He worked for some 20 years as a Primary Care Physician and is now an Associate Dermatologist and skin cancer diagnostics educator. He blogs about skin cancer and less often about C S Lewis. Stephen and his wife Julia live in Botley and have 2 adult daughters: Emily is a food scientist with a love for travel, Sarah is autistic and epileptic and deeply loves Jesus.
They manage a heritage apple orchard in Old Hampshire, Old England. This personal reflection mainly concerns the effect on me of deep and prolonged exposure to two influential 20 th century writers, Howard Price Lovecraft and Clive Staples Jack Lewis.
They had much in common: I am not the best-read year-old in England, my choice of a medical career saw to that, my favourite subjects at school were English and French, before the desire to become a doctor took hold but at major turning points in my life I was heavily engaged with the visions of each of these two men. These are some personal thoughts on their very different speculative fiction outputs. I tend to bundle Lewis and Tolkien together to some extent, I hope that will be excused.
Who reads H P Lovecraft? Well, I did for one. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, I liked anything weird. I got into Jimi Hendrix from the age of 11, receiving taunts from Monkees fans in the school playground.
Inklings & Yarns
Henry Rider Haggard was a favourite, especially his Zululand romances with their exotic differentness and an element of the supernatural. He was a misunderstood outcast with an enchanted axe, very like my other hero Jimi. I speed read it in an afternoon and literally ran a mile to get back to the library before closing time to order The Two Towers and The Return of The King.
By 16 I was content to be an outsider, especially as I now had a few friends who were also bored by football and mainstream pop music. Exotic, avant-garde, rebellious, even morbid and dangerous tastes were something to seek out and celebrate. Roy was a long-haired outsider who was into eastern religions and later came out as homosexual. Another friend was also heavily into Lovecraft. He was an outspoken atheist and communist. I became addicted instantly. Like my beloved Tolkien, and to a lesser extent Mervyn Peake The Gormenghast Trilogy Lovecraft had created an imaginary world which was strange and different.
But just round the corner from those sleepy towns and ordinary offices and universities, lay dark, hidden manuscripts and nameless horrors. Furthermore, these were horrors against which there was no defence, no God or hero to deliver you from the attentions of the mad gods of space, Nyarlathotep the crawling chaos, the evil rat Brown Jenkin, the noxious Yog-Sothoth who froths in primal slime, or countless other malign entities.
A grim universe indeed, of which I will offer a handful of examples. Yes, there was an evil witch in Narnia, but the place was inherently good, and if there was a witch there was also Aslan. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults. One of them was almost human. A brief quote from the story reads. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library. I can identify with that. This is a common theme in science fiction from The War of the Worlds to Star Wars , but Lovecraft took it further than most.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
This is really awful when you let it sink in.
But what if beings that acted like devils and could drag you down to some kind of hell, whether you deserved it or not, existed in a materialistic an amoral universe, and had no benevolent and righteous divine counterpart? I obtained as full a collection of Lovecraft books as possible, and read and re-read them.
I felt terrified and started running. I knelt by the side of my bed and prayed fervently to God asking for deliverance and safety. I have a clear memory of two things happening next. Not only had I spent much money on them, but promised to loan them to a friend. If I burned the books, I would look very silly. It is an indication of how disturbed I felt that 10 minutes later there was a fire on an upturned dustbin lid, which I fed until the last page was consumed.
I felt somewhat better, prayed some more, and was able to sleep. A couple of days later at school I sheepishly told Roy an edited version of what had happened. He was right; it did. Reading Perelandra restored an equilibrium in the world of my imagination, rather like a detox or hangover cure. As Lewis put it, there was such a thing as the Normal or Straight, a Power that cared about me, a Goodness that would have the last word.
Evil was real, but it would be defeated. The universe was not meaningless. Life was not a sick joke. We might be victims, but not helpless as we had a Helper. The memory of that is very clear despite the intervening years. But as the Apostle Paul wrote in 1 st Corinthians Is the universe in fact run by Nyarlathotep the crawling chaos or Maleldil the loving Father? The fact that we do, in the end, have to choose between mutually exclusive opposites is a major theme in Lewis, e. And, therefore, so what? Thank God there is a better vision available, and thank Jack for articulating it so well.
Here is a handy list of those posts, with little summaries. Please join the lively conversations going on over there in the comments! Charles Williams was not the only author of his time to write about the Holy Grail, and Suzanne Bray first puts it into its literary-historical context, then writes about more recent retellings of the Grail story: Do share your thoughts about the ability of mythology and fantasy to serve as political prophecy!
Oxford graduate and newly-hired faculty member at Signum University , I might add! Gabriel Schenk offers a blog post that began as a talk given at the Oxford C. He begins with an overview of the various negative connotations the Arthurian legends acquired over the years, which turn off some potential readers. I had never heard of this one before, and it sounds wild and wonderful! It sounds like a lively trip, and I hope you get a chance to read both the blog post and the poem it introduces. This is the Most Fun Post! Lewis went on, for a time, to collect expensive editions, which he had rebound to match each other, and always retained a love of paper, type, and covers.
But it was these inexpensive editions that allowed bookish teenagers early in the 20th century to encounter such great works as the Arthurian texts. They wrote, as it were, into the gaps in history, filling those blank spaces with stories of their own. Like the Inklings, who were in some ways his heirs, Chesterton had a view of the mythic significance of history—and the historical significance of mythology—that infused his Arthurian poems. He saw England itself as a kind of elfland or fairyland, suffused with spiritual meaning.
Fights over film adaptations of beloved books can get fierce and nasty. Is the Trickster really Trickster? Or does Creativity take hold for some time, and make Trickster what Trickster is? The world into which were are entering is one that happened to be penned by a single author, or so it is often said. You probably already know his name if you know me. Can you imagine that moment when a cosmogonic myth made itself apparent to a single human imagination?
What must that have felt like?
How many times has that happened in the history of our one species? How many beginnings have been retold of our world? But the Secondary World Tolkien shaped, a world called Arda, is one that tells the stories of other sub-creators, other divinely created beings who wished to create in their own measure and derivative mode. A world within a world, sub-creators under sub-creators. The desire to create itself, what we might call the embodiment of Creativity, has a Trickster form.
Again, can you imagine that moment when a cosmogonic myth made itself apparent to a single human imagination? Their singing, unbeknownst to them, shaped the world they would eventually build. The musical strands wove together and formed the first harmonies:. But one among the Ainur wished not to be a sub-creator, one whose musical threads were woven into the melodies of all others seamlessly.
He wished to be a creator in his own right. His name is Melkor, and at this moment he is the first embodiment of the Trickster in the Deeps of Time before the world of Arda is brought into being. The two melodies played simultaneously, conflicting yet interwoven: The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came.
For it was the sorrow of the third theme, sorrow in response to the violence of the disharmony, that gave it its profound beauty. Many Trickster themes are woven into this narrative, although the Trickster is not embodied by one being alone.
- The Oddest Inkling | An exploration of the works of poet Charles Williams () | Page 2.
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The Trickster energy moved quickly from being to being, never settling but still creating the dynamism of the moment. The Music of the Ainur is the moment of Creation, when the world is first imagined into being. It cannot be done again, and there are no mistakes. So it is that Trickster does indeed make this world, or rather shapes it, by being many agents of creativity in succession.
Seest thou not how here in this little realm in the Deeps of Time Melkor hath made war upon thy province? He hath bethought him of bitter cold immoderate, and yet hath not destroyed the beauty of thy fountains, nor of thy clear pools. Behold the snow, and the cunning work of frost! Melkor hath devised heat and fires without restraint, and hath not dried up thy desire nor utterly quelled the music of the sea. Behold rather the height and glory of the clouds, and the everchanging mists; and listen to the fall of rain upon the Earth!
To this, the Ainu of the Waters responded: In his rebellion Melkor became identified with the Trickster. He had wandered through the Void looking for the Secret Fire, that which grants true Being to the creative impulse. He represents the paradoxical category of sacred amorality. Creative Trickster energy moved on, and found its home in other sub-creators who walk the fine line between good and evil, following the ambiguous path of ingenuity and clever creativity.
Melkor has a foil among the Ainur, one who also desired to make his own independent creations: Is that thy desire? Something new is introduced that would have not existed otherwise, without the seeming rebellion of the sub-creator, or the unexpected move of the Creator to give them life. A sub-creator shapes a world within a world, Art from the raw material of Imagination.
A world within a world naturally has its boundaries, but while within the world it can be difficult to see where the boundaries lie, if it is possible to see them at all. Only when a new world is created do we see that boundary drawn, the moment sub-creator and Creator work together to breathe life into new form. The Trickster waits at the boundaries, the crossroads, the borders, leaping between those who dare to draw a line against what has come before to make something new and different.
Suggested Readings
In this world we have entered the Trickster seems particularly evasive, changing names and changing shapes, crossing from good to evil and back before there was good and evil to cross between. If he who seems to be a Trickster falls from grace, the Trickster energy moves on, finds somewhere else to be. And what is the Imperishable Flame, the Secret Fire?
Why was there a great Music to begin with? Why were the Ainur brought into being? Is that not the sign of the Trickster? Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Victims, Heroes and the Journey from the Underworld. Christopher Tolkien London, England: HarperCollins Publishers, , PageMill Press, , The Astrology of J.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World Library, Robert Hale Limited, Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. The Lord of the Rings. Ballantine Publishing Group, The musical strands wove together and formed the first harmonies: Works Cited Hyde, Lewis.
J.R.R. Tolkien & The Inklings – Becca S. Tarnas
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Next page. The notion of Recovery, as J. However, Tolkien launched the idea from theory to practice in a much more immediate way than that of his predecessors. He has a poetic sensibility that expresses itself best in mythopoeia, the making of myth. This paper uses both a conceptual and a symbolic-mythological hermeneutic analysis of their very different work to compare the attitudes and understandings of J.
Category: J.R.R. Tolkien & The Inklings
Tolkien and Max Weber towards modernity. An examination of C. A Monster that Matters: