from "The Geste of Beren and Lúthien"

(Fëanor - Source: ar-feiniel)

Book VI.
When Morgoth in that day of doom
had slain the Trees and filled with gloom
the shining land of Valinor,
there Fëanor and his sons then swore
the mighty oath upon the hill
of tower-crownéd Tûn, that still
wrought wars and sorrow in the world.
From darkling seas the fogs unfurled*
their blinding shadows grey and cold
where Glingal once had bloomed with gold
And Bethil bore its silver flowers.
The mists were mantled round th towers
of the Elves' white city by the sea.
There countless torches fitfully
did start and twinkle, as the Gnomes
were gathered to their fading homes,
and thronged the long and winding stair
that led to the wide echoing square.

J.R.R. Tolkien
(lines 1,584 to 1,601)
More next time...

The Approach to English

We were soon acquainted, for we were in the same situation; each was in the position of having no more than a year in which to read the English School, for had we taken two we would have been overstanding for Honours. I had read the History School before, and he Honour Classical Mods and Greats. Apart from this similarity of situation, we shared the good fortune of having F. P. Wilson for our tutor in English literature, arid all that year we lived at the rate of eight or ten working hours a day pressing forward under his unerring guidance, over the terra incognita (as it virtually was for us) of English poetry and prose. It was a continuous intoxication of discovery: to almost every week came its amazement. I remember particularly our excitement on first reading the poems of John Donne, who was just beginning, in those early years, to be known again after two centuries of contemptuous neglect. We were uninhibitedly happy in our work and felt supported by an endless energy.

There was no reason why we should not have been happy; we had both just emerged safely from a war which (we then believed) had ended war for ever. We had survived the trenches, the nightmare was over, we were at Oxford, we were in our early twenties. The old order seemed not only restored but renewed; life and art lay before us for exploration and the interchange of ideas, and we seemed to be experiencing what happened to Odin and his fellow-gods when they returned after their long twilight; finding their golden chessmen where they had left them in the grass, they sat down and went on with the game.

We saw clearly what lay before us, a life of reading and teaching, perhaps of writing — for, as we confessed to each other very soon, we both hoped to be poets, or at least writers. It was not until six or seven years later that Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet'. In those early days however nothing seemed impossible as we fed our imaginations on all the best that had been written in our language; for it wonderfully illuminated, for both of us, the other subjects we had been studying up till then. In my case, all the history I had so painfully and uncomprehendingly imbibed for three years and more in the History School became suddenly intelligible to me in terms of its poetry. I had, for instance, taken the reign of Richard II as my special subject; but none of my history tutors had thought of suggesting anything so obvious as that I should read some Chaucer or Langland. I presume they took it for granted that I knew them already; so they were never mentioned, and I, in my ignorance, was virtually unaware of them. But now, while all that the chronicles and other sources had told me of the reign of Richard was still fresh in my head, the poetry of The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman suddenly added a new dimension to history for me: and these poems, of course, were no less vivified in their turn by what I knew of the fourteenth century.

Nevill Coghill

“Light on C.S. Lewis” (1965)

"I am affable, but unsociable"

[On 5 June 1955 in the New York Times Book Review, the columnist Harvey Breit devoted part of his weekly article 'In and Out of Books' to an account of Tolkien and his writings.  It included this passage: 'What, we asked Dr [sic] Tolkien, makes you tick?  Dr T., who teaches at Oxford when he isn't writing novels, has this brisk reply:

"I don't tick.  I am not a machine.  (If I did tick, I should have no views on it, and you had better ask the winder.)  My work did not 'evolve' into a serious work.  It started like that.  The so-called 'children's story' [The Hobbit] was a fragment, torn out of an already existing mythology.  In so far as it was dressed up as 'for children', in style or manner, I regret it.  So do the children.  I am a philologist, and all my work is philological.  I avoid hobbies because I am a very serious person and cannot distinguish between private amusement and duty.  I am affable, but unsociable.  I only work for private amusement, since I find my duties privately amusing." '

These remarks were apparently taken from a letter written by Tolkien in answer to enquiries by a representative of the New York Times.  On 30 June 1955, Tolkien wrote to the Houghton Mifflin Co., his American publishers: 'Please do not blame me for what Breit made of my letter!....  The original made sense: not a quality, however, of which Harvey B.  seems perceptive.  I was asked a series of questions, with a request to answer briefly, brightly, and quotably.  ....  Out of sheer pity [for another enquirer wanting information] ....  I do enclose a few notes on points other than mere facts of my "curriculum vitae" (which can be got from reference books).' What follows is these 'few notes'.  The text is taken from a typescript apparently made by the Houghton Mifflin Co. from Tolkien's original; this typescript was sent to a number of enquirers at different times, some of whom quoted from it in articles about Tolkien.  Tolkien himself was given a copy of the typescript, and he made a number of annotations and corrections to it, which are incorporated into the text which is here printed.]

My name is TOLKIEN (not -kein).  It is a German name (from Saxony), an anglicization of Tollkiehn, i.e. tollkühn.  But, except as a guide to spelling, this fact is as fallacious as all facts in the raw.  For I am neither 'foolhardy' nor German, whatever some remote ancestors may have been.  They migrated to England more than 200 years ago, and became quickly intensely English (not British), though remaining musical – a talent that unfortunately did not descend to me.

I am in fact far more of a Suffield (a family deriving from Evesham in Worcestershire), and it is to my mother who taught me (until I obtained a scholarship at the ancient Grammar School in Birmingham) that I owe my tastes for philology, especially of Germanic languages, and for romance.  I am indeed in English terms a West-midiander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches; and it is, I believe, as much due to descent as to opportunity that Anglo-Saxon and Western Middle English and alliterative verse have been both a childhood attraction and my main professional sphere.  (I also find the Welsh language specially attractive.  I write alliterative verse with pleasure, though I have published little beyond the fragments in The Lord of the Rings, except 'The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth' (in Essays and Studies of the English Association, 1953, London, John Murray) recently twice broadcast by the BBC: a dramatic dialogue on the nature of the 'heroic' and the 'chivalrous'.  I still hope to finish a long poem on The Fall of Arthur in the same measure.

All the same, I was born in Bloemfontein, Orange River Free State – another fallacious fact (though my earliest memories are of a hot country) since I was shipped home in 1895, and have spent most of 60 years since in Birmingham and Oxford, except for 5 or 6 years in Leeds: my first post after the 1914-18 War was in the university there.  I am very untravelled, though I know Wales, and have often been in Scotland (never north of the Tay), and know something of France, Belgium, and Ireland.  I have spent a good deal of time in Ireland, and am since last July actually a D. Litt. of University College Dublin; but be it noted I first set foot in 'Eire' in 1949 after The Lord of the Rings was finished, and find both Gaelic and the air of Ireland wholly alien – though the latter (not the language) is attractive.

I might add that in October I received a degree (Doct. en Lettres et Phil.) at Liège (Belgium) – if only to record the fact that it astonished me to be welcomed in French as 'le createur de M. Bilbo Baggins' and still more to be told in explanation of applause that I was a 'set book' ??????  Alas!

If I might elucidate what H. Breit has left of my letter: the remark about 'philology' was intended to allude to what is I think a primary 'fact' about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration.  The authorities of the university might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances, and call it a 'hobby', pardonable because it has been (surprisingly to me as much as to anyone) successful.  But it is not a 'hobby', in the sense of something quite different from one's work, taken up as a relief-outlet.  The invention of languages is the foundation.  The 'stones' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.  To me a name comes first and the story follows.  I should have preferred to write in 'Elvish'.  But, of course, such a work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and only as much 'language' has been left in as I thought would be stomached by readers.  (I now find that many would have liked more.) But there is a great deal of linguistic matter (other than actually 'elvish' names and words) included or mythologically expressed in the book.  It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in 'linguistic aesthetic', as I sometimes say to people who ask me 'what is it all about?'

It is not 'about' anything but itself.  Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular, or topical, moral, religious, or political.  The only criticism that annoyed me was one that it 'contained no religion' (and 'no Women', but that does not matter, and is not true anyway).  It is a monotheistic world of 'natural theology'.  The odd fact that there are no churches, temples, or religious rites and ceremonies, is simply part of the historical climate depicted.  It will be sufficiently explained, if (as now seems likely) the Silmarillion and other legends of the First and Second Ages are published.  I am in any case myself a Christian; but the 'Third Age' was not a Christian world.

'Middle-earth', by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in (like the Mercury of Eddison).  It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men 'between the seas'.  And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this 'history' is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.

There are of course certain things and themes that move me specially.  The inter-relations between the 'noble' and the 'simple' (or common, vulgar) for instance.  The ennoblement of the ignoble I find specially moving.  I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.

I think the so-called 'fairy story' one of the highest forms of literature, and quite erroneously associated with children (as such).  But my views on that I set out in a lecture delivered at St Andrew's (on the Andrew Lang foundation, eventually published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams by Oxford University Press, as 'On Fairy Stories').  I think it is quite an important work, at least for anyone who thinks me worth considering at all; but the O.U.P.  have infuriatingly let it go out of print, though it is now in demand – and my only copy has been stolen.  Still it might be found in a library, or I might get hold of a copy.

If all this is obscure, wordy, and self-regarding and neither 'bright, brief, nor quotable' forgive me.  Is there anything else you would like me to say?

Yours sincerely,

J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien.

P.S.  The book is not of course a 'trilogy'.  That and the titles of the volumes was a fudge thought necessary for publication, owing to length and cost.  There is no real division into 3, nor is any one pan intelligible alone.  The story was conceived and written as a whole and the only natural divisions are the 'books' I-VI (which originally had titles).

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
#165 to the Houghton Mifflin Co

from "The Ephiphany"

The Child upon Our Lady's lap
The kings bowed down before :
To see this wonder, by good hap,
The slaves thronged at the door.

The first king fell upon his face :
' O Child, a sign behold ;
The princes of the Gentile race
Offer a gift of gold.'
Our Lady shuddered in her place,
For riches men are sold.

' I wot that when thou goest up
Unto thy throne of might,
'Tis I shall bear the golden cup,
And come into thy sight.'

Humbly the second king kneeled down.
' O Child, thy dignity
Behold, in frankincense foreshown,
Take thou this gift from me.'
Our Lady covered with her gown
Her eyes from perjury.

I wot that when with offering
Thou seest thy Father's face,
'Tis I that shall the censer swing
In that most holy place.'

The third stood forth and bowed his head.
' I bring a gift of myrrh.'
Our Lady crossed herself for dread
When he looked down on her.
' I bring a gift, O Child,' he said,
' Meet for thy sepulchre.

' I wot that when thy lips are dumb
And men defile thy head,
'Tis I shall wait thee till thou come
To be among the dead.

' When thou art neither king nor priest,
Thou shalt be friend to me,
When thou of all slain men art least,
' Tis I shall neighbour thee.

Charles Williams
Poems of Conformity

Democratic Education...

There is something about this endless examining, quite apart from the labour, which bothers me.  It sets me wondering about the whole system under which you, as well as we, now live.  Behind all these closely written sheets which I have to read every year, even behind the worst of them, lie hours of hard, long work.  Even the bad candidates are doing their best and have been trained up to this ever since they went to school.  And naturally enough: for in the Democracies now, as formerly in China under the mandarin system, success in competitive examinations is the only moyen de parvenir*, the road from elementary school to the better schools, and thence to college, and thence to the professions. (You still have a flourishing alternative route to desirable jobs through business which is largely disappearing with us: but it is at least equally competitive).

This of course is what Democratic education means - give them all an equal start and let the winners show their form.  Hence Equality of Opportunity in practice means ruthless competition during those very years which, I can't help feeling, nature meant to be free and frolicsome.  Can it be good, from the age of 10 to the age of 23, to be always preparing for an exam, and always knowing that your whole worldly future depends on it: and not only knowing it, but perpetually reminded of it by your parents and masters?  Is this the way to breed a nation of people in psychological, moral, and spiritual health?  (N.B. boys are now taught to regard Ambition as a virtue.  I think we shall find that up to the XVIIIth Century, and back into Pagan times, all moralists regarded it as a vice and dealt with it accordingly).

*way to arrive

C.S. Lewis

Letter to Warfield M. Firor Dec 3 1950

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume III (2007)

Jack, by Tollers

[A comment on an article about C. S. Lewis by one of his former pupils, George Bailey, in The Reporter, 23 April 1964.]

30 August 1964

C.S.L. of course had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. He was after all and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect; he was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy (as in the case of T. S. Eliot) is a grotesque calumny. After all it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself.

Well of course I could say more, but I must draw the line. Still I wish it could be forbidden that after a great man is dead, little men should scribble over him, who have not and must know they have not sufficient knowledge of his life and character to give them any key to the truth. Lewis was not 'cut to the quick' by his defeat in the election to the professorship of poetry: he knew quite well the cause. I remember that we had assembled soon after in our accustomed tavern and found C.S.L. sitting there, looking (and since he was no actor at all probably feeling) much at ease. 'Fill up!' he said, 'and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset.' And he did not 'readily accept' the chair in Cambridge. It was advertised, and he did not apply. Cambridge of course wanted him, but it took a lot of diplomacy before they got him. His friends thought it would be good for him: he was mortally tired, after nearly 30 years, of the Baileys of this world and even of the Duttons. It proved a good move, and until his health began too soon to fail it gave him a great deal of happiness.

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

#261 From a letter to Anne Barrett, Houghton Mifflin Co.

Some Answers...

Dear Meredith,

1. Why did I become a writer? Chiefly, I think, because my clumsiness or fingers prevented me from making things in any other way. See my Surprised by Joy, chapter I.

2. What inspires my books? Really I don't know. Does anyone know where exactly an idea comes from? With me all fiction begins with pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn't say.

3. Which of my books do I think most "representational"? Do you mean (a.) Most representative, most typical, most characteristic? or (b.) Most full of "representations" i.e. images. But whichever you mean, surely this is a question not for me but for my readers to decide. Or do you mean simply which do I like best? Now the answer would be Till We Have Faces and Perelandra.

4. I have, as usual, dozens of "plans" for books, but I don't know which, if any, of these will come off. Very often a book of mine gets written when I'm tidying a drawer and come across notes for a plan rejected by me years ago and now suddenly realize I can do it after all. This, you see, makes predictions rather difficult!

5. I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

Good luck with your "project."

yours sincerely,
C.S. Lewis

Letters to Children (1985), letter of 6 December, 1960

Monday 25 December (1922)

We were awakened early by my father to go to the Communion Service. It was a dark morning with a gale blowing and some very cold rain. We tumbled out and got under weigh. As we walked down to church we started discussing the time of sunrise; my father saying rather absurdly that it must have risen already, or else it wouldn't be light.

In church it was intensely cold. W offered to keep his coat on. My father expostulated and said "Well at least you won't keep it on when you go up to the Table." W asked why not and was told it was "most disrespectful". I couldn't help wondering why. But W took it off to save trouble. I then remembered that D was probably turning out this morning for Maureen's first communion, and this somehow emphasised the dreariness of this most UNcomfortable sacrament. We saw Gundrede, Kelsie and Lily. W also says he saw our cousin Joey...

We got back and had breakfast. Another day set in exactly similar to yesterday. My father amused us by saying in a tone, almost of alarm, "Hello, it's stopped raining. We ought to go out," and then adding with undisguised relief "Ah, no. It's still raining: we needn't." Christmas dinner, a rather deplorable ceremony, at quarter to four. Afterwards it had definitely cleared up: my father said he was too tired to go out, not having slept the night before, but encouraged W and me to do so - which we did with great eagerness and set out to reach Holywood by the high road and there have a drink. It was delightful to be in the open air after so many hours confinement in one room.

Fate however denied our drink: for we were met just outside Holywood by the Hamilton's car and of course had to travel back with them. Uncle Gussie drove back along the narrow winding road in' a reckless and bullying way that alarmed W and me, We soon arrived back at Leeborough and listened to Uncle Gussie smoking my father in his usual crude but effective way, telling him that he should get legal advice on some point. The Hamiltons did not stay very long.

Afterwards I read Empedocles an Etna wh. I read long ago and did not understand. I now recognised Empedocles' first lyric speech to Pausanias as a very full expression of what I almost begin to call my own philosophy. In the evening W played the gramophone. Early to bed, dead tired with talk and lack of ventilation. I found my mind was cumbling into the state which this place always produces: I have gone back six years to be flabby, sensual and unambitious. Headache again.

C.S. Lewis

All My Road Before Me

from "The Greater Trumps"

She took a step forward, and her heart beat fast and high as she seemed to move into the clouded golden mist that received her, and fantastically enlarged and changed the appearance of her hands and the cards within them.  She took another step, and the Tarots quivered in her hold, and through the mist she saw but dimly the stately movement of the everlasting measure trodden out before her, but the images were themselves enlarged and heightened, and she was not very sure of what nature they were.  But nothing could daunt the daring in which she went; she took a third step, and Henry's voice cried to her suddenly, "Stop there and wait for the cards."

She half-turned her head towards him at the words, but he was too far behind for her to see him.  Only, still looking through that floating and distorting veil of light, she did see a figure, and knew it for Aaron's: yet it was more like one of the Tarots - it was the Knight of Sceptres.  The old man's walking-stick was the raised sceptre; the old face was young again, and yet the same.  The skull-cap was a heavy medieval head-dress - but as the figure loomed it moved also, and the mist swirled and hid it.  The cards shook in her hands; she looked back at them, and suddenly one of them floated right out into the air and slowly sank towards the floor; another issued, and then another, and so they followed in a gentle persistent rain.  She did not try to retain them; could she have tried she knew she could not succeed.  The figures before her appeared and disappeared, and as each one showed, so in spiral convolution some card of those she still held slipped out and wheeled round and round and fell from her sight into the ever-swirling mist.

Chapter 5 "The Image that did not move"

Charles Williams

My heart and mind is in the Silmarillion...

[Image : 76 Sandfield Road, Oxford]

My heart and mind is in the Silmarillion, but I have not had much time for it. ....

It may amuse you to hear that (unsolicited) I suddenly found myself the winner of the International Fantasy Award, presented (as it says) 'as a fitting climax to the Fifteenth World Science Fiction Convention'. What it boiled down to was a lunch at the Criterion yesterday with speeches, and the handing over of an absurd 'trophy'. A massive metal 'model' of an upended Space-rocket (combined with a Ronson lighter). But the speeches were far more intelligent, especially that of the introducer: Clémence Dane, a massive woman of almost Sitwellian presence. Sir Stanley himself was present. Not having any immediate use for the trophy (save publicity=sales=cash) I deposited it in the window of 40 Museum Street. A back-wash from the Convention was a visit from an American film-agent (one of the adjudicating panel) who drove out all the way in a taxi from London to see me last week, filling 76 S[andfield] with strange men and stranger women -1 thought the taxi would never stop disgorging. But this Mr Ackerman brought some really astonishingly good pictures (Rackham rather than Disney) and some remarkable colour photographs. They have apparently toured America shooting mountain and desert scenes that seem to fit the story. The Story Line or Scenario was, however, on a lower level. In fact bad. But it looks as if business might be done. Stanley U. &: I have agreed on our policy : Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author's veto on objectionable features or alterations.

J.R.R. Tolkien

From a letter to Christopher and Faith Tolkien

11 September 1957

Look for Truth first

Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.

It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power - it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God...

I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it beings in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.

C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity (1943)

Before Morgoth's Throne

Beren and Lúthien before Morgoth's Throne in Angband. The battle in song before the throne, from the most important (IMHO of course) of all of Tolkien's works, and the composition that he returned to the most. Why do I say this? On his grave in Wolvercote Cemetery, as well as the details of J.R.R.T. and his wife Edith, are two words, "Beren and Lúthien".

In his eyes the fire to flame was fanned,
and forth he stretched his brazen hand.
Lúthien as shadow shrank aside.
'Not thus, O king! Not thus!' she cried,
'do great lords hark to humble boon!
For ever minstrel hath his tune;
and some are strong and some are soft,
and each would bear his song aloft,
and each a little while be heard,
though rude the note, and light the word.
But Lúthien hath cunning arts
for solace sweet of kingly hearts.
Now hearken!' And her wings she caught
then deftly up, and swift as thought
slipped from his grasp, and wheeling round,
fluttering, before his eyes, she wound
a mazy-wingéd dance, and sped
about his iron-crownéd head.
Suddenly her song began anew;
and soft came dropping like a dew
down from on high in that domed hall
her voice bewildering, magical,
and grew to silver-murmuring streams
pale falling in dark pools in dreams.

She let her flying raiment sweep,
enmeshed with woven spells of sleep,
as round the dark void she ranged and reeled.
From wall to wall she turned and wheeled
in dance such as never Elf nor fay
before devised, nor since that day;
than swallow swifter, than flittermouse
in dying light round darkened house
more silken-soft, more strange and fair
than slyphine maidens of the Air
whose wings in Varda's heavenly hall
in rhythmic movement heat and fall.
Down crumpled Orc, and Balrog proud;
all eyes were quenched, all heads were bowed;
the fires of heart and maw were stilled,
and ever like a bird she thrilled
above a lightless world forlorn
in ecstasy enchanted borne.
All eyes were quenched, save those that glared
in Morgoth's lowering brows, and stared
in slowly wandering wonder round,
and slow were in enchantment bound.
Their will wavered, and their fire failed,
and as beneath his brows they paled
the Silmarils like stars were kindled
that in the reek of Earth had dwindled
escaping upwards clear to shine,
glistening marvellous in heaven's mine.

Then flaring suddenly they fell,
down, down upon the floors of hell.
The dark and mighty head was bowed;
like mountain-top beneath a cloud
the shoulders foundered, the vast form
crashed, as in overwhelming storm
huge cliffs in ruin slide and fall;
and prone lay Morgoth in his hall.
His crown there rolled upon the ground,
a wheel of thunder; then all sound
died, and a silence grew as deep
as were the heart of Earth asleep.
Beneath the vast and empty throne
the adders lay like twisted stone,
the wolves like corpses foul were strewn;
and there lay Beren deep in swoon:
no thought, no dream nor shadow blind
moved in the darkness of his mind.
'Come forth, come forth! The hour hath knelled,
and Angband's mighty lord is felled!

J.R.R. Tolkien
The Geste of Beren and Lúthien
(Lines 4,044 to 4,115)

On Writing...

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)

from "The Ascent of the Spear"

Taliessin walked in the palace yard;
he saw, under a guard, a girl sit in the stocks.
The stable-slaves, lounging by the gate,
cried catcalls and mocks, flung roots and skins of fruits.
She, rigid on the hard bench, disdained
motion, her cheek stained with a bruise, veined
with fury her forehead. The guard laughed and chaffed;
when Taliessin stepped near, he leapt to a rigid salute.
Lightly the king's poet halted, took the spear
from the manned hand, and with easy eyes dismissed.
Nor wist the crowd, he gone, what to do;
lifted arms fell askew; jaws gaped;
claws of fingers uncurled. They gazed,
amazed at the world of each inflexible head.

The silence loosened to speech; the king's poet said:
'Do I come as a fool? forgive folly; once more
be kind, be faithful: did we not together adore?
Say then what trick of temper or fate?' Hard-voiced,
she said without glancing, I sit here for taking a stick
to a sneering bastard slut, a Mongol ape,
that mouthed me in a wrangle.
Fortunate, for a brawl in the hall, to escape,
they dare tell me, the post, the stripping and whipping:
should I care, if the hazel rods cut flesh from bone?'

Charles Williams
Taliessin through Logres (1938)

Siamese cats...

[A Cambridge cat breeder had asked if she could register a litter of Siamese kittens under names taken from The Lord of the Rings.]

My only comment is that of Puck upon mortals.  I fear that to me Siamese cats belong to the fauna of Mordor, but you need not tell the cat breeder that.

J.R.R. Tolkien
From a letter to Allen & Unwin
14 October 1959

The first talk

The first talk in What Christians Believe dealt with alternative belief systems, with atheism and with pantheism. This was broadcast on 11 January 1942. When eventually published in the collected talks, better known as Mere Christianity, this first script was entitled The Rival Conceptions of God.

Lewis begins by telling the listener one thing that Christians do not have to believe. They don't have to believe that all other religions are entirely wrong. All can contain 'a hint of truth'. Atheists, on the other hand, have to believe that every religion has at its heart a massive mistake. Drawing on his own experience as someone who moved from atheism to theism and then to Christian conviction, Lewis admits that as a Christian he can be more liberal towards other religions than he could as an atheist. Although Christians maintain that what they believe is right and others are wrong, they can acknowledge that some answers, even wrong ones, can be closer to the right one than others. That's why those who believe in God are in a majority - atheism is harder than belief. And Lewis goes on to say that the one argument that most convinced him is the ability to think. If there is no creative intelligence behind the universe then his brain was not designed for thinking. If this was just a cosmic accident, he argues, using a brilliant illustration, 'it's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way the splash arranges itself will give you a map of London'. How can one trust one's own thinking to be true?, he ponders. Lewis concludes: 'Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.'

Justin Phillips
C.S. Lewis at the BBC

Gil-Galad

Bill Nighy singing my very favourite song from the 1980s. Written by J.R.R. Tolkien, I learned this at the time and have sung it many times as my 'party piece'. And now it turns up on You Tube. YES... THAT BILL NIGHY.

The tapes/CDs are really worth seeking out. Priceless... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngm9B9pYgy0 or click on the title above.

Tolkien on his critics in 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 Roben 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.

Letter to Rayner Unwin

8 December 1955

J.R.R. Tolkien

A tame sort of God?

One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

C.S. Lewis
‘Mere Christianity’

Clarity or Obscurity?

The pattern of divided knowledge can be traced in criticisms of Charles Williams' writings. C.S. Lewis, himself a model of clarity, 'pitched into' Williams for all he was worth for his “obscurity”. Some think he writes ‘purple prose’, others that he writes a kind of shorthand. For some his style is too highly coloured, and some can't make head or tail of him! One couple to whom, with greater enthusiasm than judgement, I lent War in Heaven, returned it half-read with barely suppressed shudders, murmuring misgivings over his - and probably my! - preoccupation with the occult.

At our meeting in February 1986, Dr Rowan Williams described certain excerpts from The Descent of the Dove as 'purple passages’ and some of C.W.'s writings as self-indulgent. Charles Williams, interestingly enough, makes a similar observation of St Paul: “There must have been many of the churches he founded who were so illiterate as not to have heard of his best purple passages.” It seems Williams is in good company; and purple is, of course, a royal colour. Hugo Epson's exclamation: ‘clotted glory from Charles!’ will find an echo in many of C.W.'s readers. There is certainly lots of glory. Sometimes he seems almost too highly coloured - and charged! - for us to swallow. Eternity and eternal truths are so richly described, almost laid on with a trowel , that the effect can be akin to being faced with a rich and creamy dessert after a full and satisfying first course. Like the man who, having begged God for a revelation, got what he asked for, one wants to cry; ‘0 enough! enough! I can't bear any more!' There is just so much of the beatific vision mortal man can bear, and live, even when despite its brilliance, it is a veiled splendour.

Joan Northam
Charles Williams Society Newsletter
No 45 - Spring 1987 (excerpt)