Hello friends! I want to share what I have been up to in the last few weeks. Some folks will know that I have been working for about nine years on C.S. Lewis’ unfinished teenage Arthurian novel, “The Quest of Bleheris.” Each week in the Spring and Summer of 1916, a seventeen-year-old C.S. Lewis wrote a weekly letter to his best friend, Arthur Greeves. In these weekly epistles, Lewis included a chapter of an Arthurian romance he was working on. This 19,000-word unpublished manuscript was left incomplete after seventeen chapters, but is an evocative piece. As Lewis’ first attempt at long-form prose fantasy, written in the style of William Morris, “The Quest of Bleheris” emerges out of a rich and exciting time in Lewis’s life. Studying under the Great Knock, Lewis is thriving in his literary world and testing out his authorial voice with his best friend. In this period, Lewis has just encountered George MacDonald’s Phantastes, declared his atheism to Arthur, decided to enter the war, and prepared for entrance to Oxford.
More than just teen fan fiction, “The Quest of Bleheris” is a resource for understanding Lewis’ spiritual development and charting his growth as a critic and imaginative writer.
In 2018, I led a panel with Dr. David Downing at the C.S. Lewis and Friends Colloquium (with help from Jennifer Rogers), and in 2022, I presented some findings at the New York C.S. Lewis Society. This past weekend was Canada’s annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress 2023) in Toronto. In 2021, I presented some material from my forthcoming book, The Shape of the Cross in C.S. Lewis’ Spiritual Theology, to the Canadian-American Theological Association (CATA; see description and video here). I have also presented at the Christianity and Literature Study Group (CLSG) on C.S. Lewis’ instinct to write himself into stories (in 2021, see description, resources, and video here) and on language in Lewis’ Ransom Cycle (in 2022, see description here).
As the Congress–and in particular, the small academic societies within the Congress–is a fruitful place for scholarly discussion, I wanted to present some of my ideas on “The Quest of Bleheris” and what I call C.S. Lewis’ “Faculty for Friendship.” In a work-in-project peer-reviewed paper that I have brought to draft form, I am testing the implications of “The Quest of Bleheris” for Diana Pavlac Glyer‘s theory of creative collaboration among the Inklings. I was pleased when the folk at the CLSG were kind enough to accept my proposal for what is a fairly data-heavy piece.
And then I could not go! I was sad about missing the conference as it was so close (only about a 20-hour drive to Toronto) and because I wanted to connect in real life with my friends at CLSG and CATA. My cancellation also meant, though, that I would leave a hole in the CLSG programme and lose that opportunity to test out my ideas. Again, with great scholarly hospitality, the CLSG folk allowed me to record and present my paper by video.
I am limited from sharing any aspects of the physical manuscript, some particular images, and a portion of the argument. However, I wanted to share a 4-minute segment from my talk for a couple of reasons.
First, “The Quest of Bleheris” has historically been available only to those who could get to archives in Oxford, UK or Wheaton, IL. In 2021, Inklings scholar Don W. King was able to provide a full transcription of “The Quest of Bleheris” in Sehnsucht journal. Recently, Sehnsucht has become an open-access journal. Thus, by clicking on this link, you can find the full transcription of the tale, with critical notes and an introduction by Don King. As this story is now available to the reading world, I hope my short introductory video can give you a feeling for both the story and the manuscript history.
Second, I want to whet your appetite for the paper when I have finally concluded my work. I have spent these years working on this nearly lost piece of Lewis’ writing history because I believe it has deep value for readers and biographers of C.S. Lewis, as well as writers, literary scholars, and WWI historians.
Beneath my 4-minute video, you can find the abstract for the paper and some notes about project. I hope you enjoy, and I welcome any feedback or scholarly questions.
Abstract: A Faculty for Friendship: “The Quest of Bleheris” and the Roots of Co-Subcreation in C.S. Lewis’ Writing
When a seventeen-year-old C.S. Lewis was preparing for Oxford entrance and WWI service in 1916, he wrote seventeen chapters of a prose novel. “The Quest of Bleheris” is a letter-styled chivalric tale of heart-longing for adventure in a latter-days world. Young Bleheris must discover the true meaning of knighthood in a land where King Arthur is a distant memory and chivalry exists only as a formal social game.
Intriguingly, Lewis did not merely write “The Quest of Bleheris” in epistolary form; it is itself an epistolary novel that he mailed in weekly installments to his closest friend, Arthur Greeves. Thoughtful consideration of the extant correspondence, a close reading of the surviving 19,176-word text, and careful analysis of the manuscript show that a culture of creative collaboration goes deep in Lewis’ instincts as a writer. Arthur is implicated at many levels of this tale, both within and without the text. The formation of Lewis’ writerly habits, inspiration for the tale, the form of the novel, critical aspects of the world-building, the atmosphere of the story and the secondary world, critique and feedback, authorial commentary, text illustrations, and the preservation of the manuscript—Arthur was involved at each of these aspects of writing. Again and again, Lewis draws Greeves into the creative process—and goes further, as Lewis imagines he and Arthur, narrator and listener, living within the secondary world as characters. Arthur is there as the story begins to take form, he supports Lewis as he describes all of his doubts and insecurities along the way, and he is the one to whom Lewis announces “Bleheris is dead” some months later.
“The Quest of Bleheris” is an intertextually and autobiographically rich piece. Besides being the literary treasure of a precocious attempt at high romance by one of the 20th-century’s most famous fantasists, the Bleheris manuscript shows early signs of Lewis’ discipline and instincts as a career writer. While the story lacks the inversive elements in his later fiction, it has moments of heightened prose that capture the imagination and open a window into his youthful atheism and love of mythology. It also shows how Lewis instinctively viewed the writing process as going beyond the sole genius model of modern literature to a more capacious medieval model of collaboration, reinvention, multimodal storytelling, and symbolic play. Lewis’ friendship with Arthur extended his image of the “author” beyond the solidary desk to something more like an Arthurian round table experience.
This paper presents evidence for Lewis’ faculty for friendship in the creative process through analysis of the manuscript, the text, and the relevant correspondence. This analysis confirms the work of Diana Pavlac Glyer on collaboration among the Inklings by extending the data to include Lewis’ earliest creative endeavours. We discover the early roots of something like co-subcreation by teasing out Lewis’ instinct challenges us to re-imagining the creative process in these almost-forgotten literary remains.
Notes:
The hand-drawn facsimile of the header of “The Quest of Bleheris” in manuscript form was created by Katie Stevenson, who also did a bit of manuscript help for Sørina Higgins’ The Chapel of the Thorn during her visit to the Wade centre in 2014.
Thanks to Bronwyn Rivera for the note on the “Three Greats.”
I am always grateful to the amazing folk at the Wade and the Bodleian.
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
As much as we wonder about it, it’s a question that is not perfectly easy to answer. Long before technologically precise blockbuster films, Star Wars had cheesy lines, over-the-top acting, and zippers up the back of the monster’s costume. How many films just like it have found their way into the Betamax bins of history?
And those were originals! There aren’t many true fans who love all the feature films–the “trinal triplicities” and the two one-off films–not to mention Star Wars books and serials beyond count. Everyone has something that trips them up in the universe they love. For me, it is Hayden Christensen–the brooding emo-menace of Episode II. That role is worse, even, than the dead-on-the-production-floor film Ewoks in Las Vegas. Worse even than Jar Jar Binks, who I hate myself for kind of liking.
Yet, flaws and all, Star Wars lives. Not only lives, but thrives, growing in popularity as its universe of characters grows. While the Marvel Universe films have become the kings of the opening weekend, Star Wars is still a giant in a land of grasshoppers. Star Wars still beats out Harry Potter, Bond, The Lord of the Rings, and all the other comic book cinematic empires. It’s hard to beat the Japanese for pop culture or children’s entertainment for eager consumers. In total media franchise sales, Pokémon and Hello Kitty lead the world, with Winnie-the-Pooh and Micky not far behind. When it comes to total economic impact, even with the Netflixization of film, Star Wars continues to outpace Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe combined (see the infographic below).
Let’s be honest: I still wish I had an ’80s classic Millennium Falcon. I lived in great envy for a great many years.
Why did Star Wars stick? If we are to believe the writers of That ’70s Show, it is the keen action and the super-duper special effects. But there is also something more. Watch the first little bit of the famous ’70s Show episode, “A New Hope.”
The entire episode is filled with nostalgia and hilarious throwbacks to the original series. Tugged as we are back to the 1980s by series like Stranger Things, the nostalgia continues to this day–from reproductions of Star Wars lunch boxes to celebrated Goodwill discoveries of Chewy pyjamas and broken lightsabers. Though it was almost lost in the incredibly painful second film of the prequel series, Attack of the Clones, the third episode, Revenge of the Sith, begins to recover the things we loved most about the original three.
Almost. It is still a painful, painful prequel. But the empire moved on with its own strengths and weaknesses in the sequel trilogy. Perhaps you disagree. The Last Jedi was a complex and perhaps failed film, though one I quite loved. The first two parts of the sequel are echoes or mirrors of the original series, and the Rise of Skywalker conclusion brings that saga to a close. Critics are mixed on the way the series concludes, but fans are deeply torn. The trilogy that concludes the Skywalker trilogy is cinematically brilliant, but the storylines don’t always land. Some of the characters brighten up and fill out that world, while others fall with a thud.
Personally, I think the Skywalker Saga was an excellent close to the 2010s–the decade of nostalgia that we now feel nostalgic for. I love these films, even as digital waggery and character-fails replace stage acting and zippers on costumes. I am content with what we have, even having loved the standalone Rogue One–you gotta love a director who has the courage to kill almost every character on his payroll. And although Ron Howard is always better with his partner Brian Grazer, Solo, one of the most expensive films ever made, deserved my $15.
I recognize that a lot of this is memory-building and nostalgia–no doubt enhanced by the fact that COVID-era filmmaking has been inconsistent. Nostalgia is pretty important right now.
But I don’t think that’s a problem. We see this in the tone set by the very first J.J. Abrams episode, The Force Awakens. Predictably, it was filled with nostalgic moments:
“Chewy, we’re home.” Classic.
Über critical fans did not like it, I think. To them, it looked like a commercial grab for the fans of the past blended with a technological capability George Lucas could only have dreamed of. Personally, I loved the new characters and think the visual technologies have finally found their home.
There are problems with the logic of the series and the storylines. Star Wars still fails to answer its own question of providential luck–characters in The Force Awakens find each other across staggering distances or in buildings of near-infinite complexity–and Rogue One, despite its apocalyptic air, still carries that part of the myth on. But I like how the final trilogy is paced, and although there are huge gaps, and a gaff or two, it fits well into the Star Wars universe. More than nostalgic, The Force Awakens is framed up like a remake of A New Hope.
Imperial-class Star Destroyers wrenched into the sands of an alien world, Darth Vader’s mask from the flames, R2D2, the ping-pwang of laser fire: nostalgia, certainly. The deconstruction of the old series in The Last Jedi only adds to the nostalgia, even as it usurps it. But, nostalgia for what? There has to be something at the core of the series beyond cheese and lights. Why has Star Wars stuck with us?
I think the answer is hidden in this long-lost trailer from 1977.
In the days after Saturday Night Live and Spaceballs and The Simpsons, it’s hard not to imagine going into the theatre in 1977 and expecting a spoof. Perhaps we’ve lost our innocence as a culture these days.
And it is also easy to forget how far the art and science of special effects has come. When you live in a generation where you can use shareware software to stage an at-home lightsabre battle for Youtube, 20th-century effects won’t impress us much. Think of Hugo, The Life of Pi, Inception,The Jungle Book, and Harry Potter–an almost random collection of films from the last decade from five different genres that have special effects unlike anything imagined by the human race in my childhood. And the acceleration just keeps accelerating.
But it isn’t just effects is it?.
The films that visually impressed me the most growing up–Toy Story, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Matrix, Shrek, and, more recently, Inception–had more to them than technology. 2012 is a good example of a film with no story and a pretty dumb premise but pretty good effects.
No, I think the reason we love Star Wars is that it goes deeper into our cultural consciousness than we can imagine. Look at the stunning statements made by the trailer:
“an adventure unlike anything on your planet”
“the story of a boy, a girl, and a universe”
“a big, sprawling space saga of rebellion and romance”
“it’s a spectacle light years ahead of its time”
“it’s an epic of heroes and villains and aliens from a thousand worlds”
“a billion years in the making: Star Wars”
Then the flash of light.
George Lucas is, I think, at the deepest level, a mythmaker. He certainly is a genius SciFi world-builder. He takes the universe-changing work of Larry Niven and Frank Herbert to a new level with his own mythic Empire. But while Ringworld and Dune are set in the future, Star Wars, like The Lord of the Rings, is set in the deep past.
Star Wars isn’t just adventure. Star Wars is mythology.
In this sense, I think that as much as George Lucas relies on the SF masters, he is also a deep reader of the master myth-maker: J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien understood the project of mythopoiea at the most intimate level, shaping Middle-earth out of a worldview that is entirely consistent with itself. Moreover, Tolkien’s project does what myth always does: it tells us about the present world. Myths are never really buried in the past. True myths, the good ones, will resonate again and again through cultures that appear long after the myth-making culture has slipped into legend.
That is why I think Star Wars has lasted. Beyond big names and big budgets and super-duper effects, when you watch Star Wars you get the sense that it really is a film “a billion years in the making.” It is a story that tells all our stories, a myth speaks to us today. For all their flaws, I think Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams get the myth in us.
At the centre, then, it is not just about nostalgia–which is no bad thing–but about our deepest realities of being human. May the 4th be With You always!
Plus, this is amazing:
The Infographic from TitleMax, which needs to be update:
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
I am in my sixth year of teaching “The Fantasy and Science Fiction of C.S. Lewis” at The King’s College in New York City. I inherited this online course from Dr. Sørina Higgins, who followed the original mind behind the course, the late Dr. Bruce Edwards. After a year of working with their curriculum, I redeveloped the course to include a full series of lectures that anchor the online discussion and course projects.
However you decide to teach it, “The Fantasy and Science Fiction of C.S. Lewis” will be a reading-intensive course. As my students are from diverse backgrounds and come from many disciplines in a Liberal Arts college, my lectures provide background material and close readings of the texts. I also leaned in on certain aspects. For example, my lectures on Narnia provide a survey of the critical reading tools that these non-lit students would normally get in an undergraduate program in English Literature. Many of these methods follow Lewis’ own approaches, such as pairing “Meditation in a Toolshed” with The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”. I add in other elements, such as world-building in lectures like “Proposals for the Creation of Narnia,” “C.S. Lewis and the Epistolary Tradition,” and my work in reading The Screwtape Letters with the Dr. Ransom SciFi books in a single fictional universe, The Field of Arbol. I also provide fairly high-level theological analysis, including my work on Cruciformity and the Narrative Spiritual Theology of C.S. Lewis and lectures like “Remembering Heaven.”
I think it is a cool course—though no doubt challenging. Fortunately, King’s is a very cool school (e.g., see here and here), and the students have a strong ability to read deeply, think critically, and triangulate the course material with their individual intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and vocational development.
One of the factors that make this course challenging is the movement between different genres and periods of Lewis’ fiction. Narnia is different in many ways from the Science Fiction books or his WWII-era theological novellas, The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. If you are not already a Lewis reader, a classic SciFi fan, or an avid reader of dystopias, That Hideous Strength can be a deeply puzzling book. And most students have never read anything like Till We Have Faces.
As some of the students were struggling with Out of the Silent Planet last week, one of them noted that reading it before Narnia might be helpful. It is certainly something that I have considered. I currently teach the course in four movements:
The Chronicles of Narnia in Publication Order: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew, The Last Battle
Theological Novellas: The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce
The Ransom Cycle: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, with a second look at The Screwtape Letters
Mythopoeia: Till We Have Faces
As I was redesigning the course, I went back and forth on whether we should follow this pattern, or whether we should read Lewis chronologically (and I am a fan of that approach). Chronologically, it would look like this:
WWII-era: Out of the Silent Planet, The Screwtape Letters, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, The Great Divorce
For all the times I have hammered on about Reading Lewis Chronologically, my rationale for beginning with Narnia and turning to the theological novellas before the Science Fiction had a few factors.
Primarily, I was concerned about a first-day confrontation with Lewis’ first work of popular fiction, Out of the Silent Planet. I have found that Silent Planet is a strange place to start for a generation like ours. Very few undergraduate students are already lovers of classic Science Fiction before its golden age. The SciFi novels we are reading today—and there is no shortage of great writers and voracious readers—are written more like epic fantasies (deeply implicated psychological journeys, complex world-building, etc.) than Lewis’ medieval-invoking, inversive, postcolonial, modernist/anti-modernist culture-cracking novel, Out of the Silent Planet. Finally, practically speaking, Out of the Silent Planet is harder to catch up on if a student begins the course late.
By contrast, about half of my students had Narnia read to them as children or encountered it in their school curriculum growing up. And almost all of my students watched the Disney interpretation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as children. This will perhaps make some readers feel like they are aging quickly, but most of my first years were born the year the film was released. Very few students have absolutely no encounter with Narnia before they arrive in my class, and those that have missed Narnia usually sign up because of The Screwtape Letters or Mere Christianity. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a great place to invite new students into an intensive literature course.
Plus, well, Narnia is just super fun! It is rare for serious readers to read all seven books carefully and then go, “meh.” Something is there for everyone, whereas the Ransom Cycle takes more investment on the readers’ part to get started. Invariably, students also usually love one of the Ransom books— Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, or The Screwtape Letters—even if they don’t love adult speculative fiction more generally. Beginning with Narnia invites readerly investment in fresh ways.
From a close-reading perspective, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is both a rich and accessible novel to teach. It invites reading in different modes and leaves a lot of space for students to talk about their own ideas without losing sight of the text. Students often have a passionate response to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (though not always a positive one). I have taught The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for high school, undergraduate, graduate, and Senior’s College students. I have used the novel in classes about literary theory, theology, children’s literature, speculative fiction, C.S. Lewis’ life and work, “Communication, Leadership, and Culture,” and as an introduction to the Liberal Arts. I could honestly spend an entire term on Lewis’ first foray through the wardrobe. So I like beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
And we must admit that in the dozen or so years between Out of the Silent Planet on a wager and writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis had grown as a writer.
Beyond the richness and approachability of Narnia, I like the four movements of my course. I love going from The Last Battle to The Great Divorce—two apocalyptic visions of the afterlife, and two incredibly strange books from a genre perspective. I like that the new Eden tale, Perelandra, is just a handful of books after Magician’s Nephew with its own fairy tale revisioning of Genesis. The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce pair really well together: they are both theological novellas published in a serial form in The Guardian, and they are mirror-image tales about the heart of temptation in each reader’s spiritual life. Knowing how war haunts Narnia allows Out of the Silent to be more prophetic: if you read that epilogue and closing letter of Out of the Silent, it sounds like WWII has begun; it is still 2 years away. The themes of war, leadership, and courage in Narnia and Out of the Silent helps makes sense of how WWII is a living reality in all of the Ransom Cycle books.
Finally, the jump from Narnia to Till We Have Faces is quite startling for most students—even though it is only a few months of Lewis’ time between the last two Narnian chronicles and Till We Have Faces. Lewis’ myth retold is complex, literary, mythic, and intimate in a way that none of his other writing approaches. If Lewis’ genre fiction faded away in culture, I suspect that his least-read book, Till We Have Faces, might still be studied from time to time as literary fiction in universities.
There are some practical and personal reasons I chose the four movements rather than a chronological approach. Specifically, my four movements provide three “seams” in the curriculum that works well with King’s students’ needs for navigating their semester. Plus, Bruce Edwards designed the curriculum with a similar outline, and Sørina Higgins passed it on to me. I am inclined to trust their teacherly and literary wisdom.
Well, that’s the rationale. Is it wise? Have I made a case for these four movements for a Liberal Arts undergraduate program where most students are not literature majors, but all students have some training in theology, Biblical studies methods, and cultural criticism? Or have I fallen into some deep heresy in terms of Lewis’ works or curating an encounter with a diverse reading list?
Not that this excuses my professorial sins if I have made the wrong choice. But it does illustrate how diverse and varied the bookshelf is that Lewis has bequeathed to us. At the very least, I hope it can inspire your own personal curriculum of reading Lewis. As I have always argued, rereading Lewis is always more important than reading Lewis in any particular order. Ultimately, my rationale is to introduce students to Lewis as an experimental storyteller who gives us the tools to open up the doors of our imaginations and see our world in brighter and bolder colours. This order seems to work.
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
I’m pleased to announce that my son, Nicolas, is launching his new single today!
With singer-songwriter wit in an indie rock performance, “Sweet Quarantine” was written out of the depths of Nicolas’ experience of our most recent apocalypse, the COVID pandemic. “It’s the end of the world,” the song begins–and so we enter the moment again through song. Nicolas describes his new single this way:
“‘Sweet Quarantine’ is a bittersweet love song written during the darkest days of the 2020 lockdown. While the song started as a confessional of seasonal depression and covid lonesomeness, it quickly became a hopeful and tongue-in-cheek love letter.
The release of ‘Sweet Quarantine’ has been a long-time coming, and I hope that my hopeful reflection on a time of pandemic darkness may provide comfort for those who listen.”
The song was co-written with Island musician Andrew Waite (whose music you should also check out on Spotify), and produced/engineered by Sergey Varlomov at Crabbe Road Studio. Nicolas designed the album cover and promotional materials.
Although you might remember Nicolas from his 2020 song, “Obsessive, Compulsive,” which he wrote and performed with Moment of Eclipse, this is his first solo release as Nicolas Riel.
I am in the privileged position of having watched this song go from a few sketched-out words and a melody, through writing and refinement, into the studio, and then on its way to the world. As one of the chief funders of Nicolas’ studio (i.e., it’s in our Spare Room), I got a copy of this song as soon as it was mastered. “Sweet Quarantine” has been constantly spinning on my devices ever since. The lyrics and melodies of this hopeful flirtation with doomsday have wormed their way into my soul.
“Sweet Quarantine” also captures so much of my own experience during the COVID lockdowns. When I hear the beginning of the first verse:
Oh, the grass is never green this time of year When the snow stops falling…
it is like I am back in the late winter of 2020, when Prince Edward Island’s legendary natural beauty was overtaken by crusty late-winter snow and grey, barren trees, and our family went on long walks through empty streets and lonely trails just to avoid being inside another hour.
But it is the second chorus that captures in just a few words that depressive, dislocated, drudgerly, deadening feeling that haunted me through those months:
It’s the end of the world Oh sweet quarantine I try to write new songs but all I want to do is sleep
All parental pride aside, I think it is brilliant.
So I encourage you to check it out. Nicolas’ “linktree” gives links to stream the song on your favourite platforms, like Spotify, Youtube, Apple Music, and Bandcamp–where you can support his music by purchasing the song. You can also find his social media links there.
Spread the news: artists, musicians, and writers rely on you sharing their work on social media. Scholars too–which is why I have worked for more than a decade to make A Pilgrim in Narnia an accessible, no-limits, ad-free source for scholarship and artistry. As readers, music-lover, art appreciators, you can do your part by sharing.
It’s the end of the world And I’ve been thinking of you I go to bed at daylight and I stay in bed ’til moonlight Cause I’ve got nothing to do
Oh, the grass is never green this time of year When the snow stops falling, And my mind stops thinking clear You can write me if you want, I can be your confidant But listen baby I’ve been thinking I don’t want your social distance
It’s the end of the world Bittersweet sixteenth The slow recession and great depression Keeps my eyes glued on you
It’s the end of the world Oh sweet quarantine I try to write new songs but all I want to do is sleep I’ve been dreaming of you, have you been dreaming of me? Six feet further, six feet under, Six feet closer to the end
Written by Nicolas Dickieson and Andrew Waite
Performed by Nicolas Dickieson, Sergey Varlamov, Jonathan MacInnis and Josh MacNeil
Engineered by Sergey Varlamov at Crabbe Road Studio
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
Happy New Year, everyone! I am once again assembling the “reading nerd data” in an upcoming post. I love charts. And behind every chart is a great spreadsheet. I guess I just love spreadsheets.
Meanwhile, as is my tradition, I wanted to share the Goodreads “My Year in Books” infographic with some brief reflections and book discoveries. For the first time in a few years, I have to confess that I fell short of most of my goals this year–with a few exceptions. Still, the year has some lessons–and I hope some invitations to great book ideas for you, the reader of A Pilgrim in Narnia.
“You’re really good at reading, and probably a lot of other things, too!” Well shucks, thanks for the encouragement Goodreads! In 2021, I was focused on learning more about my strengths and weaknesses as a reader, writer, teacher, leader, and friend. In 2022, I completely failed to apply these lessons! Instead, 2022 was a year of survival. Most of my reading was about work–writing and teaching, especially–or imaginative escape. In previous years, I have focussed quite a lot on self-development. While there are threads of those kinds of books–and my life is designed to learn and grow from all of my reading–2022 was the least growth-centred year I’ve experienced in as long as I’ve been tracking what I read.
On paper, 133 books read looks quite great (actually, I read a couple of other books for review, which I don’t publish). In terms of yearly reading goals, the book number is right on. I had set a goal for 132–knowing that I’ll probably never repeat my 2019 success again–that period where I was at the most productive time in my PhD thesis writing. My natural rhythm is not 154 books per year, but 117-138–with an average of 129 books.
While these graphs look impressive, reading-wise, I have learned that I am lazier than I would wish. I yearn to recover that dynamic, all-engrossing ability I had as a young adult to simply immerse myself in a book! Part of my goal for 2022 was to look for bedtime readings that enthrall me. Instead, in the last half of 2022, bedtime reading for me was about rest and refreshment, not adventure or challenge.
Thus, while I tend to use the book list and page number count to motivate me, all of that fell by the wayside in 2022. In terms of sheer page number count, I turned fewer pages than in any of the five previous years (about 39,500 with review reading). As a result, I saw a huge drop in the average size of books, down to 295 pages/book (from 315 last year).
For the most part, the books I chose to read in 2022 were great. I have been openly mocked for my over-exuberant ratings, usually swinging between 4.0 and 4.2 stars, on average. I rate books too highly–even though I am trying to be tougher–to reassert 3 stars as a good book that either didn’t fully connect with me or has some correctable flaws. This inflationary star-number rating culture comes from my years ranking music, where 5-star reviews go to songs I want to hear most often, rather than a rating for the genius and exceptional works that land in my feed.
To be fair, I try not to read books that warrant 1, 2, or even 3 stars. My fiction and self-learning DNF pile is high. Unless I am made to do so by contract, I simply won’t read something that isn’t good–though inevitably, the 3-star books land on my desk. Often, my 3-star books are simply things I’ve read that I’m disappointed in. In 2022, I started and then set aside at least 20 books that I simply did not want to read. Instead, I picked up books I have loved from the past. Fully 55% (74) books in 2022 were rereads for me (especially C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Octavia Butler, L.M. Montgomery, Terry Pratchett, Nnedi Okorafor, and J.K. Rowling–and I would have read more Jane Austen, Stephen King, and Ursula K. Le Guin by audiobook if I had had the time).
Similar to last year, my list is dominated by C.S. Lewis (18 books, including 2 read twice) and L.M. Montgomery (18 books). In 2021, I focussed on Ursula K. Le Guin (22 books, with 2 read twice), and I finished a couple of others in 2022–though none of my favourite fiction.
Once again, I attempted a Shakespeare play a month (trying to include a couple of biographies and some lectures or background reading. And like the previous two years in my Shakespeare Play of the Month challenge, I failed. In 2022, I only read 5 plays–and these were all in the first half of the year, and included rereading 3 of my favourites. Oh well, here’s to 2023! I do still want to complete Shakespeare’s catalogue so I can pretend less at parties and lit-prof gatherings.
My highlights from 2022 include faithful rereads and new discoveries:
In literary criticism, I once again turned to Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’ gorgeously designed and well-written transmedial study in critical race, reader-response, and feminist theory, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. Getting to chat with Ebony when we were both guests of honour at Mythmoot VII in 2021 was pretty cool, and I was able to use her work in my Fall 2022 curriculum. That sent me back again to Toni Morrison’s powerful lecture series-née-book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (which was also my first review of 2021).
One of my favourite lit crit/bio surprise discoveries of 2022 was John Mullan’s What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (2012). Super fun and intriguing work that enhanced my reading.
Another great discovery was William Cronon’s now-classic environmental history, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992). Cronon is such a great data-centred storyteller.
Because of my mental exhaustion this year, I struggled with authors I have traditionally loved, like Albert Camus, Anne Rice, Angela Carter, Sir Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Goethe, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges (though he is still pretty great taken in small bites). Even Flannery O’Connor, who I think is brilliant, was less flavourful to me this year.
Successfully completing Cervantes’ Don Quixote was a highlight for me in 2022. I blogged about it with cat poetry, which I think is fitting.
I read no full books from the medieval world or antiquity. Weird.
In terms of full theological works, I failed utterly in my reading goal of one theology book a month (that doesn’t fit under other categories). I had quite a few great books queued up, but I simply lacked the mental space to penetrate them (or allow them to penetrate them).
Most of my reading is theologically informed, however. I was able to use an invitation by the Atlantic School of Theology to teach an online short course to deepen my theological focus on L.M. Montgomery. “Spirituality in the Writing of L.M. Montgomery” was super popular, with more than 75 participants, and gave me permission to dive deep into text that we might too easily dismiss as being unsophisticated kids’ books, like Anne of Green Gables, Anne’s House of Dreams, Rainbow Valley, The Story Girl, and Emily of New Moon.
On the heels of this course, in June 2022, I presented a paper at the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s 15th Biennial International Conference. While my presentation was a bit more focused than my proposal (see here), “Reverent Irreverence: Images of God and Montgomery’s ‘Pilgrims on the Golden Road of Youth’” allowed me to do a very cool theological close reading of the early chapters of Anne of Green Gables. I have the notes written up for the chapter, but I am trying to think about whether there is a better mode of sharing that work.
The Montgomery conference was where I officially received my Elizabeth R. Epperly Award for Outstanding Early Career Paper for my reading of Anne’s House of Dreams as theodicy–which was the background to one of the short course units.
My 2022 reading was far richer than past years in terms of ecology and creation care. More of this anon!
I had set a goal of one BIPOC author a month with the goal of stretching my experience a bit. While I came close to that goal, it was really by reading authors I knew already: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Toni Morrison, etc.
I read several new or newish Inklings studies critical texts this year that range from interesting to excellent. These include Hal Poe’s trilogy of new C.S. Lewis biographies, and studies by Jason M. Baxter, James Como, Gina Dalfonzo, Mark Vernon, John Garth, Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, and Charlie Starr. I also read some critical C.S. Lewis studies that I had never completely finished during my PhD, including work by Sharon Jebb, Doris T. Myers, and (in progress) Paul Holmer.
In teaching a new approach to Narnia in early 2022–a course on Narnia and Communication, Leadership, and Culture at UPEI–I not only had one of the greatest teaching experiences of my life, but was also refreshed by reading the Narniad in a new way.
While I usually share my “5-star Surprises” with readers, this year, only two works of new-to-me fiction made it to my 5-star list: Cervantes’ Don Quixote from the early 17th century, and The Blue Moth Motel by Olivia Robinson from 2021. Admittedly, Don Quixote is one of the greats and Olivia Robinson is a past student of mine, so these “5-star Surprises” might be a bit biased. Still, I loved reading both of these books (in quite different ways).
Here is the rest of the infographic and stay tuned for more!
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
As J.R.R. Tolkien was born about 68,899,680 minutes ago, the Tolkien Society is once again raising a toast to the Professor on his birthday, 3 January 2022 (see here). After Bilbo left the Shire on his eleventy-first birthday in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo toasted his uncle’s birthday each year, which he shared. Tolkien fans continue the tradition for the maker of Middle-earth on this day. J.R.R. Tolkien was born in South Africa on 3 January 1892, making this (if he had had Hobbitish longevity), his 131st. The Tolkien Society invites us to celebrate the birthday by raising a glass at 9pm your local time, simply toasting “The Professor!”
In honour of Tolkien’s birthday, each year, I update the catalogue of Tolkien posts featured here on A Pilgrim in Narnia. Even though 2022 was a content-light year, I wrote or rewrote 7 Tolkien-related articles, reflections, reviews, or blog posts, and I reblogged one new essay.
Tolkien posts continue to be popular at A Pilgrim in Narnia. In 2022, 4 of the top 15 most-read posts are about Tolkien. One of the most viewed posts of 2020–my tribute to Christopher Tolkien–was also popular this past year. However, by far the most popular Tolkien post of 2022 was my “Approaching The Silmarillion for the First Time“–even though it is only the 12th most popular Pilgrim post of all time. Despite being nearly 5 years old, half of its 10,000 views came in the last half of 2022.
That said, it was a hard year for me, Tolkienistically speaking. As I was supervising Tolkien projects and preparing to speak at Tolkienmoot this summer, I had the pleasure of rereading The Silmarillion, Sauron Defeated, and Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth in 2022–as well as a few other points in the Middle-earth legendarium (e.g., see here). However, I wasn’t able to make space this year to write about my thoughts, or to read either The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. These are the stories that truly refresh my spirit and invite joy, so it was a sad loss for me.
And despite my deep desire to do so, I could not make serious headway with the new nonfiction collection edited by Carl Hostetter, The Nature of Middle-earth.
Moreover, while I began the year with the hopeful news of a new Tolkien adaptation, the digital debate was frequently infused with invective designed to strike at the most intimate parts of our human beingness. I became ashamed of my own literary, religious, and activist communities as everything turned sour. I lost heart. Despite a dozen attempts to rewrite my “Approaching The Silmarillion for the First Time” article and provide an update to my “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Texts on The (Down)Fall of Númenor” piece (following great reader notes and the release of the Brian Sibley edited, The Fall of Númenor), I simply could not complete anything.
Wisely, perhaps, I stepped out of the conversation–in social media, certainly, but also here on A Pilgrim in Narnia and in my friendship groups. I also stopped watching the Rings of Power Amazon Prime serial. While I have been called immoral and disloyal for it, I have found that adaptations on the stage, in film or on television, and by audiobook can enrich my experience of reading the texts that are most meaningful for me. So, I look forward to the season ahead, when I can return to the simple pleasures of reading beyond the courts of rage.
For in A Pilgrim in Narnia, I desire to curate a space for people who love the simple pleasures of a well-told story and a well-built world. Thus, this “brace” of Tolkien posts. There are now over 110 article links listed here–far more than a brace, methinks. So I hope this great feast of guest bloggers, hot links, and feature posts will complement your Tolkien reading and inspire you to widen and deepen your Tolkienaphilia. And, of course, a glass raised to the Professor for all of the 6835 weeks since his birth, and doubtless 6835 weeks of great reading to come.
I would also encourage readers to check out the annual J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. Tolkien editor and historical fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay was the 2021 lecturer which I talk about here: “Just Enough Light: Some Thoughts on Fantasy and Literature.”
Perhaps Tolkien’s most central contribution beyond the storied world is his idea of subcreation in the poem, “Mythopoeia” and in other works like the essay, “On Fairy-stories” and the allegorical short story, “Leaf by Niggle.” I have been reading a lot about this concept–partly because of students working on the idea–and appreciated poet-philosopher Malcolm Guite’s take on it here.
I have admitted before that my Tolkien thinking-out-loud is pure enjoyment. I don’t pretend to have much original to say on the scholarly level. My most important contribution, I think, is my Theology on Tap talk, called “A Hobbit’s Theology,” which I rewrote in 2021 for Northwind Theological Seminary’s doctoral degree in Romantic Theology (which has a Tolkien studies track). It is one of the ideas I am struggling with most specifically in my academic work, and I hope to do some future writing on the topic. Out of that same lecture series came this piece, “‘Small’ and ‘Little’, a Literary Experiment on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit,” where I used some word-date analysis by Sparrow Alden and her “Words That You Were Saying” Tolkien word-study blog.
In a similar mode–thinking of Tolkien’s work through a theological lens–is Mickey Corso’s excellent work on Tolkien and Catholicism. The entire video conversation of “The Lady and Our Lady: Galadriel as a ‘Reflexion’ of Mary,” A Signum Thesis Theatre on Tolkien and Catholicism by Mickey Corso, is now online. In this mode, I blogged “’Joy Beyond the Walls of the World, Poignant as Grief,’” a conversation between J.R.R. Tolkien and Frederick Buechner. As a Tolkien Easter reflection, I reblogged Wade archivist Laura Schmidt’s piece, “Wounds that Never Fully Heal.” Also, check out a couple of video conversations: “Inklings of Imagination” with myself, Malcolm Guite, and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson on the theological imagination, and “Imaginative Hospitality” from a theological angle with Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, Diana Glyer, Michael Ward, and Fr. Andrew Cuneo.
And one of the more popular posts of 2016 was a very personal one about me as a writer and researcher, “Battling a Mountain of Neglect with J.R.R. Tolkien.” Though I am still not sure if I should have written that post, it has connected with readers. In retrospect, 2016 was a very difficult year in many ways.
Recently, I was thinking through the relationship between C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. In the midst of that search, I found Tolkien’s 30 August 1964 letter to Anne Barrett of the publisher, Houghton Mifflin. On the anniversary of that letter, I shared this piece: “Great and Little Men: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letter about C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot.” As with much of Tolkien’s praise of Lewis, there is a slighting comment or two. And yet, it is a powerful bit of testimony to the content of C.S. Lewis’ character, in his friend’s estimation. In this vein, check out “C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: Friendship, True Myth, And Platonism,” an academic paper by Justin Keena published here on A Pilgrim in Narnia.
Finally, a little fun with the post, “When Sam Gamgee Wrote to J.R.R. Tolkien.” As you might guess, it is about a real-life Sam Gamgee who sends a note to the maker of Middle-earth. And, of course, when the season of advent returns, check out the Father Christmas Letters. While there are others with better Father Christmas Letters posts and articles, my piece got picked up on Reddit in 2021, so I touched it up again for that Christmas day reading.
The Silmarillion Project
This is a newish feature for me, partly because 2017 was the year I completed The Silmarillion in its entirety in a single reading (rather than the higgledy-piggledy approach of cherry-picking stories and languishing in the mythic portions, as I am wont to do). I reread it in early 2020, this time by audiobook, and enjoyed it deeply. Still, I find it a challenge. I thought I would take advantage of my status as a Silm-struggler to offer suggestions and resources to people looking to extend their reading of the Legendarium.
In “Approaching “The Silmarillion” for the First Time,” I made a handful of suggestions for readers intending to read this peculiar book for the first time. If you are a fellow Silm-struggler, I hope this helps you get a fuller experience of a beautiful collection of texts. That experience inspired me to write “A Call for a Silmarillion Talmud,” an unusual post for Tolkienists with more creative and technological skills to consider.
Finally, I had to write as a fan and as a scholar together in considering the cycle of Lúthien and Beren. In “Of Beren and Lúthien, Of Myth and the Worlds We Love,” I talk about my love of the story and its links to the Legendarium while noting my hope for the 2017 release of the Beren and Lúthien materials and sharing some Silmarillion-inspired artwork.
Thinking about Tolkien Studies
Over the last few years, I have slowly been gathering an understanding of Tolkien studies as a discipline. I am far for an expert, but I have been struck by the strongest Tolkien books and essays I have encountered. Verlyn Flieger‘s Splintered Light is a lyrically beautiful critical study: it is tight and thematically vibrant, invested in the entire corpus and yet completely accessible as a single study of light and darkness. John Garth‘s Tolkien and the Great War is not simply one of the best Tolkien historical works I have read, and is by far my favourite study on WWI. There are numerous strong medievalist approaches to and with Tolkien, and Tom Shippey is a Tolkien scholar of great clarity and energy. Among younger scholars, I greatly admire Dimitra Fimi’s Mythopoeic Award-winning Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, and I carefully watch what her students and colleagues are doing.
Inspired by this work–and a sense of frustration in Lewis studies–I began reflecting on Tolkien Studies in 2021. The result was a somewhat saucy but generally thoughtful series on “Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship?”, in three parts, and among the top Tolkien-related posts of the last year:
Part 3: Other Factors (including comfort with literary theory, the work of literary societies to engender scholarship, and some cultural aspects of Lewis studies)
One of my first digital exchanges was participating in The Hobbit Read Along–you can still see the great collection of posts online. As I was doing this shared project, I was reading The Hobbit to my 8-year-old son. It was a great experience, but I made the mistake of doing accents to distinguish characters early on in the book. That’s fine when you’ve got oafish trolls or prim little hobbits. But a baker’s dozen of dwarfs stretched my abilities! You can read about my reading-aloud adventures here.
In 2021, I used Tolkien Reading Day (March 25th) to share some of my fun Tolkien bookstore discoveries and to think about Tolkien’s audiobooks as “adaptations” or interpretations: “Reading J.R.R. Tolkien by Audiobook and Adaptation: Thoughts on a Portland Discovery.” In this piece, I talk about The Green Hand in Portland, ME, and how at Enterprise Records, I found a beautiful library withdrawal vinyl collection of the Nicol Williamson’s abridged reading of The Hobbit. Spinning this record, and thinking about Andy Serkis’ version of The Hobbit, I discuss what audiobook readings do for me on an imaginative level. I also talk about some of my Tolkien collectable books that I’ve discovered hither and yon. None of these are super valuable: a US 1st edition of The Silmarillion that I got for $10 at a used bookstore (and I added a UK 1st edition this year for $20), a nice boxed illustrated anniversary edition of The Hobbit, the original wide-sized printing of the Tolkien-illustrated Mr. Bliss, and my UK 2nd editionLord of the Rings, which looks nice on the shelf. Truth be told, I also love the design of the Middle-earth volumes from the last decade or so, and my wife and I were pleased to give our son hardcover editions of Beren and Lúthien and The Fall ofGondolin for Christmas.
Film Reviews
When the teaser trailer of the third film, The Battle of Five Armies, was released, I wrote “Faint Hope for The Hobbit.” Although it is clear in the trailers that this is a war and intrigue film, I still had some hope I would enjoy it. The huge comment section shows in that post shows that not everyone agreed it was possible!
My review of An Unexpected Journey captures the tug back and forth I feel about the films. I called it “Not All Adventures Begin Well,” and it is a much more positive review than many of the hardcore Tolkien fans or academics. And it gives this cool dwarf picture:
“What Have We Done?” These words are breathed in the dying moments of the second installation of The Hobbit adaptation, The Desolation of Smaug. In this review, I think about what it means to do film adaptations. While I do not hate this Hobbit trilogy, I think that Peter Jackson just got lost a bit.
When I finally got to The Battle of 5 Armies, I decided it would be fun to do a Battle of 5 Blogs. 5 other bloggers joined it, making it a Battle of 6 Blogs! But the armies are pretty tough to count, anyhow. I titled my blog “The Hobbit as Living Text.” It was a controversial approach to the film, I know. Make sure you check out the other reviewer’s link here. Some of us chatted about the films in an All About Jack Podcast, which you can hear here and here.
While these aren’t substantial reviews, I featured two indie films: a documentary on Tolkien’s Great War, and a fictional biopic recreating Tolkien’s invention of Middle Earth called Tolkien’s Road—both inspired, perhaps, by John Garth’s work.
Though the Hobbit films were unsatisfying, I still miss having a Tolkien-Peter Jackson epic to watch in theatre at Christmastime. 2019 supplied us, though, with the Tolkien biopic. Besides posting the trailers, I did lead-up posts like “Getting Ready for TOLKIEN: John Garth and Other Resources.” I still encourage people to read John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War before watching the film, but I am not like many Tolkien fans who simply could not connect with the film. I reviewed it in three different ways, in three different places:
As I discussed above, I have decided to reserve judgment on the new Amazon Prime Rings of Power series–though I was excited enough to share the title announcement on the Blog nearly a year ago. Even with the announcement of the trailer, I could sense the tensions around the project and was trying to find a way through it. When I do write about the Rings of Power adaptation, it is likely that I will be too late to be relevant! I am quite fine with that.
While I fled the Rings of Power arenas of debate, I was speaking at Tolkienmoot in 2022 on the Second Age of Middle-earth, and specifically the dissipation of Númenor. Thus my “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Texts on The (Down)Fall of Númenor” piece was anticipating both the Rings of Power series and the The Fall of Númenor, and Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth edited by Brian Sibley, but was also the result of my thinking about that fine summer meeting.
Book Reviews
There was no greater friend of The Hobbit in the early days than C.S. Lewis. In “The Unpayable Debt of Writing Friends,” I talk about how, if it wasn’t for Lewis, Tolkien might never have finished The Hobbit, and the entire Lord of the Rings legendarium would be in an Oxford archive somewhere. Lewis not only encouraged the book to completion but reviewed The Hobbit a few times. Here is his review in The Times Literary Supplement.
Lewis is not the only significant reviewer of The Hobbit. When he was 8, my son Nicolas published his review, just as the first film was coming to the end of its run. When I was posting Nicolas’ review, I came across another young fellow–the son of Stanley Unwin, the first publisher to receive the remarkable manuscript of The Hobbit. Unsure how children would respond, he paid his son, Rayner, to write a response to the book. You can read about it here: “The Youngest Reviewers Get it Right, or The Hobbit in the Hands of Young Men.”
I have also done more book reviewing in the last couple of years on this blog. I note Fimi & Higgins’ “Secret Vice” above, as well as my review of Bower on Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer. I reviewed Verlyn Flieger’s edition of Tolkien’s The Story of Kullervo, which I quite loved. I also reblogged John Garth’s review of Tolkien’s Lay of Aotrou and Itrou–also edited by Flieger, and also gorgeous.
Tolkien and Art
I am fascinated by Tolkien’s own artwork. In some of the Tolkien letters we find out how his humble drawings came to be published with the children’s tale. I decided, though, that I wanted to explore it a little more, and so I wrote, “Drawing the Hobbit.”
There have been many other illustrators since–including Peter Jackson, whose work as a whole is visually stunning, even for those who don’t feel he was true to the books. One of my favourites was captured in this reblog, “Russian Medievalist Tolkien“–a gorgeous collection of Sergey Yuhimov’s interpretation of The Hobbit.
With the great new editions of unpublished Tolkien by his son, we also get to see some of Tolkien’s original art. I continue to be fascinated by this dragon drawing. What an evocation of the Würme in medieval literature!
I was also blessed throughout the year to wander through two beautiful and rich newish Tolkien books: John Garth‘s The World of J.R.R. Tolkien and the Bodleian Library exhibit text, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, edited by Catherine McIlywaine.
I know that the world of Tolkien art is rich beyond my imagination. However, I would like to note that (with permission) I have been using some of Emily Austin’s Inklings-inspired art in my lectures, and keep her 2018 “Niggle’s Country” in my office.
Well, before the fun but still interesting, I hope, is my post “Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien & Me: Thoughts on Grief.” Not super heavy on Tolkien, but we do know that Stephen Colbert is a fan. 2020 also saw two new pieces on Tolkien’s friendships. One was Pilgrim favourite Diana Glyer on The Babylon Bee, talking about “The Tolkien and Lewis Bromance.” The other piece on friendship is “C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: Friendship, True Myth, And Platonism,” a Paper by Justin Keena. This was the top guest post of 2020, and one of the few times a long, academic paper had gotten a lot of traction on A Pilgrim in Narnia. I think that is a testimonial to Justin’s work, but also a comment about how readers like that Lewis-Tolkien connection that I’ve brought out in some of those letter posts noted above.
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb Series is a discovery from my stint as a Hugo Award panellist in 2020 and 2021–the years that Gideon the Ninth (book 1) and Harrow the Ninth (book 2) were nominated. As much as I loved these books–and even though I was defending gorgeous, award-deserving books like Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi–they did not win the Hugos (though Gideon the Ninth won a few other awards, including the Locus best first novel).
While I can occasionally pick a Hugo winner, it is clear to me that my vision of “Novel of the Year” is often different than that of the Worldcon membership as a whole. I am a wee bit out of step, it seems.
SciFi books have dominated the Hugos through the decades–except, perhaps, during the first decade of this century, where the Harry Potter effect created a shift in focus. As fantasists, Rowling was joined then by folks like George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and (notably) Susanna Clarke. While I love science fiction as much as fantasy in terms of sheer readerly delight, you have to admit that those fantasy winners are such stellar standouts over the SciFi-winning novels of the period.
Fantasy novels sometimes age better, as well. What I remember of the 2011 list is N.K. Jemisin’sThe Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and not the SciFi novel that won–though Charles Stross’ 2006 AI singularity piece, Accelerando, lives still, when other novels of the period have faded in time. Though admittedly not pop-level books, Mary Doria Russell’s passed-over The Sparrow and her 2001-nominated Children of God may end up becoming science fiction classics.
And I must admit that many of the SciFi-weighted winners–and some of those passed over–have become classics or genre standards, like James Blish‘s A Case of Conscience (1959), Robert A. Heinlein‘s Starship Troopers (1960), Stranger in a Strange Land (1962) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1967), Walter M. Miller, Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1961), Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1963), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1966), Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon (nominated in 1967), Roger Zelazny‘s Lord of Light (1968), Ursula K. Le Guin‘s The Left Hand of Darkness (1970) and The Dispossesed (1975), Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s Slaughterhouse-Five (nominated in 1970), Larry Niven‘s Ringworld (1971), Arthur C. Clarke‘s Rendezvous with Rama (1974), William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1985), Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1986) and Speaker for the Dead (1987), and so on.
Though I loathe Heinlein’s writing, he is the godfather of the Hugos, a giant in his fairly gigantic field. I love most of the books on this list.
Beyond the classics, which take time to settle in, there are times that I resonate with the Hugo choice picks even though I am a little behind the times. N.K. Jemisin, for example, is clearly one of the science fiction greats of the generation. Time will tell if she will stand with the all-time greats, like H.G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, or Octavia E. Butler. With her triple Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth series—the only author to have an entire trilogy win, the only author to win three years in a row, and one of only five writers who have three or more best novel wins—Jemisin is already set apart as a generation-leading SF superstar. While I really struggled with her 2021 Hugo-shortlisted The City We Became–you can see Part 1 and Part 2 of my review–I do thint she deserved her Broken Earth triple win in 2016, 2017, and 2018 (with some hesitancy on the 2017 mid-series novel, The Obelisk Gate).
Women have been dominating the Hugo Novel category since 2016, and completely filled the shortlist of 2020 and 2021 (but not 2022). Sadly, my 2020 novel pick, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, did not win–though I think it to be a lovely and provocative work of fantasy that is both fresh and classic.
My 2021 book pick was a bit of an outlier: Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited novel, Piranesi–a work of such joyful simplicity and philosophical complexity that I have yet to complete my review … even a year later. I keep rewriting it. It seems to be a problem.
Though Piranesi is a standalone story–not a novel … a fairy tale? dream vision? parable?–I felt I needed to finally read Clarke’s vivid, game-changing 2004 Regency-era fantasy, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as background. It was pretty great. This super long novel was the perfect combination of influences for out-of-the-closet Jane Austen-slash-SF lover like myself. Crossing the genre and literary fiction divide, Strange & Norell was longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novel–as well as the World Fantasy Award, the Locus, and the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Lit. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is one of the books that defined the decade of fiction.
Although Piranesi is unusually rich and compelling, except for earning Susanna Clarke the elite 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction and a well-deserved Audie Award for Chiwetel Ejiofor’s audiobook performance, it did not top the major science fiction and fantasy award lists for which it was shortlisted (BFSA, Nebula, World Fantasy Award, Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Hugo Novel).
Another nominee of 2021, Mary Robinette Kowal’s 2021 Hugo-nominated The Relentless Moon, is not, perhaps, a novel to be remembered in history. However, the first novel in Kowal’s Lady Astronaut Universe, The Calculating Stars, deserved its 2019 Hugo win. While I would not have picked it up based on the book description because it sounded too much like a Netflix-type film with overly beautiful people “making a difference” in a historic moment, The Calculating Stars was for me a refreshing discovery–a classic feeling girl-power SciFi novel with religious and postapocalyptic sympathies in a strong and thoughtful series.
Also from the 2021 nominee list, SciFi writer Martha Wells has been publishing for decades, including a Nebula nomination in 1999 for The Death of the Necromancer and Hugo nominations and wins for novellas and book series. She carefully shaped the Murderbot Diaries series that includes the 2021 nominee, Network Effect. She also had the entire series nominated in that category.
Seriously, check out my thoughts on Black Sun, because Roanhorse’s mythic fantasy is worthy of its Hugo class.
I don’t think Network Effect was either the best or the most long-lasting of the novels. I must admit, though, that it was tough to see Tamsyn Muir’s work get passed over again.
Which brings me to the point of writing today: I sat down to write about the Heroic and Harrowing Features of Tamsyn Muir’s Newest Necromantic Dream Vision, Nona the Ninth, which I loved and found challenging and gorgeous and perverse and troubling. However, I have run out of time for the review itself–and not just because it is a supremely difficult book to review! But partly that.
So, until I have the time or courage to write my response to Nona the Ninth, I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on the Hugo Awards. While favouring the science fiction side of the speculative seating arrangement, the Hugos have been able to predict future SF classics and discern some of the best of the 21st-century turn to fantasy. While I almost never pick the right winner, the Hugos continually give me a rich reading list that includes some of the best–and some of the very good–works of the generation.
And, classically, I am already behind! There are 6 SF-heavy 2022 Hugo best novel nominees who have been in the world for months, and I haven’t read a single one.
A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine (Tor)
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager / Hodder & Stoughton)
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki (Tor / St Martin’s Press)
A Master of Djinn, by P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom / Orbit UK)
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir (Ballantine / Del Rey)
She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan (Tor / Mantle)
I guess that’s my Hugo Christmas wish list!
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
Anna Smol and the gang at the “Tolkien and Alliterative Verse” blog tipped me off to a new book from HarperCollins in 2023: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Battle of Maldon, together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. The new volume will be edited by Peter Grybauskas, who has contributed to Tolkien essays in a couple of recent well-edited collections: Baptism of Fire: The Birth of the Modern British Fantastic in World War I (2015) and A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger (2018).
First ever standalone edition of one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most important poetic dramas, that explores timely themes such as the nature of heroism and chivalry during war, and which features unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts.
In 991 AD, vikings attacked an Anglo-Saxon defence-force led by their duke, Beorhtnoth, resulting in brutal fighting along the banks of the river Blackwater, near Maldon in Essex. The attack is widely considered one of the defining conflicts of tenth-century England, due to it being immortalised in the poem, The Battle of Maldon.
Written shortly after the battle, the poem now survives only as a 325-line fragment, but its value to today is incalculable, not just as an heroic tale but in vividly expressing the lost language of our ancestors and celebrating ideals of loyalty and friendship.
J.R.R. Tolkien considered The Battle of Maldon ‘the last surviving fragment of ancient English heroic minstrelsy’. It would inspire him to compose, during the 1930s, his own dramatic verse-dialogue, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, which imagines the aftermath of the great battle when two of Beorhtnoth’s retainers come to retrieve their duke’s body.
Leading Tolkien scholar, Peter Grybauskas, presents for the very first time J.R.R. Tolkien’s own prose translation of The Battle of Maldon together with the definitive treatment of The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth and its accompanying essays; also included and never before published is Tolkien’s bravura lecture, ‘The Tradition of Versification in Old English’, a wide-ranging essay on the nature of poetic tradition. Illuminated with insightful notes and commentary, he has produced a definitive critical edition of these works, and argues compellingly that, Beowulf excepted, The Battle of Maldon may well have been ‘the Old English poem that most influenced Tolkien’s fiction’, most dramatically within the pages of The Lord of the Rings.
Thanks to the Tolkien Guide, we have an announcement of a forthcoming book that will be important for the study of Tolkien’s alliterative verse: The Battle of Maldon together with The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, edited by Peter Grybauskas and to be published by HarperCollins in March 2023.
According to the pre-publication information, the book will include Tolkien’s lecture on “The Tradition of Versification in Old English,” a valuable resource for those who can’t go to Oxford to read Tolkien’s papers (and let’s face it — that’s most of us!)
Tolkien’s translation of “The Battle of Maldon” was done in prose, most likely as notes for his lectures on the poem. What it says — or doesn’t say — about his interpretation of the word “ofermod,” which is central to his short essay accompanying “The Homecoming,” should be of interest to Tolkien scholars.
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
Most readers of A Pilgrim In Narnia will not know that I spent a number of years working as a Researcher and Writer for the Prince Edward Island Government, especially in areas of Higher Education, advanced learning, career training, workforce development, and immigration. I am deeply passionate about helping people find their best vocational space. So, even though government writing is not for me, it was rooted in work I value.
Much of the career training in the US and Canada is provided by Private Training Schools and Private Career Colleges (PTS). These institutions may be new or old, nonprofit or for-profit, local brick-and-mortar schools or online programs (or a combination of the two). PTS provide everything from small program training (e.g., Embalming, Real Estate, Bartending/Mixology, Yoga Instructor Instruction, Language Teaching certifications), to large career programs (e.g., Office Admin, Nursing, Coding, Jazz Trombone, Electrical Engineering, Nuclear Facility Inspection), to academic programs (e.g., Sociology, Counselling, Business, Journalism, Religious Studies, Design, Architecture, Biology, Literature).
Most states and provinces have unique structures of law and policy for administrating higher education–and thus, particular structures for student support within a dynamic and ever-evolving educational marketplace. Thus, it can be difficult for students to navigate PTS and college pathways.
While large-scale fraud is rare in legitimate programs, there are often critical problems. Once again, CBC in Canada has committed to revealing bad practices in career training and doing good work keeping private colleges accountable. Today, CBC Marketplace has released an exposé on CDI College, a huge private, for-profit college in Canada with thousands of students. CDI College has 23 campuses in 5 Canadian provinces (BC, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec), but not PEI (where I live). CDI has been the subject of other investigative exposés, license investigations, student lawsuits, financial reporting investigations, and international student recruitment and support reviews. Now, they are facing difficult questions about their claims about accreditation and employment outcomes.
We investigated CDI College and uncovered a pattern of using misleading information to enroll students. We documented the misleading claims about accreditation and revealed the real cost of dropping out. CDI College says recruiters may do things the company doesn’t condone. pic.twitter.com/BHdO1UBFkD
How important is the issue of PTS accountability and student protection? In the midst of my PhD, through the illness and death of my mother, in a period where I had books on my heart to write and a family I loved, I invested a huge amount of my time writing Policy, Legislation, and Regulations for Private Training Schools in Prince Edward Island. My hope was that I could help create structures where students could be a bit safer when making choices about where to invest their time and money.
Thus, I am disheartened that one of Canada’s largest educators is alleged to have lied to students about what their expensive education would mean. When you consider program fees and unpaid study time, the cost for students could be disastrous. For example, a one-year $20,000 program also costs $30,000 of lost wages (for a service worker in Canada). Students turning to PTS to make their dreams come true are the least likely to be able to incur $50,000 in meaningless debt.
By contrast, all of the local and online education I have been a part of has been very good to excellent–and often innovative and superior quality–places such as the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI, and the pics in this article are mostly from their gorgeous campus), Maritime Christian College, Signum University, Regent College, The King’s College (NYC), and Atlantic School of Theology.
Here are some quick notes about private colleges and a bit of advice for teachers, students, higher education administrators, and policy writers:
“Accreditation” has specific, legal meanings in US and Canada, so ensure the program you are interested in/leading is using the term as defined in your state, province, or territory.
Being a state-/province-approved, -regulated, or -legislated university or college is not the same as accreditation.
Accreditation is not necessarily essential to what you want to study. However, ensure your training and education match the industry you are entering in terms of degrees, diplomas, credentials, licenses, training units, etc.
Not all accreditation certifications have any meaning (e.g., in the US scene, DEAC, ATS, and the Bar are consistent and real, but there are dozens of dodgy ones).
In my research, I found that most of the family-owned, small-business private colleges offered good-quality education and training.
In my research, I also found that, in general, broader programs (like Office Administration or Computer Training) provided softer programming than state or provincial programs down the street.
Ensure your education delivery is designed for that mode (i.e., online training is designed for online learning, not just adapted classroom materials) and matches what you want to learn (i.e., if your education will need hands-on, local, in-class or on-the-job learning, ensure that’s part of the program).
In Canada, theological studies may fall under PTS categories or university categories, and may offer training for volunteer/unpaid work (nuns and monks, Sunday School teachers, music program leaders, spiritual directors, etc.) or professional work (pastors, professors, priests, preachers, missionaries, monks and nuns, etc.). For example, in PEI, Maritime Christian College is a denominational theological training school that offers career-path Bachelor degrees as well as certificates of training to support volunteer work. It is the oldest active degree-granting institution and falls under the University Act (with UPEI), while other theological schools would be under the PTS Act I wrote.
Despite what the CBC article says, some schools can get accreditation in Canada (e.g., theological schools), but I don’t know of any more traditional career college accreditation systems for entire full-service schools (there were none we could trust during policy research, but you should do research in your state or province).
In states and provinces with strong legislation, if a PTS makes any formal or informal claim about employment, credentials, or industry training, that claim must be veridical, confirmable, and evidence-based. Indeed, in most places, false claims may put the PTS is in jeopardy.
PEI (and all jurisdictions I know) has a mechanism for student complaints, so reach out to your PTS administrator if you have a concern.
I had a great team for writing legislation and policy but fraud is still possible. Quite honestly, we did not find a way to protect students from globally available online education. Thus, in PEI, we rooted our student protection in PTS that are situated here and offering whatever combination of on-campus, in-the-field, and online programs works best for their vocational focus.
I am no longer on any government payroll and am not currently being paid as an expert in this area by anyone. However, I work as a consultant, so I have a vested interest. My interest, however, is really that of a public intellectual, educator, parent, and friend. If we are real-life friends and you have questions about a particular school or training path, email me and we can chat. I am no longer an expert, but I might be able to help. And I would happily speak about the programs I know.
Best wishes everyone!
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
Despite its global celebrity, Prince Edward Island’s north shore remains a largely unknown treasure. With hundreds of inlets, creeks, wharves, harbours, river valleys, hillside views, and quaint communities to explore, visitors who come here expecting to “see the Island” in a day or two are often disappointed. I would not wish our guests to miss miles of white sandy beaches juxtaposed by jagged red seaside cliffs.
Everyone should visit the Green Gables house in Cavendish and walk the boardwalk in North Rustico, stopping to eat at one of the artisan restaurants or take a harbour cruise or see a play at the Watermark Theatre. Through federal support of the fishing industry, investment by the arts community, the long memories of old friends, and the slow discovery of a place of beauty, the rugged hills and poverty-stricken lanes that made up my Rustico schoolboy days have been transformed into a village of coastal charm.
The Island treasures “on the map” are worth visiting, but the eye hungry for beauty should leave time for wasted hours in the corner and harbour and hamlets of our northern shore.
I still find my own New Glasgow breathtakingly beautiful. 200 years ago, left their farms off the Clyde some 15 or 20 miles from Glasgow, bringing only a few things with them: a fervent religious devotion, a commitment to hard work, a few tools, books, and household memories, and the names “River Clyde” and “New Glasgow” themselves. While my great-great-great-great grandfather was apparently not worth taxing in the Parish of Houston, Renfrewshire, he managed to find passage to Prince Edward Island in 1820. And somehow in that connection, he married a Catherine Anne Stevenson, whose father became the pastor at the community church in New Glasgow. Though we late-1900s Dickiesons were the heathens to which others would find themselves next door, as a child, I played in the church that Elder Stevenson helped build. In ill-fitting Sunday clothes, I watched the ceiling fan while preachers preached and my grandmother prayed I would be still for just a few moments more. Later, still un-still but eagre, I served that church. My wife and I were married there and ordained there, and it is still a place I think of as home.
10 or 20 miles seaward of my childhood home, there are treasures many wayfarers miss. Though there are few places as Instagram-ready as French River, Prince Edward Island, Stanley Bridge is a brilliant harbour with a wide-mouth bay, archipelagos of dunes and wooded lands jutting into the sea, and a long, beautiful river to explore. Moving inland and east up Trout River, there are miles of wooded trails with red-dirt roads and the little corner of Millvale. I miss the mill, the smell of sawdust and the busy movement of laughing men working speedily inches from what seemed to me then–and still seems to me today, in memory–to be monstrously dangerous saws.
If you were to leave my old family farm in New Glasgow by car, you would pass by my church–what L.M. Montgomery somewhat disdainfully called the “New Glasgow Baptist Church”–as well as the famous Lobster Suppers and Toy Store. After about 8 hilly miles you would come to Stanley Bridge. Turning northeast would bring you within a few minutes into Cavendish, with the National Park along the shoreline, the Green Gables house inland, and Lucy Maud Montgomery‘s homestead at the centre of the village. A 3-mile drive directly west from Stanley Bridge along the 100-acred lots measured out from the river will take you to what I think of as the New London corner–though I don’t know if that’s its real name. Just 4 miles north of the corner is the postcard harbour of French River, and another two miles takes you to Park Corner, a family home where Montgomery felt love and friendship. The Park Corner home would become the image of “Silver Bush” in the 1930s.
Travelling west and south from New London corner will take you to Kensington, the train station where a fifteen-year-old Maud Montgomery would board a train to the West to reunite with her father. It is an auspicious occasion–not least because she met her grandfather, “Senator” Donald Montgomery, with Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and his wife, Lady Agnes. For Montgomery lovers, however, the following year in Saskatchewan would be decisive in Montgomery’s personal and literary life.
But on this day, the anniversary of the birth of Prince Edward Island’s most famous author and undoubtedly the Canadian writer with the most global reach, it is important to remain for a moment at New London corner. Like many PEI villages, New Londoners have extended their hospitality to visitors. There is a tea room, places to buy coffee or ice cream, historic venues for weddings, and nearby places to eat. The Potter’s Parlour is worth a visit for its coffee and craftsmanship, and The Table is a gourmand destination, a “Culinary Studio” in a beautifully renovated United Church–a newer building for what had, I presume, previously been a Methodist congregation, established in one of the earliest areas for Methodist preaching in PEI. As the St. John’s Presbyterian Church just a moment’s walk from the corner was built after Montgomery was born, I do not know where she was christened. However, the church captures the feel of Victorian rural PEI life well at the heart of New London.
And, at this same corner, Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on this day, Nov 30th, in 1874, in a small one-and-one-half-storey cottage, adjacent to the store on the corner. Secured by her grandfather, Senator Montgomery, this cozy home was where “Maud” spent her first months of life until her mother, Clara, died of tuberculosis 21 months later. Not long after, Montgomery‘s father would move to the Northwest Territories, Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, following hopeful ventures for financial success. Maud would live with her mother’s people, raised by her elderly grandparents a short walk from the corner in Cavendish.
In the 19th century, when folks were calling this area Clifton, no one could have imagined the global impact this lonely orphan of a child would have. Her early days were as inauspicious as mine, just 10 miles southeast and 101 years later. L.M. Montgomery would go on to be the author of 20 novels, 530 short stories, 500 poems, and dozens of essays. She was a church organist and Sunday School teacher, a director of plays and fund-raisers, a life-long correspondent and journal writer, and a benefactor to her rural Canadian kin. She was a minister’s wife, a friend of farmers and Prime Ministers, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an officer of the Order of the British Empire, and a lover of cats. Montgomery is probably in the 100 million club in terms of books sold, and according to this research, Anne of Green Gables is Canada’s most translated book (in at least 36 global languages, see photos below).
And, recruited by a well-meaning United Church minister in the 1980s, in Montgomery’s Cavendish church, I once gave an underwhelming reading of “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night….” punctuated by “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy” shouted with red-face exuberance. In that church some forty years earlier, Montgomery had, in 1942, been laid to rest in a state funeral–a rare occasion in Canada’s far-flung rural reaches.
So, when you have the chance one summer day, I would encourage you to visit the Lucy Maud Montgomery Birthplace museum at Clifton corner. It is an authentically decorated Victorian home, painted white and green as an homage to Green Gables. There is a replica of Montgomery‘s quite tiny wedding dress, as well as a number of her personal scrapbooks where she pasted many of her stories, poems, and personal memories. It is a pretty little place that gives me a sense of what that home might have been.
More than the museum, however, is the north shore drive. That our little Prince Edward Island could produce one of the world’s most transformative modern authors is a complete mystery until you can see what Montgomery saw–the landscapes and seashores and skyways, the stunning geography of land brimming with imaginative possibilities, and the places that Montgomery called home. I am afraid to think about how much of the shoreline has changed because o Hurricane Fiona earlier this autumn. However, PEI’s beauty is ever-changing, and no doubt the charm and allure with remain.
So on what Anne might call an auspicious moment, I wish our own Lucy Maud Montgomery a happy birthday, and invite lovers of her writing to come and see the real-life imaginative world behind her works.
I believe in open access scholarship. Because of this, since 2011 I have made A Pilgrim in Narnia free with nearly 1,000 posts on faith, fiction, and fantasy. Please consider sharing my work so others can enjoy it.
More than just teen fan fiction, “The Quest of Bleheris” is a resource for understanding Lewis’ spiritual development and charting his growth as a critic and imaginative writer.
First, “The Quest of Bleheris” has historically been available only to those who could get to archives in Oxford, UK or Wheaton, IL. In 2021, Inklings scholar Don W. King was able to provide a full transcription of “The Quest of Bleheris” in Sehnsucht journal. Recently, Sehnsucht has become an open-access journal. Thus, by clicking on this link, you can find the full transcription of the tale, with critical notes and an introduction by Don King. As this story is now available to the reading world, I hope my short introductory video can give you a feeling for both the story and the manuscript history.
A Pilgrim in Narnia 