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Worlds Without End Blog

Forays into Fantasy: C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Posted at 1:51 PM by Scott Lazerus

Scott Laz

Scott Lazerus is a Professor of Economics at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado, and has been a science fiction fan since the 1970s. The Forays into Fantasy series is an exploration of the various threads of fantastic literature that have led to the wide variety of fantasy found today, from the perspective of an SF fan newly exploring the fantasy landscape. FiF will examine some of the most interesting landmark books of the past, along with a few of today’s most acclaimed fantasies, building up an understanding of the connections between fantasy’s origins, its touchstones, and its many strands of influence.


The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobeBetween them, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis have been credited with reinventing and reinvigorating fantasy literature for the second half of the twentieth century, both creatively and, ultimately, commercially. Amazingly, the two writers most influential on modern fantasy were both professors of medieval language and literature at Oxford University, as well as being good friends, during the period in which they wrote, respectively, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. Both were members of an informal reading and writing group known as the Inklings, where they discussed their works in progress and their ideas about fantasy. The two were also bound by the shared experience of fighting in the trenches of World War I, and by their devotion to Christianity. In 1931, Tolkien was among those who helped convert the atheist Lewis, though Lewis did not embrace Tolkien’s Catholicism. The religious background of an author is not something that will come up often in my survey of fantasy, but in this case it is relevant to an understanding of Lewis’s work, nearly all of which is related to his religious ideas in some way.

Given their many affinities, then, it may come as a surprise that Tolkien expressed strong dislike for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), and the six subsequent Narnia volumes. Yet comparing it to Tolkien’s work may explain why. Tolkien, after all, is heralded as the master of what has come to be known as world-building, spending years inventing the languages, history, and geography of Middle Earth prior to writing The Lord of the Rings. This world building is probably the most influential aspect of his work, its popularity creating a large readership that would subsequently be accustomed to accepting secondary world fantasies—stories set in imagined lands with no necessary connection to ours—as a genre in itself. Fans demanded more of it, leading to the fantasy publishing boom that began after the paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings in the late ‘60s.

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The Unconsenting Skies Posted at 5:05 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

Here’s a followup of sorts to our first piece of C.S. Lewis verse, written “against too many writers of science fiction.” Despite being a rather successful science fiction writer himself, Lewis had a dark view of supposed scientific progress in general, as is clear from this pessimistic look into the future of space travel. Fans of Lewis’ more religiously-minded literature might be surprised at his frank imagery, but he wasn’t as shy about certain things as his readers. As with the previous installment, this bit of verse is available in his Poems collection.

Prelude to Space
An Epithalamium

So Man, grown vigorous now,
Holds himself ripe to breed,
Daily devises how
To ejaculate his seed
And boldly fertilize
The black womb of the unconsenting skies.

Some now alive expect
(I am told) to see the large,
Steel member grow erect,
Turgid with the fierce charge
Of our whole planet’s skill,
Courage, wealth, knowledge, concentrated will;

Straining with lust to stamp
Our likeness on the abyss—
Bombs, gallows, Belsen camp,
Pox, polio, Thais’ kiss
Or Judas’, Moloch’s fires
And Torquemada’s (sons resemble sires).

Shall we, when the grim shape
Roars upward, dance and sing?
Yes: if we honour rape,
If we take pride to fling
So bountifully on space
The sperm of our long woes, our large disgrace.

An Expostulation on Mundane Science Fiction Posted at 12:47 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

Though known most of all for his Narnia and Cosmic Trilogy works of fiction, C.S. Lewis was also an avid writer of poetry, much of which apparently remained unpublished during his life. As I was browsing through his Poems collection, I came across one such piece of verse that I thought deserved to be shared on the site, as it is a rather insightful critique of many popular forms of science fiction.

An Expostulation
Against too many writers of science fiction

Why did you lure us on like this,
Light-year on light-year, through the abyss,
Building (as though we cared for size!)
Empires that cover galaxies
If at the journey’s end we find
The same old stuff we left behind,
Well-worn Tellurian stories of
Crooks, spies, conspirators, or love,
Whose setting might as well have been
The Bronx, Montmartre, or Bethnal Green?

Why should I leave this green-floored cell,
Roofed with blue air, in which we dwell,
Unless, outside its guarded gates,
Long, long desired, the Unearthly waits
Strangeness that moves us more than fear,
Beauty that stabs with tingling spear,
Or Wonder, laying on one’s heart
That finger-tip at which we start
As if some thought too swift and shy
For reason’s grasp had just gone by?

YA Genre Fiction Month: The Chronicles of Narnia Posted at 12:45 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

It all began with a wardrobe. Being your average, American, suburban child, of course I had no idea what a wardrobe was. All I knew was that it was far larger on the inside than the outside, large enough to house a fairy kingdom of gods and talking beasts, of hidden kings and snowed in lampposts.

The stories of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series are in a certain sense pretty standard fare: a child living in unappealing and banal circumstances finds a doorway to a magical realm, has many adventures in said realm, then returns to find that life in the normal world is much enriched by the experience. It would be hard to find a more prototypical plot than this. Even so, Lewis’s series manages to stand out in a crowd of similar stories, and I suspect this is because he evoked a world that is lost, but which was very much real: the Middle Ages.

Being a scholar of Medieval literature by trade, Lewis was well-suited to the task of reviving a dead age. His book The Discarded Image is an introductory exploration of the way Medieval man viewed the world, which was as a subtly complex and interconnected system that hummed in a sort of clockwork harmony. It was a world rife with symbols and archetypes, with God at its source, and all his creatures working either against or with this source.

So of course modern fantasy writers hate it. Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman are the most recent detractors, vilifying Lewis’s books as being nothing more than religious propaganda. They are not entirely wrong. Lewis was hardly ashamed of his conversion to Anglicanism, publishing many books and essays on both his conversion and the theology of his new religion. When it came to writing fiction, Anglican-Protestant theology was a motivating force, as well. His Cosmic Trilogy is clearly theological in places, especially in Perelandra, which served as a “scientifiction” reimagining of Paradise Lost on another planet. The Narnia series is even more blatantly Christian in as much as it depicts Aslan, a talking lion who is not simply a Christ-figure or an allegory, but Christ himself.

So of course Tolkien hated it. Lewis’s Catholic friend and fellow writer could only accept Lewis’s books as allegorical works because of the theological problems that would arise with a literal intention. Lewis himself published an introductory study to Medieval allegory, The Allegory of Love, and he knew his own intentions well enough to know that he was not writing an allegory. The structure of the series, and many of the characters therein, are densely symbolic (cf. Planet Narnia by Michael Ward), as is Aslan’s leonine appearance, but the character himself is controversially straightforward.

Oddly enough, none of these controversies have diminished the series’ popularity. Children and young adults everywhere continue to read them, finding inside something too often lacking in today’s literature for young people: a sense of wonder. From Mr. Tumnus’s cozy home to the Green Lady’s cavern, from the deserts of Calormen to the edge of Aslan’s country, Narnia is an unceasing flow of delightful places and events. The popularity of the recent Narnia films proves that the series has legs in the modern world. Lewis would probably be the first to insist that one should read for delight rather than duty, and even his popular detractors can’t make the books unpleasurable to read, except for unhappy adults who insist on writing and reading propaganda of the opposing sort. I think we can expect Narnia to stick around for a long time.