lester had struck at Richard, one gesture whether accurst or blest. In the fierceness of her knowledgeable love, she struck so hard -- all heaven in the blow -- that he loosed his arm from her and fell back a pace. Richard caught and steadied him. At that moment, as Betty entered the circle, the rain broke in.
Charles Williams “All Hallows Eve”
Lewis on Longing
Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory: “If we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we will get in.”
.
Lewis wrote that the sight of the Castlereagh Hills from his nursery window would cause a beautiful aching, an inconsolable longing to arise within his heart. “They taught me longing,” he recalled. He felt the same feelings, he said, when viewing great works of art or reading powerful literature. As he analyzed these experiences, he defined them as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”
.
Lewis asked himself, even as an atheist, “what is it that I am longing for?” George MacDonald’s book, Phantastes, helped him make the first connection between his feeling of longing and Christianity.
.
Lewis found that no experience in this life completely fulfilled this longing or the desires it awakens in us. All we get are hints and guesses.
.
He queried in a letter to his friend Sheldon Vanauken (author of A Severe Mercy) on December 23, 1950: “Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or, if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?”.
In Mere Christianity, he concludes similarly,
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.” C. S. Lewis wrote of longing often.
In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien had Gandalf try to explain it to Frodo. It ran through each of Charles Williams’ novels. It’s an experience we’ve all had from time to time.
He queried in a letter to his friend Sheldon Vanauken (author of A Severe Mercy) on December 23, 1950: “Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or, if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?”.
In Mere Christianity, he concludes similarly,
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.” C. S. Lewis wrote of longing often.
In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien had Gandalf try to explain it to Frodo. It ran through each of Charles Williams’ novels. It’s an experience we’ve all had from time to time.
Tolkien on Longing (excerpt)
What's also notable about THE LORD OF THE RINGS is, for a book as long as it is, many
of its readers reread the novel many times over. Yet despite its enduring
popularity, Tolkien is often held in complete disregard by the literary
establishment.
The real question is why? In the literary
climate that is characterized by modernism and post-modernism where the
twentieth and twenty first century is a wasteland why does a "series"
of fantasy novels become one of the most beloved works in modern times?
It's because the power of myth over the
human imagination works wonders, creating a longing and a hunger that, Tolkien
argues, is met by the Christian religion. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis are the
flip-sides of the same coin, with Lewis giving us accounts of the longing and
Tolkien providing the books that would create that longing. And what about the
longing? It's that longing for Myth, that love for those beauties which Tolkien
shows us in THE LORD OF THE
RINGS. It's that longing that sets man apart from all other creatures in
the universe: a craving for beauty and for joy. The German word for this
longing is "senhsucht". In a time characterized by
fast-food, cell-phones, materialism, superficiality, the account of a Hobbit
working against all odds in a mythic landscape so captures the human
imagination (and this is NOT hype) that an entire genre is created. It is
because of how Tolkien so masterfully handles Myth that he has been so highly
treasured by such a large fan base.
.
Joseph Pearce - Tolkien: Man and Myth,
Ignatius (1999)
.
The Eden “myth” was at the very heart of
Tolkien's creation of The Silmarillion, as well as being at the very heart of
the Creation myth contained within it. Tolkien's longing for this lost Eden and
his mystical glimpses of it, inspired and motivated by his sense of “exile”
from the fullness of truth, was the source of his creativity. At the core of
The Silmarillion, indeed at the core of all his work, was a hunger for the
truth that transcends mere facts: the infinite and eternal Reality which was
beyond the finite and temporal perception of humanity.
.
Review of The Lord of the Rings –
Amazon.com
Thû and Huan
Thus
came Thû, as wolf more great
than
e'er was seen from Angband's gate
to
the burning south, than ever lurked
in
mortal lands or murder worked.
Sudden
he sprang, and Huan leaped
aside
in shadow. On he swept
to
Lúthien lying swooning faint.
To
her drowning senses came the laint
of
his foul breathing, and she stirred;
dizzily
she spake a whispered word,
her
mantle brushed across his face
He
stumbled staggering in his pace.
Out
leaped Huan. Back he sprang.
Beneath
the stars there shuddering rang
the
cry of hunting wolves at bay,
the
tongue of hounds that fearless slay
Backward
and forth they leaped and ran
feinting
to flee, and round they span,
and
bit and grappled, and fell and rose.
Then suddenly Huan holds and throws
his ghastly foe; his throat he rends
choking his life. Not so it ends.
From shape to shape, from wolf to worm,
from monster to his own demon form,
Thû changes, but that desperate grip
he cannot shake, nor form it slip
No wizardry, nor spell, nor dart,
no fang, nor venom, nor devil's art
could harm that hound that hart and boar
had hunted once in Valinor.
The Geste of Beren and Lúthien
J.R.R. Tolkien
(lines 2,740 to 2,769)
Hope
[Image: Vitali Linitsky "Christmas Visitation]
When we were lost in the
night
Down grass-paths old,
Miserable,
without light,
Hungry
and cold,
Then
your voice cried 'Hush !' through the dark.
We
saw no lantern nor heard
Any
man near:
But
we stood still at the word
With
hope to hear,
For
your voice cried 'Hush !' through the dark.
When
Satan had hold on me
To
make an end,
In
heaven, in earth, I could see
Sign
of no friend :
Then
your voice cried 'Hush !' through the dark.
Does
one draw near where I grope,
To
put off death ?
I see
him not, nor have hope,
Yet
hold my breath :
For
your voice cried 'Hush !' through the dark.
Charles Williams
Poems of Conformity
(1917)
Lewisian Ents?
Lucy woke out of the
deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best
in the world had been calling her name. She thought at first it was her
father's voice, but that did not seem quite right. Then she thought it was
Peter's voice, but that did not seem to fit either. She did not want to get up;
not because she was still tired - on the contrary she was wonderfully rested
and all the aches had gone from her bones - but because she felt so extremely
happy and comfortable. She was looking straight up at the Narnian moon, which
is larger than ours, and at the starry sky, for the place where they had
bivouacked was comparatively open.
"Lucy,"
came the call again, neither her father's voice nor Peter's. She sat up,
trembling with excitement but not with fear. The moon was so bright that the
whole forest landscape around her was almost as clear as day, though it looked
wilder. Behind her was the fir wood; away to her right the jagged cliff-tops on
the far side of the gorge; straight ahead, open grass to where a glade of trees
began about a bow-shot away. Lucy looked very hard at the trees of that glade.
"Why, I do
believe they're moving," she said to herself. "They're walking
about." She got up, her heart beating wildly, and walked towards them.
There was certainly a noise in the glade, a noise such as trees make in a high
wind, though there was no wind tonight. Yet it was not exactly an ordinary tree
noise either. Lucy felt there was a tune in it, but she could not catch the
tune any more than she had been able to catch the words when the trees had so
nearly talked to her the night before. But there was, at least, a lilt; she
felt her own feet wanting to dance as she got nearer. And now there was no
doubt that the trees were really moving moving in and out through one another
as if in a complicated country dance. ("And I suppose," thought Lucy,
"when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.') She was
almost among them now.
The first tree she
looked at seemed at first glance to be not a tree at all but a huge man with a
shaggy beard and great bushes of hair. She was not frightened: she had seen
such things before. But when she looked again he was only a tree, though he was
still moving. You couldn't see whether he had feet or roots, of course, because
when trees move they don't walk on the surface of the earth; they wade in it as
we do in water. The same thing happened with every tree she looked at. At one
moment they seemed to be the friendly, lovely giant and giantess forms which
the tree-people put on when some good magic has called them into full life:
next moment they all looked like trees again. But when they looked like trees,
it was like strangely human trees, and when they looked like people, it was
like strangely branchy and leafy people - and all the time that queer lilting,
rustling, cool, merry noise.
"They are
almost awake, not quite," said Lucy. She knew she herself was wide awake,
wider than anyone usually is.
C.S. Lewis,
Prince Caspian (1951)
Sweeter than Honey?
"More to be desired are they than gold, yea than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb"*.
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)
*Psalm 19
The Other Mrs. Moore
[Image : Quarry Church]
"There was in the grounds of The Kilns when I arrived there, away over beyond the desolate tennis court, a small two roomed weather-board shack. It was almost completely overgrown with creepers and bushes and was evidently not in use for any purpose. When I asked Fred Paxford about it he told me that it had been "Mrs Moore's house", and it had been built for her use. On further inquiry I came to understand that the "Mrs Moore" in question had been a family friend and had fallen on hard times and thus had been brought into the household in Ireland to "help", and that when things became very hard in her later life, Jack and Warnie had "rescued" her, brought her over from Ireland, and built that little bungalow for her so that she could spend her declining last years in peace and without worry.This information may or may not be completely accurate as it was gleaned over a period of time; neither Jack nor Warnie would ever openly talk about their charitable works.
The little house later became my "Gang Hut" (rather a posh one actually as it had two rooms and a coal fired heating stove) and also an alternative "sleep-out" bedroom for me to use when I was feeling adventurous or whatever.I visited Mrs Moore's grave only a few weeks ago as it happens in order to point it out to some visitors. She shares the burial place of her Earthly residue with that of the other Mrs Moore, at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry.
Douglas Gresham - Lenten Lands (1988)
"I myself am not fit to run a henhouse"
I think Lewis was so compelling because, first, he was incomparable at evoking "joy" as he defined it. Whatever idea and yearning for "heaven" I ever had came from Narnia. Second, I think he had an intuitive -- not theoretical -- grasp of psychology -- he was one of those people who reads his own mind so well, he knows a good deal about how all human minds (and wills and emotions) work.The bickering of the children in The Magician's Nephew, Eustace's redemption in Dawn Treader, the seeds of human hatred elucidated by Screwtape -- and above all, the parental love turned to jealous gall in Till We Have Faces -- his greatest imaginative leap and rendition of the romance of the soul --have a kind of easy, intimate verity that give his spiritual dramas life.
At the same time, when it came to doctrine and apologetics, I think he was an unwitting sophist -- an honest sophist, if that makes any sense, because he fooled himself first.
He had a ridiculously thin dodge against the then au courant Freudian claims that God was the expression of various unconscious wishes: that we have equally strong unconscious wishes for there to be no God. Not true, where he was concerned. His need is palpable -- and poignant, given the brutalities and deprivations of his childhood and early manhood -- his mother's death at eight, a school he called "Belsen" and others almost equally brutal, and then a stint in the trenches beginning on his nineteenth birthdy and ending months later with a serious wound (he found school more trying). If anyone ever needed an omniscient, omnibenevolent parent, it was CSL.
His motives can't be proved. Fair enough. What's palpably ridiculous are his warmed-over medieval arguments for the objective truth of Christian doctrine. One was that Christ had to be "either a God or a devil" - or self-delusive megalomaniac, as we'd now say. While sniping at the imperfections of scientific Biblical scholarship, Lewis shut his eyes to the painstaking work of two centuries that convincingly discerned different voices, sources, periods, influences on Biblical text. There's also no recognition in his work that people from different eras might perceive and express truth differently -- i.e., that someone in an earlier era who claimed to deliver God's words directly might be neither a fraud nor God's stenographer.
Then there's the cultural chauvinism in his claims that other religious traditions foreshadowed or provided latter-day distortions of Christianity -- the one truth, which worked like something "gradually coming into focus." And the absurd argument that God would create the physical laws of the universe in part to get our attention by His deliberate breaking of them through miracles. And his over-correction of what he called (this may be a paraphrase) our era's chronological snobbery -- an assumption that new ideas are inherently superior to old ones. Lewis, making the opposite error, refused to acknowledge any lasting advances in political ethics or developments in our understanding of human rights.
What's all this got to do with your conservatism? Lewis's politics in the broadest sense, I suspect, inform yours. He's one of your conservatives of doubt -- dubious about the efficacy of human attempts to permanently improve human life. He's a democrat (small d, believer in democracy) by default, of the Churchillian school that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the alternatives. His own formulation was that democracy is necessary because human corruption means that no individual or small group can be trusted with power. That's true, and salutary.
What Lewis lacked was any sense that participating in political life is part of what makes us fully human -- and the corollary, that a people's meaningful participation in politics could permanently advance human welfare. Strange, for a man steeped in Greek literature -- no sense that man is a political animal. He charmingly wrote, "I myself am not fit to run a henhouse." Well, neither am I. But that doesn't mean I have no role or responsibility in governance, and that if all were well I'd live like one of Lewis's Narnian badgers, in peaceful quietism. And while you, Andrew, are a very political animal, you share Lewis' unduly limited sense of what government and politics can accomplish. I recognize, with Obama, that Reagan had a lasting insight, and that the lasting pressure he put on liberalism not to bloat government, not to intrude it into every aspect of our lives, not to let it suck any more resources out of the private sector than it needs to perform its functions at maximum efficiency, is salutary. But to go from there to an assumption that government can't improve on its furtherance of commonwealth, that it can't fairly counteract rising income inequality or spread the most fundamental risks, like illness or destitution in old age, more effectively than it does now, is defeatist.
Phillip Pullman, author of the fantasy series His Dark Materials, has attacked Lewis with Oedipal fervor as being politically repressive, indoctrinating children to be obedient uber alle -- obedient to manifestly present gods and kings. There's an element of truth in this. Lewis sees human beings essentially as subjects, not citizens. In Lewis' fantasy, kings rule for the benefit of the governed, subject spontaneously offer up their loyalty, chivalry works as advertised, and the good guys' wars are always purely defensive. But Pullman misses Lewis' core anti-authoritarianism. When Lewis said that the desire to be left alone is as strong as the desire for a heavenly father, he was speaking to the heart to the extent that he did heartily want to be left alone, and he wanted everyone else to be, too. His benevolent rulers don't intrude in their subjects' lives. He had a great imaginative grasp of tyrants whose core assumption is that their subjects exist to serve them. And he provides for children the great pleasure of well-dramatized rebellions against bullies and tyrants. In fact Pullman respects raw power more than Lewis does, and he's more dogmatic in his anti-monotheism than Lewis ever was in his 'mere Christianity.'
.
The Atlantic ~ March 2009
All that is not Eternal
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)
Via Mortis
At first he did not believe. This was certainly the place,
though in the dawn which was less bright than the moon, and he
knew he had hated the moon because it watched him, the corners of
that stage between earth and sky were now in darkness. But he
went and peered into them and felt. Uselessly. He knelt down,
staring round, unaware of any sickness or exhaustion, only of
anxiety. He almost lay down, screwing up his eyes, dragging
himself round. It was all useless. The rope was not there.
By now, as he raised his head and looked out, the silence was
beginning to trouble him, and the pallid dawn. It was good that
the light should not grow, but also it was terrifying.
There had not been much time, or had there? He could not attend
to it; the absence of the rope preoccupied him. Could someone,
out of the world that was filled with his rich enemies, have
come, while he was down at the foot, doing something he could not
remember, and run up the ladder quietly, and stolen back his rope
as he himself had stolen it? Perhaps the men who had sent him off
that day, or even his wife, out of the room, stretching a lean
hand and snatching it, as she had snatched things before-but then
she would have snarled or shrilled at him; she always did. He
forgot his caution. He rose to his feet, and ran round and round
seeking for it. He failed again; the rope was not there.
By the ladder he stood still, holding on to it, utterly defeated
at last, in a despair that even he had never felt before. There
had always been present to him, unrecognized but secure, man's
last hope, the possibility of death. It may be refused, but the
refusal, even the unrecognized refusal, admits hope. Without the
knowledge of his capacity of death, however much he fear it, man
is desolate. This had gone; he had no chance whatever. The rope
was gone; he could not die. He did not yet know that it was
because he was already dead.
Charles Williams
Descent into Hell (1937)
(Ch 2 'Via Mortis')
A letter to Rayner Unwin
8 December 1955
[The radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was discussed on the BBC programme 'The Critics'; and on 16 November, W. H. Auden gave a radio talk about the book in which he said: 'If someone dislikes it, I shall never trust their literary judgement about anything again.' Meanwhile Edwin Muir, reviewing The Return of the King in the Observer on 27 November, wrote: 'All the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes ... and will never come to puberty. ... Hardly one of them knows anything about women.']
I agreed with the 'critics' view of the radio adaptation; but I was annoyed that after confessing that none of them had read the book they should turn their attention to it and me — including surmises on my religion. I also thought Auden rather bad – he cannot at any rate read verse, having a poor rhythmical sense; and deplored his making the book 'a test of literary taste'. You cannot do that with any work – and if you could you only infuriate. I was fully prepared for Robert Robinson's rejoinder 'fair-ground barker'. But I suppose all this is good for sales. My correspondence is now increased by letters of fury against the critics and the broadcast. One elderly lady – in part the model for 'Lobelia' indeed, though she does not suspect it – would I think certainly have set about Auden (and others) had they been in range of her umbrella.
(...)
I hope in this vacation to begin surveying the Silmarillion; though evil fate has plumped a doctorate thesis on me...
Blast Edwin Muir and his delayed adolescence. He is old enough to know better. It might do him good to hear what women think of his 'knowing about women', especially as a test of being mentally adult. If he had an M.A. I should nominate him for the professorship of poetry – a sweet revenge.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon & Gothic... Welsh and Finnish
Yes, it's JRRT at the back holding on to the tree. Exeter College, Oxford students in June 1914. Within 4 years many of these young men would be dead. I hope you will not mind a personal comment from me, "What a waste."
I am afraid this is becoming a dreadful bore, and going on too long, at any rate longer than 'this contemptible person before you' merits. But it is difficult to stop once roused on such an absorbing topic to oneself as oneself. As for the conditioning: I am chiefly aware of the linguistic conditioning. I went to King Edward's School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English. Not English Literature! Except Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially), the chief contacts with poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin. Not a bad mode of introduction, if a bit casual. I mean something of the English language and its history. I learned Anglo-Saxon at school (also Gothic, but that was an accident quite unconnected with the curriculum though decisive — I discovered in it not only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and scientific side, but for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the 'vehicle of a literature').
I am afraid this is becoming a dreadful bore, and going on too long, at any rate longer than 'this contemptible person before you' merits. But it is difficult to stop once roused on such an absorbing topic to oneself as oneself. As for the conditioning: I am chiefly aware of the linguistic conditioning. I went to King Edward's School and spent most of my time learning Latin and Greek; but I also learned English. Not English Literature! Except Shakespeare (which I disliked cordially), the chief contacts with poetry were when one was made to try and translate it into Latin. Not a bad mode of introduction, if a bit casual. I mean something of the English language and its history. I learned Anglo-Saxon at school (also Gothic, but that was an accident quite unconnected with the curriculum though decisive — I discovered in it not only modern historical philology, which appealed to the historical and scientific side, but for the first time the study of a language out of mere love: I mean for the acute aesthetic pleasure derived from a language for its own sake, not only free from being useful but free even from being the 'vehicle of a literature').
There
are two strands, or three. A fascination that Welsh names had for me, even if
only seen on coal-trucks, from childhood is another; though people only gave me
books that were incomprehensible to a child when I asked for information. I did
not learn any Welsh till I was an undergraduate, and found in it an abiding
linguistic-aesthetic satisfaction. Spanish was another: my guardian was half
Spanish, and in my early teens I used to pinch his books and try to learn it :
the only Romance language that gives me the particular pleasure of which I am
speaking - it is not quite the same as the mere perception of beauty: I feel the
beauty of say Italian or for that matter of modern English (which is very
remote from my personal taste): it is more like the appetite for a needed food.
Most important, perhaps, after Gothic was the discovery in Exeter College
The Letters of J.R.R. Tokien
7 June 1955 (To W.H. Auden)
7 June 1955 (To W.H. Auden)
Taliessin through Loegres
With the governments throughout the world now seeking to
impose a foreign 'morality' on it's Christian subjects, I was reminded of the
Prelude to Williams 'Taliessin' poems, and in particular the first two lines of
'Prelude II'. The whole context of Williams words here seem strangely prescient
in the world of 2013 where once again we are engulfed in a battle of ideologies.
As Williams writes, "The blind rulers of
Logres...", encapsulating for me the whole leadership of the liberal, I
would say libertine, West. But what do you think?
Prelude
I
Recalcitrant tribes heard;
orthodox wisdom sprang in Caucasia andThule
the glory of the Emperor stretched to the ends of the world.
In the season of midmost Sophia
the word of the Emperor established a kingdom inBritain
they sang in Sophia the immaculate conception of wisdom.
Carbonek. Camelot,Caucasia ,
were gates and containers, intermediations of light;
geography breathing geometry, the double-fledged Logos.
II
The blind rulers of Logres
nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue;
the seals of the saints were broken; the chairs of the Table reeled.
Galahad quickened in the Mercy;
but history began; the Moslem stormedByzantium
lost was the glory, lost the power and kingdom.
Call on the hills to hide us
lest, men said in the City, the lord of charity
ride in the starlight, sole flash of the Emperor's glory.
III
Evil and good were twins
once in the alleys of Ispahan; the Moslem
crying Alla il Alla destroyed the dualism ofPersia
Caucasia fell to the Moslem;
the mamelukes seized the ancient cornland of Empire.
Union is breached; the imams stand in Sophia.
Good is God, the muezzin
calls, but lost is the light on the hills ofCaucasia ,
Glory of the Emperor, glory of substantial being.
I
Recalcitrant tribes heard;
orthodox wisdom sprang in Caucasia and
the glory of the Emperor stretched to the ends of the world.
In the season of midmost Sophia
the word of the Emperor established a kingdom in
they sang in Sophia the immaculate conception of wisdom.
Carbonek. Camelot,
were gates and containers, intermediations of light;
geography breathing geometry, the double-fledged Logos.
II
The blind rulers of Logres
nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue;
the seals of the saints were broken; the chairs of the Table reeled.
Galahad quickened in the Mercy;
but history began; the Moslem stormed
lost was the glory, lost the power and kingdom.
Call on the hills to hide us
lest, men said in the City, the lord of charity
ride in the starlight, sole flash of the Emperor's glory.
III
Evil and good were twins
once in the alleys of Ispahan; the Moslem
crying Alla il Alla destroyed the dualism of
the mamelukes seized the ancient cornland of Empire.
Good is God, the muezzin
calls, but lost is the light on the hills of
Glory of the Emperor, glory of substantial being.
Charles Williams (1938)
Gangrel
“He is only a wretched gangrel creature, but I have him under my care for a while.” (Frodo, speaking of Gollum to Faramir : LotR iv. iv)
The choice of this unusual word is doubly appropriate. The first sense in the OED is 'a vagabond' and, when used as an adjective, ‘vagrant': Was it a light thing that gangrel thieves should burn and waste in Mid-mark and depart unhurt, that ye stand here with clean blades and cold bodies?
(William Morris The House of the Wolfings, chapter xxii)
The second sense is 'a lanky loose-jointed person', which may seem equally apt for the agile Gollum. The word is a Middle English formation which adds a disparaging suffix (also seen in mongrel and wastrel) to a stem apparently meaning 'go or walk'.
Tolkien also used the word (but only in the first sense) in Feanor's dismissal of Melkor: “Get thee from my gate, thou gangrel” ('Annals of Anian' 97)
The Ring of Words ~
Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford University Press (2006)
Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford University Press (2006)
The Opening of the Graves
Margaret Anstruther was buried on the next day but one, to the sound of that apostolic trumpet which calls on all its hearers to rise from the dead, and proclaims the creation on earth of celestial bodies, "sown in corruption, raised in incorruption; sown in dishonour, raised in glory; sown in weakness, raised in power". "Be steadfast, unmovable . . . your labour is not in vain in the Lord." Pauline heard with a new attention; these were no longer promises, but facts. She dared not use the awful phrases for herself; only, shyly, she hoped that perhaps, used by some other heavenly knowledge, they might not be altogether inapplicable to herself. The epigram of experience which is in all dogma hinted itself within her. But more than these passages another stranger imagination struck her heart: "Why are they then baptized for the dead?" There, rooted in the heart of the Church at its freshest, was the same strong thrust of interchange. Bear for others; be baptized for others; and, rising as her new vision of the world had done once and again, an even more fiery mystery of exchange rolled through her horizons, turning and glancing on her like the eyed and winged wheels of the prophet. The central mystery of Christendom, the terrible fundamental substitution on which so much learning had been spent and about which so much blood had been shed, showed not as a miraculous exception, but as the root of a universal rule . . . "behold, I shew you a mystery", as supernatural as that Sacrifice, as natural as carrying a bag. She flexed her fingers by her side as if she thought of picking one up.
Charles Williams “Descent into Hell”, Chapter 11, ‘The Opening of the Graves’
An Inklings Meeting
"I can see the room so clearly now, the electric fire pumping heat into the dank air, the faded screen that broke some of the keener draughts, the enamel beer-jug on the table, the well-worn sofa and armchairs, and the men drifting in... leaving overcoats and hats in any corner and coming over to warm their hands before finding a chair. There was no fixed etiquette, but the rudimentary honours would be done partly by Lewis and partly by his brother... Sometimes, when the less vital members of the circle were in a big majority the evening would fall flat; but the best of them were as good as anything I shall live to see."
Sprightly Running (John Wain)
It was in this setting that, along with from lively talk about many things, and without an iota of self-consciouness about securing a place in history, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, C.S.Lewis's The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce,Charles Williams's All Hallow's Eve, and Warnie Lewis's The Splendid Century were - along with other works by other members - read and discussed. Those of us who did not enjoy the privilege of being there can at least imagine what it must have been like to read one's own work to such a friendly but formidable jury.
Gondolin
Turgon and his
people built Gondolin in secret. After it was completed, he took with him to
dwell in the hidden city his entire people in Nevrast — almost a third of the
Ñoldor — as well as nearly three quarters of the northern Sindar. He originally
named the city Ondolindë, which is Quenya for "The Rock of the Music of
Water" after the springs of Amon Gwareth. The name was later changed to
its Sindarin form.
The Hidden Way
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
