Lamorak and the Queen Morgause of Orkney

Hued from the livid everlasting stone

the queen's hewn eyelids bruised my bone;

my eyes splintered, as our father Adam's when the first

exorbitant flying nature round creation's flank burst.

Her hair was whirlwind about her face;

her face outstripped her hair; it rose from a place

where pre-Adamic sculpture on an ocean rock lay,

and the sculpture torn from its rock was swept away.

Her hand discharged catastrophe; I was thrown

before it; I saw the source of all stone,

the rigid tornado, the schism and first strife

of primeval rock with itself, Morgause Lot's wife.

I had gone in summer at the king's word to explore

the coast of the kingdom towards the Pole; the roar

of the ocean beyond all coasts threatened on one hand;

on the other we saw the cliffs of Orkney stand.

Caves and hollows in the crags were filled with the scream

of seamews nesting and fleeting; the extreme theme

of Logres rose in harsh cries and hungry storms,

and there, hewn in a cleft, were hideous huge forms.

(Lines 1 - 20)

Charles Williams
Taliessin through Logres (1938)

Note: Lamorak was the son of King Pellinore and in some legends the brother of Percivale. He was one of the strongest Knights of the Round Table. Lamorak was the lover of Morgause, whose husband King Lot of Orkney had been killed by Lamorak's father, Pellinore. 

Dumbledore

Many of those familiar with J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, or the films based on them, have been surprised to discover that the name of the headmaster of Hogwarts School also occurs in Tolkien's writings.  (They might be even more surprised to find it in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.)  The word is recorded by the OED as a dialect name for the bumblebee (and certain other insects), with quotations dating back to 1787.  Tolkien used it in some versions of his poem 'Errantry', in which the 'merry passenger', we are told, 'battled with the Dumbledores' (HME VII. 86, 88).

The Ring of Words
Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary
(OUP 2006)

Gladden

"They took a boat and went down to the Gladden Fields, where there were great beds of iris and flowering reeds."

Gladden is Tolkien's updating of the Old English word glaedene 'iris'.  This is recorded in an Old English document from the 9th (or possibly the 8th) century.  In the names Gladden River and Gladden Fields in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien intended the word to refer to the 'yellow flag' (Iris pseudacorus), which grows by streams and in marshes (Lett. 297).  The Old English word in fact continued in later use in the slightly different form gladdon, though, as Tolkien went on to explain, the name is now usually applied to a different species, the purple-flowered Irisfoetidissima (or 'stinking iris').  The word is now rarely found outside regional dialects.

The OED entry (gladdon) quotes a line from the Middle English romance The Wars of Alexander, evoking an image reminiscent of the Gladden Fields: a dryi meere was full ofgladen & of gale & ofgrete redis (a dry lake was full of gladdon and bog-myrtle and great reeds).

The Ring of Words
Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary

OUP (2006)

Tolkien on LOTR in 1956

[Before writing a review of The Lord of the Rings, Michael Straight, the editor of New Republic, wrote to Tolkien asking a number of questions: first, whether there was a 'meaning' in Gollum's rôle in the story and in Frodo's moral failure at the climax... 

[Not dated; probably January or February 1956.]

Dear Mr Straight,

Thank you for your letter. I hope that you have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? Enjoyed is the key-word. For it was written to amuse (in the highest sense): to be readable. There is no 'allegory', moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all.

It is a 'fairy-story', but one written – according to the belief I once expressed in an extended essay 'On Fairy-stories' that they are the proper audience – for adults. Because I think that fairy story has its own mode of reflecting 'truth', different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or 'realism', and in some ways more powerful. But first of all it must succeed just as a tale, excite, please, and even on occasion move, and within its own imagined world be accorded (literary) belief. To succeed in that was my primary object.

But, of course, if one sets out to address 'adults' (mentally adult people anyway), they will not be pleased, excited, or moved unless the whole, or the incidents, seem to be about something worth considering, more e.g. than mere danger and escape: there must be some relevance to the 'human situation' (of all periods). So something of the teller's own reflections and 'values' will inevitably get worked in. This is not the same as allegory. We all, in groups or as individuals, exemplify general principles; but we do not represent them. The Hobbits are no more an 'allegory' than are (say) the pygmies of the African forest. Gollum is to me just a 'character' – an imagined person – who granted the situation acted so and so under opposing strains, as it appears to he probable that he would (there is always an incalculable element in any individual real or imagined: otherwise he/she would not be an individual but a 'type'.)

I will try and answer your specific questions. The final scene of the Quest was so shaped simply because having regard to the situation, and to the 'characters' of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum, those events seemed to me mechanically, morally, and psychologically credible. But, of course, if you wish for more reflection, I should say that within the mode of the story the 'catastrophe' exemplifies (an aspect of) the familiar words: 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.'

'Lead us not into temptation &c' is the harder and the less often considered petition. The view, in the terms of my story, is that though every event or situation has (at least) two aspects: the history and development of the individual (it is something out of which he can get good, ultimate good, for himself, or fail to do so), and the history of the world (which depends on his action for its own sake) – still there are abnormal situations in which one may be placed. 'Sacrificial' situations, I should call them: sc. positions in which the 'good' of the world depends on the behaviour of an individual in circumstances which demand of him suffering and endurance far beyond the normal – even, it may happen (or seem, humanly speaking), demand a strength of body and mind which he does not possess: he is in a sense doomed to failure, doomed to fall to temptation or be broken by pressure against his 'will': that is against any choice he could make or would make unfettered, not under the duress.

Frodo was in such a position: an apparently complete trap: a person of greater native power could probably never have resisted the Ring's lure to power so long; a person of less power could not hope to resist it in the final decision. (Already Frodo had been unwilling to harm the Ring before he set out, and was incapable of surrendering it to Sam.)

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

#181 to Michael Straight

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

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

The Inquisition

One might think that the phrase of Lord Acton (that "it cannot really be held that in Rome sixteen centuries after Christ men did not know that murder was wrong") might be held to apply [to the Inquisition]; it cannot be that men did not think such methods doubtfully holy. It was not so. Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin; it is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up sap and produce the black fruits of hell. The peacock fans of holy and austere popes drove the ashes of burning men over Christendom.

Charles Williams
The Descent of the Dove 

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)