Selected Medieval and Religious Themes in the Works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien

321 Pages·2013·2.08 MB·English

by  Andrzej Wicher

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Selected Medieval
and Religious Themes
in the Works of C. S. Lewis
and J. R. R. Tolkien
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Andrzej Wicher
Selected Medieval
and Religious Themes
in the Works of C. S. Lewis
and J. R. R. Tolkien
Łódź 2013
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ŁÓDZKIE TOWARZYSTWO NAUKOWE
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EDITORIAL BOARD OF ŁTN:
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Wanda M. Krajewska (Editor-in-Chief), Jan Szymczak
Proofread by:
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Printed edition is the primary version.
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ISBN 978–83–60655–71–9
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Contents
Preface .......................................................................................................7
Chapter 1
A Comparison of J. R. R. Tolkien’s and C. S. Lewis’s Modes of Thinking
as exemplifi ed by The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia ...15
Chapter 2
Some Medieval Aspects of the Theme of Friendship and Love
in The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis ..................................................61
Chapter 3
The Discourse of Orientalism in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia ........75
Chapter 4
“Nylons, Lipstick, and Invitations” – on the Question of Identity
in Narnia ....................................................................................................93
Chapter 5
Planetary Symbolism in C. S. Lewis’s
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader .............................................................105
Chapter 6
The Image of Hell as a Hidden City
in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. .........................................................127
Chapter 7
Some Boethian and Ecclesiological Themes in C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape
Letters ......................................................................................................147
Chapter 8
The Problem of the Legitimacy and Topicality of the Fears for the Future
of Civilization Expressed in C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength ...........165
Chapter 9
C. S. Lewis’s Conception of Historicism and its Consequences
– Particularly with Regard to The Last Battle ..........................................197
Chapter 10
Grief and Pain Observed and Revised in Selected Writings
by C. S. Lewis ..........................................................................................207
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Chapter 11
Tolkien’s Indolent Kings – Echoes of Medieval History
in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings ......................................................215
Chapter 12
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham as an Anti-Beowulf
– a Study in Tolkien’s Comical Spirit ......................................................231
Chapter 13
Tolkien’s Story of Beren and Lú thien in the Light of Medieval Romances,
Sir Orfeo in Particular, and Tales of Magic .............................................245
Chapter 14
What Exactly does Tolkien Argue for in Beowulf: The Monsters and the
Critics? – an Attempt at a Metacriticism .................................................267
Chapter 15
A Discussion of the Nature of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Quarrel
with Modernity. .......................................................................................288
Chapter 16
Therapeutic Categories. Some Remarks on the Relationship between
Tolkien’s “Eucatastrophe” and Aristotle’s “Catharsis” ............................295
Conclusion ..............................................................................................303
Bibliography ..........................................................................................309
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Preface
It is perhaps trivial to say that the personalities and works of J. R. R. Tol kien
and C. S. Lewis evoke rather extreme feelings in audiences. Sometimes
these emotions are those of deep admiration and fascination, and
sometimes, though much less often, those of disgust or even contempt.1 It
is, however, easy to see that sometimes they hardly incite any feelings at all
because it certainly is not true that one must feel strongly about these two
famous and popular, but hardly “canonical” English writers, who happened
to be friends and to have shared much of their life experiences together.
As writers, they both can be described as providers of niche products,
interesting for fantasy literature buffs and, particularly in the case of
C. S. Lewis, for Christians, particularly committed Christians. The latter
once were a majority of the Western consumers of culture, but, already in
the days of Tolkien and Lewis, they became, at least in Britain and in many
other places in the West, something of an embattled minority. At that time,
the majority of the population consisted of people with hardly any religion,
or of lukewarm Christians. If we try to ask ourselves why Tolkien and
Lewis are, occasionally, so much disliked and shunned, we might end up
with some rather obvious answers. They certainly are seen as profoundly
old-fashioned, or even reactionary, since they hardly belong to the epoch of
the 20th century Modernism (or Post-Modernism) with which they seem to
be associated purely by a chronological coincidence. Indeed both yearned
for rather distant epochs, and heartily disliked the modern industrial and
technological civilisation.
1 For example, Barry Langford, in the chapter ”Time” of the book: ed. R.Eaglestone,
Reading ”The Lord of the Rings”. New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic, Continuum:
London, New York 2005, p. 30, says the following: “As we all know, The Lord of
the Rings is as furiously detested as it is passionately loved”.
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On the other hand, it is also possible that sometimes both Tolkien and Lewis
exaggerated the extent of their own conservatism, while being aware that
this manoeuvre may have cost them a lot in terms of popular support. In
one of his most famous texts, the lecture called De Descriptione Temporum,
Lewis talks about how great an experience it would have been for a
paleontologist to meet a live dinosaur, or for a student of Classical Greek
drama to meet a live Athenian from the times of Sophocles. The point is
that he defi nes himself as an “old Western man”, that is a specimen of the
cultural formation that disappeared, according to him, around the year 1820,
with the onset of the age dominated by science and machinery. He mentions
Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott as some of the last representatives of this
Old Western culture:
Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you somewhat as that Athenian might
stand. I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners. You see why
I said that the claim was not really arrogant; who can be proud of speaking
fl uently his mother tongue or knowing his way about his father’s house? It is
my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you
must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have
acquired in reading modem literature. And because this is the judgement of a
native, I claim that, even if the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of
my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That
way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even
dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western
men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can.
There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.2
Thus, Lewis consciously represented himself as “old-fashioned” in quite a
literal sense of the word, that is as somebody whose mind was fashioned
a long time ago, or rather fashioned by cultural products of what he calls
Old Western age. Naturally, we have the right to treat this dinosaur rhetoric
with a pinch of salt, because there may be in it an admixture of the natural
desire of a middle-aged professor to appear more interesting in the eyes
of the students, or even in his own eyes, but, on the other hand, there is
little doubt that C. S. Lewis was steeped in old literary texts in quite an
amazing degree. He was not, at the same time, what one might call “a
natural dinosaur” because his love of old literature can more rightly be
called an acquired taste rather than a continuation of a family tradition.
2 See: C. S. Lewis, “De descriptione temporum” in: ed. D. Lodge, 20th Century
Literary Criticism. A Reader, Longman: London, New York 1981, p. 452.
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In Tolkien’s writings we may come across something similar. In his famous
essay Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, Tolkien discusses some
pusillanimous critics of Beowulf who complained about this ancient poem’s
allegedly primitive structure, he uses the following extended metaphor:
A man inherited a fi eld in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an
older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house
in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the
rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once
(without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged
to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little
labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover
whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material.
(…) And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to
consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: “He is such an odd
fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower!
Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion”. But
from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.3
Tolkien does not clearly explain the identity of the mysterious man who
built the tower. He may well be the anonymous poet who was responsible
for the creation of Beowulf (clearly enough, the tower stands for this poem),
even though it is quite possible that many poets had a hand in its making.
But it seems also likely that the tower-builder here is Tolkien himself, who
loved to “look out upon the sea”, and who also loved Old English poetry
so much that he almost completely identifi ed with its spirit. Thus Tolkien
seems to be suggesting that his great familiarity with ancient texts, texts
that are rarely appreciated in modern times and often described as obscure,
has given him a chance to see things that ordinary people usually fail to
see. This paradoxical thinking is comparable to the well known Miltonic
paradox on the basis of which John Milton, in his great poem Paradise
Lost, claimed to be able to “see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight”4,
exactly because had gone blind. In the same way, we can see that also
Lewis’s preference for being “behind his times”, instead of inducing shame
or inferiority complex, afforded him, at least in his own opinion, a unique
opportunity to be on intimate terms with the great fi gures of Europe’s
distant past.
3 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, HarperCollins
Publishers, London 1997, p. 8.
4 John Milton, “Paradise Lost” (Book III, lines 54–55), in (ed.) Douglas Bush,
Milton. Poetical Works, Oxford University Press: London, Oxford 1974, p. 258.
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