Laura Miller (33 page)

The first time I visited England I went for a walk with a friend over the headlands of the Isle of Wight off the southern coast. We happened upon a group of barrows, and hiked over the edge of the tallest. The top of the mound had collapsed long ago, leaving a grassy bowl. We lay down inside and listened as the wind blew up over the hill from the sea, while in that small shelter all was still. I tried to imagine the people who’d built the mound, thousands and thousands of years ago, a race whose very name has been lost, but who, like people everywhere, made a ceremony of burying their dead. I felt a sensation of plunging, not through space but through time, a feeling both giddy and solemn. I may even have held my breath for a while. When the moment passed, I turned and began to describe it to my friend, who, I learned to my surprise, had experienced much the same thing.

Lewis grew up amid sites like this one; the remains of the oldest man-made structures in Britain are in Northern Ireland. When I hiked to the top of Slieve Martin in Rostrevor, I found, as promised in a park brochure, a stone with fading petroglyphs and, not far off, a cairn, or pile of rocks, marking an ancient grave. A prodigious country walker like Lewis must have happened upon hundreds of such remnants as he and his friends tramped through the hills of England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.

Those experiences inspired the opening of
Prince Caspian,
a favorite scene among Lewis’s readers. The Pevensies, after being magically yanked from a railway platform in England onto a deserted island, make their way from the shore to the island’s center. There, amid the trees, they find a crumbling stone wall with an arched opening; through it, they walk into “a wide open place with walls all round it. In here there were no trees, only level grass and daisies, and ivy, and grey walls. It was a bright, secret, quiet place, and rather sad.” The children soon recognize this for the ruins of a castle, but it isn’t until Susan finds a solid gold chessman (an echo of Norse gods’ golden game pieces, found in the grass by the survivors of Ragnarok) that they realize that this is
their
castle, the remnants of Cair Paravel. Because of the incongruities in the passage of time between Narnia and our world, they’ve returned hundreds of years after their own reign.

Energetic promoters of Northern Ireland as a site for C. S. Lewis tourism have claimed that Dunluce Castle on the Antrim Coast was the model for Cair Paravel. Lewis himself never said as much, although he knew the place; his family often vacationed along the northern coast of Ireland in the summers when he was a child. Built on a tall, steep rock outcropping surrounded by rough surf, accessible only by a narrow bridge, Dunluce is gloomier than I ever imagined Cair Paravel being. (If you happen to have an old LP of Led Zeppelin’s
Houses of the Holy,
you can see for yourself; Dunluce is the background for the gatefold photograph.) What’s left of the castle looks stolid and houselike, not especially evocative of the spires and gables that Pauline Baynes drew for
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
I was, however, won over to the idea of Dunluce as Cair Paravel (sentimentally, if not rationally) by something far below the castle itself, at the foot of its massive basalt base: a little grotto, washed by the waves, called the Mermaid’s Cave. Mermaids and mermen, as some readers of Narnia will recall, sang at the coronation of Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Like the remains of Cair Paravel, Dunluce Castle is roofless, and its floors have been replaced by a carpet of grass. You can see a similarly carpeted ruin beside the Thames footpath in Oxford, the route Lewis and his friends took on their frequent walks to the Trout pub in Wolvercote. These walls, what’s left of Godstow Nunnery, are older even than Dunluce. Henry II’s popular mistress, Rosamund Clifford, was once buried in the convent’s church choir. That was too close to the altar for the liking of Saint Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, who had her tomb removed in 1191 as part of a campaign against “superstitious and magical abominations everywhere,” according to his hagiographer. The tomb was later destroyed in another religious purge when Henry VIII dissolved the Catholic orders and established the Church of England in the 1530s. At that point, the building was converted to a private house and occupied by a well-off local family — until the English civil war, when it was badly damaged during the fighting between Puritan revolutionaries and Anglican royalists. Eventually, the ruins became a picnic spot favored on sunny afternoons by, among others, Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell, and her sisters.

Look deep enough and many such places in England become spiritual palimpsests; each faith is written over the one that came before, leaving traces of the “Old Religion” still visible beneath. This was true back in the days of the
Beowulf
poet; even the dragon is a squatter in a structure built by somebody long dead. The difficulty with Tolkien’s plan “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own” was that by conceiving of that mythology as essentially Anglo-Saxon, rather than British, he tried not only to freeze a moment in that history but to airbrush out the past. The Anglo-Saxons, coming as they did somewhere in the middle of the long succession of peoples that have settled in Britain, never established an entirely “pure” culture there.

As for what Lewis called “England’s national epic,” Thomas Malory’s
Morte D’Arthur,
well, Tolkien had reservations about
that.
The Arthurian tradition was Celtic in origin and it was primarily preserved in the chivalric romances written by French poets in the Middle Ages. As a result, Tolkien disdained the stories of King Arthur and his knights on no less than three counts: first, for their Christianity, which, for complicated reasons, Tolkien felt compromised their mythic integrity; second, for the French elements (especially the “corrupt” code of courtly love), about which the less said the better; and third, for their Celtic roots.

Tolkien’s attitude toward Celtic culture was ambivalent to say the least. When, in the 1930s, his British publisher sent an early manuscript of
The Silmarillion
to a reader, a report came back that complained of the “eye-splitting Celtic names” and described Tolkien’s tales as conveying “something of that mad, bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in the face of Celtic art.” Tolkien, naturally, protested. His names and stories were not Celtic! “I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages, Irish and Welsh),” he wrote in reply, “and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright color, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’ as your reader says — but I don’t believe I am.”

The distinction is charged — politically, historically, personally, and (for Tolkien at least) linguistically. Tolkien believed, as did just about everyone at that time, that the English were descended mainly from the Anglo-Saxons. The rest of Britain — Wales, Scotland, and (especially) Ireland — constituted a “Celtic fringe,” whose ancestors had been pushed to the so-called outskirts by the invading Germanic tribes who overran the heartland after the Romans abandoned their British colonies in the fifth century. This idea had many uses for the English, all springing from the widely held conviction that the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts had fundamentally different temperaments as well as cultures.

The Celts were “mad”: moody, whimsical, flighty, and often charming, but prone to superstition, to drink, and to melancholy. The Anglo-Saxons were practical, energetic, and efficient, in accordance with the common stereotype of Germans. Anglo-Saxons got things done and hewed to a noble code of honor inherited from their warrior past. This explained why the Anglo-Saxons (that is, the English) rightfully dominated the people of the Celtic fringe; they were inherently superior and capable, uniquely fitted for leadership. Lewis himself subscribed to this view at times, characterizing his father’s Welsh family as “sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical.”

This doctrine of the two temperaments flourished in the nineteenth century, when prominent English experts equated Celtic ancestry with Catholicism and a general lazy backwardness that would have to be eradicated if the Irish (in particular) could ever hope to equal their English rulers. The prominent naturalist Robert Knox thought the Irish were incurable, and wrote, “The source of all evil lies
in the race,
the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over
historical facts
. . . . The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. England’s safety requires it. I speak not of the justice of the cause; nations must ever act as Machiavelli advised: look to yourself. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for clearing the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts.”

Tolkien would never have condoned this sort of racism, even if it hadn’t come laced with a large dose of anti-Catholicism, but he was prone to the fantasy of racialism all the same. Each language has a distinct flavor, as he saw it, and his own immediate recognition of Anglo-Saxon constituted, in his opinion, “as good or better a test of ancestry as blood-groups.” Blood explained why he “took to early West-Midland middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it.”

In this belief, incidentally, Tolkien was almost certainly wrong. Recent advances in the analysis of DNA have made it possible to determine the distant genetic roots of contemporary individuals. Samples taken from the population of Britain revealed, to the surprise of many, that the modern English are mostly
not
of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. “Overall,” wrote the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes, who oversaw the studies, “the genetic structure of the Isles is stubbornly Celtic, if by that we mean descent from people who were here before the Romans and who spoke a Celtic language.” In some parts of England, the proportion of people who can claim Anglo-Saxon ancestry does run as high as twenty percent, but that is along the eastern coast. Tolkien’s beloved homeland, the West Midlands, is almost entirely populated by the descendants of Celts, and on his mother’s side (the only branch of his family that mattered to him, and the source of his perceived Anglo-Saxonism) he too was most probably a Celt.

Tolkien did waver in his “distaste” for things Celtic. As a boy, he found the Welsh names painted on the sides of railway cars both mysterious and evocative, and the elvish language Sindarin is based on Welsh, one of his favorite tongues. He wrote (or at least began) a few poems on Arthurian subjects, despite his apprehensions about the non-English roots of the tradition. And one of the major works of his career as a scholar was a translation, with E. V. Gordon, of the fourteenth-century Middle English Arthurian poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Tolkien’s introduction (with Gordon) to that work praises it for not being as “rambling and incoherent” as “older Celtic forms.”

As for his own tales, Tolkien wrote that he intended them to convey “the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things).” Most likely, he found the Celtic legends preserved in the Irish cycles and the Welsh
Mabinogion
— rife as they are with promiscuous women, arbitrary violence, and bodily fluids, as most myths tend to be toward the root — too coarse for his taste. His new mythology for England would instead be “‘high,’ purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.”

Lewis, of course, would sometimes count himself among the Celts, but that did not necessarily keep him from agreeing with his friend on the problematic aspects of Celtic culture. He did, however, draw the line between the “flavors” of Celtic and Germanic myth with a greater, less punitive delicacy, in a letter to Arthur Greeves:

I noted that the Celtic was much more sensuous; also less
homely:
also, entirely lacking in
reverence,
of which the Germanic was full. Then again that the Germanic
glowed
in a sense with the rich somber colors, while the Celtic was all transparent and full of nuances — evanescent — but very bright. One sees that Celtic is essentially Pagan, not merely in the sense of being heathen (not-Christian), as the Germanic might be, but in the sense of being irredeemably pagan, frivolous under all its melancholy, incapable of growing into religion, and — I think — a little heartless.

Some of these words — “transparent and full of nuances — evanescent — but very bright” — could well describe Narnia, while the “rich somber colors” and “reverence” of the Germanic sounds more like Middle-earth. At times, Narnia does feel like a heroic and not entirely successful attempt to inject “religion” (that is, Christianity) into an “irredeemably pagan” (pan-pagan, really) realm that its convert author cannot bear to leave behind. But harping on the division between Germanic and Celtic (or for that matter, classical) paganism was characteristic of Tolkien, not Lewis. Lewis never felt the need to choose between the two mythologies, for as he went on to say in that letter to Arthur Greeves, “I don’t want to give up either: they are almost one’s male and female soul.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Riches All About You

L
ewis’s magpie aesthetic made Narnia a grab bag of every motif that had ever captured his fancy. Susanna Clarke told me that she’d once heard Narnia called just that, a “fancy,” in comparison to Tolkien’s fully articulated “fantasy.” The distinction, she said, originated with an academic critic of contemporary genre fiction, Gary Wolfe, author of the book
Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship.
I wrote to Wolfe to find out more, and he kindly replied, explaining that although he’d never actually applied the distinction to Lewis and Tolkien, he could see how someone else might. He’d based it on Coleridge’s conception of the difference between fancy and imagination, as described in
Biographia Literaria,
the philosophical and aesthetic autobiography Coleridge published in 1817.