John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 116
February 29, 2016
Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (Part three)
So, this part of my paper had two illustrations, neither of which I'm reposting here because both involve female nudity. The first is Wms' gynecomorphical map, which superimposes a nude female figure over a map of Europe; this forms the endpapers of Taliessin through Logres and has been reprinted many times since (e.g., in David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams). The second illustrates Wms' bondage poem and appeared in Heroes and Kings [p. 45] and so far as I know remained in obscurity until reproduced in Mythlore to accompany my essay. --JDR
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THE SECOND KEY: THE GYNECOMORPHICAL MAP(PRIVATE GEOGRAPHY)And here we come upon one of the great difficulties in reading Williams’s Arthurian poems: when he seems most firmly grounded in the real world he may well be off in what C.S. Lewis called “privatism” (Williams and the Arthuriad 188). Thus references to real-world geography and history and astronomy are usually ways in which the reader gets a grounding in the world of a story, but here taken literally they create nothing but a hopeless muddle. Hence the importance of the ‘Lost Letter’ in explaining some of Williams’s private vocabulary. Another piece that like the Lost Letter is external to the verse-cycle but crucial to understanding it can be found in what J.R.R. Tolkien dubbed Williams’s ‘gynecomorphical’ map (“Our Dear Charles Williams,” line 30). Drawn by staff artist Lynton Lamb, a colleague of Williams’s at Amen House, it formed the endpapers of Taliessin through Logres; Hadfield tells us that it was drawn carefully to Williams’s specifications (“exact direction”) and that both Williams and Lamb were “very pleased at the result” (152). The concept underlying this map was somewhat more subtle than its crude and unintentionally comical appearance would suggest. One of the cornerstones of Williams’s belief, as important to him as Escape, Recovery, and Consolation were to Tolkien’s thought, was what he called ‘Co-inherence.’ At its root this is the idea that we are all connected, so that all of humanity makes up a larger entity, almost like the Gaia theorem. Think of Donne’s “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” (Donne, Meditation XVII), but taken literally—except that, for Williams, the dead remain part of the communion, able to act and be acted upon (e.g., in the poem “Taliessin on the Death of Virgil” [TtL31–32] and the novel All Hallows’ Eve, one of whose main characters becomes a ghost just before the story starts). All Christendom, as Williams conceives it, is a single entity, which he analogized as being parallel to a (female) human body. [Note 11] And since any complex organism may have specialized cells to deal with specialized functions, he assigned to various parts of the body what he saw as appropriate roles, so that Williams can allegorically use reference to those body parts as code for the thing symbolized. Thus, when he wants to talk about sex, he inserts a reference to the Caucuses, or Caucasian girls; we hear quite a lot in the poems about the rounded bottom or curved base of empire. On those surprisingly rare occasions when he wants to evoke theology (specifically Scholasticism and the great theological colleges of the High Middle Ages), he mentions the breasts of Gaul, I think on the principle that theology is the ‘mother’s milk’ that nourishes faith (from a more puckish allegorist I’d have suspected some private joke about France being the boobs of the empire, but such seems not to be the case with Williams). The hands are crossed at Rome because for Williams the most important function of hands (evoked repeatedly in the poems as “heart-breaking manual acts”) is to perform the sacrament of transforming bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood during the mass. Some of these identifications seem arbitrary—why the right elbow of the Empire is at Cordova, in Moorish Spain (from whence come attacks against the Empire), while the left elbow is at some undifferentiated point up north of the Black Sea, I have no idea, nor why he should have placed the bung-hole of the Empire, the point of defecation, in the great Persian city of Ispahan (Williams seems to have really hated dualism). The most apparently arbitrary of them all, P’o-lu, court of the Headless Emperor, is also the most revealing, for we have two explanations for it: one, part of Williams’s mythic geography, which he shared with Lewis in the Lost Letter, and which is clearly specious, and the other deeply private, which Williams concealed from Lewis but which is essential to understanding Williams’s mythos; a point to which we’ll return. If the map with its allegorized human body seems strange, I suspect it’s because here Williams is being strongly influenced by his occult antecedents—and by its very definition occultism is hidden, secret, deliberately impenetrable to the non-initiate. It’s easy to forget that Williams was not just knowledgeable about the occult but an occultist, a practicing ceremonial magician who owned, and used, ritual robes, wand, and ceremonial sword (Hadfield 29, 31, 106). While it is true that he never belonged to the original Golden Dawn (which had splintered in 1903, when Williams was just a teenager, following a power struggle between W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley over control of the group), he was deeply involved in one of its successor groups, A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an explicitly Christianized variant of the Golden Dawn focused more on mysticism than ceremonial magic. [Note 12] Indeed, Roma King in his notes to Williams’s letters tells us that Williams always referred to Waite’s group as “the Golden Dawn” (To Michal from Serge 276). Williams was a dedicated and devoted long-time member of Waite’s Fellowship; there are even hints in R.A. Gilbert’s biography of Waite (Gilbert, Waite 148–150) that the latter may have had Williams in mind as his ultimate successor, to eventually ascend to become Master of the Fellowship. Instead, to Waite’s dismay Williams left Waite’s group in order to found his own Order, the Companions of the Co-inherence. [Note 13]
Those who have written on Williams have, with the notable exception of Gavin Ashenden, been reluctant to acknowledge his deep and abiding interest in the occult. Yet it is self-evident that Williams drew directly on this knowledge in his Arthurian cycle. For example, he uses astrology, lightly in “The Coming of Galahad” (cf. TtL 74), “The Ascent of the Spear” (TtL 49), and “The Calling of Taliessin” (RSS 17), but much more deeply in “Taliessin in the Rose-Garden” (RSS, esp. 25-28). Kabalism (the Sephirotic tree) informs “The Death of Palomides” (TtL 78 & 96), while some kind of palm-magic employing geometric symbology underlies the fifth section of “The Vision of Empire” (TtL9). [Note 14]
[image error]The most prevalent form of magic appearing in the Taliessin poems is a kind of tantric magic. Williams seems particularly drawn to scenes which describe a female initiate stripping naked and being stroked with a hazel rod by the (male) magician, who remains fully clothed. We have two such descriptions of spells being cast in this manner, the first in “The Calling of Taliessin,” in which it is Brisen, Merlin’s sister, who becomes nude while both Merlin and Taliessin remain fully clothed (RSS 17). The scene is echoed by another in “The Queen’s Servant,” in which it is one of the slave girls discussed above who disrobes to provide the nude body and Taliessin, who again remains fully clothed, who performs the spell (RSS 40–41). What are we to make of this? It’s probably best to admit it up front that there’s every reason to think Williams liked women’s naked bodies (he would not be the first English poet of whom this could be said). They appear not just on the gynecomorphical map (which, it must be pointed out, would have worked just as well, for purposes of symbology, if the human figure there had been fully clothed) but also in “The Queen’s Servant” (RSS 40–41), “The Calling of Taliessin” (RSS 17ff), and “Lamoracke’s Song to Morgause” (Heroes and Kings [H&K] [43]–[49]), the latter of which is illustrated. In particular, Williams shows a disconcerting interest in women’s bottoms. This appears not just in his poetry but carries over into real life: Hadfield tells the story of one disciple, a faithful attendee of Williams’s London night school lectures, whom he persuaded to come to his office before lectures, where he ordered her to bend over so that he could stroke her bottom with a ceremonial sword he kept in the office. [Note 15] When she objected, he replied “This is necessary for the poem.” This activity continued for several years, even after Williams had shifted his base of operations to Oxford—Hadfield quotes from an unpublished Williams letter in which he orders the same disciple to come to Oxford, specifying the cause: “I am stuck in the poem, come on Friday, tell me the train” (Hadfield 106). All this might be dismissed as an unreliable narrative if it were the only such account, but the anonymous disciple’s story is not the only such testimony, being echoed by Lois Lang-Sims’ account in Letters to Lalage of her own similar experiences (Lang-Sims 68). Both Lang-Sims and the other woman describe these encounters as “a ritual,” and Lang-Sims explains their purpose: Williams found that he could sublimate sexual stimulation into poetry (69). Thus by summoning young women to his office he could fondle them in private, become aroused, send them away without consummating that arousal, and write. This pattern is followed closely in “Lamoracke’s Song to Morgause,” perhaps Williams’s most surprising poem, found in the first book in his Arthurian cycle, Heroes and Kings [1930]. This little-known piece describes the bondage play between Arthur’s sister and Percivale’s brother; here is a representative excerpt: I Lamoracke have bound to-day the queen my mistress in our play. Though she contended, with white hands, I have driven her courage into flight and made her body fast with bands, doing her arrogance despite, till the queen, till the queen was fain to pray to be released again [...] —Heroes and Kings [43] [image error]I would say ‘and so forth’, but the most significant thing about the poem is that at this point, having stripped the queen naked and tied her down on the bed, helpless, her lover (still fully clothed, as we see from the woodcut) sits down, picks up his harp, and sings a song to his captive audience—a song inspired by her naked body and the foreplay they had just shared, whose consummation is deferred while the knight transforms that energy into composition. In short, here we are seeing in poetic form a ritual we know Williams frequently resorted to himself, albeit in more muted form in real life. And, lest we think this is all metaphoric, like the naked woman’s body on the gynecomorphic map, Williams chose to have this piece illustrated by a woodcut that shows the fully clad knight bending over the naked bound figure of the queen sprawled upon the bed. There’s a lot I could say about this poem, and what it says about Williams, but I think the essential point is simply this: I would say that a man may either lay claim to being the great Christian theological poet of his time, writing an epic cycle about the failure of the Second Coming, when Arthur and his court missed their chance to transform the world via the Grail. Or he can write, and publish, illustrated bondage poetry. But not both.
Notes11 Williams may have been inspired here by Thomas Hardy, who in a passage Williams quotes approvingly† from The Dynasts compares the map of Europe to a human body: . . . Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. (Poetry at Present 15) †Williams says of the passage in which these lines occur that it “contains some of the greatest sentences that Hardy has written” (ibid.) 12 Waite is best remembered today, not as the founder of an occult order nor as the best friend of writer Arthur Machen, but for having created the modern tarot deck, best known as the ‘Rider-Waite’ Tarot. 13 Hadfield describes the founding of this Order in 1939, prints its Credo (173–174), and even names several members: Margaret Douglas, Ursula Grundy, Phyllis Potter, Charles Hadfield, Thelma Shuttleworth, and herself (217). Joan Walsh and Anne Renwick may also have been later-day members (Hadfield is vague on this point), while Lois Lang- Sims joined towards the end of Williams’s life and was expelled a few months later (in 1943–44). Note however that this is only the group’s formal (re)organization: it had existed in less formalized form for perhaps a decade and more by this point, very likely from the time he left Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in 1928. Although this is only speculation on my part, I suspect Williams’s reluctance to formalize the group (described by Hadfield, 173), derived from his wish to maintain absolute power and the greatest possible degree of secrecy. He had learned the lesson of MacGregor Mathers and Westcott, founders of the Golden Dawn, that to create a structure and organization was to risk losing control over said organization. So long as meetings between members were a one-on-one affair arranged entirely by Williams himself, he had absolute power; putting members in touch with one another risked their taking action on their own initiative. 14 Williams writes the planes of palms, the mid-points of hid cones, opened in Lombardy, the cone’s point in Rome [...] Finger-nails, weaklings of seedtime, scratched the soil till by iron nails the toil was finished in the time of our need, the sublime circle of the cone’s bottom . . . the heart-breaking manual acts of the Pope. If this is difficult, then Williams’s gloss of this passage finds him at his most incoherent: The cones are more difficult to explain. The delicate and sensitive palms are conceived as full of points from which cones flow down—into? into the substance of our being. The mass of the points makes up the activities and passivities of the hands, for which Rome stands; which is an image of Byzantium as the hands of the whole being. The nails are (i) evolutionary and agricultural (ii) amorous (iii) architectural. The ‘circle’ at the bottom of our substance is Christ; ‘seed-springing surrender’ the Fructiferous Passion. The nails then are the actual nails. (Answers for C.S. Lewis, CW MS-2; rpt Gnomon 41 and in part in Various Hands 15) 15 At first glance, the incredible claim that Williams kept a ceremonial sword in his office would seem to cast doubt on this account. However, R.A. Gilbert’s history of the Golden Dawn explains that while each initiate in that Order was required to consecrate his or her robe, wand, and sword, the ‘sword’ was typically the size of a knife (Gilbert 63). If we assume Waite carried this practice over into his Rectified Order and later Fellowship, then it’s quite possible that Williams’s ‘sword’ was no larger than a letter opener and might easily have been kept in a desk drawer.
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THE SECOND KEY: THE GYNECOMORPHICAL MAP(PRIVATE GEOGRAPHY)And here we come upon one of the great difficulties in reading Williams’s Arthurian poems: when he seems most firmly grounded in the real world he may well be off in what C.S. Lewis called “privatism” (Williams and the Arthuriad 188). Thus references to real-world geography and history and astronomy are usually ways in which the reader gets a grounding in the world of a story, but here taken literally they create nothing but a hopeless muddle. Hence the importance of the ‘Lost Letter’ in explaining some of Williams’s private vocabulary. Another piece that like the Lost Letter is external to the verse-cycle but crucial to understanding it can be found in what J.R.R. Tolkien dubbed Williams’s ‘gynecomorphical’ map (“Our Dear Charles Williams,” line 30). Drawn by staff artist Lynton Lamb, a colleague of Williams’s at Amen House, it formed the endpapers of Taliessin through Logres; Hadfield tells us that it was drawn carefully to Williams’s specifications (“exact direction”) and that both Williams and Lamb were “very pleased at the result” (152). The concept underlying this map was somewhat more subtle than its crude and unintentionally comical appearance would suggest. One of the cornerstones of Williams’s belief, as important to him as Escape, Recovery, and Consolation were to Tolkien’s thought, was what he called ‘Co-inherence.’ At its root this is the idea that we are all connected, so that all of humanity makes up a larger entity, almost like the Gaia theorem. Think of Donne’s “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” (Donne, Meditation XVII), but taken literally—except that, for Williams, the dead remain part of the communion, able to act and be acted upon (e.g., in the poem “Taliessin on the Death of Virgil” [TtL31–32] and the novel All Hallows’ Eve, one of whose main characters becomes a ghost just before the story starts). All Christendom, as Williams conceives it, is a single entity, which he analogized as being parallel to a (female) human body. [Note 11] And since any complex organism may have specialized cells to deal with specialized functions, he assigned to various parts of the body what he saw as appropriate roles, so that Williams can allegorically use reference to those body parts as code for the thing symbolized. Thus, when he wants to talk about sex, he inserts a reference to the Caucuses, or Caucasian girls; we hear quite a lot in the poems about the rounded bottom or curved base of empire. On those surprisingly rare occasions when he wants to evoke theology (specifically Scholasticism and the great theological colleges of the High Middle Ages), he mentions the breasts of Gaul, I think on the principle that theology is the ‘mother’s milk’ that nourishes faith (from a more puckish allegorist I’d have suspected some private joke about France being the boobs of the empire, but such seems not to be the case with Williams). The hands are crossed at Rome because for Williams the most important function of hands (evoked repeatedly in the poems as “heart-breaking manual acts”) is to perform the sacrament of transforming bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood during the mass. Some of these identifications seem arbitrary—why the right elbow of the Empire is at Cordova, in Moorish Spain (from whence come attacks against the Empire), while the left elbow is at some undifferentiated point up north of the Black Sea, I have no idea, nor why he should have placed the bung-hole of the Empire, the point of defecation, in the great Persian city of Ispahan (Williams seems to have really hated dualism). The most apparently arbitrary of them all, P’o-lu, court of the Headless Emperor, is also the most revealing, for we have two explanations for it: one, part of Williams’s mythic geography, which he shared with Lewis in the Lost Letter, and which is clearly specious, and the other deeply private, which Williams concealed from Lewis but which is essential to understanding Williams’s mythos; a point to which we’ll return. If the map with its allegorized human body seems strange, I suspect it’s because here Williams is being strongly influenced by his occult antecedents—and by its very definition occultism is hidden, secret, deliberately impenetrable to the non-initiate. It’s easy to forget that Williams was not just knowledgeable about the occult but an occultist, a practicing ceremonial magician who owned, and used, ritual robes, wand, and ceremonial sword (Hadfield 29, 31, 106). While it is true that he never belonged to the original Golden Dawn (which had splintered in 1903, when Williams was just a teenager, following a power struggle between W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley over control of the group), he was deeply involved in one of its successor groups, A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, an explicitly Christianized variant of the Golden Dawn focused more on mysticism than ceremonial magic. [Note 12] Indeed, Roma King in his notes to Williams’s letters tells us that Williams always referred to Waite’s group as “the Golden Dawn” (To Michal from Serge 276). Williams was a dedicated and devoted long-time member of Waite’s Fellowship; there are even hints in R.A. Gilbert’s biography of Waite (Gilbert, Waite 148–150) that the latter may have had Williams in mind as his ultimate successor, to eventually ascend to become Master of the Fellowship. Instead, to Waite’s dismay Williams left Waite’s group in order to found his own Order, the Companions of the Co-inherence. [Note 13]
Those who have written on Williams have, with the notable exception of Gavin Ashenden, been reluctant to acknowledge his deep and abiding interest in the occult. Yet it is self-evident that Williams drew directly on this knowledge in his Arthurian cycle. For example, he uses astrology, lightly in “The Coming of Galahad” (cf. TtL 74), “The Ascent of the Spear” (TtL 49), and “The Calling of Taliessin” (RSS 17), but much more deeply in “Taliessin in the Rose-Garden” (RSS, esp. 25-28). Kabalism (the Sephirotic tree) informs “The Death of Palomides” (TtL 78 & 96), while some kind of palm-magic employing geometric symbology underlies the fifth section of “The Vision of Empire” (TtL9). [Note 14]
[image error]The most prevalent form of magic appearing in the Taliessin poems is a kind of tantric magic. Williams seems particularly drawn to scenes which describe a female initiate stripping naked and being stroked with a hazel rod by the (male) magician, who remains fully clothed. We have two such descriptions of spells being cast in this manner, the first in “The Calling of Taliessin,” in which it is Brisen, Merlin’s sister, who becomes nude while both Merlin and Taliessin remain fully clothed (RSS 17). The scene is echoed by another in “The Queen’s Servant,” in which it is one of the slave girls discussed above who disrobes to provide the nude body and Taliessin, who again remains fully clothed, who performs the spell (RSS 40–41). What are we to make of this? It’s probably best to admit it up front that there’s every reason to think Williams liked women’s naked bodies (he would not be the first English poet of whom this could be said). They appear not just on the gynecomorphical map (which, it must be pointed out, would have worked just as well, for purposes of symbology, if the human figure there had been fully clothed) but also in “The Queen’s Servant” (RSS 40–41), “The Calling of Taliessin” (RSS 17ff), and “Lamoracke’s Song to Morgause” (Heroes and Kings [H&K] [43]–[49]), the latter of which is illustrated. In particular, Williams shows a disconcerting interest in women’s bottoms. This appears not just in his poetry but carries over into real life: Hadfield tells the story of one disciple, a faithful attendee of Williams’s London night school lectures, whom he persuaded to come to his office before lectures, where he ordered her to bend over so that he could stroke her bottom with a ceremonial sword he kept in the office. [Note 15] When she objected, he replied “This is necessary for the poem.” This activity continued for several years, even after Williams had shifted his base of operations to Oxford—Hadfield quotes from an unpublished Williams letter in which he orders the same disciple to come to Oxford, specifying the cause: “I am stuck in the poem, come on Friday, tell me the train” (Hadfield 106). All this might be dismissed as an unreliable narrative if it were the only such account, but the anonymous disciple’s story is not the only such testimony, being echoed by Lois Lang-Sims’ account in Letters to Lalage of her own similar experiences (Lang-Sims 68). Both Lang-Sims and the other woman describe these encounters as “a ritual,” and Lang-Sims explains their purpose: Williams found that he could sublimate sexual stimulation into poetry (69). Thus by summoning young women to his office he could fondle them in private, become aroused, send them away without consummating that arousal, and write. This pattern is followed closely in “Lamoracke’s Song to Morgause,” perhaps Williams’s most surprising poem, found in the first book in his Arthurian cycle, Heroes and Kings [1930]. This little-known piece describes the bondage play between Arthur’s sister and Percivale’s brother; here is a representative excerpt: I Lamoracke have bound to-day the queen my mistress in our play. Though she contended, with white hands, I have driven her courage into flight and made her body fast with bands, doing her arrogance despite, till the queen, till the queen was fain to pray to be released again [...] —Heroes and Kings [43] [image error]I would say ‘and so forth’, but the most significant thing about the poem is that at this point, having stripped the queen naked and tied her down on the bed, helpless, her lover (still fully clothed, as we see from the woodcut) sits down, picks up his harp, and sings a song to his captive audience—a song inspired by her naked body and the foreplay they had just shared, whose consummation is deferred while the knight transforms that energy into composition. In short, here we are seeing in poetic form a ritual we know Williams frequently resorted to himself, albeit in more muted form in real life. And, lest we think this is all metaphoric, like the naked woman’s body on the gynecomorphic map, Williams chose to have this piece illustrated by a woodcut that shows the fully clad knight bending over the naked bound figure of the queen sprawled upon the bed. There’s a lot I could say about this poem, and what it says about Williams, but I think the essential point is simply this: I would say that a man may either lay claim to being the great Christian theological poet of his time, writing an epic cycle about the failure of the Second Coming, when Arthur and his court missed their chance to transform the world via the Grail. Or he can write, and publish, illustrated bondage poetry. But not both.
Notes11 Williams may have been inspired here by Thomas Hardy, who in a passage Williams quotes approvingly† from The Dynasts compares the map of Europe to a human body: . . . Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps shaping like a backbone, and the branching mountain-chains like ribs, the peninsular plateau of Spain forming a head. (Poetry at Present 15) †Williams says of the passage in which these lines occur that it “contains some of the greatest sentences that Hardy has written” (ibid.) 12 Waite is best remembered today, not as the founder of an occult order nor as the best friend of writer Arthur Machen, but for having created the modern tarot deck, best known as the ‘Rider-Waite’ Tarot. 13 Hadfield describes the founding of this Order in 1939, prints its Credo (173–174), and even names several members: Margaret Douglas, Ursula Grundy, Phyllis Potter, Charles Hadfield, Thelma Shuttleworth, and herself (217). Joan Walsh and Anne Renwick may also have been later-day members (Hadfield is vague on this point), while Lois Lang- Sims joined towards the end of Williams’s life and was expelled a few months later (in 1943–44). Note however that this is only the group’s formal (re)organization: it had existed in less formalized form for perhaps a decade and more by this point, very likely from the time he left Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in 1928. Although this is only speculation on my part, I suspect Williams’s reluctance to formalize the group (described by Hadfield, 173), derived from his wish to maintain absolute power and the greatest possible degree of secrecy. He had learned the lesson of MacGregor Mathers and Westcott, founders of the Golden Dawn, that to create a structure and organization was to risk losing control over said organization. So long as meetings between members were a one-on-one affair arranged entirely by Williams himself, he had absolute power; putting members in touch with one another risked their taking action on their own initiative. 14 Williams writes the planes of palms, the mid-points of hid cones, opened in Lombardy, the cone’s point in Rome [...] Finger-nails, weaklings of seedtime, scratched the soil till by iron nails the toil was finished in the time of our need, the sublime circle of the cone’s bottom . . . the heart-breaking manual acts of the Pope. If this is difficult, then Williams’s gloss of this passage finds him at his most incoherent: The cones are more difficult to explain. The delicate and sensitive palms are conceived as full of points from which cones flow down—into? into the substance of our being. The mass of the points makes up the activities and passivities of the hands, for which Rome stands; which is an image of Byzantium as the hands of the whole being. The nails are (i) evolutionary and agricultural (ii) amorous (iii) architectural. The ‘circle’ at the bottom of our substance is Christ; ‘seed-springing surrender’ the Fructiferous Passion. The nails then are the actual nails. (Answers for C.S. Lewis, CW MS-2; rpt Gnomon 41 and in part in Various Hands 15) 15 At first glance, the incredible claim that Williams kept a ceremonial sword in his office would seem to cast doubt on this account. However, R.A. Gilbert’s history of the Golden Dawn explains that while each initiate in that Order was required to consecrate his or her robe, wand, and sword, the ‘sword’ was typically the size of a knife (Gilbert 63). If we assume Waite carried this practice over into his Rectified Order and later Fellowship, then it’s quite possible that Williams’s ‘sword’ was no larger than a letter opener and might easily have been kept in a desk drawer.
February 28, 2016
Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (Part two)
. . . and here's part two of the article, the section that deals most directly with the Lost Letter.
--JDR
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THE FIRST KEY: ANSWERS TO C. S. LEWIS(PRIVATE DEFINITIONS) Comparing the full letter, as preserved by Douglas and Hunt, with those excerpts Lewis chose to preserve and use gives us a window into Lewis’s re-shaping of his friend’s legacy. For one thing, we discover how little of the original letter Lewis thought worth preserving: his quotes and paraphrase total only about 347 words out of an original total of about 3471, or a mere ten percent of the whole. Also, seeing the excerpts used in Williams and the Arthuriad within their original context highlights what aspects of the work Lewis focused attention upon and what aspects he ignored, misunderstood, or suppressed. Unfortunately, the form this Letter took does not readily make for presentation here: Answers to C. S. Lewis is not another Letter to Waldman, setting out at length a private mythology and the connections between its various parts. [Note 7] Rather, it’s clear that Lewis had written Williams a (lengthy) letter asking specific questions, poem by poem, that had arisen during his close reading of Taliessin through Logres, the middle of Williams’s three Arthurian collections. It’s important to note that this Letter has nothing to say about The Region of the Summer Stars, as yet unwritten, nor The Advent of Galahad, which remained unpublished, nor Heroes and Kings, the earliest of the three published books in the cycle, which curiously enough there is no evidence Lewis ever read. And, as a caveat, Lewis tells us in some cases that a particular note he reproduces is somewhat abridged or recast (e.g., Williams and the Arthuriad 99); this turns out to be quite true and reveals that Lewis is skilled at the art of paraphrase. However, passages Lewis represents as direct quotes are, on comparison with Williams’s original, sometimes revealed to be paraphrase as well. [Note 8] Thus it’s evident that Lewis valued (some of) the ideas, but not the exact wording, of Williams’s glosses, and that all passages in Williams and the Arthuriadpurportedly in Williams’s own words should be approached with caution by anyone without access to the original Letter: sometimes the reader is getting not Williams directly but Williams rephrased and refocused by Lewis—in the word of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewisified (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 89).The best way, I think, to convey some sense of Answers to C.S. Lewis is to give a few examples of its contents, both to emphasize its importance as a key to Williams’s thought and to highlight Lewis’s selectiveness. Aside from a general opening summarizing some major points, the bulk of the Letter takes the form of glosses. Each entry opens with a name or phrase and then expounds upon it: sometimes briefly, sometimes at length. Sometimes undue brevity renders the answer opaque, since we do not know the specific question Lewis was asking, merely the poem or passage concerned. Thus, whatever query Lewis posed about the poem “Mount Badon” (Taliessin through Logres [TtL] 16–18), Williams simply replied Badon: yes. —providing an answer that is brief, unambiguous, and unhelpful. There are a handful of such entries, whose main value is that they show Lewis did apparently apprehend a good deal of Williams’s symbolism on his own.Usually, though, Williams expanded upon such affirmations. Thus in the entry on “The Star of Percivale” (TtL 46–47), Williams writes yes, the same girl, & the same morning, I think, rather later. Or the next. Clearly, Lewis had asked if the Caucasian slave-girl who falls in love with Taliessin (the figure in the poem-cycle who stands for Williams himself) in this poem is the same slave-girl whom Taliessin finds sitting in the stocks for striking a fellow servant in the next poem, “The Ascent of the Spear” (TtL 48– 50). The two figures are certainly similar, but there’s no way we could have known for sure it was the same person, since poet-worshipping slave-girls are a recurrent motif moving through Williams’s Arthuriad; they appear in at least two other poems in this book, plus two more out of the eight in Region of the Summer Stars. [Note 9] Other times, Williams’s answers raise as many difficulties as they solve. Thus, he explains four different layers of symbolism represented by ‘Islam,’ which dominates the southern half of his gynecomorphical map, telling Lewis that Islam is (a) Deism (b) Manichaenism (c) heavy morality (d) Islam [Note 10] —Thus, Williams tells Lewis that his primary meaning for ‘Islam’ is to equate it with Deism; that is, the idea dominant during the 18th-century Enlightenment that our world was made by a remote creator-god who has entirely withdrawn and plays no part in our daily world (as opposed to The Emperor in Byzantium, who in Williams’s myth is God Himself, sending out ‘logothetes’ [administrators] and ‘nuntii’ [envoys] who are not just messengers but literal angels). This helps explain Palomides’ logical and detached highly rational mind, and his expressing his passion for Iseult in geometrical terms (“The Coming of Palomides,” TtL 33–37). But the equation of Islam and Deism would come as a surprise, to say the least, to most Muslims, or any non- Muslim student of that religion. Furthermore, it seems entirely at odds with the second layer of meaning, since Deism and Manichaenism are starkly different things. That Williams connects Islam with Manichaenism (the idea that our world is a battleground between two great powers, one good and the other evil) explains his otherwise baffling reference in “The Son of Lancelot” (TtL 57) to “iconoclastic heretical licentiates of Manes” preaching war against the Empire (that is, Christendom) from pulpits in Cordova. But again this identification bears no recognizable resemblance at all to real Islam, whose caliphs suppressed Manichaeism wherever they encountered it. The third layer of symbolism, using ‘Islam’ as shorthand for any repressive religion with a strict code of conduct, is more familiar, being alive and well in our time, unfortunately. And finally and fourthly, to paraphrase Dr. Freud, sometimes ‘Islam’ is just Islam—which is good to know, but unhelpful. The fourth meaning is the obvious one any reader would assume, and the third layer is not that hard to guess at simply through reading the poems. But those first and second layers are, I would say, difficult to tease out, and I doubt that it’s possible to combine all four into a coherent whole (though Lewis tries manfully, but I think unsuccessfully, in Williams and the Arthuriad, where he equates Williams’s Islam with ‘all religions that are afraid of matter and afraid of mystery’; 124).For all practical purposes, I think the lesson we should take from this and similar glosses is that it’s best to think of ‘Islam’ as it appears in Williams’s Arthuriad as a composite fictional religion created to hold up in contrast to his own idealized Christianity, assuming chameleon-like whatever aspect of non- Christianity he needs at the time. The simple truth is that Williams has no interest in actual Islam (elsewhere he praises the crusades, likening them to the Allied liberation of France from Nazi control—The Figure of Arthur 60–61) any more than he cares about the actual history of the Byzantine Empire or Dark-Age Britain. The historical situation represented both by the map accompanying Taliessin through Logres and events in the poems are Williams’s mythic invention: aspects of his subcreated mythic world, and as such do not correspond to real-world history, any more than do the usual knights-in-armor in Malory et al. that we usually associate with the names Lancelot, Guinevere, and Galahad (in any case, a historical Arthur would have lived and died a century before Mohammed proclaimed Islam). [image error]Or, to pick a simpler example, Williams at one point refers to Jupiter and its two moons (“The Coming of Galahad,” TtL 74). Lewis simply remarks in passing “Williams seems to have forgotten that [Jupiter] has four” (171). But it’s far more likely that Williams knew and didn’t care: if the symbolism in the poem requires Jupiter to have only two moons, then in Williams’s world two moons Jupiter will have. Compared with this, it only seems oddly quirky that Williams would identify the Great Red Spot on Jupiter with the Dolorous Blow: Pelles [the Fisher-King] bleeds below Jupiter’s red-pierced planet. (“Taliessin in the Rose-Garden,” Region of the Summer Stars [RSS] 27)
Or, as Lewis helpfully explicates (a good example of his ability to elucidate Williams’s more obscure lines), “Jupiter, the planet of Kingship [...] becomes, like the wounded King Pelles, another ectype of the Divine King [Christ] wounded on Calvary” (Williams and the Arthuriad 150).
NOTES
7 Tolkien’s lengthy letter to Milton Waldman, reproduced in part as the preface to the second edition of The Silmarillion.8 Thus Lewis writes on p. 99 of Williams and the ArthuriadA note in my own hand (but it is either transcribed or abridged from a letter of Williams’s) runs as follows: ‘Broceliande, West of Logres, off Cornwall; both a forest and a sea—a sea-wood. It joins the sea of the Antipodes. Beyond it (at least beyond a certain part of it) is Carbonek; then the open sea; then Sarras. A place of making, home of Nimue. From it the huge shapes emerge, the whole matter of the form of Byzantium—and all this is felt in the beloved.’ The passage as Williams wrote it runs as follows; I have highlighted the words and phrases picked up by Lewis in his paraphrase: Broceliande is somewhere round Cornwall and Devon, to the west of Logres. It is regard both as a forest and as a sea—a sea-wood; in this sense it joins the sea of the antipodes which lies among its roots. Carbonek is beyond it, or at least beyond a certain part of it; C. stands between B. and the full open sea, beyond which is Sarras. Mystically it is the ‘making’ of things. Nimue is the Nature of Creation as the mother of Merlin (Time) and Brisen (Space); she is the source of movement and of distance (p. 77).† She is almost the same state represented by the Emperor’s Court, but more vast, dim, and aboriginal. The huge shapes emerge from B.; and the whole matter of the form of the Empire. And all this is felt in the beloved. (this is reproduced almost verbatim in “Notes on the Arthurian Myth” 179 and in Gnomon 41-42) †[JDR Note:] the reference is to the next to last stanza of “The Departure of Merlin” in Taliessin through Logres. It will be seen that Lewis’s skillful paraphrase clarifies the natures and relative positions of various major sites, while the information about Williams’s idiosyncratic family tree of Nimue as the mother of Merlin and his invention of Brisen, Merlin’s sister, as well as these magical siblings’ embodiment of Space and Time, respectively, appears elsewhere in Lewis’s commentary (see Williams and the Arthuriad 102). By contrast, Lewis presents the following as a direct quote from Williams’s letter (Williams and the Arthuriad 178): According to Williams’s note ‘For them (i.e. Galahad and his companions) all that was Logres and the Empire has become this flight of doves. Galahad as a symbol of Christ now has necessity of being in himself.’ However, what Williams actually wrote is slightly different; again I have highlighted the parts taken verbatim from Williams’s Letter in Lewis’s version: [...] from the point of view of the lords, Logres is dissolving behind them (although Bors is to return); all that was Logres & the Empire has become the flight of doves driving the ship on its way; at the point where Galahad is so united with Christ that he has almost a necessity of being in himself; doctrinally heretical, I fear (reprinted with only minor changes in Gnomon 45) As will be seen, this is skillful paraphrase, but paraphrase nonetheless, and in this case wrongly presented as direct quotation. And, just as significantly, Lewis has quietly excised Williams’s cheerful admission of heresy.
9 “The Sister of Percivale” (TtL 51–53), where Taliessin enjoys watching the body of a Caucasian slave-girl as she goes about her work drawing water; “The Coming of Galahad” (TtL 69–74), where a favored slave she asks an insightful question which Taliessin evasively answers; “The Departure of Dindrane” (RSS 29–33), in which the slave rejects freedom in order to choose a lifetime of slavery with Taliessin as her master; and “The Queen’s Servant” (Region of the Summer Stars [RSS] 39–42), in which a slave girl (it is unclear whether it is the same or another) is unwillingly freed and forced to leave Taliessin’s service. That Williams romanticized slavery is evident not just from these poems but from his expressing a wish, in a letter to his wife, that he could personally own a slave (To Michal from Serge 220). 10 Also reproduced almost verbatim in “The Arthurian Myth” 178 and in Gnomon 40, except that the latter substitutes “Theism” for “Deism”; the manuscripts differ as to which reading is correct. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
More (Part Three: The Second Key) to follow tomorrow -- JDR
--JDR
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THE FIRST KEY: ANSWERS TO C. S. LEWIS(PRIVATE DEFINITIONS) Comparing the full letter, as preserved by Douglas and Hunt, with those excerpts Lewis chose to preserve and use gives us a window into Lewis’s re-shaping of his friend’s legacy. For one thing, we discover how little of the original letter Lewis thought worth preserving: his quotes and paraphrase total only about 347 words out of an original total of about 3471, or a mere ten percent of the whole. Also, seeing the excerpts used in Williams and the Arthuriad within their original context highlights what aspects of the work Lewis focused attention upon and what aspects he ignored, misunderstood, or suppressed. Unfortunately, the form this Letter took does not readily make for presentation here: Answers to C. S. Lewis is not another Letter to Waldman, setting out at length a private mythology and the connections between its various parts. [Note 7] Rather, it’s clear that Lewis had written Williams a (lengthy) letter asking specific questions, poem by poem, that had arisen during his close reading of Taliessin through Logres, the middle of Williams’s three Arthurian collections. It’s important to note that this Letter has nothing to say about The Region of the Summer Stars, as yet unwritten, nor The Advent of Galahad, which remained unpublished, nor Heroes and Kings, the earliest of the three published books in the cycle, which curiously enough there is no evidence Lewis ever read. And, as a caveat, Lewis tells us in some cases that a particular note he reproduces is somewhat abridged or recast (e.g., Williams and the Arthuriad 99); this turns out to be quite true and reveals that Lewis is skilled at the art of paraphrase. However, passages Lewis represents as direct quotes are, on comparison with Williams’s original, sometimes revealed to be paraphrase as well. [Note 8] Thus it’s evident that Lewis valued (some of) the ideas, but not the exact wording, of Williams’s glosses, and that all passages in Williams and the Arthuriadpurportedly in Williams’s own words should be approached with caution by anyone without access to the original Letter: sometimes the reader is getting not Williams directly but Williams rephrased and refocused by Lewis—in the word of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewisified (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 89).The best way, I think, to convey some sense of Answers to C.S. Lewis is to give a few examples of its contents, both to emphasize its importance as a key to Williams’s thought and to highlight Lewis’s selectiveness. Aside from a general opening summarizing some major points, the bulk of the Letter takes the form of glosses. Each entry opens with a name or phrase and then expounds upon it: sometimes briefly, sometimes at length. Sometimes undue brevity renders the answer opaque, since we do not know the specific question Lewis was asking, merely the poem or passage concerned. Thus, whatever query Lewis posed about the poem “Mount Badon” (Taliessin through Logres [TtL] 16–18), Williams simply replied Badon: yes. —providing an answer that is brief, unambiguous, and unhelpful. There are a handful of such entries, whose main value is that they show Lewis did apparently apprehend a good deal of Williams’s symbolism on his own.Usually, though, Williams expanded upon such affirmations. Thus in the entry on “The Star of Percivale” (TtL 46–47), Williams writes yes, the same girl, & the same morning, I think, rather later. Or the next. Clearly, Lewis had asked if the Caucasian slave-girl who falls in love with Taliessin (the figure in the poem-cycle who stands for Williams himself) in this poem is the same slave-girl whom Taliessin finds sitting in the stocks for striking a fellow servant in the next poem, “The Ascent of the Spear” (TtL 48– 50). The two figures are certainly similar, but there’s no way we could have known for sure it was the same person, since poet-worshipping slave-girls are a recurrent motif moving through Williams’s Arthuriad; they appear in at least two other poems in this book, plus two more out of the eight in Region of the Summer Stars. [Note 9] Other times, Williams’s answers raise as many difficulties as they solve. Thus, he explains four different layers of symbolism represented by ‘Islam,’ which dominates the southern half of his gynecomorphical map, telling Lewis that Islam is (a) Deism (b) Manichaenism (c) heavy morality (d) Islam [Note 10] —Thus, Williams tells Lewis that his primary meaning for ‘Islam’ is to equate it with Deism; that is, the idea dominant during the 18th-century Enlightenment that our world was made by a remote creator-god who has entirely withdrawn and plays no part in our daily world (as opposed to The Emperor in Byzantium, who in Williams’s myth is God Himself, sending out ‘logothetes’ [administrators] and ‘nuntii’ [envoys] who are not just messengers but literal angels). This helps explain Palomides’ logical and detached highly rational mind, and his expressing his passion for Iseult in geometrical terms (“The Coming of Palomides,” TtL 33–37). But the equation of Islam and Deism would come as a surprise, to say the least, to most Muslims, or any non- Muslim student of that religion. Furthermore, it seems entirely at odds with the second layer of meaning, since Deism and Manichaenism are starkly different things. That Williams connects Islam with Manichaenism (the idea that our world is a battleground between two great powers, one good and the other evil) explains his otherwise baffling reference in “The Son of Lancelot” (TtL 57) to “iconoclastic heretical licentiates of Manes” preaching war against the Empire (that is, Christendom) from pulpits in Cordova. But again this identification bears no recognizable resemblance at all to real Islam, whose caliphs suppressed Manichaeism wherever they encountered it. The third layer of symbolism, using ‘Islam’ as shorthand for any repressive religion with a strict code of conduct, is more familiar, being alive and well in our time, unfortunately. And finally and fourthly, to paraphrase Dr. Freud, sometimes ‘Islam’ is just Islam—which is good to know, but unhelpful. The fourth meaning is the obvious one any reader would assume, and the third layer is not that hard to guess at simply through reading the poems. But those first and second layers are, I would say, difficult to tease out, and I doubt that it’s possible to combine all four into a coherent whole (though Lewis tries manfully, but I think unsuccessfully, in Williams and the Arthuriad, where he equates Williams’s Islam with ‘all religions that are afraid of matter and afraid of mystery’; 124).For all practical purposes, I think the lesson we should take from this and similar glosses is that it’s best to think of ‘Islam’ as it appears in Williams’s Arthuriad as a composite fictional religion created to hold up in contrast to his own idealized Christianity, assuming chameleon-like whatever aspect of non- Christianity he needs at the time. The simple truth is that Williams has no interest in actual Islam (elsewhere he praises the crusades, likening them to the Allied liberation of France from Nazi control—The Figure of Arthur 60–61) any more than he cares about the actual history of the Byzantine Empire or Dark-Age Britain. The historical situation represented both by the map accompanying Taliessin through Logres and events in the poems are Williams’s mythic invention: aspects of his subcreated mythic world, and as such do not correspond to real-world history, any more than do the usual knights-in-armor in Malory et al. that we usually associate with the names Lancelot, Guinevere, and Galahad (in any case, a historical Arthur would have lived and died a century before Mohammed proclaimed Islam). [image error]Or, to pick a simpler example, Williams at one point refers to Jupiter and its two moons (“The Coming of Galahad,” TtL 74). Lewis simply remarks in passing “Williams seems to have forgotten that [Jupiter] has four” (171). But it’s far more likely that Williams knew and didn’t care: if the symbolism in the poem requires Jupiter to have only two moons, then in Williams’s world two moons Jupiter will have. Compared with this, it only seems oddly quirky that Williams would identify the Great Red Spot on Jupiter with the Dolorous Blow: Pelles [the Fisher-King] bleeds below Jupiter’s red-pierced planet. (“Taliessin in the Rose-Garden,” Region of the Summer Stars [RSS] 27)
Or, as Lewis helpfully explicates (a good example of his ability to elucidate Williams’s more obscure lines), “Jupiter, the planet of Kingship [...] becomes, like the wounded King Pelles, another ectype of the Divine King [Christ] wounded on Calvary” (Williams and the Arthuriad 150).
NOTES
7 Tolkien’s lengthy letter to Milton Waldman, reproduced in part as the preface to the second edition of The Silmarillion.8 Thus Lewis writes on p. 99 of Williams and the ArthuriadA note in my own hand (but it is either transcribed or abridged from a letter of Williams’s) runs as follows: ‘Broceliande, West of Logres, off Cornwall; both a forest and a sea—a sea-wood. It joins the sea of the Antipodes. Beyond it (at least beyond a certain part of it) is Carbonek; then the open sea; then Sarras. A place of making, home of Nimue. From it the huge shapes emerge, the whole matter of the form of Byzantium—and all this is felt in the beloved.’ The passage as Williams wrote it runs as follows; I have highlighted the words and phrases picked up by Lewis in his paraphrase: Broceliande is somewhere round Cornwall and Devon, to the west of Logres. It is regard both as a forest and as a sea—a sea-wood; in this sense it joins the sea of the antipodes which lies among its roots. Carbonek is beyond it, or at least beyond a certain part of it; C. stands between B. and the full open sea, beyond which is Sarras. Mystically it is the ‘making’ of things. Nimue is the Nature of Creation as the mother of Merlin (Time) and Brisen (Space); she is the source of movement and of distance (p. 77).† She is almost the same state represented by the Emperor’s Court, but more vast, dim, and aboriginal. The huge shapes emerge from B.; and the whole matter of the form of the Empire. And all this is felt in the beloved. (this is reproduced almost verbatim in “Notes on the Arthurian Myth” 179 and in Gnomon 41-42) †[JDR Note:] the reference is to the next to last stanza of “The Departure of Merlin” in Taliessin through Logres. It will be seen that Lewis’s skillful paraphrase clarifies the natures and relative positions of various major sites, while the information about Williams’s idiosyncratic family tree of Nimue as the mother of Merlin and his invention of Brisen, Merlin’s sister, as well as these magical siblings’ embodiment of Space and Time, respectively, appears elsewhere in Lewis’s commentary (see Williams and the Arthuriad 102). By contrast, Lewis presents the following as a direct quote from Williams’s letter (Williams and the Arthuriad 178): According to Williams’s note ‘For them (i.e. Galahad and his companions) all that was Logres and the Empire has become this flight of doves. Galahad as a symbol of Christ now has necessity of being in himself.’ However, what Williams actually wrote is slightly different; again I have highlighted the parts taken verbatim from Williams’s Letter in Lewis’s version: [...] from the point of view of the lords, Logres is dissolving behind them (although Bors is to return); all that was Logres & the Empire has become the flight of doves driving the ship on its way; at the point where Galahad is so united with Christ that he has almost a necessity of being in himself; doctrinally heretical, I fear (reprinted with only minor changes in Gnomon 45) As will be seen, this is skillful paraphrase, but paraphrase nonetheless, and in this case wrongly presented as direct quotation. And, just as significantly, Lewis has quietly excised Williams’s cheerful admission of heresy.
9 “The Sister of Percivale” (TtL 51–53), where Taliessin enjoys watching the body of a Caucasian slave-girl as she goes about her work drawing water; “The Coming of Galahad” (TtL 69–74), where a favored slave she asks an insightful question which Taliessin evasively answers; “The Departure of Dindrane” (RSS 29–33), in which the slave rejects freedom in order to choose a lifetime of slavery with Taliessin as her master; and “The Queen’s Servant” (Region of the Summer Stars [RSS] 39–42), in which a slave girl (it is unclear whether it is the same or another) is unwillingly freed and forced to leave Taliessin’s service. That Williams romanticized slavery is evident not just from these poems but from his expressing a wish, in a letter to his wife, that he could personally own a slave (To Michal from Serge 220). 10 Also reproduced almost verbatim in “The Arthurian Myth” 178 and in Gnomon 40, except that the latter substitutes “Theism” for “Deism”; the manuscripts differ as to which reading is correct. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
More (Part Three: The Second Key) to follow tomorrow -- JDR
February 27, 2016
Charles Williams: The Lost Letter (Part one)
So, my piece on Charles Williams was published in the latest issue of MYTHLORE* a few months back (my copy arrived the end of October). And, once it was in print, we contributors received permission to post our pieces to academia.edu. Since I don't have an account on that site, I got permission from the editor (Janet Brennan Croft, to whom much thanks) to repost my article here on my blog. I've been meaning to post it here since early last month but kept putting it off for one reason or another (mainly absorption in my ongoing Nodens piece); the recent publication of A. N. Wilson's interesting review of Lindop's biography has spurred me to dig it out and get on with it). It's a lengthly piece (taking up thirty of MYTHLORE's pages), so I'll be breaking it into a series of smaller, more accessible posts (probably seven in all). Comments welcome. Enjoy!
--JDR
*MYTHLORE issue 127 (VOl.34 No.1), Fall/Winter 2015, pages 5 - 36)
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THE LOST LETTER:SEEKING THE KEYS TO WILLIAMS' ARTHURIAD(Mythlore 127, Fall/Winter 2015, pages 5-36)
The sales of Charles Williams Leapt up by millions, When a reviewer surmised He was only Lewis disguised. —J.R.R. Tolkien, circa 1943 (Carpenter 187)
The story is well known how, upon the death of his friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis prepared two memorial volumes in his friend’s honor. The first was the essay collection Essays Presented to Charles Williams[1947], a festschrift said to have been already in the works at the time of Williams’s death, all but one of whose contributing authors were Inklings: Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield, Gervase Mathew, Warnie Lewis (his first publication), and Dorothy L. Sayers (the only non-Inkling)—although this near-Inkling- exclusivity was incidental and not by design, as is shown by the fact that T.S. Eliot was asked to contribute an essay on Williams’s drama but in the event was not able to complete it in time. [Note 1] This volume is remembered today primarily as the first place of publication of Tolkien’s seminal essay On Fairy- stories, just as Williams is primarily remembered for his association with Lewis (and, to a lesser degree, Tolkien).
The second memorial is the monograph-length Williams and the Arthuriad, based on a lecture series of the same name delivered by Lewis at Oxford after Williams’s death, published together with The Figure of Arthur, Williams’s unfinished prose account of the Grail legend, as Arthurian Torso [1948]. So far as I know, this is the only time one Inkling taught a course on another Inkling. [Note 2] In this work, Lewis sought both to champion and to explain Williams’s Arthurian cycle, as depicted in Taliessin Through Logres [1938] and The Region of the Summer Stars [1944]. Just as Tolkien’s On Fairy-stories essay is the most valuable part of Essays Presented to Charles Williams, so too the most valuable part of Williams and the Arthuriad are the excerpts it contains of a long letter by Williams himself explaining the symbolism in his poems: the ‘Lost Letter’ of my title. As Lewis tells the story:Since I had heard nearly all of [Williams’s Arthurian cycle] read aloud and expounded by the author and had questioned him closely on his meaning I felt that I might be able to comment on it, though imperfectly, yet usefully. His most systematic exposition had been given to me in a long letter which (with that usual folly which forbids us to remember that our friends can die) I did not preserve; but fortunately I copied large extracts from it into the margin of my copy of Taliessin at the relevant passages. (Lewis, Torso 1) I might say, as an aside, that this is entirely in keeping with Lewis’s disregard of manuscripts, his own and other people’s. After all, this is the man who, Tolkien said, destroyed the only copy of not one but two stories by Tolkien. [Note 3] Given such a straightforward account, it seemed that Williams’s careful explication of his symbolism was lost forever. Imagine my surprise, then, when reading Diana Pavlac Glyer’s The Company They Keep and finding among the endnotes (being myself a reader, and writer, of notes) the following bombshell: Unbeknownst to Lewis, Williams kept a typescript of this commentary on his Arthurian work, and he distributed a number of copies of it . . . One of these typescripts is available to researchers at the Marion E. Wade Center. (Glyer 164n28) It turns out that Lewis did indeed destroy the original, but Williams had kept a copy. Its survival seems to be largely unknown among Lewis and Inkling scholars, although Williams scholars are more cognizant of the fact. [Note 4]
And thanks to Williams’s disciples Raymond Hunt [Note 5] and especially Margaret Douglas, [Note 6] best known in Tolkien circles as the woman who typed The Lord of the Rings (Letters of JRRT94), today we have, preserved at the Wade, no fewer than three different typescripts (CW MS-2, CW MS-166, CW MS-415) giving the full text of a document thought destroyed more than seventy years ago. This ‘lost letter’, I would argue, is the first of three keys needed to unlock Williams’s poetry, to find our way through what the Zaleskis, in their new book on the Inklings, call “a nearly impenetrable thicket of obscurities” (Zaleski 433). And I think the effort worthwhile because Lewis considered Williams one of the two or three greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his Taliessin cycle to be one of the greatest works of literature of the century. And Williams thought so too. Hence the importance of ‘the lost letter’ to help us see both Williams’s work as he saw it, or purported to see it, and perhaps also what Lewis saw in it that so many others have failed to see.
Notes1 Cf. Lewis’s letters inviting Eliot to participate (May 17th 1945; Collected Letters Vol. II page 650), agreeing on a choice of topic (June 1st 1945; II 658), worrying about the non- arrival of his essay (February 28th and March 11th 1946; II 704), and finally the decision to go ahead without Eliot’s contribution (May 17th 1946; II 710). 2 I am grateful to Janice Coulter for drawing this point to my attention.
3 The source for this information is an unpublished ‘MS note by Tolkien’ cited by Carpenter: Tolkien recalled: ‘He was indeed accustomed at intervals to throw away papers and books—and at such times he destroyed those that belonged to other people. He “lost” not only official documents sent to him by me, but sole MSS. of at least two stories.’ (The Inklings 48 & 268) 4 Glyer cites “Ridler 178” as her source; this alludes to a passage in Williams’s posthumous essay collection The Image of the City and other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (1958, pages 178–179), in which Ridler prefaces her publication of the headnote from the Lost Letter with the following note (emphasis mine): Here I add, for the sake of clarity and with Professor Lewis’s permission, a couple of passages from an exposition of Taliessin through Logres which Williams made for him. Professor Lewis had written the relevant parts of these into his own copy of the book, and had destroyed the original. He lamented this, when he came to write his Commentary, not realizing that Williams had kept and distributed some copies of it; but in fact all that is essential is to be found in the Commentary, I merely add Williams’s own summary here for the reader’s convenience. A.R. David Llewellyn Dodds, in his essay in The Rhetoric of Vision, also quotes from the Lost Letter and devotes a long note to it on (Dodds, “Co-inherence” 197). The full Letter had been published as far back as 1965 by Glen Cavaliero in the small-press journal Gnomon, but that piece is hardly accessible to Inklings scholars all these years later. I am grateful to Greval Lindop (author of the forthcoming biography of Williams) and Stephen Barber (Treasurer of the Charles Williams Society), Williamsians extraordinaire, for information about this little-known publication (GL to JDR, email of October 12 2010; SB to JDR, email of October 13 2010). Finally much, but not all, of the contents of the Lost Letter were incorporated into the Charles Williams Society booklet The Taliessin Poems of Charles Williams, by Various Hands [1991]. Unfortunately, its presentation there is both incomplete and interwoven with commentary by others (Hadfield, Ridler, Shuttleworth, et al), so that it is sometimes difficult to identify which comments come from this particular source. In any case, such treatment tends to obscure the Lost Letter’s unique nature of having been written more or less at one sitting at a particular time and place and in response to specific stimulae (i.e., Lewis’s questions). 5 For more on Raymond Hunt, see Appendix B at the end of this paper. 6 Hadfield, Williams’s biographer, says of Douglas: A trained typist, she . . . saved armfuls of his verse by typing it and putting it in order as he showed her. Much that would have become illegible by age and bad treatment has been saved because she could ask him to decipher it. (Hadfield 180–181)
[end of Part One]
--JDR
*MYTHLORE issue 127 (VOl.34 No.1), Fall/Winter 2015, pages 5 - 36)
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THE LOST LETTER:SEEKING THE KEYS TO WILLIAMS' ARTHURIAD(Mythlore 127, Fall/Winter 2015, pages 5-36)
The sales of Charles Williams Leapt up by millions, When a reviewer surmised He was only Lewis disguised. —J.R.R. Tolkien, circa 1943 (Carpenter 187)
The story is well known how, upon the death of his friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis prepared two memorial volumes in his friend’s honor. The first was the essay collection Essays Presented to Charles Williams[1947], a festschrift said to have been already in the works at the time of Williams’s death, all but one of whose contributing authors were Inklings: Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield, Gervase Mathew, Warnie Lewis (his first publication), and Dorothy L. Sayers (the only non-Inkling)—although this near-Inkling- exclusivity was incidental and not by design, as is shown by the fact that T.S. Eliot was asked to contribute an essay on Williams’s drama but in the event was not able to complete it in time. [Note 1] This volume is remembered today primarily as the first place of publication of Tolkien’s seminal essay On Fairy- stories, just as Williams is primarily remembered for his association with Lewis (and, to a lesser degree, Tolkien).
The second memorial is the monograph-length Williams and the Arthuriad, based on a lecture series of the same name delivered by Lewis at Oxford after Williams’s death, published together with The Figure of Arthur, Williams’s unfinished prose account of the Grail legend, as Arthurian Torso [1948]. So far as I know, this is the only time one Inkling taught a course on another Inkling. [Note 2] In this work, Lewis sought both to champion and to explain Williams’s Arthurian cycle, as depicted in Taliessin Through Logres [1938] and The Region of the Summer Stars [1944]. Just as Tolkien’s On Fairy-stories essay is the most valuable part of Essays Presented to Charles Williams, so too the most valuable part of Williams and the Arthuriad are the excerpts it contains of a long letter by Williams himself explaining the symbolism in his poems: the ‘Lost Letter’ of my title. As Lewis tells the story:Since I had heard nearly all of [Williams’s Arthurian cycle] read aloud and expounded by the author and had questioned him closely on his meaning I felt that I might be able to comment on it, though imperfectly, yet usefully. His most systematic exposition had been given to me in a long letter which (with that usual folly which forbids us to remember that our friends can die) I did not preserve; but fortunately I copied large extracts from it into the margin of my copy of Taliessin at the relevant passages. (Lewis, Torso 1) I might say, as an aside, that this is entirely in keeping with Lewis’s disregard of manuscripts, his own and other people’s. After all, this is the man who, Tolkien said, destroyed the only copy of not one but two stories by Tolkien. [Note 3] Given such a straightforward account, it seemed that Williams’s careful explication of his symbolism was lost forever. Imagine my surprise, then, when reading Diana Pavlac Glyer’s The Company They Keep and finding among the endnotes (being myself a reader, and writer, of notes) the following bombshell: Unbeknownst to Lewis, Williams kept a typescript of this commentary on his Arthurian work, and he distributed a number of copies of it . . . One of these typescripts is available to researchers at the Marion E. Wade Center. (Glyer 164n28) It turns out that Lewis did indeed destroy the original, but Williams had kept a copy. Its survival seems to be largely unknown among Lewis and Inkling scholars, although Williams scholars are more cognizant of the fact. [Note 4]
And thanks to Williams’s disciples Raymond Hunt [Note 5] and especially Margaret Douglas, [Note 6] best known in Tolkien circles as the woman who typed The Lord of the Rings (Letters of JRRT94), today we have, preserved at the Wade, no fewer than three different typescripts (CW MS-2, CW MS-166, CW MS-415) giving the full text of a document thought destroyed more than seventy years ago. This ‘lost letter’, I would argue, is the first of three keys needed to unlock Williams’s poetry, to find our way through what the Zaleskis, in their new book on the Inklings, call “a nearly impenetrable thicket of obscurities” (Zaleski 433). And I think the effort worthwhile because Lewis considered Williams one of the two or three greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his Taliessin cycle to be one of the greatest works of literature of the century. And Williams thought so too. Hence the importance of ‘the lost letter’ to help us see both Williams’s work as he saw it, or purported to see it, and perhaps also what Lewis saw in it that so many others have failed to see.
Notes1 Cf. Lewis’s letters inviting Eliot to participate (May 17th 1945; Collected Letters Vol. II page 650), agreeing on a choice of topic (June 1st 1945; II 658), worrying about the non- arrival of his essay (February 28th and March 11th 1946; II 704), and finally the decision to go ahead without Eliot’s contribution (May 17th 1946; II 710). 2 I am grateful to Janice Coulter for drawing this point to my attention.
3 The source for this information is an unpublished ‘MS note by Tolkien’ cited by Carpenter: Tolkien recalled: ‘He was indeed accustomed at intervals to throw away papers and books—and at such times he destroyed those that belonged to other people. He “lost” not only official documents sent to him by me, but sole MSS. of at least two stories.’ (The Inklings 48 & 268) 4 Glyer cites “Ridler 178” as her source; this alludes to a passage in Williams’s posthumous essay collection The Image of the City and other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (1958, pages 178–179), in which Ridler prefaces her publication of the headnote from the Lost Letter with the following note (emphasis mine): Here I add, for the sake of clarity and with Professor Lewis’s permission, a couple of passages from an exposition of Taliessin through Logres which Williams made for him. Professor Lewis had written the relevant parts of these into his own copy of the book, and had destroyed the original. He lamented this, when he came to write his Commentary, not realizing that Williams had kept and distributed some copies of it; but in fact all that is essential is to be found in the Commentary, I merely add Williams’s own summary here for the reader’s convenience. A.R. David Llewellyn Dodds, in his essay in The Rhetoric of Vision, also quotes from the Lost Letter and devotes a long note to it on (Dodds, “Co-inherence” 197). The full Letter had been published as far back as 1965 by Glen Cavaliero in the small-press journal Gnomon, but that piece is hardly accessible to Inklings scholars all these years later. I am grateful to Greval Lindop (author of the forthcoming biography of Williams) and Stephen Barber (Treasurer of the Charles Williams Society), Williamsians extraordinaire, for information about this little-known publication (GL to JDR, email of October 12 2010; SB to JDR, email of October 13 2010). Finally much, but not all, of the contents of the Lost Letter were incorporated into the Charles Williams Society booklet The Taliessin Poems of Charles Williams, by Various Hands [1991]. Unfortunately, its presentation there is both incomplete and interwoven with commentary by others (Hadfield, Ridler, Shuttleworth, et al), so that it is sometimes difficult to identify which comments come from this particular source. In any case, such treatment tends to obscure the Lost Letter’s unique nature of having been written more or less at one sitting at a particular time and place and in response to specific stimulae (i.e., Lewis’s questions). 5 For more on Raymond Hunt, see Appendix B at the end of this paper. 6 Hadfield, Williams’s biographer, says of Douglas: A trained typist, she . . . saved armfuls of his verse by typing it and putting it in order as he showed her. Much that would have become illegible by age and bad treatment has been saved because she could ask him to decipher it. (Hadfield 180–181)
[end of Part One]
February 26, 2016
Kalamazoo 2016 Tolkien Events schedule
So, the program book for this year's Medieval Congress is now out, and as usual there's a good amount of interesting-sounding Tolkien on the schedule. Here are the ones I spotted:
THURSDAY 10 AM FETZER 1040Session 11 Fathering, Fostering, Translating, and Creating in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien Sponsor: History Dept., Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce Organizer: Judy Ann Ford, Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce Presider: Anne Reaves, Marian Univ.
Medieval Fostering in the First and Third Ages of Middle-earth: Elrond as Fóstri and Fóstr-son Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State Univ. A Stylistic Analysis of Fatherhood and Fostering in The Silmarillion Robin Anne Reid, Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation of Scholar and Poet Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College Imagined: Tolkien in the Mind of God Skyler King, College of the Desert
THURSDAY 1.30 PM FETZER 1040Session 58Tolkien and BeowulfSponsor: Tolkien at KalamazooOrganizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ.Presider: Andrew Higgins, Independent Scholar
“A Tight Fitt”: Strategies of Condensation in The Lay of Beowulf John R. Holmes, Franciscan Univ. of Steubenville Tolkien’s “Freawaru and Ingeld”: A Love Story? Christopher T. Vaccaro, Univ. of Vermont The Christian Singer in Tolkien’s Beowulf Michael D. Miller, Aquinas College Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary as a Teaching Text James L. Baugher, East Tennessee State Univ.
THURSDAY 3.30 PM FETZER 1040Session 107In Honor of Verlyn Flieger (A Roundtable) Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
Organizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ.
Presider: John D. Rateliff, Independent Scholar
Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” as a theory of literature Curtis Gruenler, Hope College The Well and the Book: Flieger and Tolkien on “the Past in the Past” Deborah Salo, Univ. of Arkansas–Fayetteville/Arkansas Archeological Survey So Many Wonders: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight according to Tolkien and Flieger Amy Amendt-Raduege, Whatcom Community College “Linguistic Ghosts”: Anglo-Saxon Poetry as Tolkien’s Tether between Past and Present Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State Univ. An Elf by Any Other Name: Naming, Language, and Loss in Tolkien’s Legendarium Benjamin S. W. Barootes, McGill Univ.
Friday, May 13 8.30 AMPlenary LectureBernhard East BallroomSponsored by the Medieval Academy of America
How We Read J. R. R. Tolkien Reading Grendel’s Mother
Jane Chance (Rice Univ.)
FRIDAY 10 AM BERNHARD 209Session 219Tolkien and Invented Languages Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
Organizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ. Presider: Brad Eden
From Goldogrin to Sindarin, or, How Ilkorin Supplanted the “Sweet Tongue of the Gnomes” Eileen Marie Moore, Cleveland State Univ. Early Explorers and Practicioners of a Shared “Secret Vice” Andrew Higgins, Independent Scholar “Art Words”: Tolkien’s “Secret Vice” Manuscripts and Radical Linguistic Experimentation Dimitra Fimi, Cardiff Metropolitan Univ. Tolkien’s Concept of “Native Language” and the English and Welsh Papers at the Bodleian Library Yoko Hemmi, Keio Univ.
SATURDAY 10 AM FETZER 1060Session 345Asterisk Tolkien: Filling Medieval Lacunae Sponsor: Dept. of Religious Studies and Philosophy, The Hill SchoolOrganizer: John Wm. Houghton, Hill SchoolPresider: John Wm. Houghton
The “Lost” Language of the Hobbits Deidre Dawson, Independent Scholar “To Recall Forgotten Gods from Their Twilight”: Tolkien, Machen, and Lovecraft John D. Rateliff, Independent Scholar “Backdreaming” Beowulf’s Scyld Scefing Legend Anna Smol, Mount St. Vincent Univ. Bred in Mockery Michael Wodzak, Viterbo Univ.
SATURDAY NOON BERNHARD 212Tolkien at Kalamazoo Business Meeting
It's not listed in the catalogue, but thanks to Anna Smol's posting last month of Tolkien events from the draft schedule, here's information on the one off-campus event, TOLKIEN UNBOUND, which is being held at Kalamazoo College's music recital hall on Saturday afternoon, starting about 2 pm and running for about three hours. This is actually two events in one: the first a Readers' Theate performance of Tolkien's Kalevala, the second Eileen Moore's performance of "Maidens of Middle-earth", part six.
In addition to the all-Tolkien events, there's presentation on "Teaching with Lord of the Rings Online" by Carol L. Robinson, as part of the Digitally Teaching the Middle Ages: Case Studies (A Poster Session) (Thursday 3.30 PM). Smol also points out a stray Le Guin session: "Medievalism and the End(s) of Empire in 1960s Science Fiction: Frank Herbert's Dune and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness" by Scott Wells, California State Univ. -- Los Angeles; this is part of a session called In Fashions Reminiscent: The Overlapping Objects, Discourses, and Ideas of the Sixties and the Middle Ages, being held Saturday at 3.30.
It's not Tolkien, but of related interest is the TALES AFTER TOLKIEN group's session, being held Saturday at 1.30. I've enjoyed their sessions in the past, but this year the whole panel's devoted to R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, so I'll probably take a pass.
And then there are the two sessions on C. S. Lewis organized by the folks from Taylor University. Last year I skipped the Tales After Tolkien panel to attend the CSL one, and regretted it -- though I have to say the C.S.L.'s bestiary topic is as good one. And the second CSL session includes presenters from Wheaton and from Fayetteville, (one of) my old alma mater. In any case, they're being held Saturday at 10 and Saturday at 1.30 respectively.
There's also a stray Lewis piece, Medieval Fantasy and the Neo-Victorian Child in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia by Heather L. N. Hess, Univ. of Tennessee–Knoxville that's part of the Childhood/Innocence in Victorian Medievalism session (Saturday, 1.30)
Of course as always I'll have to leave time to prowl the book-room (I'm hoping the Palgrave booth has Williamson's book on fantasy) and talk Tolkien with Tolk folk, of whom there'll be many in attendance.
Finally, I ought to stress what a big deal Chance's plenary lecture is. To put it in context, there are 550 sessions at this year's conference. By contrast, hers is one of only two Plenary Lectures: events against which no other events will be scheduled. From what I hear Chance is the single person most responsible for establishing the TOLKIEN AT KALAMAZOO track, so it's good to see her so honored, and impressive to see Tolkien so prominently featured.
My own contributions, as shown above, will be the chair the roundtable in honor of Verlyn Flieger (session 107; 3.30 on Thursday) -- a congenial task if ever there was one. I'm also presenting my paper on Nodens as part of session 345 (Saturday at 10), where once again I'll be in good company. I'm looking forward to it, and to all the presentations by other Tolkienists during what once again looks to be a v. crowded weekend.
--JDR
P.S.here's the link to the whole program book
http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/events/sessions
and here's another to Anna Smol's blog post
http://annasmol.net/2016/01/23/tolkien-medievalism-at-kzoo-2016-sneak-peek/
THURSDAY 10 AM FETZER 1040Session 11 Fathering, Fostering, Translating, and Creating in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien Sponsor: History Dept., Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce Organizer: Judy Ann Ford, Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce Presider: Anne Reaves, Marian Univ.
Medieval Fostering in the First and Third Ages of Middle-earth: Elrond as Fóstri and Fóstr-son Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State Univ. A Stylistic Analysis of Fatherhood and Fostering in The Silmarillion Robin Anne Reid, Texas A&M Univ.–Commerce Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation of Scholar and Poet Yvette Kisor, Ramapo College Imagined: Tolkien in the Mind of God Skyler King, College of the Desert
THURSDAY 1.30 PM FETZER 1040Session 58Tolkien and BeowulfSponsor: Tolkien at KalamazooOrganizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ.Presider: Andrew Higgins, Independent Scholar
“A Tight Fitt”: Strategies of Condensation in The Lay of Beowulf John R. Holmes, Franciscan Univ. of Steubenville Tolkien’s “Freawaru and Ingeld”: A Love Story? Christopher T. Vaccaro, Univ. of Vermont The Christian Singer in Tolkien’s Beowulf Michael D. Miller, Aquinas College Tolkien’s Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary as a Teaching Text James L. Baugher, East Tennessee State Univ.
THURSDAY 3.30 PM FETZER 1040Session 107In Honor of Verlyn Flieger (A Roundtable) Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
Organizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ.
Presider: John D. Rateliff, Independent Scholar
Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” as a theory of literature Curtis Gruenler, Hope College The Well and the Book: Flieger and Tolkien on “the Past in the Past” Deborah Salo, Univ. of Arkansas–Fayetteville/Arkansas Archeological Survey So Many Wonders: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight according to Tolkien and Flieger Amy Amendt-Raduege, Whatcom Community College “Linguistic Ghosts”: Anglo-Saxon Poetry as Tolkien’s Tether between Past and Present Kristine Larsen, Central Connecticut State Univ. An Elf by Any Other Name: Naming, Language, and Loss in Tolkien’s Legendarium Benjamin S. W. Barootes, McGill Univ.
Friday, May 13 8.30 AMPlenary LectureBernhard East BallroomSponsored by the Medieval Academy of America
How We Read J. R. R. Tolkien Reading Grendel’s Mother
Jane Chance (Rice Univ.)
FRIDAY 10 AM BERNHARD 209Session 219Tolkien and Invented Languages Sponsor: Tolkien at Kalamazoo
Organizer: Brad Eden, Valparaiso Univ. Presider: Brad Eden
From Goldogrin to Sindarin, or, How Ilkorin Supplanted the “Sweet Tongue of the Gnomes” Eileen Marie Moore, Cleveland State Univ. Early Explorers and Practicioners of a Shared “Secret Vice” Andrew Higgins, Independent Scholar “Art Words”: Tolkien’s “Secret Vice” Manuscripts and Radical Linguistic Experimentation Dimitra Fimi, Cardiff Metropolitan Univ. Tolkien’s Concept of “Native Language” and the English and Welsh Papers at the Bodleian Library Yoko Hemmi, Keio Univ.
SATURDAY 10 AM FETZER 1060Session 345Asterisk Tolkien: Filling Medieval Lacunae Sponsor: Dept. of Religious Studies and Philosophy, The Hill SchoolOrganizer: John Wm. Houghton, Hill SchoolPresider: John Wm. Houghton
The “Lost” Language of the Hobbits Deidre Dawson, Independent Scholar “To Recall Forgotten Gods from Their Twilight”: Tolkien, Machen, and Lovecraft John D. Rateliff, Independent Scholar “Backdreaming” Beowulf’s Scyld Scefing Legend Anna Smol, Mount St. Vincent Univ. Bred in Mockery Michael Wodzak, Viterbo Univ.
SATURDAY NOON BERNHARD 212Tolkien at Kalamazoo Business Meeting
It's not listed in the catalogue, but thanks to Anna Smol's posting last month of Tolkien events from the draft schedule, here's information on the one off-campus event, TOLKIEN UNBOUND, which is being held at Kalamazoo College's music recital hall on Saturday afternoon, starting about 2 pm and running for about three hours. This is actually two events in one: the first a Readers' Theate performance of Tolkien's Kalevala, the second Eileen Moore's performance of "Maidens of Middle-earth", part six.
In addition to the all-Tolkien events, there's presentation on "Teaching with Lord of the Rings Online" by Carol L. Robinson, as part of the Digitally Teaching the Middle Ages: Case Studies (A Poster Session) (Thursday 3.30 PM). Smol also points out a stray Le Guin session: "Medievalism and the End(s) of Empire in 1960s Science Fiction: Frank Herbert's Dune and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness" by Scott Wells, California State Univ. -- Los Angeles; this is part of a session called In Fashions Reminiscent: The Overlapping Objects, Discourses, and Ideas of the Sixties and the Middle Ages, being held Saturday at 3.30.
It's not Tolkien, but of related interest is the TALES AFTER TOLKIEN group's session, being held Saturday at 1.30. I've enjoyed their sessions in the past, but this year the whole panel's devoted to R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, so I'll probably take a pass.
And then there are the two sessions on C. S. Lewis organized by the folks from Taylor University. Last year I skipped the Tales After Tolkien panel to attend the CSL one, and regretted it -- though I have to say the C.S.L.'s bestiary topic is as good one. And the second CSL session includes presenters from Wheaton and from Fayetteville, (one of) my old alma mater. In any case, they're being held Saturday at 10 and Saturday at 1.30 respectively.
There's also a stray Lewis piece, Medieval Fantasy and the Neo-Victorian Child in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia by Heather L. N. Hess, Univ. of Tennessee–Knoxville that's part of the Childhood/Innocence in Victorian Medievalism session (Saturday, 1.30)
Of course as always I'll have to leave time to prowl the book-room (I'm hoping the Palgrave booth has Williamson's book on fantasy) and talk Tolkien with Tolk folk, of whom there'll be many in attendance.
Finally, I ought to stress what a big deal Chance's plenary lecture is. To put it in context, there are 550 sessions at this year's conference. By contrast, hers is one of only two Plenary Lectures: events against which no other events will be scheduled. From what I hear Chance is the single person most responsible for establishing the TOLKIEN AT KALAMAZOO track, so it's good to see her so honored, and impressive to see Tolkien so prominently featured.
My own contributions, as shown above, will be the chair the roundtable in honor of Verlyn Flieger (session 107; 3.30 on Thursday) -- a congenial task if ever there was one. I'm also presenting my paper on Nodens as part of session 345 (Saturday at 10), where once again I'll be in good company. I'm looking forward to it, and to all the presentations by other Tolkienists during what once again looks to be a v. crowded weekend.
--JDR
P.S.here's the link to the whole program book
http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/events/sessions
and here's another to Anna Smol's blog post
http://annasmol.net/2016/01/23/tolkien-medievalism-at-kzoo-2016-sneak-peek/
February 25, 2016
The Cat Report (W.2/25th-16)
With Eleanor and brother Teddie back up at the shelter (hope she’s stopped vomiting that green goo), and all three litttle black kittens (Henry, Ramona, and Beezus) adopted, that leaves just three cats in the cat-room: FLURRY, MIMOSA, and BLACK DIAMOND. All three were firm in their refusals of anything resembling a walk, turning around to paw desperately at the door as soon as I set each down outside. Did they have some bad experience that makes them so afraid of the store outside the cat-room?
I’d brought them in a treat they all liked: a little bit of cream (a tablespoon or two’s worth apiece). They all loved it, especially Mimosa, who went and cleaned up whatever Diamond and Flurry left behind.
FLURRY was in a quiet, subdued mood. She was the last to come out of her cage and spent more time in the bottom rondel beneath the cat-stand by the cabinet than near the top level that’d become her usual space. She did venture into the cabinet at one point, on her own and without any help jumping in or later back out again. She’d really been coming out of her shell; I was delighted to hear she actually spent time grooming the kittens, showing a side of her we’d not seen before. Guess we all have our quiet days.
MIMOSA on the other hand was very affectionate; she came up and purred at me, which was v. agreeable, and groomed me several times. Midway through the morning she came up and got in my lap, which I consider a complement.
BLACK DIAMOND was the active one: she was all over the place, leaping from cat-stand to cage-top with ease whenever she felt like it. And just a week ago she’d been hiding in the bottom of the cabinet, behind the dirty laundry, and the like. She came up to be petted a stroke or two and then wd be off again. Wish I cd have found the laser pointer, as she had a lot of energy to get out — at one point she went medieval on a roll of paper towels
Once all the cages were cleaned and everybody’d had some petting and a spoonful of wet catfood (the only one who ate any was Flurry, and she just licked off the sauce), we devoted the last hour of the morning to cat games. Mimosa claimed the side of the room towards the door while Black Diamond stayed on the side over near the cabinet; Flurry was hidden under her cat-stand but stuck out a paw from time to time when a particularly tempted target whizzed past. First there was catnip. Then we all played the feather game (Diamond is a great pouncer upon feathers up on the cage-tops, while Mimosa down below showed herself a true predator by grabbing them and not letting go). Then came catnip bubbles: Mimosa thought they were great and chased them down, popping them in the air. Diamond thought they were terrifying and went and hid till they all went away. Flurry watched them with surprise (what is that?) but no great alarm or particular interest. Then came the string game, with two cats playing with opposite ends of the same string (Mimosa near the door and Diamond near the cabinet). Unfortunately one time chasing the string Diamond ran into Flurry, who’d been quietly minding her own business. All I could see was a bunch of paws batting back and forth at each other and white fur floating in the air, but when they separated a few second later there was a little scratch on Flurry’s nose. It didn’t seem to hurt her, but I felt bad for her nonetheless.
I had already closed up the cat room for the morning when the person who wanted to surrender his cat arrived. I explained that we didn’t take in cats at the adoption room; that only the folks in Arlington cd do that. Gave him the flyer with the main shelter’s email/phone number/web address, and got his contact information, so hope he’ll be able to follow up with that. Though I’m beginning to think this wasn’t a Purrfect Pals cat being returned years later but a longtime pet who needed a new home and he wanted her to go to the Purrfect Pals shelter where she’d be taken care of.
And now as I’m finishing this comes the news that our adoption room will be shut down as of the 11th (two weeks from tomorrow). I’ll miss the cats, and all fellow volunteers as well -- who shd collectively take a bow for a job well done.
—John R.
I’d brought them in a treat they all liked: a little bit of cream (a tablespoon or two’s worth apiece). They all loved it, especially Mimosa, who went and cleaned up whatever Diamond and Flurry left behind.
FLURRY was in a quiet, subdued mood. She was the last to come out of her cage and spent more time in the bottom rondel beneath the cat-stand by the cabinet than near the top level that’d become her usual space. She did venture into the cabinet at one point, on her own and without any help jumping in or later back out again. She’d really been coming out of her shell; I was delighted to hear she actually spent time grooming the kittens, showing a side of her we’d not seen before. Guess we all have our quiet days.
MIMOSA on the other hand was very affectionate; she came up and purred at me, which was v. agreeable, and groomed me several times. Midway through the morning she came up and got in my lap, which I consider a complement.
BLACK DIAMOND was the active one: she was all over the place, leaping from cat-stand to cage-top with ease whenever she felt like it. And just a week ago she’d been hiding in the bottom of the cabinet, behind the dirty laundry, and the like. She came up to be petted a stroke or two and then wd be off again. Wish I cd have found the laser pointer, as she had a lot of energy to get out — at one point she went medieval on a roll of paper towels
Once all the cages were cleaned and everybody’d had some petting and a spoonful of wet catfood (the only one who ate any was Flurry, and she just licked off the sauce), we devoted the last hour of the morning to cat games. Mimosa claimed the side of the room towards the door while Black Diamond stayed on the side over near the cabinet; Flurry was hidden under her cat-stand but stuck out a paw from time to time when a particularly tempted target whizzed past. First there was catnip. Then we all played the feather game (Diamond is a great pouncer upon feathers up on the cage-tops, while Mimosa down below showed herself a true predator by grabbing them and not letting go). Then came catnip bubbles: Mimosa thought they were great and chased them down, popping them in the air. Diamond thought they were terrifying and went and hid till they all went away. Flurry watched them with surprise (what is that?) but no great alarm or particular interest. Then came the string game, with two cats playing with opposite ends of the same string (Mimosa near the door and Diamond near the cabinet). Unfortunately one time chasing the string Diamond ran into Flurry, who’d been quietly minding her own business. All I could see was a bunch of paws batting back and forth at each other and white fur floating in the air, but when they separated a few second later there was a little scratch on Flurry’s nose. It didn’t seem to hurt her, but I felt bad for her nonetheless.
I had already closed up the cat room for the morning when the person who wanted to surrender his cat arrived. I explained that we didn’t take in cats at the adoption room; that only the folks in Arlington cd do that. Gave him the flyer with the main shelter’s email/phone number/web address, and got his contact information, so hope he’ll be able to follow up with that. Though I’m beginning to think this wasn’t a Purrfect Pals cat being returned years later but a longtime pet who needed a new home and he wanted her to go to the Purrfect Pals shelter where she’d be taken care of.
And now as I’m finishing this comes the news that our adoption room will be shut down as of the 11th (two weeks from tomorrow). I’ll miss the cats, and all fellow volunteers as well -- who shd collectively take a bow for a job well done.
—John R.
February 24, 2016
A. N. Wilson on Charles Williams
So, thanks to the link posted on the MythSoc list (thanks Wendell), I've now had a chance to read A. N. Wilson's review of Grevel Lindop's new biography CHARLES WILLIAMS: THE THIRD INKLING. I have Lindop's book but haven't had a chance to read it yet, and Wilson's an intelligent and often insightful, if quirky and sometimes careless writer, so I was interested in what he had to say.
In the first place, even with his propensity for 'warts and all', Wilson clearly loves Williams with a mighty love, finding him a fascinating figure whose stranger aspects make him all the more endearingly weird. Thus he's indulgent towards Wms' practice of fondling young women whom he was spiritually mentoring. To his credit, Wilson is notably sympathetic to Florence Wms, whom he describes as "his long-suffering wife"; elsewhere he refers to her as the woman "who was to have the great misfortune of becoming his wife" and calls their marriage "disastrous". But then perhaps a stressful marriage wd be the inevitable outcome of things like Wms writing to his platonic lover that "I abandoned an instinct to masturbate last night so that I might offer the strength to you in God". Try unpacking the theological implications of that. Or when Wms writes about the antiChrist's penis in one of the Taliessin poems:
Phosphorescent gleams the point of the penis
rudiments or relics, disappearing, appearing,
live in the forlorn focus of the intellect,
eyes and ears, the turmoil of the mind of sensation
--which is not only weird, but has its weirdness infinitely compounded when Wilson misreads this and believes that Wms is writing about God's penis: Wilson wrongly says that these lines describe "the emperor of Byzantium", who in the poems is a manifestation of God Himself. In fact, as the original context of the lines makes clear, they describe the Headless Emperor of P'o-lu, the Taliessin cycle's antiChrist figure.
Wilson also rates Wms surprisingly high: he calls Wms' theological books HE CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN and THE FIGURE OF BEATRICE works of genius. In fact, much of his review is Wilson's attempt to grapple with the fact that he doesn't think Wms' work* is very good by literary standards but he finds himself deeply moved by it and so concludes it more than just 'good' in some way that's hard to define. This is interesting because it's the same reason C. S. Lewis came up with the idea of 'mythopoeic literature': works that would on the surface seem to be second-rate (he was thinking specifically of the work of George McDonald) yet have the power to deeply move the reader and stay vividly in his or her memory long afterwards. In fact Wilson praises Wms so much that I think he overstates the case. Thus when he says Wms' poetry "is avidly read by his admirers", I find myself incapable of believing that the number of people who read and enjoy Wms' poetry is not in the thousands or hundreds and maybe not even the tens: at any rate, some vanishingly small number.
In the end there are three things I think Wilson got exactly wrong.
First, he's dismissive of Wms' lifelong devotion to ceremonial magic, saying that "Wms . . . always had a weakness for mumbo jumbo". Wilson finds it hard to take this seriously, denies that such things had any influence on Wms, and says Wms' involvement with the Golden Dawn only "situates him in a particular era in the history of silliness". I'd say this is precisely like arguing that Conan Doyle never had any real interest in 'all that spiritualist stuff' --which, unfortunately, is less in accordance with the facts and more what his admirers wish were the case.
Second, Wilson says that "in the end, it is as a theologian . . . that one esteems Williams". Here I think he's right in the sense insofar as Wilson himself is clearly deeply moved by Wms' theological ideas; his own admiration for Wms is primarily based on Wms' religious beliefs. But contrarywise my own much lower opinion of Wms is at least in part based on my own beliefs being v. different, plus my inability to take his theological ideas seriously. I do wonder, though: how do those who take Wms seriously as a theologian deal with his heterodox and occasionally downright heretical ideas?
Third, he argues that Wms wasn't really an Inkling ("not an Inkling in spirit") but only on the fringes of the group. He even goes so far as to say that "the only unsatisfactory thing about Grevel Lindop's book is its title" (i.e., THE THIRD INKLING). He then goes even further to say "his arrival [in Oxford], far from consolidating the Inklings, actually broke them up by bewitching Lewis, and making Lewis neglect the central friendship of his life, that with Tolkien"
--This last sentence is, for me, Wilson's most interesting comment in the whole review. I don't remember him making that statement in his Lewis biography, though it's been a good many years since I read that and I might just be forgetting. Nor am I sure that I agree: I think a better case can be made for Arthur Greeves, or perhaps Warnie, filling that role.** Still, it's a memorable phrase and an effective point, one well worth exploring.
The irony with the not-an-Inkling argument is precisely that the only reason Wms is not wholly forgotten is his having been an Inkling, and thus sharing in Tolkien's and Lewis's reflected glory.
In the end, an interesting and thought-provoking piece that makes me want to read the book being reviewed (albeit I was already looking forward to doing so prior to reading this review, reading what Wilson has to say just re-affirms my desire to read Lindop).
Here's the link
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/03/havent-an-inkling
--John R.
*by which he means the novels and the theological books and perhaps the poetry: you'd never know from Wilson' piece that he was best known in his own time as a playwright.
**after all, as Janice points out, Lewis himself described Tolkien as a second-tier friend.
In the first place, even with his propensity for 'warts and all', Wilson clearly loves Williams with a mighty love, finding him a fascinating figure whose stranger aspects make him all the more endearingly weird. Thus he's indulgent towards Wms' practice of fondling young women whom he was spiritually mentoring. To his credit, Wilson is notably sympathetic to Florence Wms, whom he describes as "his long-suffering wife"; elsewhere he refers to her as the woman "who was to have the great misfortune of becoming his wife" and calls their marriage "disastrous". But then perhaps a stressful marriage wd be the inevitable outcome of things like Wms writing to his platonic lover that "I abandoned an instinct to masturbate last night so that I might offer the strength to you in God". Try unpacking the theological implications of that. Or when Wms writes about the antiChrist's penis in one of the Taliessin poems:
Phosphorescent gleams the point of the penis
rudiments or relics, disappearing, appearing,
live in the forlorn focus of the intellect,
eyes and ears, the turmoil of the mind of sensation
--which is not only weird, but has its weirdness infinitely compounded when Wilson misreads this and believes that Wms is writing about God's penis: Wilson wrongly says that these lines describe "the emperor of Byzantium", who in the poems is a manifestation of God Himself. In fact, as the original context of the lines makes clear, they describe the Headless Emperor of P'o-lu, the Taliessin cycle's antiChrist figure.
Wilson also rates Wms surprisingly high: he calls Wms' theological books HE CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN and THE FIGURE OF BEATRICE works of genius. In fact, much of his review is Wilson's attempt to grapple with the fact that he doesn't think Wms' work* is very good by literary standards but he finds himself deeply moved by it and so concludes it more than just 'good' in some way that's hard to define. This is interesting because it's the same reason C. S. Lewis came up with the idea of 'mythopoeic literature': works that would on the surface seem to be second-rate (he was thinking specifically of the work of George McDonald) yet have the power to deeply move the reader and stay vividly in his or her memory long afterwards. In fact Wilson praises Wms so much that I think he overstates the case. Thus when he says Wms' poetry "is avidly read by his admirers", I find myself incapable of believing that the number of people who read and enjoy Wms' poetry is not in the thousands or hundreds and maybe not even the tens: at any rate, some vanishingly small number.
In the end there are three things I think Wilson got exactly wrong.
First, he's dismissive of Wms' lifelong devotion to ceremonial magic, saying that "Wms . . . always had a weakness for mumbo jumbo". Wilson finds it hard to take this seriously, denies that such things had any influence on Wms, and says Wms' involvement with the Golden Dawn only "situates him in a particular era in the history of silliness". I'd say this is precisely like arguing that Conan Doyle never had any real interest in 'all that spiritualist stuff' --which, unfortunately, is less in accordance with the facts and more what his admirers wish were the case.
Second, Wilson says that "in the end, it is as a theologian . . . that one esteems Williams". Here I think he's right in the sense insofar as Wilson himself is clearly deeply moved by Wms' theological ideas; his own admiration for Wms is primarily based on Wms' religious beliefs. But contrarywise my own much lower opinion of Wms is at least in part based on my own beliefs being v. different, plus my inability to take his theological ideas seriously. I do wonder, though: how do those who take Wms seriously as a theologian deal with his heterodox and occasionally downright heretical ideas?
Third, he argues that Wms wasn't really an Inkling ("not an Inkling in spirit") but only on the fringes of the group. He even goes so far as to say that "the only unsatisfactory thing about Grevel Lindop's book is its title" (i.e., THE THIRD INKLING). He then goes even further to say "his arrival [in Oxford], far from consolidating the Inklings, actually broke them up by bewitching Lewis, and making Lewis neglect the central friendship of his life, that with Tolkien"
--This last sentence is, for me, Wilson's most interesting comment in the whole review. I don't remember him making that statement in his Lewis biography, though it's been a good many years since I read that and I might just be forgetting. Nor am I sure that I agree: I think a better case can be made for Arthur Greeves, or perhaps Warnie, filling that role.** Still, it's a memorable phrase and an effective point, one well worth exploring.
The irony with the not-an-Inkling argument is precisely that the only reason Wms is not wholly forgotten is his having been an Inkling, and thus sharing in Tolkien's and Lewis's reflected glory.
In the end, an interesting and thought-provoking piece that makes me want to read the book being reviewed (albeit I was already looking forward to doing so prior to reading this review, reading what Wilson has to say just re-affirms my desire to read Lindop).
Here's the link
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/03/havent-an-inkling
--John R.
*by which he means the novels and the theological books and perhaps the poetry: you'd never know from Wilson' piece that he was best known in his own time as a playwright.
**after all, as Janice points out, Lewis himself described Tolkien as a second-tier friend.
"World of Tomorrow"
So, our Saturday night Cthulhu game didn't come together this week, so Janice and I joined up with Steve Stan Brown to see a collection of Oscar-nominated anime shorts showing in a local theatre. As always with such things it was a mixed bag, but there was more good than bad and on the whole I'm glad we made it. The standout piece, which I really wd have been sorry to have missed, was called "The World of Tomorrow": the story of a four-year-old girl visited via time-travel by a clone descendent of clones of her future self. The future clone is an adult, and the way a story like this wd typically play out wd be for the future self to describe the wonders of the future to her primitive modern-day self. Except that we're not too far into the revelations before we come to realize not just how horrific these wonders are in human terms and that Future Emily is, not to put too fine a point on it, nuts. The little girl is far more human and, in an odd way, more mature than the adult from the future, who comes across as a more and more piteous the more we hear about her life story -- and all the more so because the Adult Emily has almost no self-awareness of how damaged and diminished her humanity is. And, while I didn't think about it at the time, I'm sure the deliberately simplistic art of the animation was to evoke what the story wd look like if little Emily drew it.
This is the kind of story Bradbury wd have done well, and I think he'd have recognized it as fitting firmly within his legacy. I like Bradbury, and I also enjoy stories that follow their own logic, even into absurdity and beyond, as this one does. So it follows that I liked this one quite a lot. Recommended: but be warned that the next-to-last scene is devastating in context. It was a total surprise that immediately made perfect sense; a hard trick but stunningly effective when pulled off.
As I said, there were other good pieces in this assemblage: the Russian-made "We Can't Live Without Cosmos", the story of two astronauts training for a mission, is also good, if a little long. But "World of Tomorrow" was definitely the standout.
--John R.
This is the kind of story Bradbury wd have done well, and I think he'd have recognized it as fitting firmly within his legacy. I like Bradbury, and I also enjoy stories that follow their own logic, even into absurdity and beyond, as this one does. So it follows that I liked this one quite a lot. Recommended: but be warned that the next-to-last scene is devastating in context. It was a total surprise that immediately made perfect sense; a hard trick but stunningly effective when pulled off.
As I said, there were other good pieces in this assemblage: the Russian-made "We Can't Live Without Cosmos", the story of two astronauts training for a mission, is also good, if a little long. But "World of Tomorrow" was definitely the standout.
--John R.
February 23, 2016
The Music from the Moon
So, here's a weird one.
It's recently been revealed that back in 1969, the Apollo 10 crew reported that they heard some kind of strange music during the time they were orbiting the moon, cut off from receiving transmissions from back at NASA. I assume this was a phenomenon something like feedback: that open instruments either picked up or generated some sort of white noise during the time the instruments were receiving but nothing from home base cd reach them, being blocked by the moon between them.
Now that I know about this, I want to hear what it sounded like. At first I assumed there was no recording of this sound, but re-reading the article I see they have a transcript of what the astronauts said about it while on the far side of the moon, wondering whether to report it back to NASA for fears that Mission Control might think they'd flipped their lids. And if they have a recording of the in-cockpit discussion, it follows that they must have a recording of the odd noise as well, if only in the background.
here's the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/apollo-10-astronauts-reported-unexplained-music-at-moon_us_56c80662e4b0928f5a6c0679
--John R.
today's song: there's Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon," of course, but I paired it with "The Man Who Found God on the Moon" by Mike McGear (w. brother Paul McCartney on background vocals).
It's recently been revealed that back in 1969, the Apollo 10 crew reported that they heard some kind of strange music during the time they were orbiting the moon, cut off from receiving transmissions from back at NASA. I assume this was a phenomenon something like feedback: that open instruments either picked up or generated some sort of white noise during the time the instruments were receiving but nothing from home base cd reach them, being blocked by the moon between them.
Now that I know about this, I want to hear what it sounded like. At first I assumed there was no recording of this sound, but re-reading the article I see they have a transcript of what the astronauts said about it while on the far side of the moon, wondering whether to report it back to NASA for fears that Mission Control might think they'd flipped their lids. And if they have a recording of the in-cockpit discussion, it follows that they must have a recording of the odd noise as well, if only in the background.
here's the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/apollo-10-astronauts-reported-unexplained-music-at-moon_us_56c80662e4b0928f5a6c0679
--John R.
today's song: there's Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon," of course, but I paired it with "The Man Who Found God on the Moon" by Mike McGear (w. brother Paul McCartney on background vocals).
February 21, 2016
This made me weep
So, Janice shared with me today a video that's been making the rounds on Facebook which moved me to tears: the paintings of Vincent Van Gough to the music of Don McLean's "Vincent".
Beautiful art, beautiful music, and one of the saddest stories in the world.*
I couldn't find the same compilation Janice showed me, but it turns out (not surprisingly) that there are several such on the internet: here's the links to two of them.
I thought the art was the best on this one, which had quite a few pieces that were new to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkvLq0TYiwI
Here's another take: the music's not as good on this one but the images are first-rate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD1ih3Q9otE
--John R.
*apparently his last words were "the sadness will last forever"
Beautiful art, beautiful music, and one of the saddest stories in the world.*
I couldn't find the same compilation Janice showed me, but it turns out (not surprisingly) that there are several such on the internet: here's the links to two of them.
I thought the art was the best on this one, which had quite a few pieces that were new to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkvLq0TYiwI
Here's another take: the music's not as good on this one but the images are first-rate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD1ih3Q9otE
--John R.
*apparently his last words were "the sadness will last forever"
February 20, 2016
In Medias
So, I've been immersed in my NODENS paper lately, and it's occupied my time and attention to the extent that I haven't been doing much of anything else, including posting. Luckily I've now reached the mid-point and from here on out expect to pick up the pace as I move from discussing authors like Wm Bathurst, Ch. King, Jn Rhys, and Mortimer Wheeler to instead dealing with Machan, Ellis, Lovecraft, and of course Tolkien.
And then of course there's Verlyn's festschrift: I'm happy to report that five people have actually gotten their contributions in early. Most of the rest should come in during the next few weeks. Having been impressed by the proposals, and the pieces already submitted so far, I'm really looking forward to reading the whole set of essays and seeing the book take shape. Expect to hear off and on about this project for some time to come.
--John R.
current reading: all over the place
And then of course there's Verlyn's festschrift: I'm happy to report that five people have actually gotten their contributions in early. Most of the rest should come in during the next few weeks. Having been impressed by the proposals, and the pieces already submitted so far, I'm really looking forward to reading the whole set of essays and seeing the book take shape. Expect to hear off and on about this project for some time to come.
--John R.
current reading: all over the place
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