Laura Miller

by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia

  No wonder, then, that Tolkien objected to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which mixed up classical and Northern mythologies, canonical fairy tales and slangy modern schoolchildren, myth and satire, all with such cheerful indiscrimination. He was not entirely alone in that sentiment. Even Green, who had liked the first draft of the book, tried to get Lewis to cut the scene where an incongruous Father Christmas appears to the Pevensies and the Beavers during their cross-country flight from the Witch, bearing magical gifts and a steaming pot of hot tea. Lewis ignored him. If Spenser could get away with it, why shouldn’t he?

  What was Tolkien to think? Lewis had delighted in Middle-earth. He had eagerly read and extravagantly praised all of the literary manifestations of Tolkien’s private world. He referred often and admiringly to his friend’s essay on the value of fairy tales and imaginative fiction. And, even after the two men had grown apart, he happily fulfilled a promise to the publisher of The Lord of the Rings to “do all in my power to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recognition it deserves.” That included providing a back-cover blurb, two (unsigned) rave reviews in newspapers, and urgent recommendations to all of his correspondents and friends.

  But when it came to creating his own imaginary land, Lewis disregarded Tolkien’s exacting formula for making a “secondary world.” Narnia was not self-enclosed and consistent. It lifted figures and motifs in whole cloth from a motley assortment of national traditions, making no effort to integrate them into any coherent mythos. Tolkien had carefully revised later editions of The Hobbit to remove a reference to tomatoes (if Middle-earth is meant to be an early version of Europe, then tomatoes, a New World import, would be anachronistic), while Lewis thought nothing of giving Mrs. Beaver a sewing machine!

  Tolkien could also hardly fail to notice that, as highly as this friend — his best friend — thought of him, Lewis remained indifferent to other distinctions that lay very close to Tolkien’s heart. The religious conversion that Tolkien had worked so hard to bring about had led Lewis not to Roman Catholicism, as Tolkien had hoped. Instead, his friend turned back to the Church of England, an institution Tolkien regarded as degenerate. Tolkien’s Catholicism had always contained a strain of paranoia (although ordinarily quick to spot and condemn a tyrant, he supported the fascist general Francisco Franco in the Spanish civil war because some of Franco’s left-wing opponents had persecuted priests and nuns), and here Lewis had blithely gone and joined the ranks of the enemy.

  Tolkien concluded that Lewis, try as he might to purge himself of old prejudices, had never really succeeded. At heart, his friend remained an Ulster Protestant and a member of the church whose only real foundation, in Tolkien’s opinion, lay in its hatred and persecution of “Papism.” Lewis preferred to believe that his apologetics spoke for traditionally minded Christians everywhere, that his theology transcended denomination. But this ecumenical stance amounted to asserting that the differences between Protestants and Catholics (as well as among Protestants themselves) didn’t really matter. And as far as Tolkien was concerned, they most certainly did.

  The chief reason Tolkien offered publicly for the fading of his friendship with Lewis in the 1940s was the influence of a third man, the novelist Charles Williams. Lewis read Williams’s Place of the Lion in 1936 and promptly wrote a fan letter to the author, declaring the novel “one of the major literary events of my life.” Williams, who worked at the Oxford University Press in London, had in turn recently read the manuscript of The Allegory of Love and felt something similar. They quickly became fast friends.

  During World War II, the offices of the OUP were moved to Oxford, and Williams came with them. Lewis enthusiastically incorporated his new friend into the Inklings. He adulated Williams, not just as a writer, but as a great soul. Lewis informed one acquaintance that should he happen to see Williams walking down the street he would instantly recognize him, “because he looks godlike; rather, like an angel.” Williams had this effect on people. In Williams’s company, W. H. Auden remarked, he felt himself to be “for the first time in my life … in the presence of personal sanctity.” And T. S. Eliot wrote, “He seemed to me to approximate, more nearly than any man I have known familiarly, to the saint.”

  Tolkien always maintained that he liked Williams personally; his writing and thinking, however, were another matter. “Our minds remained poles apart,” he informed his American publisher when asked about the connection. The Place of the Lion, a very strange novel, describes the unfolding of a sort of Platonic apocalypse in modern-day Britain; the ideal manifestations of things (their “forms,” as Plato called them) begin to materialize, absorbing all their imperfect iterations in the real world. One character witnesses the appearance of the ideal butterfly, into which all of the ordinary butterflies are sucked, as if by a vacuum cleaner.

  Tolkien had no use for intellectualized, quasi-allegorical stories of this ilk, but Lewis was a dyed-in-the-wool Platonist — this element of his thinking sometimes seems to eclipse the Christian — and he found The Place of the Lion inspiring. (The enormous lion that stalks the British countryside in Williams’s novel is surely one of Aslan’s inspirations.) Tolkien was convinced that Williams’s influence had spoiled the final novel in Lewis’s space trilogy, That Hideous Strength, and he lamented this as further evidence that his old friend was “a very impressionable, too impressionable, man.”

  Near the end of his life, not long after Lewis’s death, Tolkien related to a journalist how Lewis had sparked the invention of a major chunk of Middle-earth’s legendarium by one day announcing, “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I’m afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” Hence, their vow to write a “thriller” apiece. Tolkien never finished that particular book, but in the years that followed, “the most lasting pleasure and reward for both of us has been that we provided one another with stories to hear or read that we really liked — in large parts.” What Tolkien liked, however, were the first two books of the space trilogy; for Narnia, the imaginary land that many readers naturally associate with Middle-earth upon learning that the two men were friends, he felt only disdain.

  That close friendship and its disintegration, and Narnia’s role in the sad conclusion, continue to invite comparisons of the two men’s imaginary worlds. It was much the same with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose intimacy and estrangement have long prompted readers to “side” with the poetry of one or the other. For many years, Wordsworth routinely came out ahead; The Prelude was weightier, more philosophical, more overtly “serious” than any of Coleridge’s verse. Lately, now that Victorian sobriety has gone thoroughly out of fashion, Coleridge’s visionary idiosyncrasy has gained the edge over Wordsworth’s poetic essays. Perhaps Lewis would be due a similar reassessment if most of the people making the comparison weren’t still primarily interested in trying to vindicate the fantasy genre itself. They tend to be Tolkien fans, and they are upset that he is not taken as seriously as they feel he ought to be. His masterpiece should not be equated with a handful of derivative children’s books!

  Perhaps for this reason, Tolkien’s alleged objection to the rampant syncretism of the Chronicles, and to his friend’s deficiencies at “world building,” has been given extraordinary weight. Even people who don’t respect either man’s fiction — critics like John Goldthwaite and Philip Pullman — repeat the complaint that Narnia is thin and miscellaneous, a patching together, seams out, of various mythologies and narrative tones. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a version of the Christian Passion, set in a variation on the Renaissance notion of Arcadia, populated by figures from classical and Norse legend, mingling as incongruously as the costumed actors on a film studio back lot. Furthermore, it borrows its voice from the children’s fantasies of E. Nesbit and Peter Pan, its talking animals from Beatrix Potter, its chivalric trappings from Malory. Goldthwaite calls Narnia a “Platonic ‘shadowland’” constructed with “an utter disregard for the laws of consistency that must be obser
ved when writing any fantasy.”

  At least Tolkien could be thankful that by the time Narnia came along, Lewis knew better than to work bits of Middle-earth’s mythology into his new invention. Or perhaps Tolkien had to ask him not to. Such a request might indeed have been necessary, because although Tolkien could have found no better audience for his lost tales and histories, no reader more willing to enter into his imaginary world, no mind better equipped intellectually to appreciate it, Lewis simply didn’t subscribe to Tolkien’s preoccupation with cultural integrity.

  Why should he? Behind the two men’s shared fondness for medieval literature, for romance, for England, lay some important differences. Lewis had long understood the Middle Ages to be a period not of pristine simplicity but of rampant cultural admixture and amalgamation. Christianity and pagan mythology, science and theology, history and poetry, were all wrestled by those great medieval codifiers into a single, overarching system. Everything went into the pot; everything had to, to validate God’s plan. It never seems to have occurred to Lewis to regard the result as polluted. There’s little evidence that, whatever his youthful prejudice against the French, he shared Tolkien’s view of the Norman Conquest as a tragedy. Lewis adored his friend’s “private mythology” but gave no sign of agreeing that it represented the true, immaculate soul of England. And on that count, Irishman though he was, he came closer to the truth.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Old Religion

  On the second floor of the British Museum in London is a small chest known as the Franks Casket. Made of whalebone ivory, it’s roughly the size of two small cigar boxes stacked on top of each other and elaborately carved on all four sides as well as on the lid. The Franks Casket dates from the eighth century and is thought to have been made for a prince of Northumbria, a northeastern kingdom in Anglo-Saxon England, although the carvings suggest a theme of exile, so it may not have been made there. Perhaps whoever first owned it used it to store rings and other golden items, the sort of treasure with which the leaders of the Danes and Geats secure the loyalty of their men in Beowulf. The casket is about the same age as the poem, made at the moment in English history that Tolkien idealized. The runes inscribed on the casket include some of the oldest surviving lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the images resemble Pauline Baynes’s illustrations for Farmer Giles of Ham.

  The Franks Casket is also unabashedly syncretistic. The right side depicts a Germanic warrior meeting a strange animal goddess, possibly the spirit of a sacred grove, possibly a Valkyrie, but in any case a figure from Norse paganism. The left side shows Romulus and Remus, the twin brothers who founded Rome. The Adoration of the Magi shares the front panel with images of Weland the Smith, a semidivine artisan figure from Norse mythology who resembles the great elvish metalworkers of The Silmarillion. On the back is carved the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman general Titus. The images on the lid portray an archer, probably from the Norse sagas. The maker of the casket apparently found it advisable to cover every religious base, pagan as well as Christian, with a dash of lore from the receding empire thrown in for good measure. This mélange commemorates a particularly fluid time in England’s religious history, a period when a new faith was replacing an older one.

  Such moments were hardly rare in Britain. A few hundred years after the Franks Casket was carved, the ascendant Catholicism of the eighth century would become “the Old Religion,” persecuted by the officials of the new Church of England and practiced in secret by families forced to build priest holes in their houses in order to hide “recusant” Catholic clergymen. Before the Anglo-Saxons, the Celtic Britons had their own polytheistic beliefs, with gods called Lugh, Sulis, and Toutatis; the occupying Romans would summarily rename these Mercury, Minerva, and Mars. Long ago, before even the Celts arrived, there were the Neolithic peoples who erected Stonehenge (“the oldest place in the old,” as Lewis once described it in a letter) and left Britain and Ireland peppered with their tombs and standing stones. What gods they worshipped, we will never know. According to Beowulf, it is one of their earthwork tombs or barrows — built, the poet explains, by “somebody now forgotten” — that houses the dragon whose venom will ultimately kill the epic’s aging hero. After defeating the monster, the poisoned warrior king stares up at the stone arches supporting the barrow’s inner chamber, ancient even then, realizing that his own end, too, is near.

  The first time I visited England I went for a walk with a friend over the headlands of the Isle of Wight off the southern coast. We happened upon a group of barrows, and hiked over the edge of the tallest. The top of the mound had collapsed long ago, leaving a grassy bowl. We lay down inside and listened as the wind blew up over the hill from the sea, while in that small shelter all was still. I tried to imagine the people who’d built the mound, thousands and thousands of years ago, a race whose very name has been lost, but who, like people everywhere, made a ceremony of burying their dead. I felt a sensation of plunging, not through space but through time, a feeling both giddy and solemn. I may even have held my breath for a while. When the moment passed, I turned and began to describe it to my friend, who, I learned to my surprise, had experienced much the same thing.

  Lewis grew up amid sites like this one; the remains of the oldest man-made structures in Britain are in Northern Ireland. When I hiked to the top of Slieve Martin in Rostrevor, I found, as promised in a park brochure, a stone with fading petroglyphs and, not far off, a cairn, or pile of rocks, marking an ancient grave. A prodigious country walker like Lewis must have happened upon hundreds of such remnants as he and his friends tramped through the hills of England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.

  Those experiences inspired the opening of Prince Caspian, a favorite scene among Lewis’s readers. The Pevensies, after being magically yanked from a railway platform in England onto a deserted island, make their way from the shore to the island’s center. There, amid the trees, they find a crumbling stone wall with an arched opening; through it, they walk into “a wide open place with walls all round it. In here there were no trees, only level grass and daisies, and ivy, and grey walls. It was a bright, secret, quiet place, and rather sad.” The children soon recognize this for the ruins of a castle, but it isn’t until Susan finds a solid gold chessman (an echo of Norse gods’ golden game pieces, found in the grass by the survivors of Ragnarok) that they realize that this is their castle, the remnants of Cair Paravel. Because of the incongruities in the passage of time between Narnia and our world, they’ve returned hundreds of years after their own reign.

  Energetic promoters of Northern Ireland as a site for C. S. Lewis tourism have claimed that Dunluce Castle on the Antrim Coast was the model for Cair Paravel. Lewis himself never said as much, although he knew the place; his family often vacationed along the northern coast of Ireland in the summers when he was a child. Built on a tall, steep rock outcropping surrounded by rough surf, accessible only by a narrow bridge, Dunluce is gloomier than I ever imagined Cair Paravel being. (If you happen to have an old LP of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, you can see for yourself; Dunluce is the background for the gatefold photograph.) What’s left of the castle looks stolid and houselike, not especially evocative of the spires and gables that Pauline Baynes drew for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was, however, won over to the idea of Dunluce as Cair Paravel (sentimentally, if not rationally) by something far below the castle itself, at the foot of its massive basalt base: a little grotto, washed by the waves, called the Mermaid’s Cave. Mermaids and mermen, as some readers of Narnia will recall, sang at the coronation of Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

  Like the remains of Cair Paravel, Dunluce Castle is roofless, and its floors have been replaced by a carpet of grass. You can see a similarly carpeted ruin beside the Thames footpath in Oxford, the route Lewis and his friends took on their frequent walks to the Trout pub in Wolvercote. These walls, what’s left of Godstow Nunnery, are older even than Dunluce. Henry II’s popular mistres
s, Rosamund Clifford, was once buried in the convent’s church choir. That was too close to the altar for the liking of Saint Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, who had her tomb removed in 1191 as part of a campaign against “superstitious and magical abominations everywhere,” according to his hagiographer. The tomb was later destroyed in another religious purge when Henry VIII dissolved the Catholic orders and established the Church of England in the 1530s. At that point, the building was converted to a private house and occupied by a well-off local family — until the English civil war, when it was badly damaged during the fighting between Puritan revolutionaries and Anglican royalists. Eventually, the ruins became a picnic spot favored on sunny afternoons by, among others, Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell, and her sisters.

  Look deep enough and many such places in England become spiritual palimpsests; each faith is written over the one that came before, leaving traces of the “Old Religion” still visible beneath. This was true back in the days of the Beowulf poet; even the dragon is a squatter in a structure built by somebody long dead. The difficulty with Tolkien’s plan “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own” was that by conceiving of that mythology as essentially Anglo-Saxon, rather than British, he tried not only to freeze a moment in that history but to airbrush out the past. The Anglo-Saxons, coming as they did somewhere in the middle of the long succession of peoples that have settled in Britain, never established an entirely “pure” culture there.