excerpt from an Apr 4, 1950 C.S. Lewis letter to Roger Lanclyn Green; source
A few years ago, I did a series called “The Words C.S. Lewis Made Up,” with such beauties as Bulverism, rebunker, and lowerarchy. My second sweep at the project is meant to include Disneyfication, Terreauty, Busbyism, mythonomy, atheological, P’daytism (invented with his brother, Warren, and featured in a recent Crystal Hurd publication), Hobbitry (most likely a Tolkien neologism but used by Lewis), and Blurbology. The sheer usefulness and good fun of Justin Keena’s efforts in the recently published C.S. Lewis, Blurbologist (2025) in the Journal of Inklings Studies supplement series is a whole book dedicated to the last word in that list–far more than I would have attempted but a welcome addition to Lewis studies.
Once we know what a “blurb” is, “blurbology” falls quickly into place for the nimble mind. According to the OED, “blurb” popped into American slang out of nowhere in the 1910s. The word quickly caught on to capture the peculiar project of summarizing a book’s value or contents in a snappy paragraph. By the time he was publishing in the 1930s, “blurb” was a working word for Lewis, one of the sometimes tedious tasks of bringing a book into publication.
If you learned cursive, you can perhaps discern bits of Lewis’ 1950 letter to Roger Lancelyn Green about a blurb, captured in this image that is also on the cover of Keena’s study (and transcribed below).
4/4/50
My dear Roger
Thanks v. much for the blurb [for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe]: I shall send it to [publisher] Bles to-day. It seems excellent to me, but like you I don’t really understand Blurbology.
The man running this series of Lives is Milton Waldman c/o [publisher] Collins. I will write to him about you at once.
I look forward v. much to Castle in L.
I may (i.e. will if I can) look for you at the K.A. [King’s Arms pub] tomorrow (Wed) about 11.30.
Yours Jack Lewis
I learn from Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson that Castle in L is The Castle in Lyonesse, an unpublished children’s novel by Green. Doug donated a photocopy of the manuscript (among others) to the Wade Centre, making it more accessible to researchers (see the catalogue listing here). We have here an elliptical letter between friends, where Lewis has solicited Green’s help in getting his first Narnia chronicle to the public. It’s bound to have some lost trails for us interlopers decades later.
While Lewis claims not to know much about the art of Blurbology, Justin Keena’s careful study reveals Lewis’ principles of the craft:
Blurbs should be accurate
Quotations should rarely be used, and used only when they don’t misrepresent the book or interrupt its enjoyment (i.e., no spoilers)
Blurbs should capture the author’s intentions for the reading experience
In C.S. Lewis, Blurbologist, Justin Keena has conducted extensive archival work to gather together three types of Lewis-related blurbs:
Lewis’ Blurbs for His Own Books (Part One, with 26 entries)
Lewis’ Blurbs for Others’ Books (Part Two, with 26 entries)
Blurbs for Lewis’ Books (Probably) Written by Others (Appendix, with 36 entries)
Each of these sections includes the blurb in question and Justin’s notes about the historical provenance and importance of the blurb, with longer discussions about what parts of the blurb are definitively or possibly Lewis’. These copiously footnoted studies are usually brief—though some are as long as 10 pages—and focused mostly on the UK and American first editions of Lewis’ novels. Beyond learning from Lewis as a blurbologist—with the added bonus of hearing some early mini-reviews of Lewis’ writing—the primary interest is to discern whether or not we have any of Lewis’ words that we can say add to the catalogue of primary materials.
I am approaching this book review in two ways. For the remainder of this first entry, I will share brief examples to provide a sense of what this project entails. In the second part (next week), I will talk about how I gamified the experience of reading C.S. Lewis, Blurbologist, and how that led to some fruitful confirmation of and pushback against the approach.
Here is how Keena organizes each entry for study in C.S. Lewis, Blurbologist: The book’s bibliographic details, followed by the blurb text, and then Keena’s commentary about why and how this blurb represents Lewis’ voice and contributes to studying his work (with footnotes that link entries within the volume or out to research sources). Here is a fictional example:
lxv. Awesome Lewis Title (Charlottetown, PE: Brentonio Dickvinci Press, 1964), dust jack front and back flap
Book Jacket Blurb: C.S. Lewis’ book titles are so awesome we should have a book just about his book titles. Meanwhile, read this well-titled new novel.
Keena’s Analysis and Commentary: This blurb by the press editor is nearly the worst thing ever written, but there are two or three even more horrid examples in Keena’s foundational study of Lewis as Blurbologist.
Here is an example of an entry early in the volume that makes a unique contribution to our archival bibliography of Lewis’ publications. This entry on The Pilgrim’s Regress is relatively short because it follows a note on the same book, covering a lot of background details. I’ve left out the footnotes, but it is noteworthy that the entry includes Lewis’ correspondence with his best friend, Arthur Greeves, and gives some new context to the letter:
ii. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935), dust jacket front flap.
The allegory obviously suggests Pilgrim’s Progress, but the Giants and Demons are of a sort that Bunyan never knew, and Mr. Lewis’s wit would probably seem to Bunyan sinful. Certainly his theology would.
The hero, brought up in Puritania (Mr. Lewis himself was born in Ulster), cannot abide the religion he finds there. With many digressions he follows the Straight Path that runs past the City of Claptrap, between the tableland of the High Anglicans and the far-off marsh of the Theosophists. A fundamental problem throughout is to find the relation between the sexual instinct and the religious; on this the conclusion is neither that of Freud nor that of D.H. Lawrence.
Many varieties of religious and æsthetic theorising come under the lash before the final chapters, in which the realm of controversy is altogether transcended.
This piece is an editorial rewrite by Sheed & Ward of the original English version published two years previously by J.M. Dent and Sons. The particular words from the original version that survived the rewrite have been underlined, and it is due to them that this blurb counts as a distinct entry in Lewis’s bibliography. But the way in which it was rewritten was a source of resentment for him [Lewis]. He complained about the changes, as we have already seen in section I, to Arthur Greeves on 7 December 1935. He wrote to Dom Bede Griffiths a month later on the same subject:
I fear Mr. Sheed is a rascal. That blurb on his jacket, insinuating that the book contains an attack on my own religious upbringing, was printed without my knowledge or authority, and he must have known it was a suggestio falsi: at least he took good care not to know!
Lewis even marked Sheed’s blurb on a copy now in the possession of the Wade Center, underlining the offending lines on the front flap of the jacket and writing below the blurb: ‘The suggestions are put in by the unspeakable Sheed with no authority of mine & without my knowledge.’ Lewis’s comments to Greeves, Griffiths, and on the jacket itself strongly imply that the original blurb had been published with his ‘knowledge’ and ‘authority’, most probably because he himself was its author.
His authorship would also explain why, for the 1943 revised edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress published by Geoffrey Bles, the original blurb was restored (with minor changes), instead of an entirely new one being composed. It would seem that Lewis took the opportunity to finally detach Sheed & Ward’s misleading blurb from the Regress, and still considered his original blurb sufficient to entice new readers coming to his work a decade after its initial appearance.
The last entry of Part One has a fairly sophisticated argument, but this excerpt captures what Keena is trying to do in restoring Lewis’ original words:
xxvi. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), dust jacket front and back flaps.
[Front flap] WHEN reading old literature we tend to turn to commentaries, histories and other helps, as Dr Lewis says, ‘only when the hard passages are manifestly hard. But there are treacherous passages which will not send us to the notes. They look easy and aren’t. Again, frequent researches ad hoc sadly impair receptive reading, so that sensitive people may even come to regard scholarship as a baleful thing which is always taking you out of the literature itself. My hope was that if a tolerable (though very incomplete) outfit were acquired beforehand and taken along with one, it might lead in. To be always looking at the map when there is a fine prospect before you shatters the “wise passiveness” in which landscape ought to be enjoyed. But to consult a map before we set out has no such ill effect. Indeed it will lead us to many prospects; including some we might never have found by following our noses.’
The Discarded Image is C.S. Lewis’s map for medieval and renaissance literature. His theme is the problem of world models and their influence on the mind. He is concerned with the classical concept
continued on back flap
[Back flap] or ‘image’ of the universe not merely as a curio or a series of footnotes to the hard passages which are essential to the understanding of the medieval concept, but also for its emotional and aesthetic impact. This leads him in the end to reflections on the character of all cosmic images, including our own, which he believes ought to be considered.
The long quotation in the first paragraph is lifted, with a small omission in the first sentence, directly from the preface of the book. What makes this piece count as a distinct blurb in Lewis’s bibliography, however, are the underlined portions of the second paragraph. Originally written by Lewis, they were later recast to be from the publisher’s perspective. According to Lewis’s letter to Colin Eccleshare of 28 December 1962,
The book hopes to have a triple appeal. The chapters on ‘Selected Materials’ may contain some things worth the attention of scholars. The main body of the book is more for students. But, thirdly, the general reader may perhaps find my treatment is of larger interest, for I am concerned with this old ‘image’ of the universe not merely as a curio, nor even merely as ‘notes’ to the literature, but also for its emotional and aesthetic impact. This leads me in the end to reflections on the character of all cosmic images, including our own, which I believe people ought to consider. Can you make a blurb out of all this?
The only notable change made by the publisher to the underlined portion of Lewis’s suggestions is narrowing the stated function of the book from being ‘“notes” to the literature’ of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in general to being, more specifically, ‘footnotes to the hard passages’ that had already been mentioned in the first paragraph of the published blurb.
And, thus, we can see the process Justin uses to narrow in on Lewis’ own words.
I will include only a brief peek into Lewis’ blurbs of others. Some of these have been published in volumes like Of Other Worlds. However, Justin Keena and editor Norbert Feinendegen bring some new moments to light of Lewis’ words published on books in America and England. Truly, I haven’t heard of many of these books.
Of John Custance’s 1951, Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Philosophy of a Lunatic, Lewis wrote:
“I do not think I shall ever forget the experience of reading it.”
Of Nancy Wilson Ross’ 1953, Time’s Corner:
“I enjoyed it greatly. It keeps its secrets very well.”
Lewis is classically supportive of his friends’ work. Of Sr. Penelope’s The Coming of the Lord: A Study in the Creed (1953), he wrote:
“I am delighted with The Coming of the Lord; delighted, excited, and most grateful. I think it is the best book the author has yet done, and the best theological book by any one I have read for a long time. … A lovely little book.”
Finally, I will end this first review with a bit of levity. Here is the entire 17th entry of the Appendix—including Justin Keena’s full critical response.
xvii. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), dust jacket front flap.
The publication of a new book by C.S. Lewis is always an important event. The Weight of Glory, made up of five addresses given recently before various groups, is written with the author’s well-known keenness and charm.
The first address, ‘The Weight of Glory,’ concerns heaven and man’s inborn longing for a future life. It is particularly interesting if read in connection with Lewis’s longer book, The Great Divorce. The second, ‘Transposition,’ concerns the similar reaction felt to both pleasure and pain. ‘Membership,’ the third address, emphasizes the value of the individual. It also contains an interesting study of the theory of democracy. The third, ‘Learning in War-Time,’ was given at Oxford during the Second World War. ‘The Inner Ring,’ the last address, warns the students of King’s College against trying to break into one charmed circle after another, thus destroying the joy of living.
The Weight of Glory sheds new light on many of the ideas expressed in Lewis’s longer books and is provocative and stimulating reading.
This book was published in England under the title ‘Transposition and Other Addresses.’
This piece has the distinction of containing the worst summary of the contents of ‘Transposition’ so far conceived by a rational being.
Note: I have replaced the ¶ symbol in the text with paragraphs and added materials in square brackets for clarity. I also added book covers for visual interest; they are not, unfortunately, the editions referenced.
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.
Many thanks – this is fascinating! Kudos to Justin Keena (and Norbert Feinendegen)!
I need to brush up what I know about that back cover 4 December 1953 blurb – e.g., the Tolkien Society website handy Timeline notes:
29 July 1954 Publication of The Fellowship of the Ring.
11 November 1954 Publication of The Two Towers.
20 October 1955 Publication of The Return of the King.
When and how in all this did Lewis’s blurb come into play (in so far as it did)? – it seems nicely applicable to each volume.
It is also very interesting to read in conjunction with Giuseppe Pezzini’s excellent (if meagerly-indexed) Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (CUP, 2025) – at least as far as I’ve gotten (nearing the end of chapter III).
A lot of interesting things worth commenting on, here. Most of it, from my perspective, concerns one of the constant, yet underacknowledged gifts in being a fan of the Inklings writings. It’s the way in which their words can sometimes function as pointers to forgotten names and titles in the history of literature and non-fiction that can sometimes be worth rescuing from the scrap heap of history. It seems to me that the major value of Jeena’s study lies in its discovery of how even the Jacket Blurbs of such writers can function as helpful pointers in ways that the writings of their contemporaries Inspired them, or else that they considered as good enough to be worth a read. Hunting down these titles can, in turn, shine a light that serves to broaden our picture of authors like Lewis and Tolkien (in a vein similar to the work of Holly Ordway) that allows them to have a third or even fourth level of dimensionality beyond the popular cliches that they tend to be reduced to. A good example of how the author’s blurb can help comes in the form of Lewis’s acknowledgment of the John Custance text.
A brief search engine surfing reveals that the book the Narnian is talking about turns out to be an almost journalistic account of what it’s like to suffer a mental breakdown. Custance has crafted a diligent chronicle of his struggles with what he terms Manic Depression, and what is now know as Bipolar Disorder. In doing so, Custance’s memoir details his interaction with questions of religion, philosophy, and imaginative symbolism. It appears to be this spiritual-aesthetic aspect of the writer’s (Hero’s?) journey that appealed, not just to Lewis, but also to legendary psychologist C.G. Jung, who wrote the preface to the Custance text. Jung goes so far as to diagnose the book’s content as a successful case of two sides of a divided mind managing to come together to form a new and healthier whole.
This is not the sort of book that most fans of Lewis would expect him to be interested in. That fact that the creator of Narnia liked this memoir of a nervous illness enough to write a blurb for it raises all kinds of interesting questions in terms of what this says about Lewis’s thinking. For my own part, I’m curious if this is a signpost that the author of “The Personal Heresy” was willing to re-think his ideas about the relation between the Imagination and how it interacts with the personality of the artist? It’s mere conjecture, yet the fact that someone like Lewis was willing to like a mental journal enough to say so in a Blurb does allow a certain amount of room for such speculation. Indeed, it offers all sorts of further interesting questions in terms of Lewis’s own thought in interaction with that of thinkers like C.G. Jung.
As for the Nancy Wilson Ross book, a New York Times review paints it as novel somewhat in the style of Charles Williams. It starts out as a narrative of manners, then turns into a murder mystery, then the mystery broadens to include questions of the Mysterium Tremendum. With a setup like that, it really should come as no wonder that Lewis was able to look on Ross’s work favorably, especially if she was able to remind him of an old friend. In addition, Ross herself became something of a scholar of Eastern Religious thought, which opens yet another avenue into how Lewis might have interacted with the kind of cultures that gave him his concept of the Tao.
You are very right about that aspect of this study (from what Brenton notes about it) – and have given us an excellent demonstration of that by following up these two authors and works.
When I was helping look after The Kilns, Dan Hamilton visited – and mentioned he was compiling a catalogue of all the books/works Lewis mentions in his published writings (including posthumously published) up to that time. I got sadly out of touch with him, but a quick search turns up both a good article article by him from 2010 about Lewis’s introduction to Sister Penelope’s translation of St. Athanasius’s ‘De Incarnatione’ and a reference in a post here by Brenton from exactly 10 years ago, 15 October 2015, about an autobiographical blurb by Lewis which Dan helped him with!
I was struck in reading Tolkien on Chaucer by how many and varied scholarly works Tolkien himself and further John Bowers and Peter Steffensen mention that he knew – a lot of which are readily available as scans in the Internet Archive and/or in Project Gutenberg versions.
We are being helped to scads of fascinating reading to follow up!
Chris, what an intriguing comment! I am so amazed I didn’t think about this collection of blurbs of others’ books as a whole. They did strike me as unusual, but I like the ways you are finding linkages here. For those peeking in, here is the TOC from that section:
PART TWO: LEWIS’S BLURBS FOR OTHERS’ BOOKS 113
i. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) 113
ii. D.R. Davies, Down Peacock’s Feathers (1944) 117
iii. J. Moffatt, A New Translation of the Bible (1949) 118
iv. B.G. Sanders, Christianity After Freud (1949) 122
v. C. Walsh, Early Christians of the 21st Century (1950) 123
vi. J. Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (1951) 124
vii. N. Wilson Ross, Time’s Corner (1953) 125
viii. P. Lawson C.S.M.V., The Coming of the Lord (1953) 131
ix. R. Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons (1954) 132
x. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (UK 1954) 137
xi. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (US 1954) 151
xii. A.C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1954) 152
xiii. M. Skinner, The Return of Arthur (1955) 157
xiv. H. Blamires, Blessing Unbounded (1955) 158
xv. K.M. Briggs, Hobberdy Dick (1956) 162
xvi. J.B. Phillips, New Testament Christianity (1956) 163
xvii. C. Kipps, Sold for a Song (1956) 164
xviii. A. Farrer, The Core of the Bible (1957) 165
xix. E.R. Eddison, The Mezentian Gate (1958) 167
xx. M. Peake, Titus Alone (1959) 172
xxi. Y. Lubbock, Return to Belief (1961) 174
xxii. D. Bolt, Adam (1961) 174
xxiii. D. Bolt, Adam (1961) 177
xxiv. K. Trevelyan, Fool in Love (1962) 178
xxv. A. Farrer, Saving Belief (1964) 179
xxvi. O. Barfield, Orpheus (1948/1983) 179
Wow – many thanks! This is fascinating! I have read few of these, but really enjoyed both Brother to Dragons and Hobberdy Dick, and as much Farrer as I’ve read (neither of these, though) and am glad to have gotten acquainted with Titus Groan (my only Peake, so far, with the last couple chapters still to go) and Childhood’s End (my only Clarke, so far) and The Worm Ouroboros (my only Eddison so far). And I really enjoyed hearing and meeting the late Harry Blamires and keep wanting to try his fiction.
I am looking forward to Giuseppe Pezzini’s new book. A friend of mine is writing a review essay now, so we’ll see what he says.
So, I just had an AI app try to answer your question about the provenance of the LOTR blurbs, and it used my piece as the main source:
It doesn’t know that I am me, so to speak.
This is the timeline it drew out of my post and various other things I have written:
The trajectory therefore runs:
Late 1949: Lewis writes his first ecstatic private review letter after hearing the manuscript completed.
Dec 1953: Correspondence with Unwin about a promotional blurb for The Fellowship of the Ring.
July 1954: Release of Volume I with Lewis’s blurb on the dust jacket.
Aug 1954–Oct 1955: Publication of Lewis’s Time and Tide reviews coinciding with all three volumes.
I am of two minds re: both of your follow up comments. On the level of mere immediate reaction, I’d have to list my sentiments as follows: “Oh WOW”! I do this if only for the sheer amazement to be had from the list provided from Keena and Feinendegen’s work alone. I came to this review already knowing that something like the list above might have been something of a possibility to hope for, yet I never thought the rewards could be that great! The fascinating standouts to me from the catalogue provided tend to center more on author’s I already knew Lewis had not just a keen awareness, but also a long tradition of correspondence with, like Austin Farrer. I’ve familiarized myself with Farrer’s works, yet a book like “The Core of the Bible” was unknown to my knowledge until printed in Keena’s text. The net result seems to be that not only does “Blurbologist” (great title, by the way) showcase the wider scope of Lewis’s thought and interest. It also lends a greater sense of depth to those sources that are often considered as being closer to home in terms of CSL’s own manner and style of thought.
This leads me to my second reaction, and here is where I think Prof. Dodds’ anecdote about Tolkien’s Chaucer scholarship might come in handy. What it leads me to believe is that both Tolkien and Lewis must have realized something that the “Canterbury Tales” author must have found out for himself long ago. It’s that the best artists are the one who are able to turn transfigure themselves into human treasure chests. The kind where the riches inside can be said to come from the content contained in the proverbial “Wealth of Words”. It lends an interesting thematic resonance to Tolkien’s observation of how “Roads Go Ever On” and “Way Leads On to Way”. A book like Keena’s seem to point to those phrases as very useful metaphors for what the best writers might sometimes be capable of. It really is beginning to seem as if the future of Inkling scholarship will be in tracing down these forgotten literary pathways that Tolkien and Lewis traveled in their exploits at Co-creation. Here’s hoping for further vistas!
To pick one point from this – you are right to my mind about the particular fascination of Lewis’s ‘blurbological’ interaction with personally familiar authors (and friends) – and in the nature of ‘blurbs’ a very deliberately public interaction at that. And, for that matter, the variety of sorts and degrees of personal acquaintance (e.g., Arthur C. Clarke in contrast to Tolkien, Barfield, Farrer, Blamires, Skinner, Lawson, Walsh, Eddison, and, I think, Briggs and Phillips – but what of the (to me) unfamiliar others authors, I wonder?).
Well, now, the contrast between authors such as Lewis and Clarke (no pun intended) in distinction between what might be termed his blurb correspondence with others (i.e. writers like Farrer, Blamires, and the other Inklings) makes sense in terms of degrees of personal acquaintance.
Where I can’t tell how this degree extends is with others writers such as Walsh, Skinner, or Lawson, who are a bit too new for me to make any comment on.
I just looked up Tolkien’s remarks in the 9 September 1954 Letter 149 (lazily in the 1981 edition, closest to hand) about Ariosto and Lewis blurb-wise, and the contrasting one in the 13 May 1954 Letter 145!
I first met an Orc in an excerpt from Ariosto thanks to a Lin Carter anthology – a very different sort of Orc, as it turned out when I finally read Tolkien! It would be fun to know if Lewis and Tolkien ever talked contrasting Orcs.
I hope this isn’t an inconvenience, however, since it’s the month of October, I thought there was something Horror and Mythopoeia related worth passing along. With that in mind, I’ve been able to put what I’ve discovered re: Edmund Spenser as a forgotten Mythopoeic architect of the modern Horror genre to good use. Shirley Jackson is the author who allowed me to do it. She wrote an appropriately Gothic yet overlooked short story called “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons”. Like a lot of Jackson’s work, this is a Domestic Horror tale centered around how one person’s life is turned upside down by the arrival of a new family who may just be ordinary new neighbors, or else they could be a pack of malicious Fair Folk straight out of Shakespeare’s dark woods. I was able to write a review about it, and what makes it worth passing along here is the skill of Jackson’s artistry. Much like her literary ancestor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jackson displays a masterful instinctive grasp of how the sort of Poetry of Enchantment that both Spenser and Shakespeare specialized in could just as easily be turned into shivers of Terror, just as much as Delight or Wonderment. Rather, let’s say that Jackson has discovered how to utilize the Gothic side of Joy. It’s not what most Inklings scholars might think of when the term is used, yet it’s possible to argue that it’s just as legitimate an artistic use of the concept as the other.
Furthermore, if it’s a question of whether or not this short story possesses anything like a genuine Mythopoeic quality, then I would direct the critic’s attention to a passage from Ruth Franklin’s biography for the creator of Hill House, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. It’s there on page 168 (American Trade Paperback Edition) that Franklin tells of the reading habits in the Stanley Edgar Hyman household, of which Shirley was the Lady of the House. “In the Hyman household, intellectual curiosity and creativity were cultivated and nurtured. There was singing around the piano and dancing in the living room and art projects at the kitchen table: Shirley’s old clothespin dolls even made a reappearance. One year, dismayed to discover the children’s lack of familiarity with the Bible, Shirley and Stanley read from it every night at the dinner table. Shirley also read her favorite books aloud to the children at bedtime: the Oz series. “The Hobbit” by J. R. R. Tolkien (which she preferred to “The Lord of the Rings”), (and) fairy tales (ibid)”. Further on in the biography’s page count, we find this interesting bit of trivia:
“But in 1960, she did virtually no writing, other than a few pieces for Good Housekeeping —and her letters to Jeanne Beatty. Those letters total more than sixty pages, often single-spaced, of Shirley’s signature yellow copy paper. Their subject matter ranges widely: from the Oz books to C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Frank Baker’s comic mystery novel Miss Hargreaves, about a young man who invents a fictional character and discovers, to his astonishment and eventual chagrin, that his invention has come to life (430)”. These are the only two times that the twin main Inklings ever appear in Franklin’s biography. It’s a frustrating thing to spot if you’re a fan of either Middle Earth or Narnia, and yet it helps to keep in mind that Franklin’s concentration isn’t focused on the question of Mythopoeia. So of course, there’s no way any of those considerations would find a place in her book. That still might be a shame, because even if the chronicler has no interest in the Inklings’ writings, that’s still no guarantee that Shirley Jackson felt the same. The fact that the builder of Hill House was also aware of Secondary Worlds like Hobbiton and Cair Paravel enough to mention them more than once in her desk jottings, and to her children, along with a focus on the Bible, tells me just one thing. For better or worse, Franklin’s information means that she’s Mythopoeic scholars a new bread crumb trail to follow. One that leads all the way to the doorstep of one of the most famous architects of Haunted Houses in the history of American Gothic fiction.
It means Inklings scholarship has a new path of study available for exploring the cultural, generic, and artistic impact that Lewis and Tolkien left upon other authors, some of whom made their mark in genres that most wouldn’t connect with places like Narnia or Rivendell. The inclusion of both Spenser and Shakespeare as shaping influences in one of her short stories widens the avenue of potential exploration. It leaves open the question of what, if anything, a writer like Jackson might have learned not just from the Bar of Avon or the author of “The Faerie Queene”, but also from Elizabethan scholars like Lewis? The answer, of course, is, no one knows. That’s why Jackson’s highlighting of the Inklings and the two premiere Renaissance writers is so important! It shines light on an unexplored path in the forest of Inklings scholarship. Whatever the final results of any possible exploration of this path might be, what I’d argue shouldn’t be overlooked is the connecting threads that Franklin and Jackson’s words have established between the realms of Horror and Eucatastrophe. If a Spenserian scholar like Maik Goth can effectively demonstrate how the poet’s use of the early modern form of the Gothic Monster can tie in with Tolkien’s notion of the Monstrous as “fundamentally allied to the ideas of the poem (cf: Goth, “Monsters and the Poetic Imagination in The Faerie Queene”, Manchester University Press, 2015, pgs. 33-34), then Franklin’s words and Jackson’s Spenserian-Shakespearean story are all good places to start. With this in mind, I hope it’s alright if I drop a link to a review of “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons”.
Sounds like I should try more Shirley Jackson, having read almost nothing – I think only “The Lottery” (in high school? – ‘formally’?). I should hunt down a copy of “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” to start with (maybe before reading your article, for fear of possible spoilers).
I wonder if her papers in the Library of Congress might have more Inklings details? (Clicking the External link to them at her Wikipedia article only left me bewildered, alas.)
The remark about preferring The Hobbit reminded me of something the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware said about simply enjoying the early part of The Fellowship of the Ring about the hobbits and the Shire most in rereading The Lord of the Rings.
For the record, “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” can be found in the pages of a posthumous collection of short stories edited by Ruth Franklin called, “Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings”. There the tale can be enjoyed to its full extent. If I had to give any caveat to the collection, then it wouldn’t be from the contents of Jackson’s writing therein, in and of itself. Instead, it would to exercise a certain amount of caution when it comes to a potential critical question of generic labeling, especially when it comes to defining what Kind of narrative it is that Jackson is weaving. For what ever reason, Franklin doesn’t view the story of the Suburban Housewife and the possible Wicked Faes Next Door as an example of legitimate Gothic fiction. Instead, she’s content to label it all as a Comedy. While it is possible that this story contains a definite element of Satire, it’s also clear that the author is utilizing both the term and its employment in an older manner. One that takes the definition well outside the confines of its contemporary meaning, which would limit it to the Modern Comic. It’s clear that whatever sense of humor there is to be had in this story is written in the service to a larger, traditionally Gothic meaning. Thus lending the laughter a sardonic, macabre edge that would be more at home in the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Henry James, rather than that of the Slapstick, proper.
This is an integral element of the story that seems to escape Franklin’s notice, yet which other scholars such as Alissa Burger have picked up on at a first reading. In her own essay, “The (Un)natural Worlds of ‘Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons’ and ‘The Man in the Woods’” (which can be located in the pages of Joan Passey’s edited collection of criticism, “Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales”), Burger, correctly posits (to my mind) a link between Shirley’s story and the older dark folkloric traditions surrounding not just the Mythology of the Elves, but also of figures from the Celtic Twilight, such as the Green Man. It serves to establish a thematic connection of descent from the fog shrouded landscapes of writers like the CW adjacent Arthur Machen to Jackson’s own modern American suburbia (or at least the mid-20th century version of that setting). In doing so, Burger does the attentive reader a favor by showing the connections that a story like Jackson’s might have to the work of writers like Spenser and Shakespeare. For me, this in turn serves as the piece of a larger puzzle that I’ve been fascinated with for a while now. It’s the possibility that the Modern Horror genre might be able to trace its roots back the work of older Mythopoeic fantasists (per Lewis’s reckoning) such as the author of “The Faerie Queene”.
The study text that first raised this possibility to my mind was D.G. Kehl’s “Jack Lewis and His American Cousin”, which details the “elective affinities” between the work of CSL, and the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Kehl does a serviceable enough job of demonstrating a potential route of influence between Lewis’s writings, and stories like “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven Gables”. In addition, Kehl highlights how both Hawthorne and Lewis shared and enthusiasm for all things Spenserian. Hawthorne appears to have gone so far as to utilize Spenser’s literary techniques in the service of constructing his own American Gothic voice. It’s the discovery that a writer of early modern Mythopoeic fantasy such as the “Queene” could have a primary shaping influence on one of the approximately five main architects of the American Gothic expression (the other four being Poe, Melville, Washington Irving, and the lesser known Charles Brockdon Brown) that got to me to wondering if it was just possible to trace a line of literary descent for the idea of Gothic Mythopoeia. One that could, to give a suggestion, lead all the way from Grendel and Glorianna up to more contemporary Gothic expressions, such as the work of authors like Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Rod Serling, Peter Straub, or Stephen King.
Whatever the merits of any of these later scribblers may amount to, it remains this uncovering of the fact that Hawthorne drew upon both Spenser’s work and literary techniques to construct the American Gothic mode of storytelling as we now still have it that stands out to me as a key unexplored pathway in the development of the still flourishing genre of the Supernatural Uncanny that I find to be the most fascinating, as it is akin to find an undiscovered country waiting to be explored. It’s this desire for further exploration which has resulted in reviews such as the one covering the obscure Jackson short piece linked above. My hope is that such attempts can act as a spur towards further, professional excavation of these more Gothic avenues to the work of Mythopoeia. This is why the work of enterprising scholars such as Maik Goth come as something as an assurance. It’s a hint that there are others out there who might have begun the groundwork for a more thorough scholarly exploration of how Mythopoeic writing might have contributed to the construction of the Horror genre. For the record, a good review of Goth’s work on Spenser and Monsters (one which does acknowledge that it builds upon Tolkien’s discussion of what is now known as the Monstrous in Fiction) can be found in the link attached below:
As for the age old question of whether or not “The Hobbit” is better than “LOTR”, well, what can anyone say that hasn’t been said already? The latter Hobbit Sequel was written in part to prove that such work could have an inherent dignity all its own. It’s more than possible to say that in this task, at least, Tolkien succeeded. That said, I will admit that there are certain special types of Joy to be found in the exploits of Bilbo Baggins that can be considered lacking in its later, larger relative. With that said, something tells me that this is a minority opinion, on the whole. No matter how many famous names out there might agree. The best solution therefore also appears to be the simplest. Questions like this will always have to rest content as mere matters of personal tase and opinion, nothing more, I’m afraid.
One last item as proof of concept for a connection between the work of poet’s like Spenser, and the story of things that go bump in the night. It is possible to test this hypothesis if a clear demonstration of what Tolkien the Faerian aspect of writing can show itself in a work of reasonably contemporary Gothic fiction. The best candidate I can find comes from the pages of a book called “Ghost Story”, by Peter Straub. It’s the author’s magnum opus, and somewhere in the middle of the narrative, he writes the following words: “”I had found the hook for the Hawthorne lecture; it was in an essay by R. P. Blackmur: “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.” The idea seemed to radiate throughout Hawthorne’s work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare—by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove. And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life (192-93)”.
Oh yes, and before I forget, here’s wishing everyone a Happy All Hallow’s Eve!
It looks like Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings is available in the University of Amsterdam Library – and variously second-hand, over here.
There seem a plethora of Jackson audiobooks on YouTube, including the 1960 Folkways recording of her reading two of her stories “provided to YouTube by the Smithsonian” – I wonder how many others are AI robo-recordings momentarily evading copyright strikes? No “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” in any form I can discover, though.
I remember talking with Mick Henry of the Tolkien Society about Hawthorne when I first started reading Tolkien, Williams, and Lewis fiction, thinking of him as something like an American analogue in some ways.
It’s fascinating how well various American authors were known in England – and, for example, John Garth has written interestingly about Tolkien and Longfellow connections and debts. Even as Americans have been very active in creative and scholarly ways with their English literary heritage. In that context Lewis’s connections with Douglas Bush and Tolkien with Francis Magoun are intriguing. But I can’t remember being aware of American attention to Spenser – in contrast to Malory, Shakespeare, and Bunyan – until you brought these matters to my attention!
It occurs to me that Tolkien’s comment on Williams reading the whole Lord of the Rings draft as it then existed gives a nice context to the various distinct yet intertwining enjoyments of hobbitry and heroism.
We’ve got an oratorio choir rehearsal – general with orchestra and soloists, but not dress – on Hallowe’en, and I had just decided I might wear my Karloff Frankenstein’s monster t-shirt.
With good wishes to you and all, for All Hallows’ Eve and Day – and All-Souls (we’ll be chanting on 3 November for that, as Sunday takes priority) – and, first, for the Feast of St. Raphael – on one of the few dates mentioned in the main text of The Lord of the Rings, 24 October!
The fortune (or lack thereof) in being able to obtain a copy of the Jackson collection is both unfortunate and familiar by turns. Nothing would be more gratifying to me than for the Cambridge Press to release an affordable modern edition of Alastair Fowler’s “Spenser and the Numbers of Time” in the same price range that Lewis’s “Discarded Image” still enjoys on this side of the pond. Instead, here I am, forced to hand over ninety something dollars for a copy bought off the antique books market. I wish someone would remedy that. The misfortune is further compounded by the knowledge that this same process can work in reverse for the Isles, and not even for obscure texts of scholarship, but of otherwise widely circulated works of popular fiction by a Brand Name author. There’s a whole world of improvement begging to happen on each side of this issue.
As for Hawthorne as an American analogue to Tolkien. A lot of that is accountable for one simple enough reason. At the risk of stating the obvious, America, in a great many details, is a country that has built itself out of the history England and its politics, even when it has made some modifications to this inheritance. With that in mind, it really comes as no surprise to speak of artists like Hawthorne, or even later scholars such as Douglas Bush, as being literary inheritors, or a kind, at least. Especially if you keep in mind T.S. Eliot’s notion of the relation between Tradition and Individual Talent. There are at least two good text sources that might help to shed light in the ways in which the then New World adopted, appropriated, and later modified some of these English literary sources. The first is George Frank Sensabaugh’s “Milton in Early America”. The second is “Alexander Pope’s Prestige in America”. This latter study might contain something of a pleasant surprise, as it is authored by Agens Mary Sibley. For what it’s worth, her other book on Charles Williams contains some of the best summation of that Inkling’s otherwise complex thought. She does a good job at capturing at least some of the Humanism that existed CW’s works. The point is that she and Sensabaugh do a good job of showing how America was able to incorporate its English sources and origins. Indeed, Sibley’s book devotes a chapter to how the “Essay on Man” was received and spread in Early American thought and philosophy.
What makes that so remarkable is that it has to be one of the last few times that CSL’s Discarded Image ever made an appearance in a major work of literary art. It raises all sorts of implicit questions about what both the pre and post-revolutionary colonials might have thought about such a strand of thought. I was always under the impression that it was considered “Old Hat” even in Pope’s time. Apparently, the success of the “Essay” “might” tell a different story. Milton, meanwhile, is a bit more obvious. One might almost have to call him one of the unsung legislators in the forging of the Colonies. In contrast, I think the relative obscurity of Spenser’s influence at and around this same time can be explained partly by a number of factors. The first is a simple matter of the passage of time. The second, however, is a bit more complex. It might have had something to do with the possible outsized influence that Milton had on Early Colonial thought. If the Civil War poet’s ambitions could be spoken as being realized in some form with the second Revolutionary period, then perhaps one of the forgotten corollaries of this influence was the way Milton viewed the poetry of Spenser. The Poet of the Fall made no secret that he regarded the Cartographer of Fairyland as, not just a poet, but also a religious and philosophic sage.
It might not therefore be too out of court to speculate thus. If it makes enough sense to claim Milton as one of the voices that Inspired early America, then perhaps it was Milton’s specific reading of Spenser that shaped whatever form of reception the Faerian versifier had on these shores. If so, then it may explain the relatively obscure, yet somehow still tangible impact of Spenser in American Gothic letters. If his legacy was viewed as one inherited in the shadow of Milton, then is it any wonder that Lewis’s favorite poet has been left with a literal underground reputation in the States? Still, Hawthorne was as big a fan of Fairyland as CSL, and it was Spenser’s artistry that he used to help create the modern form of the Gothic tale, complete witches, spells, ghosts, haunted house, and all (with even the fauns of Greek myth thrown in, for good measure). It seems to hint that the particular Literary Tradition that the Inklings specialized in is one of those Story Trees. One with any number of branches extending outward into numerous regions of Inspiration.
I am delighted to learn of Alexander Pope’s Prestige in America! I’m not part of the Internet Archive “Log In and Borrow” set-up, but her Appendices look tantalizing, as there described.
It would be splendid – and convenient – if there were an analogous book on Spenser.
Word-searching Archive copies for the name Spenser, I find no results for Sibley’s book, but three for Sensabaugh’s. Working out from Wikipedia’s note on Pope and Spenser, I find John R. Elliott’s The Prince of Poets recording various later writers’ awareness of Pope’s attention to Spenser. Perhaps both Milton and Pope made their contributions to encouraging American interest in him!
I am already keen to know more about Tolkien and the TCBS interest in Eighteenth-century literature and that of the (‘major’) Inklings more broadly, and verse not least. (It just struck me the other day that there was a parallel with Lovecraft, here, too!)
It saddens me a lot how neither Oxford nor Cambridge UPs seem to be making various fascinating books as easily available as, for example, OUP has very sensibly done with Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia – let us hope for future improvement (but, how politely to campaign for it?).
I’d have to agree one-hundred-percent in terms of the need for a closer look at the Eighteenth Century and the reputation of authors like Spenser and Milton in the shaping of the modern face of Mythopoeic thinking. A good place start (as I’ve mentioned in a previous comment at Oddest Inkling) is with the efforts of Robert Dodsley and the writer’s group I labeled as the Tully’s Head Circle, which included among their number perhaps “the” pioneer in modern Spenserian Studies, Thomas Warton.
Indeed, it may be possible to claim a critic like Warton as penning the first modern work of proto-Inkling criticism. As such, Dodsley, Pope, Warton, and their shared literary milieu would be the best place to start. Work like Sibley’s functions as a good untapped source, in that respect. You also might be on to something re: the possibility of Spenser’s reputation being shaped by both Milton and Pope. Though as stated above, it seems that critics like Warton should be added to the list.
In this regard, I am aware of at least three good sources devoted to the subject. One is Richard Frushell’s “Edmund Spenser in the Eighteenth Century”. Another is a Routledge reprint of Warton’s “Observations on Spenser’s Fairy Queen”. This tome is noteworthy in that it also includes another volume of criticism by one Richard Hurd, another member of Dodsley’s Tully’s Circle. His efforts are entitled, “Letters on Chivalry and Romance”. They are the first collection of essays ever devoted to a literary study of the Medieval literature that Tolkien and Lewis would later make into their shared professional subjects. Hurd plowed the field for them both.
The third and last source is Hazel Wilkinson’s “Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth Century Book”. Now the caveat emptor trick is just this. It is at least possible to claim that there have been books such as you mention above. The somewhat fitting punchline is that this established subject is so obscure (in spite of the efforts of writers like Lewis) that no one has seen fit to link the two. The other issue goes back to the problem of price tags.
Of all the volumes listed above, only Wilkinson’s is anywhere within a normal currency range. The other two are out of print. In fact, any remaining copies of the Routledge Warton/Hurd volumes (which contains a very informative essay by David Fairer) has a current used listing that is…let’s call it “interesting”. I could afford it, I suppose. If I was the heir to something like the Hearst fortune. Yes, and also some wish that rain was Bacchanalian Wine, yet it’s not.
All of which brings the topic to your final question of how does one get such volumes of forgotten lore back into the public eye, where there’s at least the chance of them doing some good? For whatever it is worth, I did see fit to contact Dr. Ward about Fowler’s “Numbers of Time” study. The reason for sending this missive was simple enough.
The claims of the Spenser text match up with those of the Narnia Code. Indeed, it is even possible to claim that Prof. Fowler beat Dr. Ward to a sort of invisible finish line that neither was ever aware of, at least in terms of making the claim that a famous Fantasy writer was able to cleverly encode a literary-artistic form of Astrological symbolism into their written work. Ward makes the claim for the Narniad in 2007. Fowler did the same thing for “The Faerie Queene” way back in 1964 (with an implicit sort of blessing from Lewis into the bargain).
It was this knowledge, combined with the amateur student’s desire to strike a blow for a scholarly theory or paradigm that one is attached to which somehow made me put my head on the chopping block, and send Dr. Ward information about the existence of Prof. Fowler’s old Spenserian study. He responded with genuine curiosity and interest, yet that is all I know, so far.
Part of the reason for this note of things hanging in suspension is because I can’t say that I know either how to broach the idea of gaining Dr. Ward’s interest in pushing for, say, a contemporary (and above all, affordable) re-issue by either the OUP or CUP of “The Numbers of Time”; perhaps complete with a new scholarly and contextual introduction by the author of “Planet Narnia”. One that would serve as an entry into an earlier work of Coded Astrological criticism, while also carrying the Narnia Code notion forward from there.
The trick is, even if that sounds like a good idea, I myself have no clue as to how to go about it. If it’s a matter of asking for a suggestion, then the only one I can offer is something you might not like, Professor. It occurs to me to wonder what would happen if an Eminence Grise in the field of Mythopoeic studies such as yourself were to broach the idea to Ward as one scholar to another?
Maybe a good word or two from you about “Numbers” might be enough for Ward to start a campaign of bringing Fowler’s words back into the spotlight. I am unable to know how this must sound, in the strictest sense, other than the feeling of having painted a target on one’s own head. If that’s the case, then the blow is deserved, and what I wrote just above can be disregarded. With no sense of harm or ill will meant.
So, while I was away, you talked about Spenser, Shirley Jackson, mythopoeia, the horror genre, Shakespeare, the American Gothic, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Inklings, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit vs. The Lord of the Rings, forgotten short stories like “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” literary biography (specifically Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life), the concept of “Gothic Joy,” the Inklings’ cultural impact, Maik Goth’s scholarship on monsters (that is a mammoth Scribblurus essay!), Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, the availability of academic texts, the price of scholarly books, monsterology, 18th-century literary circles like the Tully’s Head Circle, Alexander Pope’s reputation in America, John Milton’s influence on early American thought, Thomas Warton’s Spenserian criticism, Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, the transmission of English literary traditions to America, the “Discarded Image,” Alastair Fowler’s Spenser and the Numbers of Time, Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, and finally, a proposal to reissue Fowler’s book with an introduction by Ward. Well now!
How do I catch up? It’s so big now, I responded to the initial post, hoping you both see it.
-Reach out to Michael Ward with the idea, but Doug Anderson is sort of the genius for getting things into print or recovering lost things.
-I have not read “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” but I will watch for it; Chris and other readers pointed me to Straub … but my problem with horror writing, is that I go to read something new and I keep reaching for old things I love, like the Ransom Cycle, Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King (tho I like his mythopoeic and postapocalyptic work better); I do try to read something new each year, I recently read a brilliant new horror by Mark Sampson, Lowfield. But my reading is pretty focussed this fall.
-Partly, that’s because I’m attending MonsterFest next week! See, a connection. I’ll post my abstract, perhaps, for this piece: “The Monster in Me: C.S. Lewis’ Inversion of the Monstrous Other in his Speculative Fiction.”
-Finally, I love the conversation and peeking in! I do get a little lost in American fiction, I’m afraid. I’m not against it, but growing up (and in my media today), our local lit is Canadian, not the US. And the UK is sort of foundational for my reading. Outside of King, Buechner, Marilynne Robinson, Octavia Butler, Okorafor, Jemisin, and some classic sf, I hardly read US lit.
A couple of other additions to this fantastic and thrilling conversation My
ChrisC, you’ve nailed something essential here I want to come back to but don’t have time right now: the idea that the mythopoeic impulse (theologically, the subcreative) can flow into channels of Gothic lit (and has always been there, haunting at the edges of the genre), but also into genre horror and lit horror: i.e., it isn’t only endemic to high fantasy. You’re quite right to identify Shirley Jackson as a perfect case study. In the little I have read, she’s a master of the unnerving, the quietly monstrous, and the psychologically haunted. The discovery that she was reading Tolkien and Lewis aloud to her children is an absolute gem; it’s one of those archival breadcrumbs that can open up an entire new path in the forest of literary influence.
What breadcrumbs do ghosts leave behind? Story idea!
“Gothic Mythopoeia” lineage, stretching from Spenser and Shakespeare through Hawthorne and into Jackson. I forgot to mention Charles Williams and his Arthurian mythos, not just the novels, which help shape the genre of Urban Fantasy. Or Lewis and his proto-horror instincts in SF.
What about George MacDonald, a writer who seamlessly blended fantasy, terror, theological depth, and fairy-tale logic. I think of Jane Austen’s use of the word “horrid” for how some of his literature reaches readers–evil goblins, loss, enemies, and shadows. He also has good fay, life, heroes, and light. Is he the hidden link in the chain between Spenser’s allegorical monsters and Jackson’s psychological ones?
Or, is the numinous the link between them and high fantasy? I’m biased in that direction.
David, I was sort of responding to you also about books. You read so much and so widely! Thanks ChrisC and David for building such a thoughtful thread in an unthoughtful age.
Well, what can I say! The first thing to note is that Prof. Dodds perhaps deserves more credit here than me. He’s the possessor of that rare for literate raconteur that groups like the Inklings had, and which is now a rare quality in an age whose mindset is determined more or less by the Tweet. Therefore, it’s hard to resist getting caught up in a sense of actual intelligent conversation. Also, apologies are in order if Prof. Dodds and I got side-tracked in picking up a thread of old conversation from another Inkling related blog.
As for any difficulties to be had in trying out new things, rest assured it’s possible to sympathize with such a mindset. I’ve had a similar experience, of sorts. In my case, it’s knowing that there are all sorts of avenues in terms of books or films worth exploring, and yet it’s like I can’t break out the reading habits I established as a child. Always running through the same old ground, and sticking to the familiar names that you know you’re way around. I think part of it might be because that’s the closest most readers get in terms of having any incentive to explore further up and further in. The good news about some writers like King or the Inklings is that they are great sounding boards for encouraging their readers to try looking into the other famous Names that Inspired them. To give a good example, it’s thanks to King’s words that I’ve finally gotten around to exploring the work of Thornton Wilder and J.D. Salinger. The real kicker is it took this long to get around to a pair of modern Canonical writers. So yeah, it’s easy to see where you’re coming from in terms of both the joys and shackles of reading habits. Also, of course, I won’t even venture to guess how it is with an academic schedule of reading to keep up with.
Also, what you mention about how different countries prioritize different literary concerns is pretty much the same here. Like I told Prof. Dodds, we’ve taken our English heritage, and re-molded into our own idiom. I just seem to be one of the few who’ve picked up on it, and somehow arrived at what I hope is a greater cosmopolitan outlook (again, I “hope”). All of which is to say that no apologies are necessary if the approach to any of what D.L. Dodds and I have been discussing here is a matter of slow going, Professor. All of this began as just discovering these neat threads between the fiction of Fright, and the work of the Inklings. You mentioned once that you were looking for a possible connection between the two categories. So far as I’m concerned, I at least “hope” I’ve done nothing other than supply a rich vein of ore which would go a long way toward establishing that connection.
I never consciously set out to discover that writers like Edmund Spenser would be a key architect in the establishment of the Horror genre, yet it was a genuine pleasure to both uncover and share the discovery with others (and here I should point out that in my mind, there is no clear wall of separation between Horror and Gothic, the two are one and the same in my mind; to suggest otherwise is to create an artificial distinction that serves no real purpose). I just hope I’ve given some useful food for thought in your own studies, Professor.
Also, thanks for the tip about useful contacts such as Douglas A. Anderson, at least in terms of “maybe” getting the Fowler text a much needed re-issue. Somehow, I also forgot about MacDonald’s efforts in this field as well. The punchline being that I have in fact read “Lilith”, so I should have known what Prof. Dickieson is talking about. That’s a novel which reads in parts as if the protagonist has wandered into all of those Trippy album covers that used to feature on the record sleeves for bands like Pink Floyd, Rush, Yes, and Iron Maiden back during the 70s. I’m serious, that’s the kind of vibe I got from certain passages in the exploits of the curious Mr. Vane. The standouts, of course, being the Waste Land of Monsters, and the Skeleton Dance. So yes, there is an undoubted sort of continuation of the Gothic strand of Mythopoeia going on there. The only real shame is that while it’s clear they were fans, none of the Inklings ever really seem to have followed up on this particular thread offered up by MacDonald. It’s true Tolkien might have cast a side glance at the work of Lovecraft, yet it’s not the same thing, nor does it seem to have gone very far beyond the level of a quick call out, however recognizable.
Also, few, if any in the fandom community have ever bothered to pick up on this element. It all amounts to a great shame, yet it’s good to see it getting at least “some” recognition, however miniscule. I’m just grateful to have to opportunity to share some of it.
Picking up a couple points quickly (with hopes of more later):
Thanks for the Frushell and Wilkinson references – and the Warton, Hurd, and Fairer one!
I have not read the Fowler (yet), but like the idea of a new edition with introduction by Michael Ward! I do not know I’d be a better encourager of that than you, but perhaps we should both try! Ditto as to sounding out Douglas Anderson for ideas, thoughts about likelihoods, etc.! (Do you know his blog work?)
I can’t recall whether I’ve run into MacDonald references to Spenser or not – though I would not be surprised if he does quote and discuss him. A quick word-search of the Internet Archive scan of Greville MacDonald’s George MacDonald and His Wife (1924) sadly did not find a Spenser or Hawthorne reference. He does quote a letter by his mom about visiting Longfellow. (Also four results for Canada!)
Tangentially, I recently ran into a Wikipedia reference to Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers discovering “rare original editions of the Northanger Horrid Novels mentioned in the novel Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Beforehand, some of these books, with their lurid titles, were thought to be figments of Austen’s imagination” – with a link about the novels which leads on to a Wikisource page about them!
Thanks for the heads up. For the record, yes, I have heard of Anderson’s, I believe it’s called the Sacnoth blog, is that correct? Though I’ve never been there much in the past. Looks like I’ll have to remedy that.
By the way, Professor, it seems that Rolland Hein discusses the influence of TFQ on “Phantastes” in his study “The Harmony Within”. As for any good examination of the “Northhanger” author’s reading, a good recent (and hopefully available) source is “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf”, by Rebecca Romney. It’s the first study I’m aware of to take a look at the books Austen mentions in her novels, and then tries to trace these hints back to the writer’s (predominantly women artist’s whose voices have gone unheard until now), and from there into an unpacking of the ways in which they influenced such seminal novels like “Pride and Prejudice”.
As an interesting side not to this topic, Professor, it seems that Austen might have been the owner of one of Dodsley’s edited collection of fables and legends from the Middle Ages. Thus establishing a connection between her work and the group over at Tully’s Head,
Incidentally, thank you for the consideration in trying to put a good word in for Fowler and his Spenser study. Now I just need to figure out what to say to D.A. Anderson. Something tells me we should all wish each other luck in this endeavor.
Thanks for this – not least the Romney reference – wow! And the Rolland Hein detail – though I had no luck with a quick Internet Archive scan word-search (but do not know how to ‘weigh’ that).
Sacnoth’s Scriptorium is John Rateliff’s site – and always worth a look!
Douglas Anderson has several blogs – and (I take it) all are in the list at his Tolkien and Fantasy one, though somehow the one (with assorted contributors) I remember to check most often is Wormwoodiana. I can’t remember whether he finally got around to introducing himself to me, or I to him, but I think I had first commented at Wormwoodiana, and we have various mutual friends – but I think he is generally friendly!
Just a note of cheers to Douglas Anderson who read the initial review and solved a little problem. The Castle in L that Lewis refers to is The Castle in Lyonesse, an unpublished children’s novel by Green. Doug donated a photocopy of the manuscript (among others) to the Wade Centre, making it more accessible to researchers.
Thinking it sounds Arthurian, and wondering what a quick search would find, I found a post on Douglas Anderson’s Nodens Books site from 1 August 2019 with a list of books reviewed in his collection entitled Late Reviews – including Green’s The Castle in Lyonesse as one of these books, with that review being first published in this collection! Late Reviews is happily still available and the U.S. and U.K. Amazon listings provide a sample – including a review of an unpublished book (of 1037 pages!) by Robert Aickman. An exchange in the comments under his post briefly discusses unpublished books by Green donated to the Wade.
I also found a link on the Wade website to the Roger Lancelyn Green Manuscripts Collection with the description “This collection contains photocopied manuscripts of several works by Roger Lancelyn Green.” But my attempts to follow the link got ‘timed out’ for whatever reason.
Yes, Doug and I haven’t met in the same room, but he has been generous to me in reaching out. Honestly, he has done a great bit. There is also a review in that same collection of Green’s “The Wood the World Forgot” … wait, is it “The Wood Beyond Time”? Shoot, I will have to find it.
We haven’t either – and he is indeed kind and generous, and he has done an enormous variety of interesting things!
“The Wood That Time Forgot” is the Green work discussed in the comments at that post! Doug anthologized a chapter of it in Tales Before Narnia, and remarks “Only chapter 2 of Green’s ‘The Wood That Time Forgot’ has ever been published. Some years ago I donated my photocopy of the typescript (along with a few other such books by Green) to the Wade Center at Wheaton College (Illinois), where scholars may consult it. So I no longer have a copy.”
What a lot of interesting-looking things Green wrote and published which I have never seen, much less read! But my first attempt to find out anything about his heirs quickly came to a dead end where his daughter, Priscilla West (described in 2004 as ” a writer from Watlington, Oxfordshire”), is concerned, but I found a contact address for his son, Scirard Roger Lancelyn Green. I wonder if they would be amenable to the publishing of these novels?
Well, as someone who made a point of purchasing any remaining books by Roger Green in the hopes of learning anything about the Inklings and their philosophy that might have escaped notice (and mission accomplished there, so far as I’m concerned), I’d say by all means, try and see if you can get a book like “The Wood Beyond the World” published. It sounds fascinating, like as if he’s borrowed Lewis’s image of the Wood Between the Worlds, and used it for his own Inspiration.
For the record, the biggest discovery I have made in browsing through the better version of Lewis’s Green Books (sorry, couldn’t help myself) is that it is possible to claim that J.R.R. Tolkien was more or less willing to update his positions re: the contents of his classic “On Fairy-Stories” essay as he kept up his studies and kept abreast with the direction of modern scholarship
.
The way that works is this. Perhaps the most important work of non-fiction Green ever wrote is a work of biography and analysis called “Andrew Lang: A Critical Study”. The reason this is important is twofold. Lang was one of the experts who came in for a drubbing of sorts in the pages of OFS. In Green’s book, however, the tone is more conciliatory, encouraging, and maybe even a bit revealing.
For instance, Prof. Dodds, one of the highlights of Green’s “Critical Study” is learning that Lang poured over volumes of obscure medieval lore such as the works of Cornelius Agrippa and a text called “The Count of the Kabbalah”, which I’ve never heard of before, yet it’s intriguing to be sure if you’re a Williams fan. It just opens up so many interesting questions, such as what does this say about Tolkien’s own thoughts about the same areas of interest as that explored by CW?
Beyond that, however, what makes “Andrew Lang: A Critical Study” so important is something that can be found right near the start on the book’s Acknowledgements page. It’s there the careful reader is treated to a background story told in just the vaguest, yet rewarding hints. You learn, for instance, that none other than Tolkien was one of the two, maybe three sponsors and supervisors of Green’s study, which was published as an OUP college text of sorts.
It also becomes clear that the it’s the Co-creator of Hobbits who has been granted the leading and shaping voice of Green’s literary analysis, and this is important for a few simple reasons. To start with, it shows us that Tolkien’s thoughts about the nature of Fairy Stories wasn’t a one off thing. He didn’t just state his case and then leave it at that. Instead, it was a topic that kept occupying his thoughts.
Not only that, it seems as if Tolkien’s own perceptions on the subject, while remaining essentially the same in terms of basics (there’s nothing in Green’s “Lang” that acts as a flat-out contradiction of the main strictures of OFS) he still nonetheless might have found logical reasons to be more open-minded in terms of what types of narrative constitutes a Fairy Story proper, and have mellowed out a great deal toward Lang’s thoughts on the matter.
I have a working for why this is. It may be possible that Tolkien made a mistake of misattribution. He might have confused Lang’s thinking with another of his bête-noirs, like Max Mueller, and got the two mixed up together. He “might” have then discovered his mistake, realized he’d had egg on his face this whole time, and leapt at the chance to course correct his mistake. This might be especially true is it sent him back into Lang’s own work on Fairy Tales, where instead of a foe, Tolkien discovered he was kindred spirit all along.
Therefore, when Green came to him with the proposal for publishing a master’s thesis on the Victorian Folklore Scholar and Anthropologist, it’s easy to imagine Tolkien eagerly granting the future Inkling access to all he knew, and encouraging him to feel free to correct whatever he felt was off-base. The interesting final result is a basic restatement of “On Fairy-Stories” in a digestible book-length format. Green uses Lang’s life and scholarship to expound the same points Tolkien made in his 1939 essay. This time it’s a bit more cleaned up, a bit less rough around the edges, and a lot more expansive and inclusive of what narrative Kinds belong as Fairy Stories.
They were both still skeptical of “Gulliver’s Travels” though, for some reason. Yet the good news is that Tolkien now seems to have realized that Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books did indeed count as legit. It means Tolkien gave his fans a larger gift when it comes to exploring the nature of his thoughts on Mythopoeia, which is sort of like main vein of ore when it comes to a topic such as this.
For the record, the key bit of textual evidence for all this goes as follows: ““The nucleus upon which this book is founded was a Dissertation on Lang’s imaginative writings submitted a few years ago for the Degree of Bachelor of Letters at Oxford; and my gratitude to Professor D. Nichol Smith and Professor J.R.R. Tolkien for their unfailing guidance and encouragement leaves with me a debt that can never be adequately repaid (Green x)”.
Also, just the idea of a Robert Aickman novel(?) of over a thousand pages is mind boggling. I’m pretty sure the world would be curious about that!
Many thanks for this! Stupidly enough, as it seems to me, I have not yet read Green’s great Lang book, but just checked the Internet Archive and found scans of three copies of what I take to be the first edition: each has, on the back of the title page, “First published October, 1946” – exactly 79 years ago!
Reading Giuseppe Pezzini’s very interesting use of “On Fairy-Stories” in his Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (CUP, 2025), I was just thinking I need to delve into the chronology of Lewis’s putting together his (as it turned out) memorial Festschrift for Williams, where a version of Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” made its first appearance in print. E.g.,, do we know (if I’ve read it, I have forgotten!) if Tolkien was planning to offer this to Williams while he was still very much alive and (of course) not expected to die suddenly? If so, before or after Williams had borrowed and read the whole current draft of what would be published as The Lord of the Rings?
Word-searching one of the Lang book scans for the surname Tolkien just now, I find not only the acknowledgement you quote, but in the list of published Lang Lectures (item “3” in Appendix C) the note “(Also a few as yet unpublished lectures, by J.R.R. Tolkien and others)” (p. 239). Did Green write and submit this for publication knowing – or not knowing – “On Fairy-Stories” would be included in the Festschrift (which appeared on 4 December 1947)?
These are all fascinating questions, and I only wish I knew what the answers were. Each counts as a hitherto undisclosed gap in the chronology of the Oxford writing group’s history. It is just possible that Tolkien might have been considering sharing his Lang Lecture with CW. Though whether or not the “Essay Presented” volume was ever something that the group meant to publish all along, I’m really not certain one way or another. It’s difficult to tell if Tolkien even so much as mentioned the Lecture to Williams. Grevel Lindop speculates that the book of Presented Essays was meant as a going away present, when it seemed like the end of the War meant CW’s return to Amen House. If that’s the case, then it could very well be that its original intention was as a private volume, something that was originally meant for an audience of one. Williams’ death threw a wrench into a lot of the Inklings lives and plans, in retrospect. One of those plans could have been (for all we know) for the Lang Lecture to remain a mostly unpublished first draft, and for the Green Book (the good one) to be what Tolkien might have hoped would be the study text that presented his matured view of Mythopoeia to the world.
In which case, all of this would have been something that neither Green nor Tolkien would have planned on. At least that’s the best on offer so far as pure speculation goes. If there is any possible truth to this surmise, then one of the ironic outcomes of Williams’ passing is that it might have resulted in a slight skewing of Tolkien’s plans for how to present the theory of Fairy Stories to the world. It’s easy enough to see how this “might” have happened. When “LOTR” became a literary touchstone, fans of the book wanted to get their hands on anything else Tolkien might have written directly, under his own hand. OFS fits that definition to the letter, so of course the result would be that this would become the go-to text that fans and critics would reference when it came to trying to figure out the artist’s thought process.
The complete and perfect irony “might” be that in doing so, Tolkien’s own original goals have been lost in translation, in a manner of speaking. His original aim could very well have been to let Green’s “Lang” study be the text that delivered a more complete and expansive view of the group’s thought. It’s also possible to see how focusing on one single (and by now, almost forgotten) Victorian scholar and artist might have been able to achieve this. Because in the Green Book it’s clear that Lang is presented as someone with a clear understanding of Mythopoeia, and of what the Fairy Story’s highest achievement is capable of. As such, he would have been seen by Tolkien as the ideal vehicle for conveying the basics of Mythopoeia as a concept by allowing it all to be summed up in the life and work of one writer.
If there’s any truth to this speculation, then it means the history of Inklings Studies has been operating under one long handicap. The punchline being all the richer as it might very well have been one that neither Tolkien nor the rest of the group ever intended. Instead, what Bob Dylan might have called a “Simple Twist of Fate” was dealt out to them all with the passing of Charles Williams, and one of the side effects is that the group sort of lost the full measure of their intended voice. It’s clear enough, at least, that Green’s scholarship goes a long way toward filling in a lot of the gaps about the Inklings’ thought.
For instance, in works like the “Lang” book, and others such as “Tellers of Tales”, “A.E.W. Mason”, “Kipling and the Children”, and “Fifty Years of Peter Pan”, he’s able to grant readers an idea of the cultural context for how the Inklings saw themselves and their efforts. Green’s writing makes clear that Mythopoeia is meant to be seen as an inheritance of the authors of Victorian Children’s Fiction. In other words, Tolkien and Lewis saw themselves as following in the footsteps of writers like Mason, Kipling, Carroll, and Nesbit. Some of this might count as old news, yet the major benefit of Green’s writings is that he foregrounds just how important the genre of Victorian Fantasy was to the group, and it’s two lead writers.
In that sense, a good volume to hunt down on the topic might be Stephen Prickett’s own study entitled “Victorian Fantasy”. Like Green, he was a former pupil of C.S. Lewis, and that study text just cited contains the distillation of what he learned from the creator of Narnia, just as the “Lang” book does for Green as a student of Tolkien. Put the two together, and we’re closer to a more complete picture of the Inklings’ artistic background. The somehow brilliant irony might be that the loss of just one member was enough eclipse the group’s full intentions for how they wanted their efforts to be seen. CW would have appreciated that.
If there’s one consolation in all this, it’s that there’s been a new book on the Scottish Folklorist out by OUP. It’s titled simply as “Andrew Lang”, by John Sloane. With any luck, this might be a start in the right direction toward correcting gaps and mistakes in Mythopoeic criticism, though it might be that bringing Roger Lancelyn Green’s name back into the spotlight is also a necessary part of such revitalization.
I don’t think I ever read the first version of the late Stephen Prickett’s Victorian Fantasy right through, and was not even aware till now that he had revised and updated it in 2005 – when I quickly went a-searching and learned that! Now I’ve had a look at the table of contents in the scan in the Internet Archive and word-searched the surname Tolkien. On page 169 he briefly discusses Tolkien and MacDonald together, with a reference to Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, in a context intriguing and tantalizing.
I happen to be reading the mediaeval Dutch version of the voyage of St. Brendan at the moment and was running into things reminding me variously of Lewis and Tolkien – making me think I need to look into a lot more than the little I did so far in the context of two somewhat Lewis- and Tolkien-like characters in The Notion Club Papers discussing the Saint and his voyage. Lazily seeing if there night be an audiobook of a translation of the Latin version or of any English versions on YouTube, I ran into a fascinating little talk by Dimitra Fimi about St. Brendan and both of them – and Kingsley’s Water Babies! I’d already been wondering if Tolkien knew Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, and now I’m all the more tantalized. Maybe Kingsley is consciously among the Victorian predecessors you note – I hope I learn more about this.
What makes a writer like Kingsley interesting from a Mythopoeic perspective is that, while never as far out there as CW, there are still elements of his thinking which seem not just to resonate, but also to perhaps prefigure the thoughts of the Oddest Inkling. In particular, there’s the way each writer seemed to take a very liberal view on questions of sexuality in relation to matters of religion. Also, as I’ve pointed out on Prof. Higgins’ blog, the “Water Babies” author can be found in his volume of “Historical Lectures and Essays” doing his best to try and rehabilitate Agrippa’s work in the service of the staunchest Christian Orthodoxy. It’s with discoveries like this in mind that it becomes possible to understand why Williams painted a somewhat indulgent and humoring prose portrait of this now obscure Victorian fantasist.
Also, Lang devoted at least two essays to Kingsley (that I know of) in his collection “Essays in Little”. In each article, Lang is concerned with what he regards as the Romanticism of Charles Kingsley. The basic summary of Lang’s thought on the artistry of the “Hereward” writer might go something like: “He goes reasonably far, when he puts his mind to it. At the same time, he could go further up and further in. And sometimes, he doesn’t go far enough”. It’s these nice little breadcrumb trails that I think future scholars will have to concentrate on when taking any and all studies of Williams and the Inklings further.
I have heard of the St. Brendan legend, meanwhile, yet I’ve never really looked into it. I might need to rectify that soon.
Thanks – thus belatedly – for this! A lot more fascinating things by and about Kingsley to follow up, and ponder (including Lang’s remarks)!
I’ve now very enjoyably finished the Dutch St. Brendan poem and have nearly re-enjoyed all of The Water-Babies thanks to Cori Samuel’s LibriVox audiobook and the linked text – astonishingly illustrated in 1889 by Punch (satirical) cartoonist, Linley Sambourne. And what should the epigraph of chapter II be but the first stanza of Book II, Canto VIII of The Faerie Queene? – ! Among other things, very interesting to encounter again after reading Pezzini’s book, and also to make mental comparisons with George MacDonald.
And now I am keen to get acquainted with (translations of) other mediaeval versions of St. Brendan’s voyage, to see if things that seem Tolkien-related are in them, too.
That Spenser quote in “Water Babies” has to count as one of those minor details that never really manages to jump out at you until some key piece of background knowledge has managed to lodge somewhere in the memory. As such, all sort of interesting connections come to light in retrospect.
Also, I just realized something I forgot to mention. CW’s somewhat well-disposed thoughts on Kingsley can be found in “Descent of the Dove”. He comes in near the end, when Williams takes a side glance at the debates the “Hereward” author got into with John Henry Newman.
And thank you again! Your “details that never really manages to jump out at you” aptly fitted C.W. on Kingsley for me, and I had not yet attempted word-searching various online versions of C.W.’s books to see where it might be!
I’ve started Vincent Hunink’s 1998 Dutch translation of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, ordered a book he recommends, and another by Doris Edel (both Dutch, too), and am thoroughly enjoying a collection of essays (in Dutch) by Maartje Draak – including her translation of the English one she sent Tolkien, as discussed in the fascinating October Mythlore article – whee!
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
Many thanks – this is fascinating! Kudos to Justin Keena (and Norbert Feinendegen)!
I need to brush up what I know about that back cover 4 December 1953 blurb – e.g., the Tolkien Society website handy Timeline notes:
29 July 1954 Publication of The Fellowship of the Ring.
11 November 1954 Publication of The Two Towers.
20 October 1955 Publication of The Return of the King.
When and how in all this did Lewis’s blurb come into play (in so far as it did)? – it seems nicely applicable to each volume.
It is also very interesting to read in conjunction with Giuseppe Pezzini’s excellent (if meagerly-indexed) Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (CUP, 2025) – at least as far as I’ve gotten (nearing the end of chapter III).
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
A lot of interesting things worth commenting on, here. Most of it, from my perspective, concerns one of the constant, yet underacknowledged gifts in being a fan of the Inklings writings. It’s the way in which their words can sometimes function as pointers to forgotten names and titles in the history of literature and non-fiction that can sometimes be worth rescuing from the scrap heap of history. It seems to me that the major value of Jeena’s study lies in its discovery of how even the Jacket Blurbs of such writers can function as helpful pointers in ways that the writings of their contemporaries Inspired them, or else that they considered as good enough to be worth a read. Hunting down these titles can, in turn, shine a light that serves to broaden our picture of authors like Lewis and Tolkien (in a vein similar to the work of Holly Ordway) that allows them to have a third or even fourth level of dimensionality beyond the popular cliches that they tend to be reduced to. A good example of how the author’s blurb can help comes in the form of Lewis’s acknowledgment of the John Custance text.
A brief search engine surfing reveals that the book the Narnian is talking about turns out to be an almost journalistic account of what it’s like to suffer a mental breakdown. Custance has crafted a diligent chronicle of his struggles with what he terms Manic Depression, and what is now know as Bipolar Disorder. In doing so, Custance’s memoir details his interaction with questions of religion, philosophy, and imaginative symbolism. It appears to be this spiritual-aesthetic aspect of the writer’s (Hero’s?) journey that appealed, not just to Lewis, but also to legendary psychologist C.G. Jung, who wrote the preface to the Custance text. Jung goes so far as to diagnose the book’s content as a successful case of two sides of a divided mind managing to come together to form a new and healthier whole.
This is not the sort of book that most fans of Lewis would expect him to be interested in. That fact that the creator of Narnia liked this memoir of a nervous illness enough to write a blurb for it raises all kinds of interesting questions in terms of what this says about Lewis’s thinking. For my own part, I’m curious if this is a signpost that the author of “The Personal Heresy” was willing to re-think his ideas about the relation between the Imagination and how it interacts with the personality of the artist? It’s mere conjecture, yet the fact that someone like Lewis was willing to like a mental journal enough to say so in a Blurb does allow a certain amount of room for such speculation. Indeed, it offers all sorts of further interesting questions in terms of Lewis’s own thought in interaction with that of thinkers like C.G. Jung.
As for the Nancy Wilson Ross book, a New York Times review paints it as novel somewhat in the style of Charles Williams. It starts out as a narrative of manners, then turns into a murder mystery, then the mystery broadens to include questions of the Mysterium Tremendum. With a setup like that, it really should come as no wonder that Lewis was able to look on Ross’s work favorably, especially if she was able to remind him of an old friend. In addition, Ross herself became something of a scholar of Eastern Religious thought, which opens yet another avenue into how Lewis might have interacted with the kind of cultures that gave him his concept of the Tao.
LikeLike
ChrisC,
You are very right about that aspect of this study (from what Brenton notes about it) – and have given us an excellent demonstration of that by following up these two authors and works.
When I was helping look after The Kilns, Dan Hamilton visited – and mentioned he was compiling a catalogue of all the books/works Lewis mentions in his published writings (including posthumously published) up to that time. I got sadly out of touch with him, but a quick search turns up both a good article article by him from 2010 about Lewis’s introduction to Sister Penelope’s translation of St. Athanasius’s ‘De Incarnatione’ and a reference in a post here by Brenton from exactly 10 years ago, 15 October 2015, about an autobiographical blurb by Lewis which Dan helped him with!
I was struck in reading Tolkien on Chaucer by how many and varied scholarly works Tolkien himself and further John Bowers and Peter Steffensen mention that he knew – a lot of which are readily available as scans in the Internet Archive and/or in Project Gutenberg versions.
We are being helped to scads of fascinating reading to follow up!
LikeLike
Chris, what an intriguing comment! I am so amazed I didn’t think about this collection of blurbs of others’ books as a whole. They did strike me as unusual, but I like the ways you are finding linkages here. For those peeking in, here is the TOC from that section:
PART TWO: LEWIS’S BLURBS FOR OTHERS’ BOOKS 113
i. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) 113
ii. D.R. Davies, Down Peacock’s Feathers (1944) 117
iii. J. Moffatt, A New Translation of the Bible (1949) 118
iv. B.G. Sanders, Christianity After Freud (1949) 122
v. C. Walsh, Early Christians of the 21st Century (1950) 123
vi. J. Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (1951) 124
vii. N. Wilson Ross, Time’s Corner (1953) 125
viii. P. Lawson C.S.M.V., The Coming of the Lord (1953) 131
ix. R. Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons (1954) 132
x. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (UK 1954) 137
xi. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (US 1954) 151
xii. A.C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1954) 152
xiii. M. Skinner, The Return of Arthur (1955) 157
xiv. H. Blamires, Blessing Unbounded (1955) 158
xv. K.M. Briggs, Hobberdy Dick (1956) 162
xvi. J.B. Phillips, New Testament Christianity (1956) 163
xvii. C. Kipps, Sold for a Song (1956) 164
xviii. A. Farrer, The Core of the Bible (1957) 165
xix. E.R. Eddison, The Mezentian Gate (1958) 167
xx. M. Peake, Titus Alone (1959) 172
xxi. Y. Lubbock, Return to Belief (1961) 174
xxii. D. Bolt, Adam (1961) 174
xxiii. D. Bolt, Adam (1961) 177
xxiv. K. Trevelyan, Fool in Love (1962) 178
xxv. A. Farrer, Saving Belief (1964) 179
xxvi. O. Barfield, Orpheus (1948/1983) 179
LikeLike
Wow – many thanks! This is fascinating! I have read few of these, but really enjoyed both Brother to Dragons and Hobberdy Dick, and as much Farrer as I’ve read (neither of these, though) and am glad to have gotten acquainted with Titus Groan (my only Peake, so far, with the last couple chapters still to go) and Childhood’s End (my only Clarke, so far) and The Worm Ouroboros (my only Eddison so far). And I really enjoyed hearing and meeting the late Harry Blamires and keep wanting to try his fiction.
LikeLike
I am looking forward to Giuseppe Pezzini’s new book. A friend of mine is writing a review essay now, so we’ll see what he says.
So, I just had an AI app try to answer your question about the provenance of the LOTR blurbs, and it used my piece as the main source:
It doesn’t know that I am me, so to speak.
This is the timeline it drew out of my post and various other things I have written:
The trajectory therefore runs:
Late 1949: Lewis writes his first ecstatic private review letter after hearing the manuscript completed.
Dec 1953: Correspondence with Unwin about a promotional blurb for The Fellowship of the Ring.
July 1954: Release of Volume I with Lewis’s blurb on the dust jacket.
Aug 1954–Oct 1955: Publication of Lewis’s Time and Tide reviews coinciding with all three volumes.
LikeLike
Prof. Dickieson, D.L. Dodds,
I am of two minds re: both of your follow up comments. On the level of mere immediate reaction, I’d have to list my sentiments as follows: “Oh WOW”! I do this if only for the sheer amazement to be had from the list provided from Keena and Feinendegen’s work alone. I came to this review already knowing that something like the list above might have been something of a possibility to hope for, yet I never thought the rewards could be that great! The fascinating standouts to me from the catalogue provided tend to center more on author’s I already knew Lewis had not just a keen awareness, but also a long tradition of correspondence with, like Austin Farrer. I’ve familiarized myself with Farrer’s works, yet a book like “The Core of the Bible” was unknown to my knowledge until printed in Keena’s text. The net result seems to be that not only does “Blurbologist” (great title, by the way) showcase the wider scope of Lewis’s thought and interest. It also lends a greater sense of depth to those sources that are often considered as being closer to home in terms of CSL’s own manner and style of thought.
This leads me to my second reaction, and here is where I think Prof. Dodds’ anecdote about Tolkien’s Chaucer scholarship might come in handy. What it leads me to believe is that both Tolkien and Lewis must have realized something that the “Canterbury Tales” author must have found out for himself long ago. It’s that the best artists are the one who are able to turn transfigure themselves into human treasure chests. The kind where the riches inside can be said to come from the content contained in the proverbial “Wealth of Words”. It lends an interesting thematic resonance to Tolkien’s observation of how “Roads Go Ever On” and “Way Leads On to Way”. A book like Keena’s seem to point to those phrases as very useful metaphors for what the best writers might sometimes be capable of. It really is beginning to seem as if the future of Inkling scholarship will be in tracing down these forgotten literary pathways that Tolkien and Lewis traveled in their exploits at Co-creation. Here’s hoping for further vistas!
LikeLike
ChrisC,
To pick one point from this – you are right to my mind about the particular fascination of Lewis’s ‘blurbological’ interaction with personally familiar authors (and friends) – and in the nature of ‘blurbs’ a very deliberately public interaction at that. And, for that matter, the variety of sorts and degrees of personal acquaintance (e.g., Arthur C. Clarke in contrast to Tolkien, Barfield, Farrer, Blamires, Skinner, Lawson, Walsh, Eddison, and, I think, Briggs and Phillips – but what of the (to me) unfamiliar others authors, I wonder?).
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
Well, now, the contrast between authors such as Lewis and Clarke (no pun intended) in distinction between what might be termed his blurb correspondence with others (i.e. writers like Farrer, Blamires, and the other Inklings) makes sense in terms of degrees of personal acquaintance.
Where I can’t tell how this degree extends is with others writers such as Walsh, Skinner, or Lawson, who are a bit too new for me to make any comment on.
LikeLike
Brenton,
Thanks for this!
I just looked up Tolkien’s remarks in the 9 September 1954 Letter 149 (lazily in the 1981 edition, closest to hand) about Ariosto and Lewis blurb-wise, and the contrasting one in the 13 May 1954 Letter 145!
I first met an Orc in an excerpt from Ariosto thanks to a Lin Carter anthology – a very different sort of Orc, as it turned out when I finally read Tolkien! It would be fun to know if Lewis and Tolkien ever talked contrasting Orcs.
LikeLike
Prof. Dickieson
I hope this isn’t an inconvenience, however, since it’s the month of October, I thought there was something Horror and Mythopoeia related worth passing along. With that in mind, I’ve been able to put what I’ve discovered re: Edmund Spenser as a forgotten Mythopoeic architect of the modern Horror genre to good use. Shirley Jackson is the author who allowed me to do it. She wrote an appropriately Gothic yet overlooked short story called “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons”. Like a lot of Jackson’s work, this is a Domestic Horror tale centered around how one person’s life is turned upside down by the arrival of a new family who may just be ordinary new neighbors, or else they could be a pack of malicious Fair Folk straight out of Shakespeare’s dark woods. I was able to write a review about it, and what makes it worth passing along here is the skill of Jackson’s artistry. Much like her literary ancestor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jackson displays a masterful instinctive grasp of how the sort of Poetry of Enchantment that both Spenser and Shakespeare specialized in could just as easily be turned into shivers of Terror, just as much as Delight or Wonderment. Rather, let’s say that Jackson has discovered how to utilize the Gothic side of Joy. It’s not what most Inklings scholars might think of when the term is used, yet it’s possible to argue that it’s just as legitimate an artistic use of the concept as the other.
Furthermore, if it’s a question of whether or not this short story possesses anything like a genuine Mythopoeic quality, then I would direct the critic’s attention to a passage from Ruth Franklin’s biography for the creator of Hill House, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. It’s there on page 168 (American Trade Paperback Edition) that Franklin tells of the reading habits in the Stanley Edgar Hyman household, of which Shirley was the Lady of the House. “In the Hyman household, intellectual curiosity and creativity were cultivated and nurtured. There was singing around the piano and dancing in the living room and art projects at the kitchen table: Shirley’s old clothespin dolls even made a reappearance. One year, dismayed to discover the children’s lack of familiarity with the Bible, Shirley and Stanley read from it every night at the dinner table. Shirley also read her favorite books aloud to the children at bedtime: the Oz series. “The Hobbit” by J. R. R. Tolkien (which she preferred to “The Lord of the Rings”), (and) fairy tales (ibid)”. Further on in the biography’s page count, we find this interesting bit of trivia:
“But in 1960, she did virtually no writing, other than a few pieces for Good Housekeeping —and her letters to Jeanne Beatty. Those letters total more than sixty pages, often single-spaced, of Shirley’s signature yellow copy paper. Their subject matter ranges widely: from the Oz books to C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Frank Baker’s comic mystery novel Miss Hargreaves, about a young man who invents a fictional character and discovers, to his astonishment and eventual chagrin, that his invention has come to life (430)”. These are the only two times that the twin main Inklings ever appear in Franklin’s biography. It’s a frustrating thing to spot if you’re a fan of either Middle Earth or Narnia, and yet it helps to keep in mind that Franklin’s concentration isn’t focused on the question of Mythopoeia. So of course, there’s no way any of those considerations would find a place in her book. That still might be a shame, because even if the chronicler has no interest in the Inklings’ writings, that’s still no guarantee that Shirley Jackson felt the same. The fact that the builder of Hill House was also aware of Secondary Worlds like Hobbiton and Cair Paravel enough to mention them more than once in her desk jottings, and to her children, along with a focus on the Bible, tells me just one thing. For better or worse, Franklin’s information means that she’s Mythopoeic scholars a new bread crumb trail to follow. One that leads all the way to the doorstep of one of the most famous architects of Haunted Houses in the history of American Gothic fiction.
It means Inklings scholarship has a new path of study available for exploring the cultural, generic, and artistic impact that Lewis and Tolkien left upon other authors, some of whom made their mark in genres that most wouldn’t connect with places like Narnia or Rivendell. The inclusion of both Spenser and Shakespeare as shaping influences in one of her short stories widens the avenue of potential exploration. It leaves open the question of what, if anything, a writer like Jackson might have learned not just from the Bar of Avon or the author of “The Faerie Queene”, but also from Elizabethan scholars like Lewis? The answer, of course, is, no one knows. That’s why Jackson’s highlighting of the Inklings and the two premiere Renaissance writers is so important! It shines light on an unexplored path in the forest of Inklings scholarship. Whatever the final results of any possible exploration of this path might be, what I’d argue shouldn’t be overlooked is the connecting threads that Franklin and Jackson’s words have established between the realms of Horror and Eucatastrophe. If a Spenserian scholar like Maik Goth can effectively demonstrate how the poet’s use of the early modern form of the Gothic Monster can tie in with Tolkien’s notion of the Monstrous as “fundamentally allied to the ideas of the poem (cf: Goth, “Monsters and the Poetic Imagination in The Faerie Queene”, Manchester University Press, 2015, pgs. 33-34), then Franklin’s words and Jackson’s Spenserian-Shakespearean story are all good places to start. With this in mind, I hope it’s alright if I drop a link to a review of “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons”.
https://www.scriblerusinkspot.com/2025/09/mrs-spencer-and-oberons-2013.html
LikeLike
ChrisC,
Sounds like I should try more Shirley Jackson, having read almost nothing – I think only “The Lottery” (in high school? – ‘formally’?). I should hunt down a copy of “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” to start with (maybe before reading your article, for fear of possible spoilers).
I wonder if her papers in the Library of Congress might have more Inklings details? (Clicking the External link to them at her Wikipedia article only left me bewildered, alas.)
The remark about preferring The Hobbit reminded me of something the late Metropolitan Kallistos Ware said about simply enjoying the early part of The Fellowship of the Ring about the hobbits and the Shire most in rereading The Lord of the Rings.
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
For the record, “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” can be found in the pages of a posthumous collection of short stories edited by Ruth Franklin called, “Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings”. There the tale can be enjoyed to its full extent. If I had to give any caveat to the collection, then it wouldn’t be from the contents of Jackson’s writing therein, in and of itself. Instead, it would to exercise a certain amount of caution when it comes to a potential critical question of generic labeling, especially when it comes to defining what Kind of narrative it is that Jackson is weaving. For what ever reason, Franklin doesn’t view the story of the Suburban Housewife and the possible Wicked Faes Next Door as an example of legitimate Gothic fiction. Instead, she’s content to label it all as a Comedy. While it is possible that this story contains a definite element of Satire, it’s also clear that the author is utilizing both the term and its employment in an older manner. One that takes the definition well outside the confines of its contemporary meaning, which would limit it to the Modern Comic. It’s clear that whatever sense of humor there is to be had in this story is written in the service to a larger, traditionally Gothic meaning. Thus lending the laughter a sardonic, macabre edge that would be more at home in the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Henry James, rather than that of the Slapstick, proper.
This is an integral element of the story that seems to escape Franklin’s notice, yet which other scholars such as Alissa Burger have picked up on at a first reading. In her own essay, “The (Un)natural Worlds of ‘Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons’ and ‘The Man in the Woods’” (which can be located in the pages of Joan Passey’s edited collection of criticism, “Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales”), Burger, correctly posits (to my mind) a link between Shirley’s story and the older dark folkloric traditions surrounding not just the Mythology of the Elves, but also of figures from the Celtic Twilight, such as the Green Man. It serves to establish a thematic connection of descent from the fog shrouded landscapes of writers like the CW adjacent Arthur Machen to Jackson’s own modern American suburbia (or at least the mid-20th century version of that setting). In doing so, Burger does the attentive reader a favor by showing the connections that a story like Jackson’s might have to the work of writers like Spenser and Shakespeare. For me, this in turn serves as the piece of a larger puzzle that I’ve been fascinated with for a while now. It’s the possibility that the Modern Horror genre might be able to trace its roots back the work of older Mythopoeic fantasists (per Lewis’s reckoning) such as the author of “The Faerie Queene”.
The study text that first raised this possibility to my mind was D.G. Kehl’s “Jack Lewis and His American Cousin”, which details the “elective affinities” between the work of CSL, and the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Kehl does a serviceable enough job of demonstrating a potential route of influence between Lewis’s writings, and stories like “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven Gables”. In addition, Kehl highlights how both Hawthorne and Lewis shared and enthusiasm for all things Spenserian. Hawthorne appears to have gone so far as to utilize Spenser’s literary techniques in the service of constructing his own American Gothic voice. It’s the discovery that a writer of early modern Mythopoeic fantasy such as the “Queene” could have a primary shaping influence on one of the approximately five main architects of the American Gothic expression (the other four being Poe, Melville, Washington Irving, and the lesser known Charles Brockdon Brown) that got to me to wondering if it was just possible to trace a line of literary descent for the idea of Gothic Mythopoeia. One that could, to give a suggestion, lead all the way from Grendel and Glorianna up to more contemporary Gothic expressions, such as the work of authors like Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Rod Serling, Peter Straub, or Stephen King.
Whatever the merits of any of these later scribblers may amount to, it remains this uncovering of the fact that Hawthorne drew upon both Spenser’s work and literary techniques to construct the American Gothic mode of storytelling as we now still have it that stands out to me as a key unexplored pathway in the development of the still flourishing genre of the Supernatural Uncanny that I find to be the most fascinating, as it is akin to find an undiscovered country waiting to be explored. It’s this desire for further exploration which has resulted in reviews such as the one covering the obscure Jackson short piece linked above. My hope is that such attempts can act as a spur towards further, professional excavation of these more Gothic avenues to the work of Mythopoeia. This is why the work of enterprising scholars such as Maik Goth come as something as an assurance. It’s a hint that there are others out there who might have begun the groundwork for a more thorough scholarly exploration of how Mythopoeic writing might have contributed to the construction of the Horror genre. For the record, a good review of Goth’s work on Spenser and Monsters (one which does acknowledge that it builds upon Tolkien’s discussion of what is now known as the Monstrous in Fiction) can be found in the link attached below:
https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/46.1.6/index.html
As for the age old question of whether or not “The Hobbit” is better than “LOTR”, well, what can anyone say that hasn’t been said already? The latter Hobbit Sequel was written in part to prove that such work could have an inherent dignity all its own. It’s more than possible to say that in this task, at least, Tolkien succeeded. That said, I will admit that there are certain special types of Joy to be found in the exploits of Bilbo Baggins that can be considered lacking in its later, larger relative. With that said, something tells me that this is a minority opinion, on the whole. No matter how many famous names out there might agree. The best solution therefore also appears to be the simplest. Questions like this will always have to rest content as mere matters of personal tase and opinion, nothing more, I’m afraid.
One last item as proof of concept for a connection between the work of poet’s like Spenser, and the story of things that go bump in the night. It is possible to test this hypothesis if a clear demonstration of what Tolkien the Faerian aspect of writing can show itself in a work of reasonably contemporary Gothic fiction. The best candidate I can find comes from the pages of a book called “Ghost Story”, by Peter Straub. It’s the author’s magnum opus, and somewhere in the middle of the narrative, he writes the following words: “”I had found the hook for the Hawthorne lecture; it was in an essay by R. P. Blackmur: “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.” The idea seemed to radiate throughout Hawthorne’s work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare—by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove. And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life (192-93)”.
Oh yes, and before I forget, here’s wishing everyone a Happy All Hallow’s Eve!
LikeLike
ChrisC,
Thank you for all this interesting detail!
It looks like Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings is available in the University of Amsterdam Library – and variously second-hand, over here.
There seem a plethora of Jackson audiobooks on YouTube, including the 1960 Folkways recording of her reading two of her stories “provided to YouTube by the Smithsonian” – I wonder how many others are AI robo-recordings momentarily evading copyright strikes? No “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons” in any form I can discover, though.
I remember talking with Mick Henry of the Tolkien Society about Hawthorne when I first started reading Tolkien, Williams, and Lewis fiction, thinking of him as something like an American analogue in some ways.
It’s fascinating how well various American authors were known in England – and, for example, John Garth has written interestingly about Tolkien and Longfellow connections and debts. Even as Americans have been very active in creative and scholarly ways with their English literary heritage. In that context Lewis’s connections with Douglas Bush and Tolkien with Francis Magoun are intriguing. But I can’t remember being aware of American attention to Spenser – in contrast to Malory, Shakespeare, and Bunyan – until you brought these matters to my attention!
It occurs to me that Tolkien’s comment on Williams reading the whole Lord of the Rings draft as it then existed gives a nice context to the various distinct yet intertwining enjoyments of hobbitry and heroism.
We’ve got an oratorio choir rehearsal – general with orchestra and soloists, but not dress – on Hallowe’en, and I had just decided I might wear my Karloff Frankenstein’s monster t-shirt.
With good wishes to you and all, for All Hallows’ Eve and Day – and All-Souls (we’ll be chanting on 3 November for that, as Sunday takes priority) – and, first, for the Feast of St. Raphael – on one of the few dates mentioned in the main text of The Lord of the Rings, 24 October!
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
The fortune (or lack thereof) in being able to obtain a copy of the Jackson collection is both unfortunate and familiar by turns. Nothing would be more gratifying to me than for the Cambridge Press to release an affordable modern edition of Alastair Fowler’s “Spenser and the Numbers of Time” in the same price range that Lewis’s “Discarded Image” still enjoys on this side of the pond. Instead, here I am, forced to hand over ninety something dollars for a copy bought off the antique books market. I wish someone would remedy that. The misfortune is further compounded by the knowledge that this same process can work in reverse for the Isles, and not even for obscure texts of scholarship, but of otherwise widely circulated works of popular fiction by a Brand Name author. There’s a whole world of improvement begging to happen on each side of this issue.
As for Hawthorne as an American analogue to Tolkien. A lot of that is accountable for one simple enough reason. At the risk of stating the obvious, America, in a great many details, is a country that has built itself out of the history England and its politics, even when it has made some modifications to this inheritance. With that in mind, it really comes as no surprise to speak of artists like Hawthorne, or even later scholars such as Douglas Bush, as being literary inheritors, or a kind, at least. Especially if you keep in mind T.S. Eliot’s notion of the relation between Tradition and Individual Talent. There are at least two good text sources that might help to shed light in the ways in which the then New World adopted, appropriated, and later modified some of these English literary sources. The first is George Frank Sensabaugh’s “Milton in Early America”. The second is “Alexander Pope’s Prestige in America”. This latter study might contain something of a pleasant surprise, as it is authored by Agens Mary Sibley. For what it’s worth, her other book on Charles Williams contains some of the best summation of that Inkling’s otherwise complex thought. She does a good job at capturing at least some of the Humanism that existed CW’s works. The point is that she and Sensabaugh do a good job of showing how America was able to incorporate its English sources and origins. Indeed, Sibley’s book devotes a chapter to how the “Essay on Man” was received and spread in Early American thought and philosophy.
What makes that so remarkable is that it has to be one of the last few times that CSL’s Discarded Image ever made an appearance in a major work of literary art. It raises all sorts of implicit questions about what both the pre and post-revolutionary colonials might have thought about such a strand of thought. I was always under the impression that it was considered “Old Hat” even in Pope’s time. Apparently, the success of the “Essay” “might” tell a different story. Milton, meanwhile, is a bit more obvious. One might almost have to call him one of the unsung legislators in the forging of the Colonies. In contrast, I think the relative obscurity of Spenser’s influence at and around this same time can be explained partly by a number of factors. The first is a simple matter of the passage of time. The second, however, is a bit more complex. It might have had something to do with the possible outsized influence that Milton had on Early Colonial thought. If the Civil War poet’s ambitions could be spoken as being realized in some form with the second Revolutionary period, then perhaps one of the forgotten corollaries of this influence was the way Milton viewed the poetry of Spenser. The Poet of the Fall made no secret that he regarded the Cartographer of Fairyland as, not just a poet, but also a religious and philosophic sage.
It might not therefore be too out of court to speculate thus. If it makes enough sense to claim Milton as one of the voices that Inspired early America, then perhaps it was Milton’s specific reading of Spenser that shaped whatever form of reception the Faerian versifier had on these shores. If so, then it may explain the relatively obscure, yet somehow still tangible impact of Spenser in American Gothic letters. If his legacy was viewed as one inherited in the shadow of Milton, then is it any wonder that Lewis’s favorite poet has been left with a literal underground reputation in the States? Still, Hawthorne was as big a fan of Fairyland as CSL, and it was Spenser’s artistry that he used to help create the modern form of the Gothic tale, complete witches, spells, ghosts, haunted house, and all (with even the fauns of Greek myth thrown in, for good measure). It seems to hint that the particular Literary Tradition that the Inklings specialized in is one of those Story Trees. One with any number of branches extending outward into numerous regions of Inspiration.
LikeLike
ChrisC,
And thank you for this, too!
I am delighted to learn of Alexander Pope’s Prestige in America! I’m not part of the Internet Archive “Log In and Borrow” set-up, but her Appendices look tantalizing, as there described.
It would be splendid – and convenient – if there were an analogous book on Spenser.
Word-searching Archive copies for the name Spenser, I find no results for Sibley’s book, but three for Sensabaugh’s. Working out from Wikipedia’s note on Pope and Spenser, I find John R. Elliott’s The Prince of Poets recording various later writers’ awareness of Pope’s attention to Spenser. Perhaps both Milton and Pope made their contributions to encouraging American interest in him!
I am already keen to know more about Tolkien and the TCBS interest in Eighteenth-century literature and that of the (‘major’) Inklings more broadly, and verse not least. (It just struck me the other day that there was a parallel with Lovecraft, here, too!)
It saddens me a lot how neither Oxford nor Cambridge UPs seem to be making various fascinating books as easily available as, for example, OUP has very sensibly done with Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia – let us hope for future improvement (but, how politely to campaign for it?).
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
I’d have to agree one-hundred-percent in terms of the need for a closer look at the Eighteenth Century and the reputation of authors like Spenser and Milton in the shaping of the modern face of Mythopoeic thinking. A good place start (as I’ve mentioned in a previous comment at Oddest Inkling) is with the efforts of Robert Dodsley and the writer’s group I labeled as the Tully’s Head Circle, which included among their number perhaps “the” pioneer in modern Spenserian Studies, Thomas Warton.
Indeed, it may be possible to claim a critic like Warton as penning the first modern work of proto-Inkling criticism. As such, Dodsley, Pope, Warton, and their shared literary milieu would be the best place to start. Work like Sibley’s functions as a good untapped source, in that respect. You also might be on to something re: the possibility of Spenser’s reputation being shaped by both Milton and Pope. Though as stated above, it seems that critics like Warton should be added to the list.
In this regard, I am aware of at least three good sources devoted to the subject. One is Richard Frushell’s “Edmund Spenser in the Eighteenth Century”. Another is a Routledge reprint of Warton’s “Observations on Spenser’s Fairy Queen”. This tome is noteworthy in that it also includes another volume of criticism by one Richard Hurd, another member of Dodsley’s Tully’s Circle. His efforts are entitled, “Letters on Chivalry and Romance”. They are the first collection of essays ever devoted to a literary study of the Medieval literature that Tolkien and Lewis would later make into their shared professional subjects. Hurd plowed the field for them both.
The third and last source is Hazel Wilkinson’s “Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth Century Book”. Now the caveat emptor trick is just this. It is at least possible to claim that there have been books such as you mention above. The somewhat fitting punchline is that this established subject is so obscure (in spite of the efforts of writers like Lewis) that no one has seen fit to link the two. The other issue goes back to the problem of price tags.
Of all the volumes listed above, only Wilkinson’s is anywhere within a normal currency range. The other two are out of print. In fact, any remaining copies of the Routledge Warton/Hurd volumes (which contains a very informative essay by David Fairer) has a current used listing that is…let’s call it “interesting”. I could afford it, I suppose. If I was the heir to something like the Hearst fortune. Yes, and also some wish that rain was Bacchanalian Wine, yet it’s not.
All of which brings the topic to your final question of how does one get such volumes of forgotten lore back into the public eye, where there’s at least the chance of them doing some good? For whatever it is worth, I did see fit to contact Dr. Ward about Fowler’s “Numbers of Time” study. The reason for sending this missive was simple enough.
The claims of the Spenser text match up with those of the Narnia Code. Indeed, it is even possible to claim that Prof. Fowler beat Dr. Ward to a sort of invisible finish line that neither was ever aware of, at least in terms of making the claim that a famous Fantasy writer was able to cleverly encode a literary-artistic form of Astrological symbolism into their written work. Ward makes the claim for the Narniad in 2007. Fowler did the same thing for “The Faerie Queene” way back in 1964 (with an implicit sort of blessing from Lewis into the bargain).
It was this knowledge, combined with the amateur student’s desire to strike a blow for a scholarly theory or paradigm that one is attached to which somehow made me put my head on the chopping block, and send Dr. Ward information about the existence of Prof. Fowler’s old Spenserian study. He responded with genuine curiosity and interest, yet that is all I know, so far.
Part of the reason for this note of things hanging in suspension is because I can’t say that I know either how to broach the idea of gaining Dr. Ward’s interest in pushing for, say, a contemporary (and above all, affordable) re-issue by either the OUP or CUP of “The Numbers of Time”; perhaps complete with a new scholarly and contextual introduction by the author of “Planet Narnia”. One that would serve as an entry into an earlier work of Coded Astrological criticism, while also carrying the Narnia Code notion forward from there.
The trick is, even if that sounds like a good idea, I myself have no clue as to how to go about it. If it’s a matter of asking for a suggestion, then the only one I can offer is something you might not like, Professor. It occurs to me to wonder what would happen if an Eminence Grise in the field of Mythopoeic studies such as yourself were to broach the idea to Ward as one scholar to another?
Maybe a good word or two from you about “Numbers” might be enough for Ward to start a campaign of bringing Fowler’s words back into the spotlight. I am unable to know how this must sound, in the strictest sense, other than the feeling of having painted a target on one’s own head. If that’s the case, then the blow is deserved, and what I wrote just above can be disregarded. With no sense of harm or ill will meant.
LikeLike
So, while I was away, you talked about Spenser, Shirley Jackson, mythopoeia, the horror genre, Shakespeare, the American Gothic, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Inklings, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit vs. The Lord of the Rings, forgotten short stories like “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” literary biography (specifically Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life), the concept of “Gothic Joy,” the Inklings’ cultural impact, Maik Goth’s scholarship on monsters (that is a mammoth Scribblurus essay!), Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, the availability of academic texts, the price of scholarly books, monsterology, 18th-century literary circles like the Tully’s Head Circle, Alexander Pope’s reputation in America, John Milton’s influence on early American thought, Thomas Warton’s Spenserian criticism, Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, the transmission of English literary traditions to America, the “Discarded Image,” Alastair Fowler’s Spenser and the Numbers of Time, Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, and finally, a proposal to reissue Fowler’s book with an introduction by Ward. Well now!
How do I catch up? It’s so big now, I responded to the initial post, hoping you both see it.
-Reach out to Michael Ward with the idea, but Doug Anderson is sort of the genius for getting things into print or recovering lost things.
-I have not read “Mrs. Spencer and the Oberons,” but I will watch for it; Chris and other readers pointed me to Straub … but my problem with horror writing, is that I go to read something new and I keep reaching for old things I love, like the Ransom Cycle, Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King (tho I like his mythopoeic and postapocalyptic work better); I do try to read something new each year, I recently read a brilliant new horror by Mark Sampson, Lowfield. But my reading is pretty focussed this fall.
-Partly, that’s because I’m attending MonsterFest next week! See, a connection. I’ll post my abstract, perhaps, for this piece: “The Monster in Me: C.S. Lewis’ Inversion of the Monstrous Other in his Speculative Fiction.”
-Finally, I love the conversation and peeking in! I do get a little lost in American fiction, I’m afraid. I’m not against it, but growing up (and in my media today), our local lit is Canadian, not the US. And the UK is sort of foundational for my reading. Outside of King, Buechner, Marilynne Robinson, Octavia Butler, Okorafor, Jemisin, and some classic sf, I hardly read US lit.
LikeLike
A couple of other additions to this fantastic and thrilling conversation My
ChrisC, you’ve nailed something essential here I want to come back to but don’t have time right now: the idea that the mythopoeic impulse (theologically, the subcreative) can flow into channels of Gothic lit (and has always been there, haunting at the edges of the genre), but also into genre horror and lit horror: i.e., it isn’t only endemic to high fantasy. You’re quite right to identify Shirley Jackson as a perfect case study. In the little I have read, she’s a master of the unnerving, the quietly monstrous, and the psychologically haunted. The discovery that she was reading Tolkien and Lewis aloud to her children is an absolute gem; it’s one of those archival breadcrumbs that can open up an entire new path in the forest of literary influence.
What breadcrumbs do ghosts leave behind? Story idea!
“Gothic Mythopoeia” lineage, stretching from Spenser and Shakespeare through Hawthorne and into Jackson. I forgot to mention Charles Williams and his Arthurian mythos, not just the novels, which help shape the genre of Urban Fantasy. Or Lewis and his proto-horror instincts in SF.
What about George MacDonald, a writer who seamlessly blended fantasy, terror, theological depth, and fairy-tale logic. I think of Jane Austen’s use of the word “horrid” for how some of his literature reaches readers–evil goblins, loss, enemies, and shadows. He also has good fay, life, heroes, and light. Is he the hidden link in the chain between Spenser’s allegorical monsters and Jackson’s psychological ones?
Or, is the numinous the link between them and high fantasy? I’m biased in that direction.
David, I was sort of responding to you also about books. You read so much and so widely! Thanks ChrisC and David for building such a thoughtful thread in an unthoughtful age.
LikeLike
Prof. Dickieson,
Well, what can I say! The first thing to note is that Prof. Dodds perhaps deserves more credit here than me. He’s the possessor of that rare for literate raconteur that groups like the Inklings had, and which is now a rare quality in an age whose mindset is determined more or less by the Tweet. Therefore, it’s hard to resist getting caught up in a sense of actual intelligent conversation. Also, apologies are in order if Prof. Dodds and I got side-tracked in picking up a thread of old conversation from another Inkling related blog.
As for any difficulties to be had in trying out new things, rest assured it’s possible to sympathize with such a mindset. I’ve had a similar experience, of sorts. In my case, it’s knowing that there are all sorts of avenues in terms of books or films worth exploring, and yet it’s like I can’t break out the reading habits I established as a child. Always running through the same old ground, and sticking to the familiar names that you know you’re way around. I think part of it might be because that’s the closest most readers get in terms of having any incentive to explore further up and further in. The good news about some writers like King or the Inklings is that they are great sounding boards for encouraging their readers to try looking into the other famous Names that Inspired them. To give a good example, it’s thanks to King’s words that I’ve finally gotten around to exploring the work of Thornton Wilder and J.D. Salinger. The real kicker is it took this long to get around to a pair of modern Canonical writers. So yeah, it’s easy to see where you’re coming from in terms of both the joys and shackles of reading habits. Also, of course, I won’t even venture to guess how it is with an academic schedule of reading to keep up with.
Also, what you mention about how different countries prioritize different literary concerns is pretty much the same here. Like I told Prof. Dodds, we’ve taken our English heritage, and re-molded into our own idiom. I just seem to be one of the few who’ve picked up on it, and somehow arrived at what I hope is a greater cosmopolitan outlook (again, I “hope”). All of which is to say that no apologies are necessary if the approach to any of what D.L. Dodds and I have been discussing here is a matter of slow going, Professor. All of this began as just discovering these neat threads between the fiction of Fright, and the work of the Inklings. You mentioned once that you were looking for a possible connection between the two categories. So far as I’m concerned, I at least “hope” I’ve done nothing other than supply a rich vein of ore which would go a long way toward establishing that connection.
I never consciously set out to discover that writers like Edmund Spenser would be a key architect in the establishment of the Horror genre, yet it was a genuine pleasure to both uncover and share the discovery with others (and here I should point out that in my mind, there is no clear wall of separation between Horror and Gothic, the two are one and the same in my mind; to suggest otherwise is to create an artificial distinction that serves no real purpose). I just hope I’ve given some useful food for thought in your own studies, Professor.
Also, thanks for the tip about useful contacts such as Douglas A. Anderson, at least in terms of “maybe” getting the Fowler text a much needed re-issue. Somehow, I also forgot about MacDonald’s efforts in this field as well. The punchline being that I have in fact read “Lilith”, so I should have known what Prof. Dickieson is talking about. That’s a novel which reads in parts as if the protagonist has wandered into all of those Trippy album covers that used to feature on the record sleeves for bands like Pink Floyd, Rush, Yes, and Iron Maiden back during the 70s. I’m serious, that’s the kind of vibe I got from certain passages in the exploits of the curious Mr. Vane. The standouts, of course, being the Waste Land of Monsters, and the Skeleton Dance. So yes, there is an undoubted sort of continuation of the Gothic strand of Mythopoeia going on there. The only real shame is that while it’s clear they were fans, none of the Inklings ever really seem to have followed up on this particular thread offered up by MacDonald. It’s true Tolkien might have cast a side glance at the work of Lovecraft, yet it’s not the same thing, nor does it seem to have gone very far beyond the level of a quick call out, however recognizable.
Also, few, if any in the fandom community have ever bothered to pick up on this element. It all amounts to a great shame, yet it’s good to see it getting at least “some” recognition, however miniscule. I’m just grateful to have to opportunity to share some of it.
LikeLike
Prof. Dickieson,
Almost forgot, that “Monster in Me” CSL essay sounds fascinating. Looking forward to it, if possible!
LikeLike
ChrisC – and Brenton,
Picking up a couple points quickly (with hopes of more later):
Thanks for the Frushell and Wilkinson references – and the Warton, Hurd, and Fairer one!
I have not read the Fowler (yet), but like the idea of a new edition with introduction by Michael Ward! I do not know I’d be a better encourager of that than you, but perhaps we should both try! Ditto as to sounding out Douglas Anderson for ideas, thoughts about likelihoods, etc.! (Do you know his blog work?)
I can’t recall whether I’ve run into MacDonald references to Spenser or not – though I would not be surprised if he does quote and discuss him. A quick word-search of the Internet Archive scan of Greville MacDonald’s George MacDonald and His Wife (1924) sadly did not find a Spenser or Hawthorne reference. He does quote a letter by his mom about visiting Longfellow. (Also four results for Canada!)
Tangentially, I recently ran into a Wikipedia reference to Michael Sadleir and Montague Summers discovering “rare original editions of the Northanger Horrid Novels mentioned in the novel Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Beforehand, some of these books, with their lurid titles, were thought to be figments of Austen’s imagination” – with a link about the novels which leads on to a Wikisource page about them!
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
Thanks for the heads up. For the record, yes, I have heard of Anderson’s, I believe it’s called the Sacnoth blog, is that correct? Though I’ve never been there much in the past. Looks like I’ll have to remedy that.
By the way, Professor, it seems that Rolland Hein discusses the influence of TFQ on “Phantastes” in his study “The Harmony Within”. As for any good examination of the “Northhanger” author’s reading, a good recent (and hopefully available) source is “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf”, by Rebecca Romney. It’s the first study I’m aware of to take a look at the books Austen mentions in her novels, and then tries to trace these hints back to the writer’s (predominantly women artist’s whose voices have gone unheard until now), and from there into an unpacking of the ways in which they influenced such seminal novels like “Pride and Prejudice”.
As an interesting side not to this topic, Professor, it seems that Austen might have been the owner of one of Dodsley’s edited collection of fables and legends from the Middle Ages. Thus establishing a connection between her work and the group over at Tully’s Head,
Incidentally, thank you for the consideration in trying to put a good word in for Fowler and his Spenser study. Now I just need to figure out what to say to D.A. Anderson. Something tells me we should all wish each other luck in this endeavor.
LikeLike
Thanks for this – not least the Romney reference – wow! And the Rolland Hein detail – though I had no luck with a quick Internet Archive scan word-search (but do not know how to ‘weigh’ that).
Sacnoth’s Scriptorium is John Rateliff’s site – and always worth a look!
Douglas Anderson has several blogs – and (I take it) all are in the list at his Tolkien and Fantasy one, though somehow the one (with assorted contributors) I remember to check most often is Wormwoodiana. I can’t remember whether he finally got around to introducing himself to me, or I to him, but I think I had first commented at Wormwoodiana, and we have various mutual friends – but I think he is generally friendly!
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
Thanks for the heads up re: D.A. Anderson!
LikeLike
Just a note of cheers to Douglas Anderson who read the initial review and solved a little problem. The Castle in L that Lewis refers to is The Castle in Lyonesse, an unpublished children’s novel by Green. Doug donated a photocopy of the manuscript (among others) to the Wade Centre, making it more accessible to researchers.
LikeLike
Thinking it sounds Arthurian, and wondering what a quick search would find, I found a post on Douglas Anderson’s Nodens Books site from 1 August 2019 with a list of books reviewed in his collection entitled Late Reviews – including Green’s The Castle in Lyonesse as one of these books, with that review being first published in this collection! Late Reviews is happily still available and the U.S. and U.K. Amazon listings provide a sample – including a review of an unpublished book (of 1037 pages!) by Robert Aickman. An exchange in the comments under his post briefly discusses unpublished books by Green donated to the Wade.
I also found a link on the Wade website to the Roger Lancelyn Green Manuscripts Collection with the description “This collection contains photocopied manuscripts of several works by Roger Lancelyn Green.” But my attempts to follow the link got ‘timed out’ for whatever reason.
LikeLike
Yes, Doug and I haven’t met in the same room, but he has been generous to me in reaching out. Honestly, he has done a great bit. There is also a review in that same collection of Green’s “The Wood the World Forgot” … wait, is it “The Wood Beyond Time”? Shoot, I will have to find it.
LikeLike
We haven’t either – and he is indeed kind and generous, and he has done an enormous variety of interesting things!
“The Wood That Time Forgot” is the Green work discussed in the comments at that post! Doug anthologized a chapter of it in Tales Before Narnia, and remarks “Only chapter 2 of Green’s ‘The Wood That Time Forgot’ has ever been published. Some years ago I donated my photocopy of the typescript (along with a few other such books by Green) to the Wade Center at Wheaton College (Illinois), where scholars may consult it. So I no longer have a copy.”
What a lot of interesting-looking things Green wrote and published which I have never seen, much less read! But my first attempt to find out anything about his heirs quickly came to a dead end where his daughter, Priscilla West (described in 2004 as ” a writer from Watlington, Oxfordshire”), is concerned, but I found a contact address for his son, Scirard Roger Lancelyn Green. I wonder if they would be amenable to the publishing of these novels?
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds, Prof. Dickieson,
Well, as someone who made a point of purchasing any remaining books by Roger Green in the hopes of learning anything about the Inklings and their philosophy that might have escaped notice (and mission accomplished there, so far as I’m concerned), I’d say by all means, try and see if you can get a book like “The Wood Beyond the World” published. It sounds fascinating, like as if he’s borrowed Lewis’s image of the Wood Between the Worlds, and used it for his own Inspiration.
For the record, the biggest discovery I have made in browsing through the better version of Lewis’s Green Books (sorry, couldn’t help myself) is that it is possible to claim that J.R.R. Tolkien was more or less willing to update his positions re: the contents of his classic “On Fairy-Stories” essay as he kept up his studies and kept abreast with the direction of modern scholarship
.
The way that works is this. Perhaps the most important work of non-fiction Green ever wrote is a work of biography and analysis called “Andrew Lang: A Critical Study”. The reason this is important is twofold. Lang was one of the experts who came in for a drubbing of sorts in the pages of OFS. In Green’s book, however, the tone is more conciliatory, encouraging, and maybe even a bit revealing.
For instance, Prof. Dodds, one of the highlights of Green’s “Critical Study” is learning that Lang poured over volumes of obscure medieval lore such as the works of Cornelius Agrippa and a text called “The Count of the Kabbalah”, which I’ve never heard of before, yet it’s intriguing to be sure if you’re a Williams fan. It just opens up so many interesting questions, such as what does this say about Tolkien’s own thoughts about the same areas of interest as that explored by CW?
Beyond that, however, what makes “Andrew Lang: A Critical Study” so important is something that can be found right near the start on the book’s Acknowledgements page. It’s there the careful reader is treated to a background story told in just the vaguest, yet rewarding hints. You learn, for instance, that none other than Tolkien was one of the two, maybe three sponsors and supervisors of Green’s study, which was published as an OUP college text of sorts.
It also becomes clear that the it’s the Co-creator of Hobbits who has been granted the leading and shaping voice of Green’s literary analysis, and this is important for a few simple reasons. To start with, it shows us that Tolkien’s thoughts about the nature of Fairy Stories wasn’t a one off thing. He didn’t just state his case and then leave it at that. Instead, it was a topic that kept occupying his thoughts.
Not only that, it seems as if Tolkien’s own perceptions on the subject, while remaining essentially the same in terms of basics (there’s nothing in Green’s “Lang” that acts as a flat-out contradiction of the main strictures of OFS) he still nonetheless might have found logical reasons to be more open-minded in terms of what types of narrative constitutes a Fairy Story proper, and have mellowed out a great deal toward Lang’s thoughts on the matter.
I have a working for why this is. It may be possible that Tolkien made a mistake of misattribution. He might have confused Lang’s thinking with another of his bête-noirs, like Max Mueller, and got the two mixed up together. He “might” have then discovered his mistake, realized he’d had egg on his face this whole time, and leapt at the chance to course correct his mistake. This might be especially true is it sent him back into Lang’s own work on Fairy Tales, where instead of a foe, Tolkien discovered he was kindred spirit all along.
Therefore, when Green came to him with the proposal for publishing a master’s thesis on the Victorian Folklore Scholar and Anthropologist, it’s easy to imagine Tolkien eagerly granting the future Inkling access to all he knew, and encouraging him to feel free to correct whatever he felt was off-base. The interesting final result is a basic restatement of “On Fairy-Stories” in a digestible book-length format. Green uses Lang’s life and scholarship to expound the same points Tolkien made in his 1939 essay. This time it’s a bit more cleaned up, a bit less rough around the edges, and a lot more expansive and inclusive of what narrative Kinds belong as Fairy Stories.
They were both still skeptical of “Gulliver’s Travels” though, for some reason. Yet the good news is that Tolkien now seems to have realized that Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books did indeed count as legit. It means Tolkien gave his fans a larger gift when it comes to exploring the nature of his thoughts on Mythopoeia, which is sort of like main vein of ore when it comes to a topic such as this.
For the record, the key bit of textual evidence for all this goes as follows: ““The nucleus upon which this book is founded was a Dissertation on Lang’s imaginative writings submitted a few years ago for the Degree of Bachelor of Letters at Oxford; and my gratitude to Professor D. Nichol Smith and Professor J.R.R. Tolkien for their unfailing guidance and encouragement leaves with me a debt that can never be adequately repaid (Green x)”.
Also, just the idea of a Robert Aickman novel(?) of over a thousand pages is mind boggling. I’m pretty sure the world would be curious about that!
LikeLike
ChrisC – and Brenton,
Many thanks for this! Stupidly enough, as it seems to me, I have not yet read Green’s great Lang book, but just checked the Internet Archive and found scans of three copies of what I take to be the first edition: each has, on the back of the title page, “First published October, 1946” – exactly 79 years ago!
Reading Giuseppe Pezzini’s very interesting use of “On Fairy-Stories” in his Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (CUP, 2025), I was just thinking I need to delve into the chronology of Lewis’s putting together his (as it turned out) memorial Festschrift for Williams, where a version of Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” made its first appearance in print. E.g.,, do we know (if I’ve read it, I have forgotten!) if Tolkien was planning to offer this to Williams while he was still very much alive and (of course) not expected to die suddenly? If so, before or after Williams had borrowed and read the whole current draft of what would be published as The Lord of the Rings?
Word-searching one of the Lang book scans for the surname Tolkien just now, I find not only the acknowledgement you quote, but in the list of published Lang Lectures (item “3” in Appendix C) the note “(Also a few as yet unpublished lectures, by J.R.R. Tolkien and others)” (p. 239). Did Green write and submit this for publication knowing – or not knowing – “On Fairy-Stories” would be included in the Festschrift (which appeared on 4 December 1947)?
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
These are all fascinating questions, and I only wish I knew what the answers were. Each counts as a hitherto undisclosed gap in the chronology of the Oxford writing group’s history. It is just possible that Tolkien might have been considering sharing his Lang Lecture with CW. Though whether or not the “Essay Presented” volume was ever something that the group meant to publish all along, I’m really not certain one way or another. It’s difficult to tell if Tolkien even so much as mentioned the Lecture to Williams. Grevel Lindop speculates that the book of Presented Essays was meant as a going away present, when it seemed like the end of the War meant CW’s return to Amen House. If that’s the case, then it could very well be that its original intention was as a private volume, something that was originally meant for an audience of one. Williams’ death threw a wrench into a lot of the Inklings lives and plans, in retrospect. One of those plans could have been (for all we know) for the Lang Lecture to remain a mostly unpublished first draft, and for the Green Book (the good one) to be what Tolkien might have hoped would be the study text that presented his matured view of Mythopoeia to the world.
In which case, all of this would have been something that neither Green nor Tolkien would have planned on. At least that’s the best on offer so far as pure speculation goes. If there is any possible truth to this surmise, then one of the ironic outcomes of Williams’ passing is that it might have resulted in a slight skewing of Tolkien’s plans for how to present the theory of Fairy Stories to the world. It’s easy enough to see how this “might” have happened. When “LOTR” became a literary touchstone, fans of the book wanted to get their hands on anything else Tolkien might have written directly, under his own hand. OFS fits that definition to the letter, so of course the result would be that this would become the go-to text that fans and critics would reference when it came to trying to figure out the artist’s thought process.
The complete and perfect irony “might” be that in doing so, Tolkien’s own original goals have been lost in translation, in a manner of speaking. His original aim could very well have been to let Green’s “Lang” study be the text that delivered a more complete and expansive view of the group’s thought. It’s also possible to see how focusing on one single (and by now, almost forgotten) Victorian scholar and artist might have been able to achieve this. Because in the Green Book it’s clear that Lang is presented as someone with a clear understanding of Mythopoeia, and of what the Fairy Story’s highest achievement is capable of. As such, he would have been seen by Tolkien as the ideal vehicle for conveying the basics of Mythopoeia as a concept by allowing it all to be summed up in the life and work of one writer.
If there’s any truth to this speculation, then it means the history of Inklings Studies has been operating under one long handicap. The punchline being all the richer as it might very well have been one that neither Tolkien nor the rest of the group ever intended. Instead, what Bob Dylan might have called a “Simple Twist of Fate” was dealt out to them all with the passing of Charles Williams, and one of the side effects is that the group sort of lost the full measure of their intended voice. It’s clear enough, at least, that Green’s scholarship goes a long way toward filling in a lot of the gaps about the Inklings’ thought.
For instance, in works like the “Lang” book, and others such as “Tellers of Tales”, “A.E.W. Mason”, “Kipling and the Children”, and “Fifty Years of Peter Pan”, he’s able to grant readers an idea of the cultural context for how the Inklings saw themselves and their efforts. Green’s writing makes clear that Mythopoeia is meant to be seen as an inheritance of the authors of Victorian Children’s Fiction. In other words, Tolkien and Lewis saw themselves as following in the footsteps of writers like Mason, Kipling, Carroll, and Nesbit. Some of this might count as old news, yet the major benefit of Green’s writings is that he foregrounds just how important the genre of Victorian Fantasy was to the group, and it’s two lead writers.
In that sense, a good volume to hunt down on the topic might be Stephen Prickett’s own study entitled “Victorian Fantasy”. Like Green, he was a former pupil of C.S. Lewis, and that study text just cited contains the distillation of what he learned from the creator of Narnia, just as the “Lang” book does for Green as a student of Tolkien. Put the two together, and we’re closer to a more complete picture of the Inklings’ artistic background. The somehow brilliant irony might be that the loss of just one member was enough eclipse the group’s full intentions for how they wanted their efforts to be seen. CW would have appreciated that.
If there’s one consolation in all this, it’s that there’s been a new book on the Scottish Folklorist out by OUP. It’s titled simply as “Andrew Lang”, by John Sloane. With any luck, this might be a start in the right direction toward correcting gaps and mistakes in Mythopoeic criticism, though it might be that bringing Roger Lancelyn Green’s name back into the spotlight is also a necessary part of such revitalization.
LikeLike
ChrisC,
Thanks for this!
I don’t think I ever read the first version of the late Stephen Prickett’s Victorian Fantasy right through, and was not even aware till now that he had revised and updated it in 2005 – when I quickly went a-searching and learned that! Now I’ve had a look at the table of contents in the scan in the Internet Archive and word-searched the surname Tolkien. On page 169 he briefly discusses Tolkien and MacDonald together, with a reference to Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, in a context intriguing and tantalizing.
I happen to be reading the mediaeval Dutch version of the voyage of St. Brendan at the moment and was running into things reminding me variously of Lewis and Tolkien – making me think I need to look into a lot more than the little I did so far in the context of two somewhat Lewis- and Tolkien-like characters in The Notion Club Papers discussing the Saint and his voyage. Lazily seeing if there night be an audiobook of a translation of the Latin version or of any English versions on YouTube, I ran into a fascinating little talk by Dimitra Fimi about St. Brendan and both of them – and Kingsley’s Water Babies! I’d already been wondering if Tolkien knew Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, and now I’m all the more tantalized. Maybe Kingsley is consciously among the Victorian predecessors you note – I hope I learn more about this.
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
What makes a writer like Kingsley interesting from a Mythopoeic perspective is that, while never as far out there as CW, there are still elements of his thinking which seem not just to resonate, but also to perhaps prefigure the thoughts of the Oddest Inkling. In particular, there’s the way each writer seemed to take a very liberal view on questions of sexuality in relation to matters of religion. Also, as I’ve pointed out on Prof. Higgins’ blog, the “Water Babies” author can be found in his volume of “Historical Lectures and Essays” doing his best to try and rehabilitate Agrippa’s work in the service of the staunchest Christian Orthodoxy. It’s with discoveries like this in mind that it becomes possible to understand why Williams painted a somewhat indulgent and humoring prose portrait of this now obscure Victorian fantasist.
Also, Lang devoted at least two essays to Kingsley (that I know of) in his collection “Essays in Little”. In each article, Lang is concerned with what he regards as the Romanticism of Charles Kingsley. The basic summary of Lang’s thought on the artistry of the “Hereward” writer might go something like: “He goes reasonably far, when he puts his mind to it. At the same time, he could go further up and further in. And sometimes, he doesn’t go far enough”. It’s these nice little breadcrumb trails that I think future scholars will have to concentrate on when taking any and all studies of Williams and the Inklings further.
I have heard of the St. Brendan legend, meanwhile, yet I’ve never really looked into it. I might need to rectify that soon.
LikeLike
ChrisC,
Thanks – thus belatedly – for this! A lot more fascinating things by and about Kingsley to follow up, and ponder (including Lang’s remarks)!
I’ve now very enjoyably finished the Dutch St. Brendan poem and have nearly re-enjoyed all of The Water-Babies thanks to Cori Samuel’s LibriVox audiobook and the linked text – astonishingly illustrated in 1889 by Punch (satirical) cartoonist, Linley Sambourne. And what should the epigraph of chapter II be but the first stanza of Book II, Canto VIII of The Faerie Queene? – ! Among other things, very interesting to encounter again after reading Pezzini’s book, and also to make mental comparisons with George MacDonald.
And now I am keen to get acquainted with (translations of) other mediaeval versions of St. Brendan’s voyage, to see if things that seem Tolkien-related are in them, too.
LikeLike
D.L. Dodds,
You’re welcome.
That Spenser quote in “Water Babies” has to count as one of those minor details that never really manages to jump out at you until some key piece of background knowledge has managed to lodge somewhere in the memory. As such, all sort of interesting connections come to light in retrospect.
Also, I just realized something I forgot to mention. CW’s somewhat well-disposed thoughts on Kingsley can be found in “Descent of the Dove”. He comes in near the end, when Williams takes a side glance at the debates the “Hereward” author got into with John Henry Newman.
LikeLike
ChrisC,
And thank you again! Your “details that never really manages to jump out at you” aptly fitted C.W. on Kingsley for me, and I had not yet attempted word-searching various online versions of C.W.’s books to see where it might be!
I’ve started Vincent Hunink’s 1998 Dutch translation of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, ordered a book he recommends, and another by Doris Edel (both Dutch, too), and am thoroughly enjoying a collection of essays (in Dutch) by Maartje Draak – including her translation of the English one she sent Tolkien, as discussed in the fascinating October Mythlore article – whee!
LikeLike