Laura Miller

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

  As for what Lewis called “England’s national epic,” Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, well, Tolkien had reservations about that. The Arthurian tradition was Celtic in origin and it was primarily preserved in the chivalric romances written by French poets in the Middle Ages. As a result, Tolkien disdained the stories of King Arthur and his knights on no less than three counts: first, for their Christianity, which, for complicated reasons, Tolkien felt compromised their mythic integrity; second, for the French elements (especially the “corrupt” code of courtly love), about which the less said the better; and third, for their Celtic roots.

  Tolkien’s attitude toward Celtic culture was ambivalent to say the least. When, in the 1930s, his British publisher sent an early manuscript of The Silmarillion to a reader, a report came back that complained of the “eye-splitting Celtic names” and described Tolkien’s tales as conveying “something of that mad, bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in the face of Celtic art.” Tolkien, naturally, protested. His names and stories were not Celtic! “I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages, Irish and Welsh),” he wrote in reply, “and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright color, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’ as your reader says — but I don’t believe I am.”

  The distinction is charged — politically, historically, personally, and (for Tolkien at least) linguistically. Tolkien believed, as did just about everyone at that time, that the English were descended mainly from the Anglo-Saxons. The rest of Britain — Wales, Scotland, and (especially) Ireland — constituted a “Celtic fringe,” whose ancestors had been pushed to the so-called outskirts by the invading Germanic tribes who overran the heartland after the Romans abandoned their British colonies in the fifth century. This idea had many uses for the English, all springing from the widely held conviction that the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts had fundamentally different temperaments as well as cultures.

  The Celts were “mad”: moody, whimsical, flighty, and often charming, but prone to superstition, to drink, and to melancholy. The Anglo-Saxons were practical, energetic, and efficient, in accordance with the common stereotype of Germans. Anglo-Saxons got things done and hewed to a noble code of honor inherited from their warrior past. This explained why the Anglo-Saxons (that is, the English) rightfully dominated the people of the Celtic fringe; they were inherently superior and capable, uniquely fitted for leadership. Lewis himself subscribed to this view at times, characterizing his father’s Welsh family as “sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical.”

  This doctrine of the two temperaments flourished in the nineteenth century, when prominent English experts equated Celtic ancestry with Catholicism and a general lazy backwardness that would have to be eradicated if the Irish (in particular) could ever hope to equal their English rulers. The prominent naturalist Robert Knox thought the Irish were incurable, and wrote, “The source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over historical facts… . The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. England’s safety requires it. I speak not of the justice of the cause; nations must ever act as Machiavelli advised: look to yourself. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for clearing the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts.”

  Tolkien would never have condoned this sort of racism, even if it hadn’t come laced with a large dose of anti-Catholicism, but he was prone to the fantasy of racialism all the same. Each language has a distinct flavor, as he saw it, and his own immediate recognition of Anglo-Saxon constituted, in his opinion, “as good or better a test of ancestry as blood-groups.” Blood explained why he “took to early West-Midland middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it.”

  In this belief, incidentally, Tolkien was almost certainly wrong. Recent advances in the analysis of DNA have made it possible to determine the distant genetic roots of contemporary individuals. Samples taken from the population of Britain revealed, to the surprise of many, that the modern English are mostly not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. “Overall,” wrote the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes, who oversaw the studies, “the genetic structure of the Isles is stubbornly Celtic, if by that we mean descent from people who were here before the Romans and who spoke a Celtic language.” In some parts of England, the proportion of people who can claim Anglo-Saxon ancestry does run as high as twenty percent, but that is along the eastern coast. Tolkien’s beloved homeland, the West Midlands, is almost entirely populated by the descendants of Celts, and on his mother’s side (the only branch of his family that mattered to him, and the source of his perceived Anglo-Saxonism) he too was most probably a Celt.

  Tolkien did waver in his “distaste” for things Celtic. As a boy, he found the Welsh names painted on the sides of railway cars both mysterious and evocative, and the elvish language Sindarin is based on Welsh, one of his favorite tongues. He wrote (or at least began) a few poems on Arthurian subjects, despite his apprehensions about the non-English roots of the tradition. And one of the major works of his career as a scholar was a translation, with E. V. Gordon, of the fourteenth-century Middle English Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien’s introduction (with Gordon) to that work praises it for not being as “rambling and incoherent” as “older Celtic forms.”

  As for his own tales, Tolkien wrote that he intended them to convey “the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things).” Most likely, he found the Celtic legends preserved in the Irish cycles and the Welsh Mabinogion — rife as they are with promiscuous women, arbitrary violence, and bodily fluids, as most myths tend to be toward the root — too coarse for his taste. His new mythology for England would instead be “‘high,’ purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.”

  Lewis, of course, would sometimes count himself among the Celts, but that did not necessarily keep him from agreeing with his friend on the problematic aspects of Celtic culture. He did, however, draw the line between the “flavors” of Celtic and Germanic myth with a greater, less punitive delicacy, in a letter to Arthur Greeves:

  I noted that the Celtic was much more sensuous; also less homely: also, entirely lacking in reverence, of which the Germanic was full. Then again that the Germanic glowed in a sense with the rich somber colors, while the Celtic was all transparent and full of nuances — evanescent — but very bright. One sees that Celtic is essentially Pagan, not merely in the sense of being heathen (not-Christian), as the Germanic might be, but in the sense of being irredeemably pagan, frivolous under all its melancholy, incapable of growing into religion, and — I think — a little heartless.

  Some of these words — “transparent and full of nuances — evanescent — but very bright” — could well describe Narnia, while the “rich somber colors” and “reverence” of the Germanic sounds more like Middle-earth. At times, Narnia does feel like a heroic and not entirely successful attempt to inject “religion” (that is, Christianity) into an “irredeemably pagan” (pan-pagan, really) realm that its convert author cannot bear to leave behind. But harping on the division between Germanic and Celtic (or for that matter, classical) paganism was characteristic of Tolkien, not Lewis. Lewis never felt the need to choose between the two mythologies, for as he went on to say in that letter to Arthur Greeves, “I don’t want to give up either: they are almost one’s male and female soul.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Riches All About You

  Lewis’s magpie aesthetic made Narnia a grab bag of every motif that had ever captured his fancy. Susanna Clarke told me that she’d once heard Narnia called just that, a “fancy,” in comparison to Tolkien’s fully articulated “fantasy.” The distinction, she said, originated with an academic critic of contemporary genre fiction, Gary Wolfe, author of the book Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Gl
ossary and Guide to Scholarship. I wrote to Wolfe to find out more, and he kindly replied, explaining that although he’d never actually applied the distinction to Lewis and Tolkien, he could see how someone else might. He’d based it on Coleridge’s conception of the difference between fancy and imagination, as described in Biographia Literaria, the philosophical and aesthetic autobiography Coleridge published in 1817.

  According to Biographia Literaria, imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” Fancy, by contrast, only rearranges preestablished “fixities and definites,” and is really no more than a “mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” It is the difference between rearranging the furniture in your mind and building it from scratch. “So by these standards,” Wolfe wrote in his e-mail to me, “you could make an argument that Tolkien inventing a new world and language that is not a direct mirror or allegory, is a better representative of Coleridge’s ‘imagination’ than Lewis, who employed Christian allegorical elements and familiar figures from myth and folklore in a way that more or less equates with ‘fancy.’”

  Here we come to one aspect of the Romantic creed that Lewis found myopic: the cult of individual genius and its corollary preoccupation with originality. Lewis knew that the high valuation placed on artistic novelty was itself fairly recent. The writers he studied regarded new material and ideas as precarious; far better to found your text on established authorities, as the great writers of the past were called. But contrary to what a modern reader might conclude, Lewis believed that this attitude didn’t necessarily reduce the work of medieval writers to the mere parroting or imitation of other authors.

  When Chaucer “works over” a poem by Boccaccio, Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, his delightful book on the medieval mind, “no line, however closely translated, will do exactly what it did in the Italian once Chaucer has made his additions. No line in those additions but depends for much of its effect on the translated lines which precede and follow it.” As he saw it, the miracle of medieval literature was that its great writers, without attempting to do anything unprecedented, and in the act of what appeared to be no more than touching up some venerable source, nevertheless transfigured their material: “they handled no predecessor without pouring new life into him.”

  Lewis took the defense of the Middle Ages as the great cause of his academic career. The Allegory of Love aimed to unlock the riddles of the medieval romances for modern scholars, and the same could be said of his critical magnum opus, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, a volume in The Oxford History of English Literature series (semiaffectionately nicknamed OHEL). Lewis described the supreme English poet of the 1500s, Edmund Spenser, as “neo-Medieval.” What was good about English literature in the sixteenth century, Lewis firmly believed, had its roots in the worldview, the style, and the tastes of the Middle Ages.

  The brilliance of the Renaissance (if by “Renaissance” we mean the revival of classical forms of art, literature, and philosophy in Europe beginning in Italy in the fifteenth century), Lewis felt, was not just overrated, but possibly nonexistent. “My line,” he wrote to a colleague, “is to define the Renaissance as ‘an imaginary entity responsible for anything a modern writer happens to approve in the 15th or 16th century.’” According to then current intellectual fashion, whatever the modern observer liked — such as Dante, a poet Lewis considered completely medieval — would be chalked up to a manifestation of the Renaissance; everything unappealing would be labeled as typical of the Middle Ages.

  Like most students, I was taught to think of the years between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries as the Dark Ages. Historians have by now virtually abandoned that term, and even when it was more commonly used, it was meant to describe only the period before the eleventh century; the “darkness” refers to the lack of contemporary historical records from those years. But from the perspective of my Renaissance-adulating sixth-grade teacher and our social studies textbook, the metaphorical shadow fell over all of the Middle Ages. Those were ignorant and backward times as far as we were concerned, and not worth much attention. Perhaps this was true of, say, the visual arts in Italy. But, as Lewis observes in OHEL, it doesn’t make much sense to regard the bulk of sixteenth-century English literature as a major improvement on Chaucer.

  It would also be a mistake, he insists, to give too much credit for the flowering of Elizabethan literature in the late 1500s to “humanism.” The English humanists — those thinkers who read, taught, and emulated classical authors — were, in Lewis’s opinion, far more influenced by Latin than by Greek (which in any case most of them barely knew). And that influence was not necessarily salubrious. The English writers of the early sixteenth century made the mistake of attempting to mimic Latin prose and verse styles in their own language. This was a bad idea, partly because Latin is inflected and English is not, and it led to stiff, drab writing.

  If only the humanists had been as familiar with Greek as many people seemed to think they were! Then their writing might have escaped this Latinate deadliness; Lewis felt that it was impossible to be “marmoreal” in Greek. Latin, alas, permits endless pomposity. “The desire [among early sixteenth-century British writers] was for order and discipline, weight, and decorum,” Lewis writes in OHEL, and this affectation produced prose and verse that was ponderous, artificial, and abstract. “Nothing is light, or tender or fresh” in the literature of the early 1500s, he complains. “All the authors write like elderly men.”

  Only when English writers got over their aspirations to classical dignity did English literature recover, and when it did, “fantasy, conceit, paradox, color, incantation” returned. Spenser and Philip Sidney brought back these qualities by taking up that quintessentially medieval form, the romance, in The Faerie Queene and Arcadia. Even Shakespeare’s vitality as a dramatist, Lewis insisted, was tapped from popular art forms that had survived from the Middle Ages, unsullied by the fashions of the lettered classes. The literary rebirth in the Elizabethan era occurred, he argued, not because of classicism, but in spite of it. It happened because the great artists of the period revived the inherently medieval flavor of English, a language that is particular, intimate, diverse, and lively, rather than grand and abstract. Few English writers could successfully reproduce the stately gravitas of Latin verse (only Milton ever excelled at it, Lewis felt), and as long as they kept trying, they generated nothing but bad poetry and the rationales to justify it. “The more we look into the question,” he wrote, “the harder we shall find it to believe that humanism had any power of encouraging, or any wish to encourage, the literature that actually arose” under Elizabeth I.

  With this unconventional argument, Lewis completely reversed the commonly held view of the Middle Ages as a cultural lull, and placed them at the center of the English imagination and sensibility. If modern readers have difficulty appreciating this truth, he felt, it’s because our world is so different from that one; we have to learn to imaginatively project ourselves into the medieval universe in order to read medieval books properly. Doing this requires more than just picturing a life without combustion engines or penicillin; you have to slip into the consciousness of someone with an entirely different conception of the cosmos. And you can’t just think your way into it by, say, intermittently reminding yourself that the author you’re reading believed that the planets are embedded in a series of nested crystal spheres and play music as they revolve. You had to try to feel what that world felt like to that man or woman. “The recipe for such realization is not the study of books,” Lewis wrote. “You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology.”

  Lewis regarded the medieval model of the universe as a great collective work of art and science, a conceptual cathedral b
uilt of the thoughts and words of many people. Not all of these were Christians by any means; the medievals respected the classical philosophers they knew about almost as much as they revered scripture, and even the “barbarians” (that is, nonclassical pagans) had some influence. “The Model,” as Lewis refers to it, was both beautiful to contemplate and reassuring to inhabit; everything had its proper place in a perfectly ordered hierarchy proceeding from unformed matter at the bottom of the scale to God at the pinnacle. All things were known, or at least knowable; all ideas could be made to fit into the whole, which was one reason why innovation for its own sake seemed superfluous.

  If Lewis himself couldn’t entirely believe in this “finite” yet melodious universe, he felt its attraction. “The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie,” he wrote; “the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony… . This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien — all agoraphobia — is so markedly absent from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky.”

  The medieval universe, however, was also extremely intricate. The angelic population alone consists of three hierarchies of beings, divided into three species apiece, each with its own name, duties, and native powers. This complexity was yet another result of the incorrigible bookishness of the time, compounded by the sheer credulity of medieval scholars whenever dealing with venerable texts. “They find it hard to believe that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue,” Lewis observed drily. If it was written down, it had to be correct, and therefore must be accommodated into the model.

  As a result, medieval intellectuals devoted themselves not only to compiling, but also to reconciling the whole, diverse panoply of known printed information, pagan and Christian, much of it seemingly incompatible. This task called for great feats of imaginative metaphysics. The medievals’ conception of astronomy may be the most eloquent example of their ability, à la Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, to believe several impossible things before breakfast. They regarded the stars as physical objects and as supernatural intelligent beings bearing the names of pagan gods (although ultimately emanations of, and subordinate to, the Supreme God) and as disembodied forces, exerting great influence over human affairs — all at the same time. It’s easy to see why allegory became the signature literary form of the period.