Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ the recommendation of his ten-year-old son, Rayner, he published Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Again at the recommendation of Rayner, he published The Lord of the Rings. Because that book was so difficult to describe, Unwin asked Lewis if he would write something to serve as a ‘blurb’ for its cover. Lewis included such a piece with this letter. Unwin was knighted in 1946.

231 Mrs Farrer took exception to Lewis’s portrayal of God as, not male, but masculine. In That Hideous Strength, ch. 14, part V, p. 350, Ransom tells Jane Studdock: ‘You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing–the gold lion, the bearded bull–which breaks through hedges and scatters the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’ that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’

232 Lewis was referring to the love of the dwarf, Gimli, for Galadriel, Queen of the Elves, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 7: ‘The Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes, and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.’

233 In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 8, ‘Farewell to Lórien’, the Fellowship takes leave of the security of Lothlórien to destroy the Ring.

234 In the final chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the noble Boromir covets the Ring so badly he tries to take it from Frodo: ‘“It is by our own folly that our Enemy will defeat us,” cried Boromir. “How it angers me! Fool! Obstinate fool! Running wilfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Númenor, and not Halflings. It is not yours save by unhappy chance. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!”’

235 See the letter to Sir Stanley Unwin of 4 December 1953.

236 ‘make haste slowly’.

237 The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 BC).

238 Lewis was referring to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

239 ibid., Preface, p. 12: ‘It would be affectation to pretend that I know whether Mr. Harding’s attempt, in its present form, will work. Very possibly not. One hardly expects the first, or the twenty-first, rocket to the Moon to make a good landing. But it is a beginning.’

240 See Dorothy L. Sayers in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1065-72.

241 Lewis had received one of Sayers’ Christmas cards. The text, ‘The Days of Christ’s Coming’, was by Sayers, with a painting by Fritz Wegner, and the card was printed by Hamish Hamilton. The picture had 27 numbered doors to be opened from 14 December to 7 January

242 Kathleen Nott had just published The Emperor’s Clothes (London: Heinemann, 1953), described on the jacket as ‘An attack on the dogmatic orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and others.’

243 A Scots word for money or silver.

244 Sayers’ first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy had been published in 1949. She was now working on her translation of the Purgatorio.

245 David Gresham was in fact nine and a half years old and Douglas eight.

246 The ‘Little Kingdom’ of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) is set in that pleasant area east of Oxford which includes Thame, Long Crendon and Worminghall.

247 Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: Ballantine, 1953).

248 H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).

249 Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), whose Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are mentioned in CL II, pp. 236, 594.

250 i.e., Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, one of Lewis’s oldest loves. See the references to it in CL I, pp. 29, 139n, 381-2.

251 Clarke, Childhood’s End, ch. 21, p. 163.

252 ibid., p. 164.

253 Luke 14:26.

254 But in Book V when they have returned to Sicily, the women try to burn the ships so they need not go to Latium. See CL 11, p. 750, N. 148. In Virgil, Aeneid, Book III Aeneas and his companions build a fleet and set off in search of the land that first bore the Trojan race (Italy). They have many strange adventures along the way, but eventually reach Libya.

255 That is, from matters of the soul (psyche) to those of the spirit (pneuma).

256 Dante, Inferno, IV, 42.

257 The letter was unsigned.

258 Her husband, Henry Gerard Walter Sandeman, died on 19 January 1953.

259 Matthew 19:5-6; Mark 10:8-9.

260 Titirangi School for the Deaf had now merged with the Kelston Deaf Education Centre, New Lynn, Auckland, and Bodle had moved to New Lynn to continue her teaching.

261 Herbert, The Temple, ‘The Church-porch’, Stanza 72, 5-6: ‘If all want sense, God takes a text, and preacheth Patience.’

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