The Bird and Baby

The world's richest man has purchased the Oxford pub where the Inklings once met. From The Telegraph:

The most unlikely part of Ellison’s plan to put his stamp on Oxford is his purchase of one of its most historic and best loved pubs. In 2023, EIT reportedly paid the eye-watering sum of £8m for the Eagle and Child, in the centre of the city, which is being restored by Foster + Partners.

The pub, which first opened in 1684, closed its doors in March 2020 because of the pandemic and has never reopened. Until its closure, its most famous feature was the wooden plaque in the back room, known as the Rabbit Room, commemorating the literary group known as the Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, who would meet there regularly to socialise and discuss their work.

It was here, when Tolkien was reading The Lord of the Rings to the assembled company, that the academic Hugh Dyson is said to have remarked, “not another f------ elf”.

In one of the group’s last meetings, Lewis distributed literary proofs for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. ....

Ellison bought the pub from St John’s College – co-incidentally, [Tony] Blair’s old college – with a pledge to refurbish and reopen it as a place where technologists and university scholars can come to meet and exchange ideas – as well, of course, as to drink. The pub’s menu will also, apparently, become rather more refined. .... (more)

I had a drink there when in Oxford and, of course, visited the area in the pub where the Inklings would gather, usually on Tuesday. They would also meet in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College on Thursday evenings. I hope the restoration of the pub retains reference to its association with Lewis, Tolkien, and the others. The Bird and Baby picture is one I collected some time ago..

Mick Brown, "How the world’s richest man is buying up Oxford," The Telegraph, Sept. 13, 2025.

In the time we are given

Tolkien delivered "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" in 1936, before he began writing the Middle-earth books. This is from "Monsters and the Long Defeat" about that lecture:

.... The need to defend “man’s precarious fortress” would never cease; crisis would emerge yet again, and then again, exhaustingly, until the end of the age. Tolkien had no patience for defeatism, but he knew at the same time that the dragon-fight to which any of us, the descendants of Adam, are summoned, will not be the last. And if it is branded the “dragon-fight to end dragons,” the vendors of that narrative will consign many hopeful young persons to the bleak fate of having failed. We cannot hope to root out Evil from the soil of the cosmos entirely. All we can do is confront its promulgation so far as we are able to in our weakness. This is the responsibility entrusted to human beings in the time they are given. If we neglect this, we will discover, each and every time, that the cost of our crusades is unbearably high. ....

The history of our species isn’t one of onward and upward progress: it is one of chaos and desperate rearguard actions, punctuated by all too short gasps of peace. We try to hold the dark but it’s never a single, concentrated line of defense holding across time, united by the same allegiances or the same threats. It is fragmented clumps of contention putting themselves in the way of the dark’s machinations, and the fact that they are often overwhelmed by it is no discrediting of the effort.

And it is the eschaton that is the final retroactive judgment that will unveil everything’s hidden significance and the obscured connections they bear to one another. Then the seemingly isolated, disparate string of defeats will be revealed to be episodes in the long campaign against the darkness, from a cup of cold water to rescuing a persecutor to a doomed last stand. The Beowulf-poet illuminated Tolkien’s instinct to see eschatological reversal as a source of hopeful activity. We, their unpromising descendants, can likewise contend for the present with the hope that the eschaton will vindicate and resurrect its good within its upheaval, but without triumphalism or presumption. Instead, we can adhere to Beckett’s like-hearted maxim, “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This is our doom and our challenge: to fight the long defeat, the only fight in which there is real integrity due to its small aims and its recognition of human frailty. We may be summoned to many fights, to end this wrong or that evil, but the end of the evils and afflictions that characterize our existence will always asymptotically evade our reach. But if we would not be monsters, then we must strive all the same and leave their ultimate defeat to God. (more)

Ian Olson, "Monsters and the Long Defeat," Mere Orthodoxy, July 24, 2025.

"As in a dream"

Jake Meador, in an email to subscribers of Mere Orthodoxy:

.... It is not a question of knowing what is right. It is a question, rather, of one’s commitment to the right.

This is something Peter Jackson never understood about Tolkien, incidentally, and is perhaps the single biggest problem with the Lord of the Rings movies, much as I do love those films. Jackson seems to only understand one sort of moral dilemma: Will I choose the good or the bad? Tolkien understood that one, of course; it’s central to how he treats Boromir and Denethor.

But the question that really seems to have most preoccupied Tolkien was something more like “can a person persist in the good, past the point of all hope and even unto death?” That is the problem Aragorn, Faramir, and Theoden all confront in different ways and, of course, is also near the heart of Frodo and Sam’s journey. ....

[Meador is reminded] of the opening sentence in Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a text that Lewis knew well and praised in his scholarly work. Hooker, writing at a time when the fate of the Church of England was unclear and when it was far from certain that his particular flavor of Anglicanism would endure, opened his great masterwork with this line:

Though for no other cause, yet for this; that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream, there shall be for men's information extant thus much concerning the present state of the Church of God established amongst us, and their careful endeavor which would have upheld the same.

In other words, Hooker wrote, if for no other reason than simply for this: That those who came after him would know that he and his colleagues had not allowed what they believed to be true and right to pass away “as in a dream.” ....

What Lewis and Tolkien both force their readers to do, in different ways, is ask themselves “if you are called to a cause that is both just and hopeless, what will you do?” Neither of them want us to desire hopelessness, obviously. That can be an easy thing to do for people of a certain turn of mind. It is a vice I am sometimes prone to myself.

The point is, rather, that one should have an answer to that question because once you’ve answered it something has been decided. Obviously the good can and often do triumph. Tolkien and Lewis both wrote many morally admirable characters who win great victories. But I suspect both would also say that the ability of a character to remain good amidst their glory is a consequence of their resolve to hold to the good even in defeat. If you persist in what is right in the face of defeat, then you love the good more than you love temporal success, which is precisely the thing that allows you to handle success with maturity and wisdom when it comes.

Jake Meador in a Mere Orthodoxy email.

Moral imagination

From a long, very interesting, essay by Katherine Rundell, herself an author of books for children, "Why children’s books?":

.... It was W.H. Auden who said: ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’ The great discipline of children’s fiction is that it has to be written for everyone: because if it is not for everyone then it’s not for anyone at all. It offers us the specific joy of finding our commonality: we can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida. ....

...[T]here are common threads that run through the children’s books that have endured and the new books that children currently devour. If, as a practitioner, I were to draw up a list it would include: autonomy, peril, justice, secrets, small jokes, large jokes, revelations, animals, multitudinous versions of love, inventions – and food.

Food gives both solid reality and delicious longing to children’s books. Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series about monastic chivalric mice, was a milkman when he began volunteering to read at a school for the blind. He found himself horrified by the quality of the books he was reading, and decided to write his own – and, because the children were blind, he accentuated senses other than sight: smell, sound, temperature, texture and, most important of all to children, taste. The food in Redwall is the thing most of its readers remember....

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages. And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder? ....

What is​ fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death. As Tolkien said, in an interview in 1968, ‘human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.’ ....

C.S. Lewis wrote that tales of the marvellous are their own, real thing: fictional, yes, but also solid pieces of knowledge. They are ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.’ The greatest children’s fantasies were worth your time when you were twelve, and they are equally worth it now. They keep the imagination sharp, and big, and hungry. They remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood. It is at the very heart of everything. It is deadly serious, the necessary condition of political change, of love. It is the sharpest tool of ethics. Edmund Burke popularised the term ‘moral imagination’ to describe the ability of ethical perception to step beyond the limits of the fleeting moment and beyond the limits of a single person’s experience. ....

There’s no doubt that reading for pleasure as a child can change your life. It is a key predictor of economic success later in life. But the main reason to help children seek out books is this: if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. ....

To write those books is to insist that though the world burns, and there is more fire to come, it will always be worth teaching children to rejoice. It will always be worth showing them how to build an internal blueprint for happiness. Nothing about being alive demands joy. But, over and over, the great children’s books insist on it: on joy as a way that humans both create and are given meaning. Joy is insisted on through talking spiders, and rats in rowing boats, and in the vast promise of an opening line: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ .... (much more)

Katherine Rundell, "Why children’s books?," London Review of Books, Feb./ 6, 2025.

Read "The Lord of the Rings"

Five Books recommends reading Tolkien because the books are a different experience than the films:

These are stories of adventure that have the epic feel that the movies capture, but against a backdrop of conviviality and the pleasures of eating, drinking and telling stories by the fireside as you gather with your companions. Notably, the books are filled with poems that are composed and told by the main characters and pay homage to an oral storytelling tradition that has largely disappeared from our culture but Tolkien clearly admired.

The Hobbit is the recommended first read. I have known people who could not get through it and consequently went no further. I did read it first and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Hobbit introduces the creature known as a hobbit, about half the height of a human, beardless, and with hairy feet. In particular, the book introduces the figure of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit in his 50s who enjoys eating, smoking his pipe and taking it easy, and who is very emphatically NOT in search of an adventure. Unfortunately, a visit from Gandalf, a wizard, and 13 dwarves changes all that. Mr Baggins is dragged off from his comfortable home on a quest to recover a treasure.

The Hobbit is fun and light-hearted but has a slightly two-dimensional feel—featuring elves, goblins and dragons: creatures you might expect in a magical story for kids. It does not yet have the epic and ‘real’ feel of The Lord of the Rings. However, it’s in The Hobbit that a magical ring first makes its appearance, as does the creature who is obsessed with it—called Gollum because of the strange noise he makes in his throat when he talks. It’s clear that the ring’s power and the role it would play in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings had yet to take shape in Tolkien’s mind.

Continue "Lord of the Rings Books in Order" here. If you have read the books there are no surprises. But the descriptions may intrigue those who haven't without giving too much away.

"Lord of the Rings Books in Order," Best Books for Kids, Nov. 2, 2024.

"Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear..."

Jake Meador, on Tolkien's view of moral responsibility. This was published in September and I missed it.

.... There is a simplicity about Tolkien’s moral vision that is refreshing. Certainly, there are times when the answer to the right course of action is not altogether plain, and wisdom and prudence are needed to help one see the right way. But if honour compels one toward a certain action, come what may, then nothing else matters—at least not for Tolkien.

We might stumble over the centrality of honour because Tolkien draws on a moral vision largely forgotten in our day. But the wise elders of old understood that when an individual faced a question of right and wrong, they were also facing a question of honour and dishonour. ....

For Tolkien, the demands of honour wed to wisdom and prudence are generally the only demands on us when we consider what we ought to do. History is simply the stage on which we act, playing our part well or poorly. Our feet are set down at some moment in time by forces entirely outside our control, and we must decide how to walk. As the wizard Gandalf counsels elsewhere in Lord of the Rings, “All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.” But this is not how many of us think about the relationship between time and moral choice. Rather than the space in which we make choices, history has come to be one of the central inputs that informs our choices, competing with the claims of honour as defined by the moral law.

Consider the ways in which both the Right and the Left now routinely avail themselves of what might be called “the appeal to the calendar.” The Left, including former president Barack Obama, have long spoken of the possibility of being “on the wrong side of history,” as if history itself is a moral force that calls us to certain choices and will judge us should we choose wrongly. Yet the Right makes its own appeal to the calendar. Any number of moral horrors are tolerated and justified through the claim that the offending party “knows what time it is,” and therefore must be allowed or even encouraged. ....

Tolkien did not think much of such “historical” arguments. In The Two Towers, Éomer, the prince of Rohan, says to Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor, “It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange.... How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” To which Aragorn replies, “As he ever has judged. Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” While Tolkien certainly had a category for complex moral problems and possessed a deep understanding of the need for wisdom in approaching moral difficulties, he had no category whatever for engaging in evil to secure good ends. One’s moment in history did not let one off the hook of acting with honour. ....

Our hope is never to vanquish evil altogether, for we cannot do that. But we can act, as Tolkien says in The Return of the King:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Those who wish to fight the long defeat well know that the “weather” facing future peoples is not ours to rule. But we can uproot what evils we encounter in hopes that our children and grandchildren might see a more fruitful crop than we ourselves ever shall ..... (more)

Jake Meador, "The Long Defeat of History," Comment, Sept. 5, 2024.

“I enjoy monotony”

I'm tempted, but it seems rather expensive. From a review, "Of mice and men and Magdalen: C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin":

The life of a dedicated Oxford don and literary figure is bound to contain few opportunities for drama, glamour, or adventure. “I enjoy monotony,” C.S. Lewis once admitted to a questioner, and that was surely a fortunate trait, given that he spent 30 years teaching at Oxford, mainly in undergraduate tutorials, before he finally moved to a non-teaching post at Cambridge.

Yet such is the fascination that many have with the author of the Screwtape Letters (1942), the Narnia Chronicles (1949-54), and the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955), that many readers will relish the details of his Oxford life revealed in this sympathetic and atmospheric biography.

Simon Horobin records that Lewis typically taught 24 hours of tutorials a week, a huge burden over the three Oxford terms, which then as now consisted of eight intense weeks (the standard stint of a teaching fellow in Classics today, which tutors find taxing enough, is eight hours a week). When he was finally appointed to a chair at Cambridge in 1954, Lewis commented in a letter: “29 years of pupils’ essays is enough, bless ’em” and some years later wrote delightedly to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, “I’ve never been so under-worked since I first went to school.” ....

“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.” Lewis was eventually persuaded by his old friend J.R.R. Tolkien that he would still be able to live at The Kilns if he took the chair. By the time he arrived in Cambridge he was already a literary celebrity (his relationship with other literary stars such as Tolkien, T.S. Eliot and particularly John Betjeman was not entirely happy).

He correctly recognised that a large part of the success of the Narnia books was due to the marvelous illustrations by Pauline Baynes. When she wrote to congratulate him on the award of the Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, Lewis generously responded saying that it was “our medal”: the pictures were bound to have been a factor. He was similarly generous in his letters to Dorothy Sayers, though the statement that “Lewis’s long friendship with Dorothy L. Sayers contradicts the suggestion that he sought out only members of his own sex” strikes an unduly defensive note. .... (more)

8/21/2024  I'm not very good at resisting temptation. My copy arrived today. 

Armand D’Angour, "Of mice and men and Magdalen," The Critic, July 2024.

The everyday acts of ordinary people

Re-posted because I agree even more strongly today than I did then. From Alan Jacobs on "A Long Defeat, A Final Victory":

.... The phrase “long defeat” comes from J.R.R. Tolkien, who in The Lord of the Rings puts it in the mouth of Galadriel, and in a letter uses it himself: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” ....

.... Perhaps the chief problem with the “culture wars” paradigm that governs so much Christian action and reflection, in the North American context anyway, is that it encourages us to think in terms of trophies rather than testimonies. It tempts us to think too much about whether we’re winning or losing, and too little about the only thing we ultimately control, which is the firmness of our own resolve. ....

It seems to me that the most important political acts I can perform do not involve siding with one of the existing parties, or even necessarily to vote at all, but to try to bear witness through word and action to this double vision of the earthly city: a long defeat followed by a longer joy.

We are too prone, I believe, to think that voting is the definitive political act. That would be true only if politics simply belongs to the government. There is a far vaster sphere of politics — the life of the polis — that belongs to everyday acts of ordinary people. In this maybe Gandalf is a pretty good guide: “Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

A Long Defeat, A Final Victory – Snakes and Ladders

"Hope that breaks the witch’s spell"

Making an argument that G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien have also made:

.... Fairy tales are beloved by children partly because they are tales of action. Rather than revolving around the inner thoughts and motivations of nuanced characters, they are concerned with what happens next, what the characters (often archetypes) do. They are more than mere fables with a snappy moral (think Aesop) because their meaning transcends clearcut lessons. Instead, they are full of mystery. There is room inside these tales for the child to explore fairyland: a strange and dangerous world in which she can practice overcoming her fears by journeying alongside the hero. And at the end of the tale, everything is set right. ....

The fairy tale acknowledges that parents do not always love and care for their children as they ought, that loved ones die and leave us alone and grieving, that evil is real and often powerful, and that violence and sin are present in our world. All these truths make grownups uncomfortable; we are eager to smooth over a child’s fears with comforting falsehoods. “Don’t worry, nothing is going to happen to me,” a mother might say when her child is distraught at the thought of her mortality. But the child knows that sometimes mothers die and his mother is no different. Children are wise enough to be afraid of death, loss, and danger – after all, these are frightening things. The question is whether we allow them to wrestle well with these fears or not. British writer G. K. Chesterton famously wrote, “The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a Saint George to kill the dragon.” If we spend our efforts trying to convince a child that the dragons of life can’t hurt him, we not only fail to tell the truth, we fail to show him that dragons do not have the last word. And the child longs to be equipped to face the monsters he fears, whether dragons or death. ....

Every human being understands the world and his place in it through narratives. God wires us to be formed by story; Jesus himself tells parables to teach his disciples. It is of the highest importance that we consider what stories we are telling our young people. What character do they think they are in the story of their lives? And what kind of world is their story set in? Is it a world in which greed and power will be ultimately triumphant? Is it a world in which love and goodness hold any sway? Could the dread that seems to plague our young people be not merely a reaction to the brokenness of our world but our failure to communicate that the universe will ultimately be set right as both fairy tales and the gospel promise? ....

To combat both the anxiety that comes to children robbed of the space to confront evil and the despair that holds that the last chapter of humanity’s tale is final defeat, we have to offer truer stories. Early in life, children need to be steeped in fairy tales that don’t gloss over the dark and ugly parts of the world. Children are wise; they reject the false advertising of cheap positive thinking for the real prize of hard-won hope. For a message of hope to be received, it must be hope that shines in darkness, hope that breaks the witch’s spell. .... (more)

Haley Stewart, "The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales," Plough, June 17, 2024.

Uncontrollable laughter

When the Inklings gathered the usual routine was for one of them to read from something on which he was working. Apparently, when none were prepared to present, Irene Iddesleigh would be brought out. The game was to see how much could be read without someone bursting out in laughter.

Irene Iddesleigh is a free download or can be read online at ManyBooks. The challenge posed to the Inklings would be difficult, I think, for any group. It definitely is for me. I suffer the impulse almost immediately.

If conversation lags open Irene Iddesleigh, read it aloud, and see whether you can retain your composure better than Lewis or Tolkien.

C.S. Lewis

A.N. Wilson was a biographer of C.S. Lewis (not my favorite). Here Wilson narrates a pretty good biographical documentary about CSL, "Clive Staples Lewis: The Lost Poet Of Narnia":

“The strong do what they will..."

Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War is the first of "Five Best: Books on Geopolitics" recommended by Adm. James Stavridis in The Wall Street Journal. It was one of the books assigned in a political theory class that I took in graduate school.

Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) is the ultimate tale of a powerful geopolitical conflict. Athens, the dominant sea power, is challenged by Sparta, the upstart land power. The two city-states rely on complex alliance systems, crafty diplomats, military might and shifting objectives to dominate ancient Greece. The war lasts nearly three decades and forces almost all the other city-states to pick a side. The inferno would engulf them all. This is a work of history at once idealistic (“Judging happiness to be the fruit of freedom and freedom of valor, never decline the dangers of war.”) and pragmatic (“The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.”). In recounting a war that deeply harmed both sides, Thucydides gives us a maxim for our own troubled times: “The course of war cannot be foreseen, and its attacks are generally dictated by the impulse of the moment.”

It's a good selection, but the last recommendation surprised me: The Lord of the Rings. It's an interesting interpretation of the trilogy, but one that I suspect would not have pleased Tolkien.

How does J.R.R. Tolkien’s three-volume fantasy novel land on a list of books about geopolitics? By being a thinly disguised roman à clef of World War II. Put Hitler in the role of evil Sauron, let Mussolini be the wizard Saruman and create a heroic alliance to oppose them. The hobbits—a peaceful people Tolkien introduced in his preceding work—carry much of the story. But the rest of the cast are the geopolitical masters of the tale. And what a tale it is: an immense force of evil seeking control of a devastating technology; a shopworn and fractious alliance formed in resistance; a harrowing series of battles across plains, mountains and rivers; and lessons in complex diplomacy, economic strangulation, courtly betrayal and mind control. The Lord of the Rings is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of the world, as we hear from ancient elven lord Elrond: “Let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.” The hobbits try their best to remain naive and innocent. At one point Frodo, their accidental leader, says: “It is useless to meet revenge with revenge: it will heal nothing.” Maybe so. But the geopolitical lesson of The Lord of the Rings is to fight with all your heart and soul against evil—and build what alliances you can along the way.

James Stavridis, "Five Best: Books on Geopolitics," The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2024.

"Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice"

Douglas Murray's choice this week in his series, "Things Worth Remembering," is a sermon delivered by C.S. Lewis soon after the outbreak of World War II:

When I was at Oxford, I met the actor Robert Hardy, who told me that, as an undergraduate, he was fortunate enough to have had Tolkien as his tutor in Anglo-Saxon literature and C.S. Lewis as his tutor in Medieval English.

Both men became most famous for creating their own fantasy worlds—Tolkien with the Middle Earth of The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis with his Chronicles of Narnia series, which are often thought of as children’s books, but which are much more than that. ....

Lewis was not only a writer of scholarly books and popular fiction. He was also, perhaps, the foremost Christian apologist of the mid-twentieth century. His books and lectures—Fern-Seed and Elephants is a very good place to start—did something that very few people can do today.

Most professors, not least of literature, have no interest in communicating with a wide audience. They play games for other people in their field. They also seem to take exceptionally obvious or untrue ideas and try to spin them out in a way that makes really rather banal observations seem infinitely more complex than they are.

Lewis had the opposite skill—a real skill—which was to distill a lifetime’s learning and make complex and deep ideas not just understandable but relatable. ....

The selection that Murray has chosen is from a sermon Lewis delivered in 1939, “Learning in Wartime.”   Murray:

It is a profoundly important message. Essentially, it is this: do not put off what you have to do in your life until the times are optimal. Because they never were optimal, and they never will be.

Human life, he notes, was always filled with distractions, alarms, panics, and tragedy. That is not what makes it remarkable. What makes life remarkable is that we get on with what we have to do in spite of these things. Alone among the creatures, we have the capability to understand the world around us and to have some sense of where it might be going. That could push us into despair and despondency. But the history of mankind is not that. It is that we did and do remarkable things, in spite of such knowledge. .... (more)

Douglas Murray, "Things Worth Remembering: C.S. Lewis on Keeping Calm in Chaos," The Free Press, March 10, 2024.

Tolkien has endured

From a review of Tolkien's Faith:

The year 2023 marked 50 years since the death of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, and 2024 will mark 70 years since the publication of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, which holds the title of the best-selling novel ever written. Fantasy and science-fiction authors mostly come and go, but Tolkien has endured. Why is this so? What is different about him?

For answers, we would do well to look at the recent work of Holly Ordway, whose 2023 biography Tolkien’s Faith constitutes a significant breakthrough in Tolkien scholarship. ....

Fantasy novels will typically feature a muscle-bound alpha with a bikini-clad babe on the cover. At the very least they will exalt the smart, or the fast, or the lucky. Tolkien’s hobbits aren’t like that at all: He celebrates small, decent folk. Frodo, the Ringbearer himself, doesn’t even really get to be extraordinary: At the end, he succumbs to temptation and fails in his quest, which is saved only by the mercy he has shown to Gollum, a creature even more miserable and lowly than himself. In other words, his premise is based on the Christian values of humility and mercy. As Tolkien himself wrote, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” ....

Tolkien was not ignoring the modern world by writing of a world of handicraft, virtue, nature, friendship, and, ultimately, religion. He was saying that these represented the answers to our problems, the enduring and true answers. The Lord of the Rings is just as much about modern war, totalitarianism, global surveillance, and the dangers of technology — our “smartphones” grow daily more similar to the Ring in their power over us — as it is about the medieval world.

Modern thinkers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali have recently made the case that without Christianity there will be no resistance to the forces of disintegration operating in our culture today. ....

John Byron Kuhner, "The Enduring Appeal of J.R.R. Tolkien," National Review, April, 2024, pp. 62-63.

Seven Christian authors

The Wade Center is on the campus of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Its purpose: "We emphasize the ongoing relevance of seven British Christian authors who provide a distinctive blend of intellect, imagination, and faith: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams."

I visited there sometime in the 1970s with a friend and haven't been back since. One memory is having seen the wardrobe that had been owned by Lewis and may have been the inspiration for the wardrobe that provided access to Narnia. There are also Tolkien's writing desk and a chair and desk that belonged to Lewis. But the main attractions of the Center are its collections. The materials are non-circulating but there is no charge and the Reading Room is open to the public.

One of the first books I read about (as opposed to by) C.S. Lewis was The Christian World of C.S. Lewis (Eerdmans, 1964) by Clyde Kilby, the first curator of the Wade Center. Kilby had met Lewis and corresponded with him until Lewis died in 1963. He was responsible for beginning the collections. The Kilby book is available, second hand, or on-demand, at Amazon. I still have the copy I bought in 1968.

The Wade Center publishes VII, a journal about its seven authors. Readers of this blog will know that four of them have been of particular interest to me: Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, and Sayers.

Learning to enjoy books

Yesterday I came across a site called Tea and Ink Society and I've been exploring it. It introduces itself as "a bookish haven in the internet sea. Bookworms from around the world have been enjoying Tea and Ink Society since 2017." One of my discoveries there is the "50 Classic Chapter Books to Read Aloud with Your Kids" page. From the introduction to the book list:

One of the best gifts you can give your children is a love of reading. And reading aloud classic, time-honored chapter books will build that foundation. ....

There are many fantastic children’s chapter books published each year, but I’m not an expert in those. I’ll recommend what I do know, and that’s classic children’s literature.

I was blessed with a large family of six kids growing up, and we read aloud daily: a chapter book with Mom in the mornings, a different chapter book with Dad after supper. We read a variety, not just fiction or classics, but many of our favourites–our repeat read alouds–were classics. That’s the book list I’m giving you today. This is a sampling of some of the excellent classic chapter books we read as a family, with a few mixed in that I discovered or read on my own. ....

• Most of the authors on this list wrote multiple chapter books for children, so if you like a book you read by them see what else is in their bibliography. I just chose one book or series per author, because this list was getting rather extensive!
• Since some of these classic chapter books are quite old (some almost 200 years old), you’ll find a lot of differences in the way we think today. I believe it’s healthy for children to put themselves not just in someone else’s place, but in someone else’s time, and differences in worldview make for excellent conversation.
• Don’t be afraid of “big” or dated vocabulary. Children can comprehend a lot through context.

The list. (it's pretty good)

"Ultimate List of Classic Chapter Books to Read Aloud with Your Kids (or to read on your own…)," Tea and Ink Society, March 16, 2020.

The New York C.S. Lewis Society

I have been a non-attending member of the New York C.S. Lewis Society since I was in graduate school in 1969/70. And I have subscribed to The Bulletin from, I think, the first issue. It always, as you would expect, includes articles about Lewis,—sometimes other Inklings—along with book reviews and accounts of the Society's monthly meetings. The Society's website has recently been redesigned. That site includes, among other things, links to other online resources about CSL and the Inklings, and, for a fee, downloadable back issues of The Bulletin. I am particularly grateful for the latter since I just went looking for back issues that I thought I had saved and haven't found any earlier than the last ten or so years. Did I give them away?

The main article in the current issue of the bulletin is "C.S. Lewis: Supervisor" by Alastair Fowler who, while doing doctoral research at Oxford, was supervised by Lewis, and they became friends. The article was originally published in Yale Review in 2003 and is interesting to people like me because of Fowler's direct experience with Lewis. For instance:

He had almost no small talk; he was courteous but dialectical and sometimes combative. Like his model Dr. Johnson, Lewis was "a very polite man," Claude Rawson remarks, only in self-ignorance. But I think he knew his shortcoming well enough. He generally followed the adversarial system, and not always quietly. Exulting in victory, he argued closely on until his adversary was crushed or ridiculous. For some reason, this method of conversation did not win universal popularity.

Another:

...[S]o far was he from standing on ceremony or authority or superior learning that he started his lecture as he came through the door and finished it as he walked out. He was a popular and (not at all the same thing) good lecturer — lecturing sometimes to an audience of three hundred or more. He towered above his colleagues as easily audible (something that could not be said of Tolkien).

By 1962 Fowler had taught both in Britain and America; and renewed his friendship with Lewis.

Lewis, too was a different person from the supervisor I remembered: he had married but lost his wife and was himself seriously ill. Visiting him in the Acland hospital and at the Kilns, I got to know him as a friend. Now our talk, more recollective and ruminative, was about anything and everything: his dreams, plum jam, The Lord of the Rings. On his side at least, it seemed without reserve. .... In the United States, I heard of a Lewis quite distinct from the Lewis I knew. My Lewis smoked incessantly, drank more than was altogether good for him, and appreciated bawdy... If he was a saint, it was not one of an austere or narrowly pious sort. Nor given to angst. He was assured, and talked of his wife, Joy, without difficulty. Retrospection now brought no unbearable sadness.

If you consider subscribing, it can be done at the website. An annual contribution can be as low as $10.

"He loved anything that Lewis wrote"

I've read several books by Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?, Splendor in the Ordinary, Christ the Tiger, and some of the essays collected in The Night is Far Spent. Today I found an interview with the editor of another collection of Howard essays, Pondering the Permanent Things: Reflections on Faith, Art, and Culture. From that interview:

Tom Howard was in the South. He was enlisted (in the military). He was a chaplain’s assistant. He stayed back in the office while the chaplain was out in the field. Tom would just clean up the office, empty trash cans, and kind of keep the chapel clean. He said he was usually done by about 11 o’clock. The rest of the day he would read books that people had sent him. At some point, someone sent him a copy of The Lord of the Rings—and he loved The Lord of the Rings, and he didn’t know why! For some reason—he doesn’t remember why he did it—he wrote a fan letter to C.S. Lewis and Lewis wrote back. ....

In the essay, he doesn’t remember why [he wrote Lewis rather than Tolkien]. Maybe it was because they were in the same circle or he was associating them because they drank together in the same pub or something like that, but a couple of years later he wound up in Oxford, and he had a friend there who arranged for him to meet with Lewis.

So he followed Lewis’ directions and took a bus and met him at Lewis’ home at the Kilns. They had a nice visit. He didn’t see any of the other people that you associate with C.S. Lewis—his brother Warren or anybody like that. It was just Tom and C.S. Lewis. He said Lewis smoked cigarette after cigarette. He was just like you hear him described. He was a very avuncular, cheerful man. He told stories. Tom Howard didn’t want to press his luck. So he stayed for about 45 minutes and then left, but he had a wonderful visit with Lewis.

He loved the Narnia stories. He loved anything that Lewis wrote. Some people, in fact, compared (them). He’s thought of as an extension of C.S. Lewis. Tom Howard wrote elegantly and insightfully and picked up on a lot of Lewis’ thoughts. He went through great pains to read what C.S. Lewis wrote—whether it was unpublished letters or published letters, any little bit of ephemera, anything he could get his hands on. He adored Lewis.

Again, he loved Tolkien. He felt that a great Christian cosmology was wrapped up in The Lord of the Rings—and, particularly, a Catholic cosmology. He loved the writing, the story, and the vastness of it. It was a big story that pulled you in. It was wholesome, too. He appreciated that. He also tried to find everything he could that Tolkien wrote. He relished it. ....

John W. Kennedy interviewing Keith Call, "Thomas Howard: Separating Art and Media," Religion & Liberty Online, November 14, 2023.

A belief in justice and truth

On Dorothy L. Sayers:

.... Among Christians, she is best known as a colleague of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and others in the Inklings writers circle in Oxford. Sayers wrote poetry, theological essays and theatrical works for the stage and BBC Radio. She was gifted in multiple languages and spent the final years of her life translating Dante’s The Divine Comedy into English.

Sayers is also known for a 1947 Oxford presentation — “The Lost Tools of Learning” — that has influenced generations of classical education leaders in the United States, England and elsewhere. As a child, she was educated by her father, an Anglican vicar, who taught choral music and Latin at Oxford. ....

The Lord Peter Wimsey tales emerged during the golden age of British detective fiction, after World War I — the “war to end all wars” — had rocked the moral and cultural foundations of Europe. The popular, and profitable, mystery novels in this era offered complex, logical puzzle plots with detectives using evidence that included chemistry, medicine, physics and psychology.

Some British intellectuals were attempting to restore shaken public faith that good could defeat evil. Sayers, Chesterton and other masters of detective fiction truly believed that the great mysteries of their troubled age “were solvable,” said Williams in one of her lectures.

“I don't think that we're in a golden age of mystery now. I think part of that is, you have to have a belief that there is a truth that can be known,” she said. Thus, a yearning for absolutes could be “one of the reasons why people like mystery novels. They are kind of self-contained. You can trust the author to do certain things. ... There is justice here and you have to have a belief in justice, you have to have a belief in truth to do that kind of mystery.”

In a 1957 eulogy for Sayers, Lewis stressed that his friend didn’t want to preach. She was striving to communicate clearly to a broader audience.

“There is in reality no cleavage between the detective stories and her other works,” wrote Lewis. “In them, as in it, she is first and foremost the craftsman, the professional. She always saw herself as one who has learned a trade, and respects it, and demands respect for it from others. We who loved her may (among ourselves) largely admit that this attitude was sometimes almost comically emphatic. … As the detective stories do not stand quite apart, so neither do the explicitly religious works. She never sank the artist and entertainer in the evangelist.”

Here is a link to Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning" (pdf)

Terry Mattingly, "Dorothy Sayers’ Christian Faith: Murder Mysteries, Theology And Classical Ed," Religion Unplugged, October 25, 2023.

Gathering darkness

Russell Moore recently attended a gathering where a letter from C.S. Lewis to J.R.R. Tolkien was quoted. The Lewis quotation, then Moore:

“All my philosophy of history hangs upon a sentence of your own.”

If I’ve ever read that letter, I’ve forgotten it. And I think I had forgotten the sentence in question too. I immediately went to my well-worn copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to find it.

In it, Gandalf says to Frodo, “That is a chapter of ancient history which it might be good to recall; for there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valor, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.”

“Great deeds that were not wholly vain.” Gandalf was right (on this and most other things). Yes, this is a time of darkness. Yes, there is sorrow all around us. But there’s valor too. And there are deeds done—small, almost always unnoticed—that will turn out to be not wholly in vain.

So don’t be afraid. And don’t give up. ....

Russell Moore, "Let the Children Play: Their Lives Depend on It," CT, October 19, 2023.