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C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien Faith and Fiction

C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien Faith and Fiction. Stonyhurst Essay Society May 2 nd 2008 David Alton . The Last Battle. "Welcome, in the lion's name. Come further up and further in....the further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.".

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C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien Faith and Fiction

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  1. C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.TolkienFaith and Fiction Stonyhurst Essay Society May 2nd 2008 David Alton

  2. The Last Battle "Welcome, in the lion's name. Come further up and further in....the further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside."

  3. “Lewis was simply a genius” J.K.Rowling Philip Pullman “But there is no doubt in the public mind that what matters is the Narnia cycle, and that is where the puzzle comes, because there is no doubt in my mind that it is one of the most ugly and poisonous things I've ever read….there is no shortage of nauseating drivel in Narnia.”  

  4. The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe – completed 1949, published 1950 Narnian Chronicles: 85 million copies, over 30 languages

  5. 1932, 1942, 1945

  6. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…”

  7. Over 150 million copies sold worldwide… …1954

  8. 1962, 1949, 1964

  9. Christopher Tolkien: • - Silmarillion: 1977 • History of Middle Earth: • 1983 & 1997 • - The Children of Hurin: 2007

  10. C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien Who were these two men? What influences formed them? What was it they believed?

  11. Malory’s fifteenth century Arthurian legend: Morte d’Arthur

  12. Common Influences: War, Faith, Love of Myth and Legend

  13. Lewis was born in 1898 in Northern Ireland With father, Albert, and older brother, Warnie.

  14. Father and brother both suffered from alcoholism Lewis later wrote that his father’s “nerves had never been of the steadiest and his emotions had always been uncontrolled. Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.” Brother, Warnie

  15. Jack’s mother died when he was aged nine: “With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, departed from my life”

  16. “how would you like it….if your Mother was ill and was going to – going to – die.”- Digory Kirke

  17. Unhappy School Days “I was at three schools (all boarding schools) of which two were very horrid. I never hated anything so much, not even the front line trenches in World War I. Indeed, the story is far too horrid to tell anyone of your age.”

  18. The Silver Chair • Experiment House, the school attended by Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb in “The Silver Chair” - “a mixed school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.”

  19. After Edmund has encountered Aslan, Lucy says that her brother has been transformed: “not only healed of his wounds but looking better than she has seen him look – oh for ages; in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he began to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face.” John Dewey

  20. Lewis castigates modern educationalists as “the new Conditioners” :“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise….we castrate them and then bid the geldings be fruitful.” Of the Conditioners he says “It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all…they are artefacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”

  21. Oxford 1916 “The place has surpassed my wildest dreams”

  22. Unskilled Butchery of War “The bear lay on the ground, moving feebly. Then it mumbled in its throaty voice, bewildered to the last, “I – I don’t – understand”, laid its big head down on the grass quietly as a child going to sleep, and never moved again.” - ‘The Last Battle’

  23. Lewis: on non belief and friendship: When asked whether he had been scared during he time in the trenches, Lewis, now utterly confirmed in his non-belief, responded: “All the time, but I never sank so low as to pray.” Lewis once wrote that “There’s no sound I like better than male laughter.”

  24. The genesis of the Inklings “CSL had a passion for hearing things read aloud.” - Tolkien.

  25. The Inklings The ‘Bird and Baby’ C.S.Lewis Owen Barfield J.R.R.Tolkien

  26. The Four Loves Lewis would write of the importance of such friendship in ‘The Four Loves’: “He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest or funniest in all the others.” Affection, Eros, Friendship, Caritas

  27. Surprised By Joy “You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady unrelenting approach of Him Whom I so earnestly desired to meet. That which I greatly feared had come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England…The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

  28. 1931 Conversion to Christianity “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ – in Christianity. …My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.” In this moment of conversion he also recanted what he described as “depth upon depth of self-love and self-admiration.”

  29. The Screwtape Letters, 1942 In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis provides a series of lessons in the importance of the Christian life and Christian morality by portraying a typical human life, with all its temptations and failings, as seen from the devil's viewpoint. Wormwood and Screwtape live in a peculiarly morally reversed world, where individual benefit and greed are seen as the greatest good, and neither devil is capable of comprehending or acknowledging true human virtue when he sees it. “Our Father Below”…”The Miserific Vision”

  30. Mere Christianity Repudiation of “Christianity and water” Lewis states that to understand Christianity, one must understand the moral law, which is the underlying moral structure of the universe. The moral law is "hard as nails." Unless one understands the dismay which comes from the moral law, one cannot understand the coming of Christ and his work.

  31. The Cosmic Trilogy

  32. That Hideous Strength George Orwell wrote a review of the book in The Manchester Evening News. He said that the purpose of the Belbury scientists was to wipe out life deemed to be "superfluous" to turn "common people into slaves" and to turn the "ruling caste of scientists “into our rulers "who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself."

  33. Orwell on Lewis "There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb - of a type already pronounced "obsolete" - has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable."

  34. The Pseudo Scientists of Belbury At the N.I.C.E, in this contemporary Tower of Babel, the Progressive Element wage war against the Diehards.

  35. That Hideous Strength Lord Feverstone clinically describes the mission of NICE as "Quite simple and obvious things at first - sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races, selective breeding." Ultimately, he declares, they will create "a new type of man: and, he tells the impressionable Studdock, "It's people like you who've got to begin to make him."

  36. Kenneth Tynan on Lewis Kenneth Tynan, was one of his students in 1945, and recalled later that Lewis was “terribly sound and funny”…He was a deeply kind and charitable man too.” On one occasion when Tynan went to see his tutor he said “I had entered the room suicidal, and I left it exhilarated.”

  37. Tolkien on Lewis’ Asceticism In 1944 The Daily Telegraph misleadingly referred to Lewis as “an ascetic”. Tolkien scoffed at this in a letter to his son: “Ascetic Mr.Lewis!!! I ask you! He put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning and said he was ‘going short for Lent.”

  38. Lewis and Joy Davidman Lewis wrote“A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photographs was saying ‘These bones are as solid as rock.’ It’s miraculous”.

  39. Shadowlands “The happiness now is part of the pain later…that’s the deal.”

  40. A Grief Observed “I never thought I would have in my sixties the happiness that passed me by in my twenties”. “Through the megaphone of pain, God speaks to an unlistening world.”

  41. The Last Battle “The dream is ended: this is the morning. And as He spoke He no longer looked at them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

  42. J.R.R.Tolkien - Born in Bloemfontein -1892 - Father died, returned to England – 1896 - Obtained scholarship to King Edward’s Birmingham – 1903 - Mother died -1904 - Father Francis Morgan became his guardian

  43. Tolkien’s Tea Club And Barrovian Society - King Edward’s School

  44. 1910 - Oxford From King Edward’s, Tolkien won an exhibition to Exeter College, Oxford in 1910, and graduated with First Class Honours in 1915.

  45. Marriage to Edith Bratt - 1916 Tolkien was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers

  46. On July 15, 1916, Smith wrote to Tolkien of Gilson's death: My dear John Ronald,I saw in the paper this morning that Rob has been killed. I am safe but what does that matter? Do please stick to me, you and Christopher. I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this worst news. Now one realises in despair what the T.C.B.S. really was. O my dear John Ronald what ever are we going to do? Yours ever. G. B. S.

  47. 5 months later, Tolkien was informed by Wiseman that Smith had also died in a mission. Smith wrote his last letter to Tolkien just before setting out:“My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight - I am off on duty in a few minutes - there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the T.C.B.S. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! A discovery I am going to communicate to Rob before I go off tonight. And do you write it also to Christopher. May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. Yours ever, G. B. S.”

  48. Smith to Tolkien “may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.” The Book of Lost Tales…..

  49. 1929: he started to write a story for his children, Christopher, Michael, John and Priscilla

  50. “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit…”

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