The Lay of Leithian : XII (excerpt)

Then Morgoth came. For the last time
in those great wars he dared to climb
from subterranean throne profound,
the rumour of his feet a sound
of rumbling earthquake underground.
Black-armoured, towering, iron-crowned
he issued forth; his mighty shield
a vast unblazoned sable field
with shadow like a thundercloud;
and o'er the gleaming king it bowed,
as huge aloft like mace he hurled
that hammer of the underworld,
Grond. Clanging to ground it tumbled
down like a thunder-bolt, and crumbled
the rocks beneath it; smoke up-started,
a pit yawned, and a fire darted.

Tolkien: The Lays Of Beleriand

C. S. Lewis [Four Volumes]: Life, Works, and Legacy

Book Description

Most popularly known as the author of the children's classic The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis was also a prolific poet, essayist, novelist, and Christian writer. His most famous work, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, while known as a children's book is often read as a Christian allegory and remains to this day one of his best-loved works. But Lewis was prolific in a number of areas, including poetry, Christian writing, literary criticism, letters, memoir, autobiography, sermons and more. This set, written by experts, guides readers to a better understanding and appreciation of this important and influential writer. Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His mother died when he was young, leaving his father to raise him and his older brother Warren. He fought and was wounded in World War I and later became immersed in the spiritual life of Christianity. While he delved into the world of Christian writing, he did not limit himself to one genre and produced a remarkable oeuvre that continues to be widely read, taught, and adored at all levels.

As part of the circle known as the Inklings, which consisted of writers and intellectuals, and included J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and others, he developed and honed his skills and continued to put out extensive writings. Many different groups now claim him as their own: spanning genres from science fiction to Christian literature, from non-fiction to children's stories, his output remains among the most popular and complex.

Here, experts in the field of Lewis studies examine all his works along with the details of his life and the culture in which he lived to give readers the fullest complete picture of the man, the writer, and the husband, alongside his works, his legacy, and his place in English letters.

About the Author
BRUCE L. EDWARDS is Professor and Associate Dean at Bowling Green State University. His works include The C. S. Lewis Readers Encyclopedia, for which he served on the editorial board and wrote 25 entries, The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Critic, Reader, and Imaginative Writer.

All four volumes are to be published on 30th April 2007 by Praeger Press (USA)

Descent into Hell - a review

Charles William's is the real thing. He had an influence on CS Lewis as one of the Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis and Williams are probably the three best known members of the group). Genius though he was, Williams has been overshadowed by Tolkien and Lewis, and forgotten by the general reader. Nevertheless his books are worth investigating if this offering is anything to go by, containing as it does a wealth of (at times explosive) imagery. It focuses on two characters in particular -- Pauline Anstruther and Laurence Wentworth. The story centres on the production of a play by a poet called Peter Stanhope.

One of the actors, Pauline Anstruther, an intelligent, alert and rather bitter young woman, has been haunted from childhood by a doppelganger. This second self sometimes appears at a distance walking toward her, and then turns aside; it has appeared much more often in the past two years than ever before. She lives in an undertow of perpetual dread; she is terrified of the day she will meet her other self and “go mad or die.” The apparition has no discernible cause -- there is no terrifying event or series of events in childhood to which its development can be linked. The doppelganger cannot be identified as the psychic fallout of trauma; it is itself the trauma.

Peter Stanhope is the only person to whom Pauline fully confides her secret. Her grandmother, with whom she lives, has tried to find out what is troubling her, but Stanhope's friendship can presume further without damage to her privacy. On hearing her story he responds startlingly with an offer of the most apparently impossible kind of help. He suggests that someone else -- he himself, if she will consent to it - -“carry her fear.” With casual and self-deprecating logic he unfolds a method whereby the emotional burden of an experience can be assumed by a disinterested party, while the experience itself remains to be undergone.

“The thing itself you may one day meet--never mind that now, but you'll be free from all distress because that you can pass on to me” (p98).

He will imagine and fear Pauline's double, if she will relinquish the burden of the fear. For Stanhope, and for Williams, this “doctrine of substituted love” is based in Christianity -- in the substitutionary atonement and in Paul's injunction to “bear one another's burdens”.

The character of Wentworth in the story reveals how compulsive a fantasy life can become. Choosing to take to himself an insubstantial fantasy of the woman he desires, he becomes increasingly incoherent, and enclosed in himself -- finally falling into the hell of self, an abyss of non-being.

'Descent into Hell' is a tour-de-force.

(Source unknown)

Consistency of Vision

"Christopher was always much concerned with the consistency of the story and on one occasion ... interrupted: 'Last time, you said Bilbo's front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a golden tassel on this hood, but you've just said that Bilbo's front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin's hood was silver'; at which point Ronald exclaimed 'Damn the boy!' and strode across the room to make a note."

(The Tolkien Family Album, Priscilla and John Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992, p. 58.)

What exactly happened at the end of the First Age?

The Noldorin Elves had made war on Morgoth (referred to as “the Great Enemy” by Aragorn in 'A Knife in the Dark') to recover the three Silmarils, which he had stolen, and had been totally defeated. The Valar then used their full power against Morgoth. In the resulting cataclysm Beleriand, the land in which the tales of the The Silmarillion took place, was destroyed and sank under the Sea. There are thus various references to “lands under the waves”.

On the The Lord of the Rings map, Beleriand would have been far to the west, beyond the Blue Mountains (Ered Luin), which also appear at the far right of the The Silmarillion map. It is difficult to make an exact correlation because the mountain range was much altered, having been split when the Gulf of Lune created. Nogrod and Belegost, the ancient dwarf-cities, are located on the The Silmarillion map, and existed as ruins in the Third Age, but where they fall on the The Lord of the Rings map is not known. Lindon was definitely the same land as Ossiriand, where Beren and Luthien once dwelt.

(RR)

The Children of Húrin

The Children of Húrin (2007) is a forthcoming completion of a tale by J. R. R. Tolkien. Begun in 1918 and revised several times, the tale was never completed by Tolkien before his death. Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien, has now completed the tale for publication for the first time as an independent work.

The book is scheduled for publication on 17 April 2007, by HarperCollins in the United Kingdom and by Houghton Mifflin in the United States. Alan Lee, illustrator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings has created the jacket and the book will include colour paintings by him too.

The story deals with a hero of the First Age, Húrin, of the race of Men, who is cursed by the Dark Lord Morgoth, and the effect this curse has on his children Túrin Turambar and Nienor.

The Children of Húrin takes the reader back to a time long before The Lord of the Rings, in an area of Middle-earth that was to be drowned before ever Hobbits appeared, and when the great enemy was still the fallen Vala: Morgoth with Sauron only his lieutenant. This heroic romance is the tale of the Man, Húrin, who dared to defy Morgoth's force of evil, and his family's tragic destiny, as it follows his son Túrin Turambar's travails through the lost world of Beleriand.

Source: Wikipedia

The Lay of the Children of Húrin (excerpt)

With winding horns - winter hunted

in the weeping woods, - wild and ruthless;

sleet came slashing - and slanting hail

from glowering heaven - grey and sunless,

whistling whiplash - whirled by tempest.

The floods were freed, - and fallow waters

sweeping seaward, - swollen, angry,

filled with flotsam, - foaming, turbid,

passed in tumult. - The tempest died.

(JRRT)

The Only Sensible Thing

I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God's existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existant address. Mind you I don't think so--the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so. However, there is nothing to do but to peg away. One falls so often that it hardly seems worth while picking oneself up and going through the farce of starting over again as if you could ever hope to walk. Still, this seeming absurdity is the only sensible thing I do, so I must continue it.

~C.S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves, (24 December 1930)

Welcome back the Daily CS Lewis weblog... we missed you (click on the title above)

Spirits and Ghosts

Magdalen College
Oxford
Dec 11th 1952

Dear Mrs Sandeman

You were perfectly right to put in the bit about the friendly ghosts. I think the absence of fear is, as far as it goes, probable evidence that the experience was not merely imaginary. Everyone fears lest he should meet a ghost, but there seems to be some ground for supposing that those who really meet them are often quite unafraid. Notice that angels. on the other hand. seem in Scripture to be nearly always terrifying & have to begin by saying 'Fear not'.

In Ireland I stayed at a lonely bungalow last summer which the peasants avoided not because a ghost had been seen near it (they didn't mind ghosts) but because the Good People, the Faerie, frequented that bit of coast. So apparently ghosts are the least alarming kind of spirit.

With all good wishes.....

Yours sincerely,

C.S. Lewis

Collected Letters - Volume III

World of Books by A N Wilson

The way to hang on to a heroic past
It is strange to be reminded, by a recent geological history of Rome, that the volcanic catastrophes which created the seven eternal hills occurred between two million and 500,000 years ago. It reminds us of how recent were the arrival of Aeneas or the foundation of the city in 753 BC.

That there was an old world that has now passed away, a heroic world, snatches of which we hear only in half-comprehended song, is an ever-present awareness in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. He is the only modern writer of what might be termed fantasy-literature who conveys this sense – which we find in Virgil and is also present in the Beowulf poet — of a heroic past that is slipping out of memory.

As a Germanic philologist, he expounded the old Icelandic Eddaic verses that recount the doings and death, for example, of Atli or Attila the Hun: he died in 453, was celebrated in song for 500 years, and immortalised in Atlakvitha some time before the Viking settlement of Iceland in 985. Or those mythic beings, the dwarves, preserved in the Voluspa, a mythology of the North, perhaps written down in the 11th century, but keeping alive much older memories of, among others, "Veigr, Gandalfr, Vindalfr, Thrainn…" – that is, the Potion-elf and the Sprite-elf…

Tolkien soaked up all this stuff through his imaginative pores, just as he made it his pastime to learn the older languages of northern Europe — Irish, Welsh, Norse, Old English, Gothic. The fragmentary nature of these language survivals, especially Gothic, is itself something that, if meditated on intelligently, could only produce a Tolkienian world perspective. You feel all the time that something has been lost — it has been lost partly through the passage of time, partly through human malice and wickedness. Language and poetry alone keep its half-memory echoing.

In time, Tolkien came to invent languages and mythologies, and did so until middle age without forming the whole thing into an entire narrative of the earlier ages of the world; there were many stories and myths kept in desk drawers but no one big Aeneid. Then came The Hobbit, a very simple quest story that incorporates some of the Eddaic thoughts about elves and dwarves. Gandalf, the dwarfish name meaning Sprite-elf, turns up as a wizard. The lost ring that can make the little Hobbit invisible is little more than a magic talisman in this book. But in the figure of Beorn the Bee-man we find heroic echoes, both of Beowulf and of the northern berserks.

In The Lord of the Rings, however, composed largely during the Second World War, we find a narrative of immense seriousness. All the surviving civilisations, of Gondor the city of men, and of the more primitive, "heroic" kingdom of Theoden, with its Heorot-like mead-hall, as well as the worlds of those elves who still survive from an earlier age and of the dogged dwarves, is threatened by the need for the Dark Lord of Mordor to hold the Ring of Power that Bilbo Baggins had heedlessly purloined in the earlier story.

When the Wagner bug bit me, 10 to 15 years ago, I demoted Tolkien in my mind and felt that here was a neutered, ersatz Ring-cycle, devoid of all the things that make Wagner interesting — namely sex and religion. But although it is true that Tolkien does not write about the things that obsessed Richard Wagner, his myth is no less overwhelming.

Is it an allegory of the Second World War? Of course he denied it, for to read it in this way would be to invite all sorts of silly comparisons between the ring and the atomic bomb that do not really bear close analysis.

But Tolkien's experience of war obviously adds gravitas to his story. Just as his experience of soldiering in the trenches surely contributes to the Ringbearer and friends trudging on, cold and hungry, through dark and bad weather, so, too, the experience of the Second World War, in which the homely little race of Captain Mainwarings stood out alone in 1940 against the forces of darkness, surely quickens the appeal of Frodo and Sam Gamgee's remarkable quest.

But The Lord of the Rings itself, great work of art as it is, is devoid of its author's "personality". It is not pastiche; it is heroic literature in its own right, down to the end when, unable to find peace in his old home, Frodo takes off, a tragic parting of friends, to the Grey Havens.

London Daily Telegraph
5th February 2007

Comments to the original article in the ‘Telegraph’:
Surely Beorn was a "Bear Man", not a "Bee Man"

Posted by John Bell on February 5, 2007 4:21 PM

At last- a serious critique and understanding of Tolkien in the mainstream media. His collective work remains the greatest work of the human imagination of the 20th century- bar none. It may be recalled that he unsuccessfully advocated Philip Pullman's godless alternative as our nations's favourite in the recent "Big Read" jamboree. Pullman's overrated oeuvre is a weak response by the literary left to the seductive power of the Professor. The Lord of the Rings will still be as effective (and divisive) 100 years from now as it is today. And it will still win every popular literary competition going ....

Posted by David Platt on February 5, 2007 1:26 PM

Is this article an excerpt of something larger? I'm not quite sure what you are suggesting. I think I agree in that Tolkein's books are clearly inflected by his experiences in both wars, and also that his writing takes place in the gritty reality of a collapsing world, whose systems of belief and order are only half remembered, and whose epic stoneworks are are crumbling and anonymous. But I'm still left wondering if there was a concluding paragraph left off the bottom of this article.

Posted by Douglas Bulloch on February 5, 2007 12:07 PM

Another author in the same genre, who manages to capture a sense of history previous to the current events in his books, is Steven Erikson. His world is a more brutal one than Tolkien's but you are always aware of the vast sweeping past upon which the story is pinned. So much so that you sometimes feel as though you are reading a second set of books and may have missed an entire series of books that would have explained what has gone before.

Posted by Stevo on February 5, 2007 11:47 AM

Yes, good article. It's become trendy for the literary "intellectuals" to dismiss Tolkien, but in many ways he is a modern-day Homer - a story-teller who brought together legends in a digestible way for the masses.

Posted by F Wright on February 5, 2007 11:03 AM

Tolkien would bore the pants off anybody. Like 'A Brief History of Time' I doubt if few people have got beyond the first dozen pages. The films were awful. The message suspect.

Posted by swatantra nandanwar on February 5, 2007 10:01 AM

It has to be said also that the plot of the Lord of the Rings is far more convincing than that of Wagner's Ring (Siegfried falling in love with his aunt, etc.) Pace Brian Lewis, I don't see Aragorn as Jesus, any more than I see Dan Brown as a reincarnation of Mary Magdalene; Tolkien could write about good and evil without feeling it necessary to mention God, which is perhaps why the LOTR appeals to many who are not religious, in a way that C.S. Lewis's (also excellent but more explicit) Narnia books don't.

Posted by Glop on February 5, 2007 9:38 AM

I cannot be alone in being uninspired by the Hobbit / Lord of the Rings. My brother devoured them all but they left me cold. I assume the wheel has turned full circle in that I am today absorbed by Harry Potter which Rings afficionados will be quick to call lightweight and banal alongside the many supposed subtexts in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Posted by simon coulter on February 5, 2007 8:14 AM

It's a thoughtful piece, but not altogether accurate in saying that Tolkien is the only modern writer who achieves the effect described. The late David Gemmell, who tends to be seen predominantly as a hack-and-slash writer, wrote a number of novels evoking very much the same sort of nostalgia, such as his "Echoes of the Great Song". It's difficult for post-Tolkien fantasy writers to avoid the accusation that they are basically repeating Tolkien's formula, as the popular Terry Brooks seems to me to do, but Gemmell has a distinctive flavour of his own.

Posted by Nick Palmer MP on February 5, 2007 8:13 AM

'The Lord of the Rings' has been my inspiration for 40 years as it reflects the folk history of the English and other northern European peoples so marvellously well: Indeed now a wonderfe bible for expressing English independence if we suppose the elves (the Welsh) and the Scots (the Dwarfs) are abandoning us to fight 'Mordor' alone as they sail away to their own misty islands! I never did understand how Tolkien could be a devout Roman-Catholic, but perhaps he saw 'Aragorn' as a reflection of 'Jesus'. I see it far more likely that Tolkien was carried away by his imagination and position as a professor of Anglo-Saxon and forgot his Christian origins as he wrote.

Posted by Brian Lewis on February 5, 2007 2:31 AM

Thank you A.N. Wilson (and I never thought I would write a sentence like that)!
Posted by Roger Rowe on February 6, 2007 7:28 PM

Tolkien to his son Christopher [extract]

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"

Frodo on Gandalf

When evening in the Shire was grey
his footsteps on the Hill were heard;
before the dawn he went away
on journey long without a word.

From Wilderland to Western shore,
from northern waste to southern hill
through dragon-lair and hidden door
and darkling woods he walked at will.

With Dwarves and Hobbits, Elves and Men,
with mortal and immortal folk,
with bird on bough and beast in den,
in their own secret tongues he spoke.

A deadly sword, a healing hand,
a back that bent beneath its load;
a trumpet-voice, a burning brand,
a weary pilgrim on the road.

A lord of wisdom throned he sat,
swift in anger, quick to laugh;
an old man in a battered hat
who leaned upon a thorny staff.

He stood upon the bridge alone
and Fire and Shadow both defied;
his staff was broken on the stone,
in Khazad-dûm his wisdom died.

Samwise:
The finest rockets ever seen:
they burst in stars of blue and green,
or after thunder golden showers
came falling like a rain of flowers.

Notes on Old English

Neville Coghill habitually took notes at lectures and minutes of meetings in Chaucerian English, just a small sample will suffice from 1923, never mind the context!

“Sir Lewis was ther; a good philosópher
He hadde a noblé paper for to offer.
Well couthe he speken in the Greeké tongue;
And yet, his countenance was swythé yong.”

All My Road Before Me, Page 192

What do the Inklings have to teach us in 2007?

"Above all, and by example, it is the strength and beneficent power of the human spirit. Here we have... very different men, each with his own vision, and finding expression for it in very different ways. And yet there is a secret and subtle accord that unites them, not only in their personal friendship, but in all the interplay of circumstances that brought them together, and sparked recognition between them...”

Gareth Knight: “The Magical World of the Inklings”, Postscript.

Saruman or Stalin ?

Interesting piece on the Bioethics.net blog referring to Stalin's plan to create half-human/half-chimpanzee warriors:

"A secret plan to create hordes of half-man half-ape super-warriors to conquer the rest of world has been uncovered in Moscow. If successful, the plan would have seen humans and chimpanzees cross-breeding to create a new race of "living war machines", which ignored pain and fear and which thrived on hardship. It didn't work with the technology available to Stalin, but with the expanding knowledge of cellular mechanics and etc, one might pause to ponder the future. Makes half-orcian Uruk-Hai look plausible."

Does life imitate art, or art, life, one wonders?

Perelandra

Over his head there hung from a hairy tube-like branch a great spherical object, almost transparent, and shining. It held an area of reflected light in it and at one place a suggestion of rainbow coloring. So this was the explanation of the glass-like appearance in the wood. And looking round he perceived innumerable shimmering globes of the same kind in every direction. He began to examine the nearest one attentively. At first he thought it was moving, then he thought it was not. Moved by a natural impulse he put out his hand to touch it. Immediately his head, face, and shoulders were drenched with what seemed (in that warm world) an ice-cold shower bath, and his nostrils filled with a sharp, shrill, exquisite scent that somehow brought to his mind the verse in Pope, "die of a rose in aromatic pain." Such was the refreshment that he seemed to himself to have been, till now, but half awake. When he opened his eyes--which had closed involuntarily at the shock of moisture--all the colours about him seemed richer and the dimness of that world seemed clarified. A re-enchantment fell upon him. The golden beast at his side seemed no longer either a danger or a nuisance. If a naked man and a wise dragon were indeed the sole inhabitants of this floating paradise, then this also was fitting, for at that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth. To be the figure that he was in this unearthly pattern appeared sufficient.

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter 4 (1944)

Jack's C.B.E.

Shortly after the election of the new Conservative Government in 1951, Jack received a letter from the Prime Minister's (Winston Churchill) Secretary offering to recomment him for a C.B.E in the New Year Honour's List of 1952. Here is Jack's reply:

14 December 1951

I feel greatly obliged to the Prime Minister, and so far as my personal feelings are concerned this honour would be highly agreeable. There are always however knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftish propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours list would of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there. I am sure the Prime Minister will understand my reason, and that my gratitude is and will be none the less cordial.

Collected Letters - Volume III

Is Tolkien Actually Any Good?

The dwarves who turn up on Bilbo's doorstep are, to us as well as to him, reassuringly familiar: they have beards and silly names and mine jewels, and there is just a moment where we half expect them to start singing 'Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go.' But Tolkien immediately knocks us off balance: these aren't fairy tale dwarves, but real dwarves; uncouth and dangerous. It's more like having your house taken over by New Age Travellers than being visited by pixies or flower fairies. There is a bad tradition of post-Dungeons & Dragons fantasy which leaves it there and says 'Well then: Dwarves are perfectly mundane; simply an ethnic group.' Tolkien, on the other hand, pulls the rug away a second time: while we and Bilbo are pre-occupied with the banal (is there enough seed-cake to go round?), he hits us in the face with un-diluted Wagner:

'The dwarves of yore made mighty spells
As hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep where dark things sleep
In hollow halls beneath the fells.'

(...) Having come to grips with Tolkien's slow pace, we now have to come to grips with his unbelievably dense structure. As a teenager, I am fairly sure that I did not tolerate this; I skipped, or read passively, waiting for a 'good bit'. At the beginning of book two, all the characters get together in a council chamber to have a jolly good exposit. Some of what we hear is stirring stuff--legendary narratives about great battles and Isildur cutting the ring from Sauron's finger as a 'weregild' for his father. But we also get this sort of thing:

In the South the realm of Gondor long endured, and for a while its splendour grew, recalling somewhat of the might of Numenor, ere it fell.…Their chief city was Osgilliath, Citadel of the Stars, through the midst of which the River flowed. And Minas Ithil they built, Tower of the Rising Moon, eastward upon a shoulder of the Mountains of Shadow, and westward at the feet of the White Mountains Minas Arnor they made, tower of the Setting Sun….And in time evil thing came forth and they took Minas Ithil and abode in it, and they made it into a place of dread, and it is called Minas Morgul, the Tower of Sorcery, then Minas Anor was named anew Minis Tirith, the tower of guard.'

If this were only a piece of evocative scene setting, vaguely archaic words rolling gently through the air to create a sense of history, it would be a nice enough piece of writing. Only a professor of philology could have come up with a name as beautiful as 'Osgilliath'. But Tolkien means it. If he refers to Minas Arnor again, you are expected to jolly well remember that it is the same place as Minas Tirith.

What's more, he does it all the time. I wonder if he knows he's doing it, or if he simply forgets that you-the-reader have just bought volume one and therefore can't look things up in the appendices even if you want to. So, Gondor 'recalls the glory of Numenor ere it fell', does it? And what would that glory be? Gandalf has begun his narrative by speaking of Numenor, 'its glory and its fall'; a hundred pages earlier, Aragorn has narrated a story concluding 'And of Earendel came the kings of Numenor' but that is all we have to go on. Several times in the book, the elves recite a poem beginning 'A Elbereth! Githoniel!'. In Mordor, Sam pretty much uses the couplet as a cross to repel a vampire, or in this case a spider. Frodo expresses surprise that the first set of elves he meets 'spoke the name of Elbereth'. Who is Elbereth? According to the Simarillion she is one of the Valar, the demi-goddess of the stars, with special executive responsibility for elves. I suppose the fact that the elves say things like 'May Elbereth protect you' might clue us in. But we aren't told explicitly.

For the whole article, click on the title above.

Only a dog?

Dear Mary,

It's no good giving you an address for I am moving about. Your letter of Aug 12th reached me today. I am delighted to hear about the job. It sounds exactly the thing, sent by God, at your most need.

I will never laugh at anyone for grieving over a loved beast. I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love creatures (even animals) less. We love everything in one way too much (i.e. at the expense of our love for Him) but in another way we love everything too little. No person, animal, flower, or even pebble, has ever been loved too much - i.e. more than every one of God's works deserves. But you need not feel "like a murderer". Rather rejoice that God's law allows you to extend to Fanda that last mercy which (no doubt, quite rightly) we are forbidden to extend to suffering humans.

C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady, Letter of August 18, 1956

The Tryst of the Worlds

He was praying passionately: "Make me believe; make me believe." The choice was first in her; Omnipotence waited her decision.

She knew what she must do. But she felt, as she stood, that shecould no more do it than he. She could never bear that fear. The knowledge of being burnt alive, of the flames, of the faces, of the prolongation of pain. She knew what she must do. She opened her mouth and could not speak. In front of her, alone in his foul Marian prison, unaware of the secret means the Lord he worshipped was working swiftly for his peace, believing and unbelieving, her ancestor stood centuries off in his spiritual desolation and preluding agony of sweat. He could not see beyond the years the child of his house who strove with herself behind and before him. The morning was coming; his heart was drained. Another spasm shook him; even now he might recant. Pauline could not see the prison, but she saw him. She tried to choose and to speak.

Behind her, her own voice said: "Give it to me, John Struther." He heard it, in his cell and chains, as the first dawn of the day of his martyrdom broke beyond the prison. It spoke and sprang in his drained heart; and drove the riotous blood again through his veins: "Give it to me, give it to me, John Struther." He stretched out his arms again: he called: "Lord, Lord!" It was a devotion and an adoration; it accepted and thanked. Pauline heard it, trembling, for she knew what stood behind her and spoke. It said again: "Give". He fell on his knees, and in a great roar of triumph he called out: "I have seen the salvation of my God."

Pauline sighed deeply with her joy. This then, after so long, was their meeting and their reconciliation: their perfect reconciliation, for this other had done what she had desired, and yet not the other, but she, for it was she who had all her life carried a fear which was not her fear but another's, until in the end it had become for her in turn not hers but another's. Her heart was warm, as if the very fire her ancestor had feared was a comfort to her now. The voice behind her sang, repeating the voice in front, "I have seen the salvation of my God."

Charles Williams - Descent into Hell (Chapter 9)