Ah, Sam, what a character. When Derek Holser reached out to me about his Tolkien’s Greatest Characters series on the Plunge, Samwise Gamgee came first to mind. The most hobbitish of heroes, the gardening guardian, most faithful companion of the fellowship, Sam is worth talking about.
So we did. Derek is a good friend, and you can see how friendship takes a central place in our Sam-centred podcast. You can find the Substack link here, and I’ve embedded the YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other links of interest below.
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“A Pilgrim in Narnia” is a blog project in reading and talking about the work of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, the Inklings, L.M. Montgomery, and the worlds they created. As a "Faith, Fantasy, and Fiction" blog, we cover topics like children’s literature, myths and mythology, fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, poetry, theology, cultural criticism, art and writing.
This blog includes my thoughts as I read through my favourite writings and reflect on my own life and culture. In this sense, I am a Pilgrim in Narnia--or Middle Earth, or Fairyland, or Avonlea. I am often peeking inside of wardrobes, looking for magic bricks in urban alleys, or rooting through yard sale boxes for old rings. If something here captures your imagination, leave a comment, “like” a post, share with your friends, or sign up to receive Narnian Pilgrim posts in your email box.
Brenton Dickieson (PhD, Chester) is a father, husband, friend, university lecturer, and freelance writer from Prince Edward Island, Canada. You can follow him:
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Since this is the right sort of Day and Season for it, I thought I might pass along news of a remarkable Inklings related book that I stumbled upon by accident. Most Mythopoeic scholars are familiar with the Lewis-Anscombe Debate, an event from which both facts and all sorts of myths have been spun ever since the second edition of “Miracles” was reprinted. For the longest time, all accounts of this encounter have focused on Lewis’s side of the controversy. Now, however, both Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman have written a book that finally gives Anscombe her moment in the spotlight. It’s called “Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy back to Life”. The book’s scope isn’t limited to just E. Anscombe’s life and thought. Instead, the authors step back to take in the entire pre-and-post-war intellectual milieu which shaped E.A. and her friends, Mary Midgely, Phillipa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. It’s a text which counts as one of those surprises with an air of inevitability about it.
It might not be what you expect to find, at first. That is until you do a bit of actual thinking and realized that there was a story here that was always ready to be told. It would just be a question of when it would happen, and who would be the ones to dig up the facts of history? Cumhaill and Wiseman were the ones to break the ground on this topic. In giving us the history of the philosophical group to which Anscombe belonged, Lewis fans and scholars are granted an extended snapshot of a motivated collective of women who act as something of a curious reflection of the Inklings. Like the Oxford writers’ group, Anscombe, Murdoch, and their friends were all concerned with how to defend an older idea of Metaphysics in the Modern Age. So, what we start out with is this sense of a shared goal, and yet it’s the ways in which Murdoch, Anscombe and the rest go about it, and the sometimes diverging paths that it leads them all on that makes up the vast majority of Wiseman and Cumhaill’s study.
This is where the simple act of giving one’s two cents becomes complex, because I’m left having to not just judge, but also compare and contrast the mindset of each writer’s group. I suppose the best way I can describe it is to claim that the Inklings themselves seem to be grounded in a more familiar philosophic and theological tradition. It’s one that is encompassed by Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism, for want of the simplest terms. The Anscombe Group, in contrast, seems to be grappling with what to leave in and leave out of this same bedrock of Classical and Medieval thought. One of the major concerns of the Oxford Fantasists was how do you translate the language of the Bronze, Greco-Roman, and Middle Ages into the lingua-franca of 20th Century Western modes of speech? This is a topic that Anscombe and her friends shared, yet you get the sense that they struggle with it more. There’s this need to see what trace elements of the Discarded Image system might still be found in the most recent and contemporary schools of thought, and then they seemed to have wondered how possible it might be to accommodate thinkers like Aquinas to the philosophy of people like Ludwig Wittgenstein.
It seems to be this desire to prove the survival of the Ancient in the Modern that accounts for Anscombe’s attempts to try and take the concept of Mere Christianity and see if it can fit in with the 20th Century Continental outlook. If I had to gauge the success of their efforts, then all I can say for sure is that there are more people in schools and on the streets with a greater familiarity with Lewis’s works than they ever will be aware that people like Anscombe and Wittgenstein ever existed. This is merely how things have shaped out, for better or worse.
As it so happens, there is an interesting postscript of sorts to this discovery. If you go to the Marion E. Wade Center website and take a peek into their Author Libraries, you’ll find that one of the titles listed as belonging to C.S. Lewis’s personal bookshelf was a copy of “The Open Society” by Karl Popper. What makes that notable in terms of the interactions with Lewis and Anscombe is that Wittgenstein sort of wound up becoming Popper’s philosophical bete noir. Indeed, part of the argument of “The Open Society” is that a system such as Wittgenstein’s seems to run the risk of removing any logical basis for the practice of science proper. What unites his book with the thought of Lewis is that both are concerned with questions of Falsifiability, and how to separate actual science from mere Scientism. In other words, Popper’s concerns show a surprising match with the themes and ideas of books like “The Abolition of Man”, and its fictional counterpart, “That Hideous Strength”.
Knowing that Lewis kept a copy of Popper’s political-philosophic text close by raises all sorts of interesting questions about what else Lewis might have thought about “The Open Society”? In particular it raises the tentative query about what The Narnian’s ownership of the text means in the context of his debate with Anscombe? Might this have been a sign of Lewis carrying on the debate by trying to figure out where his opponent was coming from? Whatever the case, Cumhaill and Wiseman’s book, and the light it helps shine on a particular aspect of Inklings history just sounded like the sort of topic worth bringing to the attention of others. I hope this works as some kind of good enough Holiday recommendation. And either way, Merry Christmas to all. P.S. a review of the Wiseman book is here:
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
Would that everyone was blessed with a friend like Sam…
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Prof. Dickieson,
Since this is the right sort of Day and Season for it, I thought I might pass along news of a remarkable Inklings related book that I stumbled upon by accident. Most Mythopoeic scholars are familiar with the Lewis-Anscombe Debate, an event from which both facts and all sorts of myths have been spun ever since the second edition of “Miracles” was reprinted. For the longest time, all accounts of this encounter have focused on Lewis’s side of the controversy. Now, however, both Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman have written a book that finally gives Anscombe her moment in the spotlight. It’s called “Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy back to Life”. The book’s scope isn’t limited to just E. Anscombe’s life and thought. Instead, the authors step back to take in the entire pre-and-post-war intellectual milieu which shaped E.A. and her friends, Mary Midgely, Phillipa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. It’s a text which counts as one of those surprises with an air of inevitability about it.
It might not be what you expect to find, at first. That is until you do a bit of actual thinking and realized that there was a story here that was always ready to be told. It would just be a question of when it would happen, and who would be the ones to dig up the facts of history? Cumhaill and Wiseman were the ones to break the ground on this topic. In giving us the history of the philosophical group to which Anscombe belonged, Lewis fans and scholars are granted an extended snapshot of a motivated collective of women who act as something of a curious reflection of the Inklings. Like the Oxford writers’ group, Anscombe, Murdoch, and their friends were all concerned with how to defend an older idea of Metaphysics in the Modern Age. So, what we start out with is this sense of a shared goal, and yet it’s the ways in which Murdoch, Anscombe and the rest go about it, and the sometimes diverging paths that it leads them all on that makes up the vast majority of Wiseman and Cumhaill’s study.
This is where the simple act of giving one’s two cents becomes complex, because I’m left having to not just judge, but also compare and contrast the mindset of each writer’s group. I suppose the best way I can describe it is to claim that the Inklings themselves seem to be grounded in a more familiar philosophic and theological tradition. It’s one that is encompassed by Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism, for want of the simplest terms. The Anscombe Group, in contrast, seems to be grappling with what to leave in and leave out of this same bedrock of Classical and Medieval thought. One of the major concerns of the Oxford Fantasists was how do you translate the language of the Bronze, Greco-Roman, and Middle Ages into the lingua-franca of 20th Century Western modes of speech? This is a topic that Anscombe and her friends shared, yet you get the sense that they struggle with it more. There’s this need to see what trace elements of the Discarded Image system might still be found in the most recent and contemporary schools of thought, and then they seemed to have wondered how possible it might be to accommodate thinkers like Aquinas to the philosophy of people like Ludwig Wittgenstein.
It seems to be this desire to prove the survival of the Ancient in the Modern that accounts for Anscombe’s attempts to try and take the concept of Mere Christianity and see if it can fit in with the 20th Century Continental outlook. If I had to gauge the success of their efforts, then all I can say for sure is that there are more people in schools and on the streets with a greater familiarity with Lewis’s works than they ever will be aware that people like Anscombe and Wittgenstein ever existed. This is merely how things have shaped out, for better or worse.
As it so happens, there is an interesting postscript of sorts to this discovery. If you go to the Marion E. Wade Center website and take a peek into their Author Libraries, you’ll find that one of the titles listed as belonging to C.S. Lewis’s personal bookshelf was a copy of “The Open Society” by Karl Popper. What makes that notable in terms of the interactions with Lewis and Anscombe is that Wittgenstein sort of wound up becoming Popper’s philosophical bete noir. Indeed, part of the argument of “The Open Society” is that a system such as Wittgenstein’s seems to run the risk of removing any logical basis for the practice of science proper. What unites his book with the thought of Lewis is that both are concerned with questions of Falsifiability, and how to separate actual science from mere Scientism. In other words, Popper’s concerns show a surprising match with the themes and ideas of books like “The Abolition of Man”, and its fictional counterpart, “That Hideous Strength”.
Knowing that Lewis kept a copy of Popper’s political-philosophic text close by raises all sorts of interesting questions about what else Lewis might have thought about “The Open Society”? In particular it raises the tentative query about what The Narnian’s ownership of the text means in the context of his debate with Anscombe? Might this have been a sign of Lewis carrying on the debate by trying to figure out where his opponent was coming from? Whatever the case, Cumhaill and Wiseman’s book, and the light it helps shine on a particular aspect of Inklings history just sounded like the sort of topic worth bringing to the attention of others. I hope this works as some kind of good enough Holiday recommendation. And either way, Merry Christmas to all. P.S. a review of the Wiseman book is here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/08/metaphysical-animals-how-four-women-brought-philosophy-back-to-life-clare-mac-cumhaill-rachael-wiseman-review-elizabeth-gem-anscombe-iris-murdoch-mary-midgley-philippa-foot
And here:
https://besharamagazine.org/metaphysics-spirituality/metaphysical-animals-clare-maccumhaill-rachael-wiseman/
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