Humility?

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be . No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Beren & Lúthien in Angband

[Image: Ted Nasmith]

Into the vast and echoing gloom,
more dread than many-tunnelled tomb
in Labyrinthine pyramid
where everlasting death is hid,
down awful corridors that wind
down to a menace dark enshrined;
down to the mountain's roots profound,
devoured, tormented, bored and ground
by seething vermin spawned of stone;
down to the depths they went alone.
The arch behind of twilit shade
they saw recede and dwindling fade;
the thunderous forges' rumour grew,
a burning wind there roaring blew
foul vapours up from gaping holes.
Huge shapes there stood like carven trolls
enormous hewn of blasted rock
to forms that mortal likeness mock;
monstrous and menacing, entombed,
at every turn they silent loomed
in fitful glares that leaped and died.
There hammers clanged, and tongues there cried
with sound like smitten stone; there wailed
faint from far under, called and failed
amid the iron clink of chain
voices of captives put to pain.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Geste of Beren and Lúthien

(lines 3,850 to 3,865) 

A different source...

[My garden in July]

A garden...teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined... when the garden is in its full glory the gardener's contributions to that glory will still have been in a sense paltry compared with those of nature. Without life springing from the earth, without rain, light and heat descending from the sky, he could do nothing. When he has done all, he has merely encouraged here and discouraged there, powers and beauties that have a different source.

C.S. Lewis
The Four Loves (1960)

Gondolin

As recounted in The Silmarillion, the Vala Ulmo, the Lord of Waters, revealed the location of the Vale of Tumladen to the Noldorin Lord Turgon in a dream. Under this divine guidance, Turgon travelled from his kingdom in Nevrast and found the vale. Within the Echoriath, the Encircling Mountains, just west of Dorthonion and east of the River Sirion, lay a round level plain with sheer walls on all sides and a ravine and tunnel leading out to the southwest known as the Hidden Way. In the middle of the vale there was a steep hill which was called Amon Gwareth, the "Hill of Watching". There Turgon decided to found a great city that would be protected by the mountains and hidden from the Dark Lord Morgoth. 

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 Noldor - as well as nearly three quarters of the northern Sindar. He originally named the city Ondolinde, 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 was protected by seven gates, all constantly guarded; the first of wood, then stone, bronze, iron, silver, gold, and steel. The city stood for nearly 400 years until it was betrayed to Morgoth by Maeglin, Turgon's nephew, and sacked by the Dark Lord's armies. 

Ballade of a Street Door

As I came up into the town

Wherein my father's house abide,

I met a man in tattered gown,

In ragged garment blowing wide,

With terror fleet and open-eyed ;

' Ho, whither now so fast, I pray ? '

Fearfully looked he back and cried :

' I pulled the bell and ran away !

' Good sir, if thou hast held renown

Among this people, be my guide !

I from their welcome, not their frown,

In shelter would obscurely hide.

For when, being tired, a latch I tried.

Whence came a sound of revels gay.

Fear rose within me like a tide, —

I pulled the bell and ran away.

' A voice called " Bring the festal crown ! "

And running footsteps gateward hied.

Wherethrough I heard, as they came down.

Great names that challenged and replied.

And torchlight through the chinks I spied

My soul became a wild dismay.

And as the doors began to slide

I pulled the bell and ran away ! '

                         L'ENVOI

Prince, was it you and I whose pride

So turned, so fled, upon our Day ?

Was it our voices then which sighed

' I pulled the bell and ran away ' ?

Charles Williams

Poems of Conformity (1917)

Of Fingon's Fate... and the Silmarils

The wars and wandering of the Gnomes
this tale tells not. Far from their homes                     
they fought and laboured in the North.
Fingon daring alone went forth
and sought for Maidros where he hung;
in torment terrible he swung,
his wrist in band of forgéd steel,                           
from a sheer precipice where reel
the dizzy senses staring down
from Thangorodrim's stony crown.
The song of Fingon Elves yet sing,
captain of armies, Gnomish king,               
who fell at last in flame of swords
with his white banners and his lords.
They sing how Maidros free he set,
and stayed the feud that slumbered yet
between the children proud of Finn.           
Now joined once more they hemmed him in,
even great Morgoth, and their host
beleaguered Angband, till they boast
no Orc nor demon ever dare
their leaguer break or past them fare.             
Then days of solace woke on earth
beneath the new-lit Sun, and mirth
was heard in the Great Lands where Men,
a young race, spread and wandered then.
That was the time that songs do call           
the Siege of Angband, when like a wall
the Gnomish swords did fence the earth
from Morgoth's ruin, a time of birth,
of blossoming, of flowers, of growth;
but still there held the deathless oath,                      
and still the Silmarils were deep
in Angband's darkly-dolven keep.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Geste of Beren and Lúthien

(lines 1,644 to 1,677) 

Counting the Cost

When I was a child I often had toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go to my mother -- at least, not till the pain became very bad. And the reason I did not go was this. I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want. I wanted immediate relief from pain: but I could not get it without having my teeth set permanently right. And I knew those dentists: I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache. They would not let sleeping dogs lie, if you gave them an inch they took an ell.

.

Now, if I may put it that way, Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell. Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of or which is obviously spoiling daily life. Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment.

C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity (1952)
Chapter 9: 'Counting the Cost' 

The Triumph of the Angelicals

She was where he had left her, but dreadful change was coming over her. Her body was writhing into curves and knots where she lay, as if cramps convulsed her. Her mouth was open but she could not scream: her hands were clutching at her twisted throat. In her wild eyes there was now no malice, only an agony, and gradually all her body and head were drawn up backwards from the floor by an invisible force, so that from her hips she remained rigidly upright and her legs lay stretched straight out behind her up on the ground, as if a serpent in human shape raised itself before him.

The sight drove him backwards; he turned his face away, and prayed with all his strength to the Maker of the Celestials. From that refuge he looked again, and saw her convulsed and convulsed with spasms of anguish. But now the very colour of her skin was changing; it became blotched and blurred with black and yellow and green; not only that but it seemed distended about her. Her face rounded out till it was perfectly smooth, with no hollows or depressions, and from her nostrils and her mouth something was thrusting out. In and out of her neck and hands another skin was forming over or under her own? he could not distinguish which, but growing through it, here a coating. there an underveiling. Another and an inhuman tongue was flickering out over a human lips, and the legs were twisted and thrown from side to side as if something prisoned in them were attempting to escape. For all that lower violence her body did not fall, nor indeed, but for a slight swaying, did it much move.

Her arms were interlocked in front of her, the extreme ends of her fingers touched the ground between her thighs. But they too were drawn inwards; the stuff of her dress was rending in places; and wherever it rent and hung aside he could see that other curiously-toned skin shining behind it. A black shadow was on her face; a huge shape was emerging from it, from her, growing larger and larger as the Domination she had invoked freed itself from the will and the mind and the body that had given it a place where it could find the earth for its immaterialization. No longer a woman but a serpent indeed surged before him in the darkening room, bursting and breaking from the woman's shape behind it. It curved and twined itself in the last achievements of liberty; there came through the silence that had accompanied that transmutation a sound as if some slight thing had dropped to the floor, and the Angelic energy was wholly free.

It was free. It glided a little forward, and its head turned lowly from side to side. Richardson stood up and faced it. The subtle eyes gazed at him, without hostility, without friendship, remote and alien. He looked back, wordlessly calling on the Maker and End of all created energies. Images poured through his brain in an unceasing riot; questions such as Anthony had recounted to him propounded themselves; there seemed to be a million things he might do, and he did none of them. He remembered the Will beyond all the makings; then with a tremendous effort he shut out even that troublesome idea of the Will--an invented word, a mortal thought--and, as far as he could, was not before what was. It had mercy on him; he saw the great snake begin to move again, and then he fainted right away.

Charles Williams

The Place of the Lion (1933)

Chapter Twelve

Beren steals the Silmaril

[Image : Anke Eissmann]

He heard afar their hurrying feet,

he snuffed an odour strange and sweet;
he smelled their coming long before
they marked the waiting threat at door.
His limbs he stretched and shook off sleep,
then stood at gaze. With sudden leap
upon them as they sped he sprang,
and his howling in the arches rang.
Too swift for thought his onset came,
too swift for any spell to tame;
and Beren desperate then aside
thrust Lúthien, and forth did stride
unarmed, defenceless to defend
Tinúviel until the end.
With left he caught at hairy throat,
with right hand at the eyes he smote
- his right, from which the radiance welled
of the holy Silmaril he held.
As gleam of swords in fire there flashed
the fangs of Carcharoth, and crashed
together like a trap, that tore
the hand about the wrist, and shore
through brittle bone and sinew nesh,
devouring the frail mortal flesh;
and in that cruel mouth unclean
engulfed the jewel's holy sheen.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Geste of Beren and Lúthien

Lines 4,198 to 4,223

At this point the poem abruptly stops, but among Tolkien's papers five more lines were found:

Against the wall then Beren reeled
but still with his left he sought to shield
fair Lúthien, who cried aloud
to see his pain, and down she bowed
in anguish sinking to the ground.

There is no more.  However, JRRT did finish the story:

See "The Silmarillion", Chapter 19.

The real Lucy.

As you may remember, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is dedicated to Lucy Barfield, Lewis's goddaughter. Sadly, about 15 years after the book was published, Lucy was affected by multiple sclerosis, that left her bedridden and unable to feed herself.  But being named in the book touched her life in ways that Jack Lewis could not have imagined.

For the rest of her life, Lucy received letters from children. Some, believing she was Lucy Pevensie, asked her about Narnia.  Others knew she was ill and just wrote to say hello. "What a wonderful oasis of pleasure I have in this pretty terrible world, being recognized as Lucy," she once said.

That Hideous Strength

Extremely witty, beautifully written, thought-provoking and a real page-turner, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH is the third volume in C.S. Lewis's marvellous, Christian-themed “Space Trilogy,” but readers unfamiliar with the earlier two books should not hesitate to read this one independently. Set at a fictional university in England, the book is Lewis's dystopian examination of how without firing a short, the alliance of government, business, academia, and mass media can produce a pure evil of wholesale fascism, all in the name of “mankind.”

An influence-intoxicated college professor, his unhappy and neglected wife, a university-government complex bent on world domination, a living wizard who's been buried for more than a millennium, and a space-travelling invalid who may be the only hope for the salvation of the world are just a few of the ingredients in one of the greatest works of popular fiction.

The book explores how pure materialism produces a nihilism that is incompatible with moral ethics, individual liberty, spiritual truth, and the foundations of civil society. Drawing upon the analysis in his brilliant book, THE ABOLITION OF MAN, Lewis satirizes government power, moral relativism, academic politics, bio-engineering, mass media, narcissism and blind ambition, atheism, materialistic culture, egalitarianism, scientism, non-traditional education which "experiments" on children, and much more. THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH includes allusions to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, John Donne, Charles Williams, John Bunyan, Sir Thomas Malory, and others; and the book has been compared to Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and George Orwell's 1984.

“In his usual polished prose, he creates an elaborate satiric picture of a war between morality and devilry.”
-- The New Yorker

“Well-written, fast-paced satirical fantasy.”
-- Time Magazine

“His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story…a book worth reading."
-- George Orwell

C.S. Lewis Society Update (3rd August 2007)
What is particularly striking about this book is who Lewis fingers as the advance-guard for the evil that sadly dominates on Earth, ever trying to extend its power: a bunch of place-seeking, ethics-free, jive-talking academics who have long left any pretence to reason and science behind. Instead, they are driven by a misguided altruism that manifests itself, ultimately, as complete misanthropy.

In this regard, Lewis must be regarded as prescient. Anyone who has spent any time in academia will immediately sympathise with the plight of the characters in the book who dare to stand up to the censorial, elitist, Marxist-Leninist, anti-religion, pro-death agenda so prevalent among the ‘progressive’ leadership of the university. Lewis had these people's number fifty years ago.

(APS)

A new blog - "The Oddest Inkling"...

About Charles Williams: Charles Walter Stansby Williams was a poet, novelist, literary critic, editor, English professor, biographer, Anglican Christian, and occult master. He was a member of the Inklings with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien for the last six years of his life. He was charismatic, saintly, radiant, riveting, loquacious, and inspiring. 

Read more here : http://theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/about/

Charles Williams Society blog here : http://www.charleswilliamssociety.org.uk/

Angelic talk...

For he (Lewis) talked like an angel. My idea of how angels might talk derives from Lewis. His prose is brilliant, amusing, intimate, cogent; but his talk was of a superior order. It combined fluent, informal progression with the most articulate syntax, as if, somehow, it was a text remembered – and remembered perfectly. The steps of his argument succeeded without faltering, with each quotation in the original tongue, well pronounced. (To keep up his half dozen languages he belonged to reading groups – J. R. R. Tolkien’s Kolbitar for Norse, the Dante Society for Italian, another group for Homeric Greek.) Add an extraordinary memory, and you can see how any situation was for him accompanied by a full-voiced choir of verbal associations. "Probably no reader," he writes, "comes upon Lydgate’s ‘I herd other crie’ without recalling ‘the voces vagitus et ingens in Virgil’s hell.’" For this assumption, Lewis has been called "bookish" – a dumbed down response. Of course he was bookish; hang it, he tutored in literature. Even standing on the high end of a punt in a one piece swimming costume with a single shoulderstrap, about to dive, he had time for a quotation, half heard over the water, something about silvestrem. Was he teasing me for reclining at ease in my punt...

Alastair Fowler 
Yale Review, Vol. 91 No. 4 (October 2003), pp. 64–80

Doppelgaenger...

Her heart sprang; there, a good way off-thanks to a merciful God -- it was, materialized from nowhere in a moment. She knew it at once, however far, her own young figure, her own walk, her own dress and hat-had not her first sight of it been attracted so? changing, growing...  It was coming up at her pace -- doppelgaenger, doppelgaenger -- her control began to give... two... she didn't run, lest it should, nor did it.   She reached her gate, slipped through, went up the path.  If it should be running very fast up the road behind her now?  She was biting back the scream and fumbling for her key.   Quiet, quiet!  "A terrible good."  She got the key into the keyhole; she would not look back; would it click the gate or not?  The door opened; and she was in, and the door banged behind her.  She all but leant against it, only the doppelgaenger might be leaning similarly on the other side.   She went forward, her hand at her throat, up the stairs to her room, desiring (and every atom of energy left denying that her desire could be vain) that there should be left to her still this one refuge in which she might find shelter.

Charles Williams
Descent into Hell (Ch.1 - The Magus Zoroaster)

The Doppelganger

A strange dichotomy I find

Of mental disputation,

Each time the Betty in my mind

Meets Betty on the station.

At first, while we say how d’you do

And talk about the weather,

I see them side by side, those two

And match them both together.

“Look there and here!” says eye to heart,

“And there – your fancy hid that!

“Admit your memory took her part!

“You rather overdid that!”

Like snow the first one fades away

And melts into the second:

I lose my head and hear it say:

“She’s sweeter than you reckoned!”

Owen Barfield

“The Doppelganger” was published on 3 July 1947 in the New English Weekly. It is used on the Inklings Weblog by kind permission of the Owen Barfield Literary Estate.

Death, on Westminster Bridge

She was standing on Westminster Bridge. It was twilight, but the City was no longer dark. The street lamps along the Embankment were still dimmed, but in the buildings shutters and blinds and curtains had been removed or left undrawn, and the lights were coming out there like the first faint stars above. Those lights were the peace. It was true that formal peace was not yet in being; all that had happened was that fighting had ceased. The enemy, as enemy, no longer existed, and one more crisis of agony was done. Labour, intelligence, patience-much need for these; and much certainty of boredom and suffering and misery, but no longer the sick vigils and daily despair.

Lester Furnival stood and. looked at the City while the twilight deepened. The devastated areas were hidden; much was to be done but could be. In the distance she could hear an occasional plane. Its sound gave her a greater sense of relief than the silence. It was precisely not dangerous; it promised a truer safety than all the squadrons of fighters and bombers had held. Something was ended, and those remote engines told her so. The moon was not yet risen; the river was dark below. She put her hand on the parapet and looked at it; it should make no more bandages if she could help it. It was not a bad hand, though it was neither so clean nor so smooth as it had been years ago, before the war. It was twenty-five now, and to her that seemed a great age. She went on looking at it for a long while; in the silence and the peace, until it occurred to her that the silence was very prolonged, except for that recurrent solitary plane. No one, all the time she had been standing there, had crossed the bridge; no voice, no step, no car had sounded in the deepening night.

She took her hand off the wall, and turned. The bridge was as empty as the river; no vehicles or pedestrians here, no craft there. In all that City she might have been the only living thing. She had been so impressed by the sense of security and peace while she had been looking down at the river that only now did she begin to try and remember why she was there on the bridge. There was a confused sense in her mind that she was on her way somewhere; she was either going to or coming from her own flat. It might have been to meet Richard, though she had an idea that Richard, or someone with Richard, had told her not to come. But she could not think of anyone, except Richard, who was at all likely to do so, and anyhow she knew she had been determined to come. It was all mixed up with that crash which had put everything out of her head; and as she lifted her eyes, she saw beyond the Houses and the Abbey the cause of the crash, the plane lying half in the river and half on the Embankment. She looked at it with a sense of its importance to her, but she could not tell why it should seem so important. Her only immediate concern with it seemed to be that it might have blocked the direct road home to her flat, which lay beyond Millbank and was where Richard was or would be and her own chief affairs. She thought of it with pleasure; it was reasonably new and fresh, and they had been lucky to get it when Richard and she had been married yesterday. At least-yesterday? well, not yesterday but not very much longer than yesterday, only the other day. It had been the other day. The word for a moment worried her; it had been indeed another, a separate, day. She felt as if she had almost lost her memory of it, yet she knew she had not. She had been married, and to Richard.

The plane, in the thickening darkness, was now but a thicker darkness, and distinguishable only because her eyes were still fixed on it. If she moved she would lose it. If she lost it, she would be left in the midst of this-this lull. She knew the sudden London lulls well enough, but this lull was lasting absurdly long. All the lulls she had ever known were not as deep as this, in which there seemed no movement at all, if the gentle agitation of the now visible stars were less than movement, or the steady flow of the river beneath her; she had at least seen that flowing-or had she? was that also still? She was alone with this night in the City-a night of peace and lights and stars, and of bridges and streets she knew, but all in a silence she did not know, so that if she yielded to the silence she would not know those other things, and the whole place would be different and dreadful.

She stood up from the parapet against which she had been leaning, and shook herself impatiently. "I'm moithering," she said in a word she had picked up from a Red Cross companion, and took a step forward. If she could not get directly along Millbank, she must go round. Fortunately the City was at least partially lit now. The lights in the houses shone out, and by them she could see more clearly than in the bad old days. Also she could see into them; and somewhere in her there was a small desire to see someone-a woman reading, children playing, a man listening to the wireless; something of that humanity which must be near, but of which on that lonely bridge she could feel nothing. She turned her face towards Westminster and began to walk.

.

Charles Williams

All Hallows Eve (1948)
Chapter 1

Guest Author...

[Constable - Barge below Flatford Mill]

A sneeky little extra post.  Not an Inkling, but Ronnie Blythe certainly would have been welcome in their company... today's column from the 'Church Times' London :
http://wormingford.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/ronald-blythe-spends-some-time-messing.html

Love...

"Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."

C.S. Lewis

The Four Loves

Part of a review of a detective novel...

Messrs. Cassell, on the jacket, ask "Why was Nahum afraid of life?"

I don’t understand. Aren’t Messrs. Cassell?

(Charles Williams)

The Long Defeat...

In choosing to express my inner geekdom, I presently have SIX books by my bed that are by or related to Mr Tolkien (I have about 12 bed-side books in all just now), and last night I read something that kind of pinged me inside somewhere. Here's the quote:

Actually, I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic;

so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat'

- though it contains some samples of final victory.

Now, I don't think I've ever before come across anyone telling me that this is a (or The) standard Christian worldview - I suppose in the circles in which I've moved, the emphasis has tended to be that because God is living and active now, everything of His in the world is in the process of redemption (ie. everything's getting better). But now I'm not sure.

Everything in creation is decomposing (everything physical, I mean); I know that. We are in a world where humans are constantly trying to make things that last, whilst concurrently destroying (or at least messing up) the only things that actually do last - creation, friendship, God, etc.

Elves in Middle-Earth had a weird role. They had LIVED in paradise (the High Elves had anyway) and seen perfection. They remembered it. But they weren't a forward-thinking people - all their songs and ideals came from millenia previously, and it was all they could hope for to 'preserve all things unstained,' as Elrond said. I think all of us instinctively recognise something about the good old days which made them good in contrast to now, but we're told that we are silly to think like that. I'm not so sure.

Through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat. [Galadriel]

The idea of the long defeat is definitely not very triumphant, in the Pentecostal style of Christianity. The Rohirrim ride 'for ruin and the world's ending', not for a present victory, which is only a fool's hope (says Gandalf). Recently, I've been noticing the sensation of 'hanging on' quite a lot: kind of a helplessness; the world's wheels are turning and I just need to keep going, keep hanging in there.

When he needed to, Sam saw a star through the smogs of Mordor and 'the beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him.' I need that. Just plodding through smogs is CRAP, however heroic a story we paint ourselves into. We need to know that we win, in the end, or even after The End. Otherwise, what's the point?

How can you prove a victory before

It's won? How can you prove a man who leads,

To be a leader worth the following,

Unless you follow to the death - and out

Beyond mere death.

David Rowe : http://misterdavid.typepad.com/