What is the Significance of Worc(h)ester in C.S. Lewis’ Ransom Cycle?

Posted on December 18, 2017 by Brenton Dickieson

This is an honest question that I hope readers can help me with, and a proposal I would like to test out. C.S. Lewis’ second space travel adventure, Perelandra, begins like this: “As I left the railway station at Worchester….” It just occurred to me to find out where that station is (or was).

As far as I can tell, Worchester spelled thusly is not a place we would have found in WWII England. There is a Worcester College at Oxford, the alma mater of Emma Watson and Richard Adams—a fact that probably is more interesting to me than to Lewis. Lewis had a friend named Wyllie at Worcester while he was attending Oxford as a student. Lewis had once been given a pair of swans by the Provost of Worcester College, which he hated—the swans, not the Provost. Still, not a terribly strong link.

There is a Worcester in Worcestershire, England—a small city I passed by last year on my way from Birmingham to Cheltenham to visit friends. There are random historical events that are set in Worcester that Lewis might have found significant. Tyndale appeared for charges of heresy there in the early 1520s. Hugh Latimer was Bishop there 1535-39 when he resigned to take up being a heretic full time. Most significantly, the Battle of Worcester closed the English Civil War as Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian army defeated King Charles II’s Royalist and Scottish army. Worcester was also plan B for the Parliament in WWII in case London had to be abandoned, though I doubt if Lewis knew that.

And, of course, there is the Lea & Perrins brand of Worcestershire sauce, an ill-used staple in our home and many others, I am sure.

Perhaps the link is more personal. Lewis and his brother Warren spent a good deal of time at the schools of Malvern College, which is in Worcestershire. It is where C.S. Lewis abandoned his Christian faith, as he describes in Surprised by Joy and therein calls his school Wyvern College. This was not a warm place in Lewis’ memories, though he had friends, and he would have gone to the city of Worcester for enjoyable outings (escapes) from school.

Of all these, the links to Ransom’s world are not terribly clear. The strongest one is the Battle—and that link might not be more than tangential. Let’s walk through them.

Great Malvern Railway Station

In Perelandra, Lewis the character-narrator gets off at the Worchester station to go to Dr. Ransom’s cottage in the first lines of Perelandra. Ransom is a Cambridge philologist at the fictional Leicester College. If Worchester is Worcester–the misspelling is made with frequency and my audiobook pronounces it like the latter spelling–then the commute from Worcester to Cambridge would be unusually long—at least four hours. The reason that Ransom isn’t home when Lewis gets there is because he had to slip up to Cambridge. There is now a West Chesterton district in the suburbs of Cambridge, but I doubt that is the fictional town in view. Lewis did end up commuting from Oxford to Cambridge, which might have been a three-hour trip, but this wasn’t until more than a decade after Perelandra was written.

Is Worchester meant to be the Worcester of Lewis’ youth? Most of the geographical set up of the Ransom Cycle is fictional. In Out of the Silent Planet, the hiking villages of Nadderby and Sterk are not (unfortunately) real places where a philologist could have walked in the 30s. St. Anne’s in That Hideous Strength is not the end of any line I know (though there is a St. Anne’s College not far from Worcester College in Oxford). Among early readers or the Inklings, there may have been conjecture that Lewis was veiling real places in THS. It seems some thought Lewis’ Town of Edgestow and Bracton College were related to Durham:

A very small university [in That Hideous Strength] is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham—a university with which the only connection I have ever had was entirely pleasant (Preface to That Hideous Strength).

Malvern College Chapel

The fiction of Edgestow is filled out with a number of scenes in the text and with a college that has a deep history that roots the story:

Though I am Oxford-bred and very fond of Cambridge, I think that Edgestow is more beautiful than either. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or sausages or marmalades has yet come to industrialize the country town which is the setting of the University, and the University itself is tiny. Apart from Bracton and from the nineteenth-century women’s college beyond the railway, there are only two colleges: Northumberland which stands below Bracton on the river Wynd, and Duke’s opposite the Abbey. Bracton takes no undergraduates. It was founded in 1300 for the support of ten learned men whose duties were to pray for the soul of Henry de Bracton and to study the laws of England (ch. 1).

The Holy Well of Malvern

If Edgestow is fictional, there are some real English reference points in THS. Oxford is added to Cambridge as real universities, and there is also London, Lancaster, and, as we see below, York in the north and Warwickshire, on the borders of Worcestershire. Belbury, which houses the evil N.I.C.E., is fictional. But Belbury and Edgestow must be within a difficult walking distance of Worcester, as N.I.C.E.’s forced exodus has driven “driven two thousand families from their homes to die of exposure in every ditch from here to Birmingham or Worcester.” We also find out that St. Anne’s is on the way to Birmingham when Jane is saved from a riot in ch. 8 and as Mark tries to stumble towards his wife in ch. 17.

Plaque at the Sidbury Gate, Worcester

As mentioned above, the clearest link to the historical area of Worcester is to the Battle of Worcester that ends the reign of Charles II. It is captured here in this dialogue with Jane and Miss Ironwood at St. Anne’s Manor, as Jane is slowly discovering she is a seer—a thing she doesn’t believe in:

“What was your maiden name?” asked Miss Ironwood.

“Tudor,” said Jane. At any other moment she would have said it rather self-consciously, for she was very anxious not to be supposed vain of her ancient ancestry.

“The Warwickshire branch of the family?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever read a little book—it is only forty pages long—written by an ancestor of yours about the battle of Worcester?”

“No. Father had a copy—the only copy, I think he said. But I never read it. It was lost when the house was broken up after his death.”

“Your father was mistaken in thinking it the only copy. There are at least two others: one is in America, and the other is in this house.”

“Well?”

“Your ancestor gave a full and, on the whole, correct account of the battle, which he says he completed on the same day on which it was fought. But he was not at it. He was in York at the time” (ch. 3).

How do all these individual links connect?

Malvern College

My proposal is this: That Lewis’ fictional Edgestow is in a small town (2000 people or fewer) in the real Worcestershire, and that That Hideous Strength is likely set in a fictionalized campus like Lewis’ own Malvern College, which is about 10 miles southwest of Worcester in Worcestershire. I will explore a few connections which leads me to this idea.

Lewis loved the architecture of Malvern, and was delighted by the “great blue plain below us and, behind, those green, peaked hills, so mountainous in form and yet so manageably small in size” (Surprised by Joy ch. 4). THS is filled with small English villages, college buildings, large hills, open fields, and ancient woods. Great Malvern and Malvern Hills is a good fit for the novel, though many other places would do as well.

Pressing in on distances, if one was a N.I.C.E. exile pulling a farm cart or a wheelbarrow full of one’s possessions—”chests of drawers, bedsteads, mattresses, boxes, and a canary in a cage”—Great Malvern would be a long day’s walk to Worcester. Birmingham would be two or three days further at the pace of an exodus as one reads in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds–the image doubtless at the back of Lewis’ exiles in THS. Moreover, a train from Edgestow to St. Anne’s would follow a Birmingham direction from Malvern (or any number of nearby places).

St. Ann’s Well, Great Malvern

Malvern, then, transformed into a late medieval university instead of a Victorian school (with its nostalgic architecture), could be the setting. Great Malvern, before its post-war renovations, would have had a lot of the features of the classic English village of Edgestow. Particularly intriguing is the St. Anne’s Manor in THS. Great Malvern–the town connected to Lewis’ boyhood schooling–is home to St. Ann’s Well, which has a cafe attached to its spring water well named after Saint Anne, mother of Mary. The inclusion of Merlin’s Well and St. Anne’s Manor in That Hideous Strength makes a pretty interesting connection to Great Malvern.

If Malvern is the site of Edgestow and Bracton College, and Worchester is Worcester, it also means that Ransom’s move to St. Anne’s Manor at his sister’s will would have been a relatively simple one. He would have merely moved from his cottage in Worcester city–which would be about a half hour walk from the main station–to an estate a few trains stops that side of Great Malvern.

Register Office, Great Malvern

If all of this geographical speculation is remotely plausible, the really critical question remains: Would Merlin’s resting place be in Worcestershire?

Merlin’s Tomb in Brittany in Paimpont Forest

That’s hard for me to answer. While Merlin is probably from Welsh origins—and Malvern isn’t far from the border of Wales—I would expect Merlin to be asleep in Broceliande.  Where would that be? Bookies would say to put your money on Brittany, and the French tradition of the Matter of Britain is critical.

Clearly, though, Brittany would not suit Lewis’ purposes in his modern English Arthurian tale. It is a peculiarly English apocalypse (as is H.G. Wells’ apocalypse fifty years before). Oxfordshire and Worcestershire are not far from the legendary downtown Logres, and almost any historic place of interest south of there has a claim of being Camelot. Wales is not that far away, and I have heard the area north of there called “Merlin’s Land” (though I don’t know why).

Could Malvern as Edgestow be where Merlin has been secretly asleep for centuries? It’s possible, and Merlin’s waking is distinctly Lewisian in THS, and pulls at the threads of the Arthurian garment in more ways than just geography.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell more from the details. Most of Lewis’ connections with the area are later. Lewis walked in Great Malvern at various times in his adult life, including a tour with J.R.R. Tolkien. George Sayer was a friend of Lewis’ and his biographer, and he was head of English at Malvern from 1944–Sayer got the post as Lewis was editing THS (the draft was complete the previous December). And, of course, we don’t know how clear in his own mind Lewis had the geography of the Ransom Cycle in place. Perhaps he was just making it up as he went along.

The use of Worcester does seem striking, though. The claim that the action of That Hideous Strength takes place around Malvern–the college, Great Malvern, the evocative hills, with train and exodus lines to Worcester and Birmingham–is a good one.

Still, now it’s your turn: What do you see in the tale? Is there a significance to Worc(h)ester? Or are the geographies drawn variously to obscure a non-location for the tale—or intentionally hidden, as per the conspiracy intimated at the end of Out of the Silent Planet or Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia thesis? I would love your thoughts.

Malvern Abbey Gateway

The Malvern Hills of England

As an afterthought, and certainly no link in C.S. Lewis’ mind, is the College Grace (which is the same as Christ Church’s long-form grace. It is always given in Latin, but here is the English translation I took from Wikipedia. You “unhappy” isn’t the right word, it strikes me as a good Ransom Cycle prayer, with its request for the heavenly food that brings true sustenance:

“We unhappy and unworthy men do give thee most reverent thanks, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for the victuals which thou hast bestowed on us for the sustenance of the body, at the same time beseeching thee that we may use them soberly, modestly and gratefully. And above all we beseech thee to impart to us the food of angels, the true bread of heaven, the eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, so that the mind of each of us may feed on him and that through his flesh and blood we may be sustained, nourished and strengthened. Amen.”

Worcester College, Oxford

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Book Launch Party for “The Inklings and King Arthur”!

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Brenton Dickieson

While I probably won’t be getting to the live launch at Texmoot, I’m pleased to be a part of the team of scholars that brought these great essays together. If this is the kind of thing that interests you, check out the book launch on January 1st, attend Texmoot live, and consider contributing to the blog call I put out early this week on Inklings and King Arthur materials.

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The Words C.S. Lewis Made Up: Re/Anti/Un/Ness

Posted on December 13, 2017 by Brenton Dickieson

Behind C.S. Lewis’ famous Narnian chronicles was his experience as a teacher of English literature, a writer about the history of literary movements, and a tinker in other forms of fiction. In that tinkering, and in his letters and essays, he would sometimes create new turns of phrase when it was needed. This is the ninth in the series on words that C.S. Lewis coined. The previous two posts (Disredemption and Viricidal) were a little dark; hopefully this week’s sketch lightens things up a week.  

It was the Unblank button that did me in. I was setting up my slides for a lecture and looked down at the new tech set up. Among the buttons that control the project was the “Blank” screen button and–wait for it–its logical opposite: Unblank. Really? That’s the best they could do? This seems to me to be a repeat of the “The Door is Ajar” silliness of talking cars in the 80s.

But the tradition of throwing words onto the beginning or end a word is a long and dis/honourable one. Some of these stick with us, like dysfunctional or mistake. Others have disappeared, like the peculiar forms unabandoned, unabsoiled, unabsolute, unabsolved, unabuilyeit, disabridge, and disafforest. Others change form over time, so that we still say “unable” but the word “unability” has become “inability” and “unablety” has become “disability.” Other verbicidal forms we wish would disappear, like all the prefixes and suffixes attached to “truth” these days. Many of these words are unaccounted for because we forget they are prefixes at all (like the “a” in “unaccounted”).

Here are some of C.S. Lewis’ humorous–if not terribly elegant–uses of prefixes and suffixes to make his point in a new and interesting way.

Unvalue

I suspect many have said the word “unvalued” in the adjectival form to mean something or someone who is not properly valued. John Bail in vol. 1 of his 1551 treatise with the snappy title, The first two parts of the Actes, or vnchast examples of the Englysh votaryes, uses it as a verb: “in hys mouthe myght vnualue or dysable their masses.”

Lewis, though, tried to use “unvalue” as a noun. It is in his dialogue with philosopher C.E.M. Joad on “The Pains of Animals” that Lewis suggests that a single instance of pain where there is no accompanying fear or reflection on the pain is, from the point of view of the one who experiences the pain, essentially not pain, but a sensation. “Unvalue” may have been a good rhetorical invention for the purpose, but in this context it simply means “nil value,” so just a variation of “value” rather than its opposite. The noun in a better sense was attempted by John Ruskin in an obscure Daily Telegraph piece of 1864, “Intrinsic value or goodness in some things, and … intrinsic unvalue or badness in other things.” Still, not a terribly elegant word.

In any case, Lewis was not alone in reaching for this word, though doubtless he thought he was. Though rare, the word “unvalue” is actually attested in two kinds of 20th century literature: philosophy books that no one reads and tax surveys that no one should read. Exciting stuff.

Letterlessness

While Lewis found most of his made-up words were inelegant–and in some cases we’d agree– he liked this one. While Lewis coined “letterlessness” in a letter to his father on Mar 1st, 1917, to capture the (for him, blissful) state of not having any letters he had to write, the adjective “letterless” was already in play for a long time. “Letterless” meant “unlettered” or illiterate in the earliest 16th and 17th centuries. It took on a more tactile sense later, even referring to an unmarked grave in the 18th century. By this time it was also being used for the person who has no letters to receive or write, and Lewis uses it himself as a teenager.

Still, we know how much Lewis detested letter writing: “it is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman’s knock” (Surprised by Joy 143). I wish for him that the afterlife is some state of letterlessness–though few of us hope that heaven is letterless in the Renaissance sense of the word.

Antiparody

Lewis had a way of looking at things upside down. This is the G.K. Chesterton in him, though I suspect that he comes by the trait honestly. David Mark Purdy has argued in Both Sides of the Wardrobe (edited by Rob Fennell)–and I think argued correctly–that The Screwtape Letters is not a parody or satire exactly, but an inverted parody or inverted satire. This “double inversion” gives Screwtape it’s peculiar disorienting and bracing quality.

This isn’t the only time that Lewis tried to think in terms of double inversion. In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century he coined “antiparody” as an academic word to describe a certain kind of phenomenon:

“The excellent lyric ‘All my lufe leif me not’ … belongs to a large class [of] …  ‘antiparodies’ (if I may coin a most necessary word): the conversion of popular and secular songs to devout purposes” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century 112).

Lewis makes the observation that there is a feature of Medieval and early Renaissance poetry that converts popular and secular songs to devout purposes, such as a hymn or sacred poetry. Thus it is a kind of parody, but lacking the humour or mocking tone altogether. These folks songs will go on to make up some of the early Protestant hymns and the poetic books that the Puritans read, and began as parodies and drinking songs—and often with bawdy content. While the word is thrown about academic circles these days and means something different, Lewis enjoyed the subversive nature of this inversion that took up the popular poem and made it religious.

Not Thinkable-out

In 5 Dec 1949 letter to American correspondent Dr. Warfield M. Firor, Lewis wrote:

“I don’t think ‘incomprehensible’ in the Creed or ‘passing comprehension’ [Phil 4:7] mean what is usually thought. It doesn’t mean, I am told, simply unintelligible, like a book in an unknown tongue. It means not thinkable-out, not capable of being fully summed up or intellectually mastered).”

Here Lewis uses “not thinkable-out” as a nonce word to show the difference between something that is incomprehensible in the way we use that word today, and something that is indescribable (in its various uses). A more elegant usage would be “not think-out-able”–but that grammar break may have stretched him too much. Like the concept Lewis was trying to describe, sometimes words are elusive.

Resnuggle

We have already seen that Lewis played with words in his children’s works, though I had missed some of the tradition of those words when I wrote the piece. “Re-snuggled” might have occurred in literature before Lewis, but I cannot find it. Neither is it necessary to reach very far to imagine the concept. I bet no kid reading the sentence in which it occurred ever had doubts.

Here is the passage from the Narnian prequel, The Magician’s Nephew:

“Fledge trotted to and fro, sniffing and whinnying. The children tip-toed this way and that, looking behind every bush and tree. They kept on thinking they saw things, and there was one time when Polly was perfectly certain she had seen-a tall, dark figure gliding quickly away in a westerly direction. But they caught nothing and in the end Fledge lay down again and the children re-snuggled (if that is the right word) under his wings. They went to sleep at once” (The Magician’s Nephew ch. 12).

The words “snug” and “snuggle” have an almost onomatopoeia quality to them, don’t they? To snuggle in is an important activity, and perhaps deserves to have been put in the “re-” category a long time ago. Alas, this word hasn’t been taken up, which is true of almost none of Lewis’ neologisms and borrowed nonce words.

The Words C.S. Lewis Made Up

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A Call for Guest Posts: The Inklings and King Arthur with Guest Editor David Llewellyn Dodds

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Brenton Dickieson

It is an intriguing fact of literary history that the Inklings were individually fascinated by the Arthurian legends. Christopher Tolkien’s publication of his father’s The Fall of Arthur caused a literary sensation in 2013, highlighting how deeply the Matter of Britain is in conversation with Tolkien’s legendarium. Arthurian themes run through C.S. Lewis’ fiction—including the eruption of the whole Arthurian landscape into his dystopic That Hideous Strength—and he approaches Arthurian material as a scholar. Charles Williams, who published two Arthurian books of poems and one Grail novel, left much of his work on his desk after his sudden passing in 1945. Owen Barfield’s fiction dances with Arthurian themes, and many of us encountered Arthur first through Roger Lancelyn Green’s adaptation of Morte D’Arthur.

King Arthur seems to be one of the centrifugal forces of the Inklings as a loose literary collective. It is this observation that drew a number of Inklings readers together to produce The Inklings and King Arthur, prolifically edited by Sørina Higgins. This volume contains 20 essays from leading and emerging scholars and is the essential resource for the field.

In celebration of the launch of The Inklings and King Arthur in January, A Pilgrim in Narnia is hosting a series of guest blogs on the topic. For this occasion, we have invited David Llewellyn Dodds to be a guest editor. David is doubtless the right knight for this adventure. David has an essay on Charles Williams’ The Chapel of the Thorn, an award-nominated archival publication by Sørina Higgins. David has edited the Arthurian Poets volumes for both John Masefield and Charles Williams, which fills out our Williams Arthuriad in critical ways. Beyond all that, David is a frequent commentator here on A Pilgrim in Narnia, and will help the conversation greatly.

Besides featuring some of the authors from The Inklings and King Arthur, we are opening up the series to other readers of the Matter of Britain (Arthuriana) and the Matter of Oxford (the Inklings and their friends and influences). Proposals should include a title, a summary of the blog idea, and a brief bio of the author. Please also include a writing sample, a draft of the blog, or a draft introduction to the post.

Please email all proposals by Dec 20th to inklingsandarthur@gmail.com. The series will begin in January and will hopefully extend the dialogue of the text into a new world of great readers.

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Announcement: The Wade Center Welcomes New Co-Directors Crystal and David C. Downing

Posted on December 8, 2017 by Brenton Dickieson

Well, this is a coup! Drs. Crystal and David Downing have been appointed as Co-Directors of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. As readers will know, the Wade is the premier North American deposit of archival and library materials for the Inklings and some of their friends and influences. The work that staff and volunteers do at the Wade is irreplaceable and gives us access to the lives and works of some of our favourite authors, including C.S. Lewis (and his brother, Warren), J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, Owen Barfield, George MacDonald, and Charles Williams. My life has been changed by the Wade, and the Downings are the perfect directors-in-waiting. I have commented on their excellent work in Inklings-related work as Christian intellectuals (see here, here, and here). More than this, though, Crystal and David have each been encouraging to me in my scholarly development, and I couldn’t wish a better set of candidates on the Wade or a more important task upon the Downings.

Here is the entire press release from the Wheaton College website:

The Marion E. Wade Center is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Crystal Downing and Dr. David C. Downing as co-directors and co-holders of the Marion E. Wade Chair of Christian Thought. As Lisa Richmond, Director of Library and Archives at Wheaton College, explains, “The opportunity to have two such distinguished scholars leading the Wade Center is very exciting and holds great promise for continuing the Wade’s strong legacy of work on the seven authors. We are thrilled that the Downings are joining Wheaton in this role.” As co-directors, the Downings will share administrative responsibilities, and as a joint appointment they will also have significantly more time to invest in writing and research on the Wade authors. They will take up their responsibilities at the Wade Center on July 1, 2018.

Dr. Crystal Downing is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Film Studies at Messiah College, PA. She has published on a variety of topics, with much of her recent scholarship focused on the relationship between cultural theory and religious faith. Her first book, Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers (Palgrave Macmillan 2004) received an international award from the Dorothy L. Sayers Society in Cambridge, England in 2009. The thought of Sayers and C.S. Lewis is evident in Crystal’s next two books, How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith (IVP Academic 2006) and Changing Signs of Truth (IVP Academic 2012). The success of her fourth book, Salvation from Cinema (Routledge 2016) has led to her current book project, The Wages of Cinema: Looking through the Lens of Dorothy L. Sayers. Crystal has received a number of teaching awards and was the recipient of the Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant for 2001 from the Wade Center. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. David Downing currently serves as the R.W. Schlosser Professor of English at Elizabethtown College, PA. He has published widely on C.S. Lewis, including Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (UMass 1992), The Most Reluctant Convert: C.S. Lewis’s Journey to Faith(IVP 2002), which was awarded the Clyde S. Kilby Research Grant for 2000, Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C.S. Lewis (IVP 2005), and Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles(Jossey-Bass 2005). David is also the editor of C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress: The Wade Annotated Edition (Eerdmans, 2014). A prolific speaker and writer, David has spoken extensively throughout the U.S. and internationally. He has received numerous teaching awards and holds a PhD in English from the University of California at Los Angeles.

The Downings are the first to be jointly appointed to the Wade directorship in the more than 50-year history of the Wade Center. They follow Wade founder and first director Clyde S. Kilby (1965–1980), director Lyle W. Dorsett (1983–1990), and director Christopher W. Mitchell (1994–2013).

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