Most young adult books avoid religion. While magic is everywhere, from Harry Potter to Twilight, specific theology is notably absent. When religion is depicted it’s often not the actual faith but only its institutions that appear, usually portrayed as repressive and theocratic, as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. C. S. Lewis is one of the few other major YA authors to tackle Christianity. Lewis’s approach to Christianity comes across as instructive and unquestioning, which prevents the Narnia books from being philosophically compelling. L’Engle, on the other hand, asks questions to which faith and belief are the unspoken answers. As she herself once said, “C. S. Lewis has more answers and I have more questions.”
This nonpresentation of Christian faith is a strange blind spot for the YA genre, since the teenage years are when most people come to terms with their faith, either rejecting it or embracing it. But while there are specialized markets for Christian YA, in the broader YA market Christianity usually only appears in the context of historical novels.
A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels focus on the cosmic adventures of the tight-knit Murry family. Dad is an award-winning scientist who’s gone missing, and Mom is a stay-at-home microbiologist, who later wins a Nobel prize. There are the two practical ten-year-old twins, Sandy and Dennys; a preternaturally intelligent five-year-old, Charles Wallace; and his older sister, the angry, impatient, unattractive, and mathematically gifted Meg. The family argues over science, congregates for impromptu midnight snacks, eats dinner in Mom’s lab, looks out for each other at school, and basically serves as an emotional security blanket for a generation of kids who yearned for this kind of familial togetherness.
Wrinkle’s plot kicks off when the Murry clan are visited by three creatures—Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit—who are either bag ladies or stars disguised as bag ladies. They teach Charles Wallace, Meg, and Calvin—their friend from an abusive home down the street—to travel by tesseract, which essentially involves stepping through folds in time and space. The threesome venture to the planet Camazotz in an attempt to rescue Dr. Murry who has been abducted by the planet’s inhabitants. Camazotz is a world of utter conformity where all the children on every street bounce their balls in time, and jump rope in perfect synchronization, like participants in a North Korean mass rally. On Camazotz, Charles Wallace is possessed by its ruler, IT (a giant disembodied brain), and Dr. Murry is rescued only to prove totally useless in a crisis, leaving Meg to step up and save everyone herself.
A Wrinkle in Time is suffused with L’Engle’s own flinty Episcopalian faith. L’Engle’s books were always marketed as science fiction, and so, when alien creatures on the planet Uriel sing a wordless song whose meaning is translated for Meg as, “Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth. . . . Let them give glory unto the Lord,” the expressly Christian sentiment feels jarring nestled up next to lessons in microbiology, the scientific method, and the value of reason.
Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit are extraterrestrial angels who also sing praises to God, and the book’s central conflict is resolved by that most Christian of life lessons: Love is greater than hate. This is a pretty bland and fairly common theme in YA books—yay, love; boo, hate—but it is usually presented as simple humanism. L’Engle was specifically talking about Christian love, in which the human capacity to love is a reflection of the Creator’s love for his flawed creations. Meg goes to her final confrontation with IT like a lamb to the slaughter, armed only with advice from Mrs Who (“God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. . . .”), and a declaration of love from Mrs Whatsit (“Mrs Whatsit loves me,” Meg thinks. “That’s quite something, to be loved by someone like Mrs Whatsit”). Ultimately their love inspires her to channel her own love for Charles Wallace to break the hold IT has on him.
Meg’s confrontation with IT reflects what was, for L’Engle, one of the central stories of the Bible, the Annunciation to Mary that she had been chosen to bear God’s child. Mary, like Meg, was still a child, still capable of accepting that there are forces at work that we cannot see, still capable of seeing angels. Both Meg and Mary are called upon to do the impossible, and instead of balking, they both accept their roles: one as the mother of Jesus, the other as the rescuer of her brother. The Annunciation also reflected L’Engle’s idea of the creative process. In her book of essays, Walking on Water, she wrote,
I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.” And the artist either says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one.
She went on to explain that when she wrote, “I move into an area of faith which is beyond the conscious control of my intellect. . . . this means, first of all, that I must have more faith in the work than I have in myself.”
As a genre, science fiction tends to avoid issues of faith. Plenty of books, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Sparrow, deal with organized religion as a social structure, but when spiritual concepts arise—from The Force in Star Wars to the theology of Battlestar Galactica—it’s often literalized, leaving no doubt as to its objective reality and thus no room for faith. As L’Engle wrote in Walking on Water, “If it can be verified, we don’t need faith.” And for her, faith was the bedrock of her religion and her art. “Why does anybody tell a story?” she rhetorically asked in an interview. “It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose to say or do matters, matters cosmically.”
When L’Engle had her own crisis of faith in the 1950s, she discovered the work of Albert Einstein (she called him “Saint Albert”), Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, who opened her eyes to quantum physics. She felt that the laws of the universe Einstein had uncovered were a glimpse into the mind of its creator. As Meg says of her parents in A Wind in the Door, “Their discoveries . . . had made the Murrys more, rather than less, open to the strange, to the mysterious, to the unexplainable.” In L’Engle’s view, “Theologians and scientists seem surprised that they work together. It’s not that much of a surprise to me. I’ve always seen the discoveries of science as a way of finding out more about God, more about the universe.” Particle physics was a form of theology to her because it was an honest attempt to understand God’s creation, while she felt that theology often got lost in “peripheral things.”
Today, cultural forces on the left and the right have turned the science versus religion debate into one with no middle ground. Just as rejecting certain scientific theories (evolution, global warming) are articles of faith for many on the right, rejecting organized religion is an article of faith for many on the left. According to one survey, 52 percent of Americans in the sciences claim to have no religious affiliation as compared to only 14 percent of the general population. But for L’Engle, religion and science were one and the same. Her Time Quartet deals with mitochondria and cherubim, Noah and quantum physics, nuclear proliferation and salvation.
The strength of science to L’Engle was that it was always open to new discoveries even if they forced a reevaluation of all that had come before, a point of view she felt theologians had backed away from out of fear. Fear had no place in her church. “Christianity was not meant to be a fearful religion,” she said in an interview. “It was supposed to be affirmative, showing that everybody matters. It wasn’t supposed to be about picking and choosing who is good or who is bad.”
In A Wind in the Door, the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time, this expression of her faith blossoms fully. Meg is forced to defeat the nullifying aliens, the Echthroi, by finding it in herself to love her odious principal, Mr. Jenkins, a man with dandruff on his shoulders and dark sarcasm in his voice. Meg’s “love thy neighbor” moment isn’t treated as sentimental or sappy but as a tough-minded reject
ion of her natural instincts in which she’s forced to recognize within herself the things she most hates in this adult.
And it wasn’t just her character’s assumptions that L’Engle interrogated but also her own. In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Calvin’s mother, a slovenly, abusive, fearful woman, sacrifices her life to save the world. It’s one thing to listen to a minister give a sermon about how the least of these shall be the greatest, but it’s another thing entirely—a much tougher thing—to make the character who was the butt of your jokes for two books the hero of the third. But L’Engle used her Christian faith as a scourge with which she forced weakness and insecurities from her writing. L’Engle’s Christianity was not for sissies. As she once said, “The Lord Jesus who rules my life is not a sentimental, self-pitying weakling. He was a Jew, a carpenter, and strong.”
Where religion and science parted ways for L’Engle was that science dealt with fact while religion dealt with truth. She believed that the Bible was important not because it was literally true but because its stories conveyed irreducible truths about human nature that could only be understood through metaphor and revelation. “Nothing that’s worth anything as far as living our lives is concerned is in the realm of fact,” she said on PBS in 2000. “Jesus was talking about a man with a plank of wood in his eye. It’s a true story, it’s not factual. It’s about people who are slow to recognize their own faults and too quick to point out others’ flaws.”
L’Engle’s Time Quartet was expressly written because she wanted to speak a simple truth to the younger generation: that love defeats hate and that compassion defeats anger. Is that a fact? Probably not. One only has to look at history and see Anne Frank incinerated in an oven, Syrian troops shelling hospitals, or peaceful protestors pepper sprayed and arrested, to conclude that love, in fact, gets very little accomplished. So what is the force that inspires a scientist to devote their entire life to the mind-shattering intricacies of string theory, that causes a parent to forgive the killer of their child, that makes an ordinary, unarmed person block a tank with their body? L’Engle believed that it was an instinctive belief in a received truth that inspired us to do great things, and that no matter what the facts on the ground indicated, this greater truth was that we should love creation and each other the way our creator loved us. Believing in this despite all factual evidence to the contrary was a central tenet of her faith, and L’Engle’s faith is what motivated her life and her art. It was quiet, it was strong, and it was not always easy, but it endured. Just like her books.
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Grady Hendrix lives in New York City.
Douglas A. Anderson
Joanna Russ’s Version of The Hobbit
My title for this article may seem like a jest, an incongruent pairing of one author’s name with the uniquely titled work by another—a combination unlikely to exist save in an alternate reality as might be imagined by Paul Di Filippo—but I’m actually entirely serious here. Joanna Russ did write such a work—a play based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s well-known children’s book (using Tolkien’s own subtitle) There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Holiday.
For some years I’ve known of one copy in private hands with (as described to me) Tolkien’s “waspish” comments handwritten in the margins, but I’d never seen that. With the passing of Joanna Russ in 2011, I learned that a collection of her papers is now held in the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. So on a recent research trip, I finally got to read Joanna Russ’s version.
The typescript is undated (but more about that later), and on the title page there is a note in Russ’s hand, initialed by her, noting that “Tolkien didn’t like it, wouldn’t let it be publicly performed.” The typescript is 49 pages with three additional pages of front matter (a title page, a cast of characters, and a synopsis of scenes). Russ divided Tolkien’s storyline into three main scenes, adding a narrator to fill in some gaps of the story that are not portrayed on the stage. The company of dwarves is reduced to five in number (Balin, Dwalin, Fili, Kili, and Thorin). Many characters and events are omitted without any reference to them at all (e.g., the eagles, Beorn, the Elvenking, Laketown, Bard, the Arkenstone), but some missing scenes are mentioned in the narration (the encounter with the Trolls, and, later, with the spiders).
Scene one (the first twelve pages) tells of Gandalf visiting Bilbo and the coming of the dwarves and their enlisting Bilbo to join in their adventure. There is no mention of the Map of the Lonely Mountain, but two of Tolkien’s poems are used in the text, “Chip the glasses and crack the plates” and “Far over the Misty Mountains Cold.” Strangely, Russ, for no apparent reason, has altered the wording of the poems in several instances.
Scene two (13–30) gives a bit of the journey leading up to the taking of refuge from a storm in the cave, on the shoulder of what the narrator calls Mount Gundabad. Bilbo is wary of the supposed shelter, but the goblins spring upon the group and take away the dwarves. Bilbo is missed in the shuffle and wanders down the tunnel to meet Gollum. Bilbo finds the ring, and the riddle match ensues with the usual result. Gollum goes to get his ring and realizes that Bilbo already has it. Bilbo escapes into the sunlight where he finds Gandalf and the dwarves. Gandalf tells the party that he is leaving (he refers to having business in the North) and suggests that the dwarves choose Bilbo as their leader.
Scene three (31–49) begins at the Lonely Mountain. Bilbo doesn’t go down the tunnel alone to meet the dragon but is accompanied by the dwarves. At this time he tells the dwarves about his ring of invisibility. They still admire him for his pluck (leaping over Gollum in the dark, dodging goblin-guards, fighting spiders). The party observes Smaug from a discreet distance. Thorin requests that Bilbo pick up a memento, like a cup, from Smaug’s treasure. Bilbo does so and returns it to the dwarves, realizing that Smaug will notice its absence and trap them in the mountain without food. Bilbo returns to Smaug and has the usual conversation, discovering Smaug’s weak spot. The ring accidentally slips off Bilbo’s finger and is lost. Smaug laughs at him, but Bilbo runs toward the dragon with his sword drawn. The dwarves join in, attacking Smaug. Kili twists his foot and falls down, remaining in view of the audience to tell what he sees of the battle. Bilbo and the dwarves kill Smaug. The dwarves return to Kili, carrying Bilbo, who is told by Thorin that while they worried Smaug, it was Bilbo who killed him with one blow. Bilbo just wants to go home. The dwarves hoist him on their shoulders and sing of Smaug’s death. Bilbo joins in with Tolkien’s verse “The Dragon is Withered” (again substantially altered). A closing vignette shows Bilbo in his hobbit hole, telling Gandalf about coming home to find his possessions being auctioned. He thinks his aunt Lobelia may have taken his silver spoons. They are interrupted by a young hobbit, Bill Fernytoes, who wants to hear stories of Bilbo single-handedly killing the dragon. The young hobbit is scolded by his mother, Lobelia, who has followed him. Bilbo seizes her umbrella and turns it upside down, causing several spoons to fall out. Bilbo recites a poem he has written, “The Road Goes Ever On” (again with strange alterations by Russ). Curtain.
There is no indication of date of composition, save for the fact that Russ references tomatoes in Bilbo’s larder, indicating that she used a pre-1966 text (“tomatoes” were changed to pickles in the 1966 revision—see annotation number 26 to chapter one in the 2002 revised edition of my Annotated Hobbit). I have long suspected that Russ’s adaptation might have dated from her time at the Yale School of Drama (c. 1958–60); she received an MFA in Playwriting and Dramatic Literature from Yale in 1960. So it is nice to find corroborating evidence that this is true. There are published references in Tolkien scholarship about a dramatization of The Hobbit that originated from a female student at Yale, though the name of the adaptor is nowhere given, and all evidence points to it being Russ.
On April 23, 1959, Charles Lewis of George Allen & Unwin (Tolkien’s London publisher) sent Tolkien a letter saying that the Yale Drama School would like to perform an adaptation of The H
obbit with the adaptor paying a royalty, subject to Tolkien’s approval of the adaptation.
On April 30, Tolkien replied to Charles Lewis, noting that the adaptor had sent him a copy of the play some time before but said nothing about any performance and didn’t even ask for his opinion of it. Tolkien told Lewis that the adaptation seemed to him “a mistaken attempt to turn certain episodes of The Hobbit into a sub-Disney farce for rather silly children. . . . At the same time, it is entirely derivative.” Though he would prefer not to be associated with such stuff, Tolkien said he would waive his objections on the understanding that the performance is “part of the normal processes of Drama School (sc. in the teaching and practice of drama-writing); and that the permission for performance does not imply approval of the play for publication, sale, or performance outside of the Yale School.”
On May 6, Lewis wrote to Tolkien, saying that he had outlined Tolkien’s arguments concerning the adaptation in a letter to the adaptor, also stating that Tolkien would not object to a performance of the play by the Yale Drama School. On May 26, Lewis wrote to Tolkien that the adaptor of The Hobbit had requested the return of her manuscript.
Tolkien presumably sent back the copy he had annotated, which Russ later gave away, preserving in her own papers only her own un-annotated version. Looking at the details of her adaptation, one can see why Tolkien didn’t like it. There are a number of things in the first two scenes that would have bothered Tolkien (not least the rewriting of his poetry or the application of the name Mount Gundabad to the wrong mountain), even though much of what is presented stays fairly close to the source material. But the third scene diverges widely from what Tolkien wrote (a feature which especially irked him with every proposed adaptation of his work), and he would certainly not have approved of Russ’s alteration that has Bilbo heroically killing the dragon. On its own as a play, Russ’s version doesn’t work very well, even with the way that she has altered the plot. But overall, Russ’s version isn’t really any worse than other adaptations that have been done over the years. Whereas those were done without Tolkien’s input or approval, Russ did the honorable thing and asked Tolkien. I suspect that Peter Jackson’s forthcoming films of The Hobbit, now expanded from two to three films, may make Joanna Russ’s version appear as the more faithful to the original text. Time will tell.
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