Walking in Oxfordshire is, for me, connected to Gabriel Schenk. I’m not certain how many years ago it was now, but when hearing I was in Oxford, Gabriel offered to show me around. As an Oxford alum, Gabriel has a magic card that gets him in and out of colleges without the troublesome need to fill the porter’s cup. Over time, our gambles became more rural, closer to his home out of town, but it was Gabriel who gave me the key to the city of dreaming spires.
Dr. Gabriel Schenk is a scholar of the Arthuriad, one of the masterminds behind The Tolkien Lecture in Oxford, and a fellow teacher at Signum University. In 2023, Gabriel gave a compelling keynote speech at Mythmoot on Alfred, Lord Tennyson (the comma is important) and his “In Memoriam A.H.H.”:
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all (Canto XXVII).
At a bonfire later that night, Gabriel shared some of his vision for his social media platform. I told him I was impressed with how positive and atmospheric his Instagram feed was. The pictures of his walks and discoveries allow me to visit great English moments of the past and present when I am seconded at home.
More recently, Gabriel has been producing informative mini-documentaries on YouTube about some of Europe’s more intriguing literary figures. Gabriel takes us to “Mary Shelley’s Memorials,” “Anne Brontë in Scarborough,” and “Franz Kafka in Prague.” He even pinpoints the precise spot where Dracula landed in Whitby, North Yorkshire, England–despite more than a century and a quarter of time passing between then and now.
Now, Gabriel has turned to a place I know as well as any in Oxford, Addison’s Walk. With a captivating combination of word, image, and music, Gabriel tells the story of a September night in 1931, when fellow literary scholars J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson brought C.S. Lewis to the edges of eternity, where myth and history, like poetry and prose, become one.
As I have been writing about Lewis and “The Great Story on Which the Plot Turns”–the death and resurrection of Jesus–I know the tale of Addison’s Walk pretty well. Still, I began my day today watching this video, and I was moved by the autumnal setting, the space the film-making gives to reflection, and Gabriel’s recitation of Tolkien’s poem, “Mythopoeia“:
You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’);
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star’s a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain. . . .
It is a poem that captures the collision of worldviews that led to Lewis’s life of faith and writing. It is also the poem that helped me understand best how stories live in the world. And so I share it with you, dear reader.
For the entire text of “Mythopoeia” and my reflection, see:
And here is the link to Gabriel’s guest post on A Pilgrim in Narnia, “‘The Name is Against Them’: C.S. Lewis and the Problem of Arthur” by Gabriel Schenk
You may enjoy these other posts on A Pilgrim in Narnia:
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
Fascinating. I am certain Schenk’s new course will be fascinating. Happy to see Signum is doing so well.
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I hope to catch up with this soon – and and the other installments you mention in such an interesting-sounding series! For the moment, I note that “Mythopoeia” is in Collected Poems, with a couple corrections made in the 2001 paperback reprint/edition of the 1988 Tree ans Leaf noted, and with a few tantalizing remarks about the original and later lengths of the poem in the course of drafting/rewriting it.
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What ho! Did a comment or two of mine disappear into the dark backward and abysm of immoderately protracted adjudication?
And what does “Nonce verification failed” mean?
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Dear Xavid, I have no idea what that phrase means!
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