C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Myth

the shot the child always says do it again and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead for every grown-up for grown-up people are not strong enough to exalts in monotony but perhaps God is strong enough to exalt monotony it is possible that God says every morning to the Sun do it again and every evening do it again to the moon it may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike it may be that God makes every Daisy separately but he never gets tired of making them it may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy for we have sinned and grown old and our father is younger than we what's he saying he's saying that that in our modern istic world we crave new things incessantly we always need that new jolt that new spark that new something Cheston here is saying we are weak because of that the fact that we always need that new stimulus that new thing to shake us awake is a result of us being tired of the good old thing that should not be gotten tired of and just that image that people love to repeat is God every morning almost giggling saying do it again do it again to the Sun that he exalts in his creation and loves it the way a child loves to see their favorite thing repeated over and over and over again and that we have in this sort of interesting turn of phrase we're older than our father meaning our passion has grown dim because we are weak love Chesterton could do a really whole course on him in some ways but orthodoxy is a great place to start with him and I think you'll enjoy it if you haven't already begun it turning now to the subject of the Inklings we're going to look at a couple of bits of the books of both Lewis and Tolkien and we're gonna take what we have already explored which is their context their backdrop the things that are animating them and we're going to then apply that to their book so we're gonna so we're going to start now sort of moving through this bit and we're gonna especially talk about the space trilogy now of course I've mentioned before the Inklings the Inklings are this this tribe this small book study you might this small book club that met at the University of Oxford and at Oxford University at this time there were all kinds of different impulses and philosophies and Theological motivations etc and I'm gonna go a little more in the future lecture into Lewis's background personally I've done the the wider backdrop and we're going to Tolkien's biography a little bit in a future lecture but just to kind of give you a colonel synopsis so that we're all on the same page what happened at Oxford when both of them arrived is in some ways it was the the flowering of both of their intellects in a modern world we might say that that Tolkien and Louis were sort of outcasts type peoples meaning and I don't mean that necessarily in the social setting sense but they were they were both involved and with and they loved literature and subjects that we might today find a bit obtuse or kind of strange I mean very few of us have the desire to go be medievalists or anglo-saxon scholars we may read Beowulf and enjoy it we may read Canterbury Tales but few of us are going to enjoy it to the level of these guys did which is it took them into the world of learning the languages and studying these subjects in a very significant way well what happens when Lewis and Tolkien arrived at Oxford is they find like-minded people they find their tribe we might say they find people that that are willing to discuss literature philosophically they don't just appreciate the stories but they'll get together with any story and they'll discuss it and that really is sort of the backbone of the way that Lewis and Tolkien always approach any story whether it's pagan classical whether it's Christian medieval they always will approach the story with the question what in this is true now again that's that might be different than the way you might approach a classical mythology story or an anglo-saxon myth or Norse myth you know and it's it's it's up to you whether or not you find that the Inklings way of doing this your preferred method or not but but the way talking Louis approached these subjects is they knew there was things wrong with it they're not trying to say hey pagan theology is our theology but what they're trying to say when they read these texts is okay assuming that these things are not true how is the image of God coming out of them an old professor used to say it takes a lot of truth to float a lie that that that some things are utterly wrong but few things are actually utterly wrong meaning wrong at every single level and so with Lewis and Tolkien and with others in the Inklings orbit which I'll talk about just a second their approach is more just wonder and fascination as literary experts so they would read anything and they would discuss it that they had no they had no fear of certain texts so if they're a reading Beowulf of course it's a pagan text though technically it's not more on that a second but but they're reading Beowulf and they know it's a pagan text at least the kernel of it but they also know that it's it's a human trying to describe the world around them through this mythology and what and this is very interesting for Louis because Louis's conversion to the first of all to theism and then eventually about a year later into Christian theism becoming a full-blown cradle Confessional Christian Lewis moves along that path intellectually because his love of these stories opens up for him this concept of why is every human culture trying to explain the world and explain God or the gods or all these kinds of things and so what louis ends up saying at a later date after his conversion is he says we don't have to be fearful of paganism in the literary sense meaning if you read their text they're not gonna pervert you and make you somehow semi pagan he said but rather Christianity is stronger when it has a healthy appreciation for what what pagans are trying to do because we as Louis will say we're once them and just as we fumbled in and tried to understand the world in our backwards ways that were not biblical at all now that we have eyes the ears eyes to see and ears to hear we can now understand the the the prison that pagan literature is wrapped up in and so therefore wouldíve when he reads it he'll read it in two ways one is this a good story that's first thing you know it is it might it might be the way today in the modern world would say is it a good movie you know a lot of movies that basically our mythological they invent entire worlds and these kinds of things and when we come out of a movie we say was that worth the increasingly large amount of money it takes to see a movie these days or is that it or resent a waste of my 2 or 3 hours that's the first question and that's that's driven by the fact that their literary scholars they're essentially what would call the English faculty they're not they're not principally theologians or pastors that they're saying is this a good story that's first but secondly they say what if it is a good story like Beowulf let's say what is it that I'm attracted to is it a good thing is it a bad thing usually it's I'm attracted to a virtuous hero or a roguish antihero or I'm attracted to the defeat of evil this kind of a thing and a number of people today and ever since Lewis and Tolkien in them have commented on this but a favorite sort of pastor theologian of mine Tim Keller gordon-conwell grad pretty well known by most people it has a couple things we says on this which I think you're right he says every myth every story every fantasy every childhood story always seems to revolve around the fact that the world has fallen there is some evil out there and victory is always snatched from the jaws of defeat and he says how they are interesting that the biblical story seems to be mimicked and even unintentional stories that that the way the biblical narrative flows of it is a good world it is a fallen world and at the cross victory is snatched from what appears to be defeat always seems to comport with so many of our fantasy and our fiction and not even our just unintentional stories the things you might make up for your kids this kind of a thing so Louis in particular he loves all kinds of stories he loves that we were talking at one of the breaks he loves Beatrix Potter I guarantee he would have loved Harry Potter on some level he was not in other words a snob and the sense that if it's not fully Christian he's gonna hate it he's gonna yeah he'll hate it he will look for a good story and then the last question what is it about this and in the end the conclusion as always it's not fully there it's a it's a fragment of the broken world so if there's a pagan character that's virtuous is that virtuous in the biblical sense but there's that fragment of that image of God that is in all of us that is still there and you can spot it with Tolkien in particular this is important because Tolkien's world the Gothic world that he's studying the anglo-saxon world is a world that as the literature is being written down is actually right when Christianity is converting it believe it or not so if you actually go and read Beowulf what's what's interesting his bailiff is not written by a pagan essentially written by a Christian the the narrator of the story is Christian and he's recounting this story of this pagan story and there are there clearer times throughout it where he's shaking his head like pagans you know this kind of thing along the way but what you see happening and this is why talking is somewhat okay with doing this in his own works as he sees anglo-saxon II and all these other myths as Christianity is in wrapping in it and as its converting all the Frankish and the northern Germanic tribes after the fall of Rome he sees this mingling of these cultures and at the end Lewis and Tolkien again people don't always like this but Lewis and Tolkien believed that paganism and its mythology was some kind of the word we might use this common grace that it's some kind of way in which God prepared them for the true story that it's wrong there's no pagans they're not not semi Christian or anything like this they're still wrong but he's preparing a nation and a people for the eventualities of the truth to come that he that guy was once but that God spared them from being materialists he at least allowed them to still be spiritual and to have these pagan mythology's so that when the true God came they were able to say oh that's the true one and in Lewis's life that's exactly what happened he was in love with all these stories and then he found what he said was a true myth a true story a real story that actually happened in time and space that actually gave him something that he could engage with that shaped his entire worldview yeah yeah great question if you don't know but Tolkien was a bailiff scholar he wrote a book on it but that we that his son found that he'd actually translated Beowulf himself and it just got published like two to three months ago it's it is significantly different than the ones you might find in the other ones and I have it it's it's I mean bailiff says short little book it's not very long but it the book itself is pretty long because the the end of it like for about three-fourths of this book there are notes describing what Tolkien is doing and why he translated this word and all those kind of stuff though it if you've never read Beowulf you might read Tolkien's version of it the the bailiff story itself is quite short Grendel on the monster there's a dragon and all this kind of stuff again very hobbit-like and laced in some of the elements there's another one coming up by the way soon I think at the end of this year maybe next year poking it in an Arthurian legend believe it or not that's just a bit of a flight of Fantan what you'd expect him to do but again there you see they don't mind these things and in fact the Arthurian legend is a real great example I mean how many times have we retold the story of King Arthur and how many times have we like remade it to mean different things even more recently there was this book Camelot which told the entire Arthurian legend from the vantage of the women in the story and then it's always become in other words of a template for describing truth that's closer to where toki and lewis will be it's not if the stories of irrelevant they want the stories to be good but they always know and will say this in just a second that the stories always mean something besides just themselves so in Oxford as these guys come together and they find like-minded folks there was a small group they used to meet and they called themselves the kool biters cold Betar as it was called and the kool biters were the the first group of the Inklings it was Lewis and Tolkien and a few others and they called themselves the kool biters because for it was it was always a double meaning for them kool biters was a Viking Scandinavian word they referred to something in the past but it also meant that in a met particularly in the winter months and they was said that they sat so close to the fire that they might as well been biting the coal the coal they were that close to trying to stay warm so it was this double meaning and what happens is this talking Louis become friends and some others and talking basically says you guys like you know Norse and all these kind of mythologies these stories we can get together and read them in the original language because I could teach you how to read these things and we can just kind of discuss what the what the themes are like that's the that's the origin of all the Inklings it's just a couple of dudes nerding out on anglo-saxon mythology they just find it interesting and it's this is this period of study that no knew much about these were all these I mean could you imagine if you if you were a literary expert yourself if someone says hey by the way there's a whole cache of stories that no one reads because they're in the original language but let me help you I could we could translate him on the fly I mean this is it you know dream come true for guys like Louis and said they would get together and they would talk about it that eventually developed and eventually they the this group took the name of a student-led group which met and did other things and the student-led group was called the Inklings and Lewis and Tolkien thought it was a great name so they took it and the Inklings itself has a double meaning the name it meant first and foremost these were guys that used to write by fountain pen and so very often they'd have ink on their hands and say they were the inked ones but also as they were reading literature as they began to write literature and share it with each other they always liked the idea that their their stories in particular had Inklings of other things out there so it was a story if we say yeah there's an inkling of this it means there's little you can little think a little taste of it as you're reading it and so they purposely in other words set out to write and create in a way that smuggled in ideas that that at least got the current pagan and the 20th century to say that's something here I don't know about you but if you ask a number of people in a sort of a broad audience have you read the line of which in the wardrobe a lot of people have a lot of people can tell you that they rented as a pagan and they were just enthralled by this idea of this self sacrificial lion and all those kinds of things they didn't pick up on the cross element necessarily and then later on they fund it they they sort of keep pursuing things etc that's the goal of the Inklings it's it's to reinsure they're not writing theology they're writing literature but because they are lay theologians and Christians there their literature is going to be Christian it's going to have Christian elements built into it the place they used to meet if you ever go to Oxford is the eagle and child this is it here this is pub right on this remain strip they eventually started calling it the bird and the baby eagle bird child baby bird the baby and you can still go to it it's a it's a pretty horrible tourist trap now but you can go to it and in the back there near the fire fireplace you can see up on the mantel there pictures of the Inklings because that's where they used to sit now a couple of myths to dispel they did not get drunk there's a lot of people who think that guy got together and got roaring drunk and just read a bunch of stuff we actually know from pretty for pretty from their own letters other things and they have a drink beer they were not teetotalers but they never like Louis was very keen on this you don't you don't get drunk he would sweat he was actually what he was addicted to was tea he drank a really strong Indian tea and at some point in the night after a couple of drinks he would switch and he would go to tea this kind of thing but they would smoke their pipes and they would sit there and drink a couple of pints and they would talk they did it every every week and they would just continue to do so sometimes they would just talk about whatever sometimes they would bring things to read this kind of a thing so this is the Inklings this is where they would meet the four main guys who were there were CS Lewis JRR tolkien Charles Williams more on him just a second and Owen Barfield now to show you that this is not a purposeful theological Christian movement this is just a group of friends you need to go ahead and just be aware I need to actually just be aware of the fact that only two of these people up here at Christian Owen bar field is not a Christian he's what he called a anthroposophy which is just some random word it's basically new agey kind of spiritualist now I didn't talk about it a whole lot but he was not a Christian in the traditional sense of the word he was some sort of spiritualist but that didn't preclude him from coming and talking about literature Charles Williams is sometimes described as a Christian and it's of course until you read his biography or anything about him frankly he as well was a bit a strange bird he he he dabbled in all kinds of things in a way that was not fully Christian and his and his worldview was not Christian either his worldview was probably something closer to new agey ish now everyone always says that they said oh okay what's going on here is a lot of strange sort of dabbling in weird theology not necessarily again this is a literary group and they would actually argue about this stuff because for a for a long period of time CS Lewis was a part of this and he was an atheist for a while it was only JRR tolkien he was a Christian now eventually tolking pummels Louis and Louis converts and then eventually he becomes a full Christian but in other words this was not an evangelistic group this was just a group of colleagues you might say and just as you it wherever you might be working assuming if it's not a church hopefully you don't have pagans working on the church staff but if you're gonna say you're working in the in the marketplace you may have Christians non-christians who you are friends with or colleagues with this kind of thing it's it's more like that it's a literary group that is engaged in theology so sorry literate literature engaged in literary studies and some there are using it to understand better their own Christian faith the main thing they would do a dat Inklings meeting is they would debate and they would debate until all hours of the night sometimes what would they debate they would debate things like what is the meaning of this story or is this story any good does it ring true we don't have a you know sort of minutes of the meeting or anything like this we only know exactly what one of these debates would look like but we do have descriptions of it in general particularly from Louis's brother Warren E and Warren he said you know that they would argue into all hours of the night and even Lewis and Tolkien once Louis even went even after Lewis had converted Lewis and Tolkien would disagree I would say not unless that is not a good text that story is so contrived this kind of a thing and they were just debate it's again it's got a nerd Club no it's fine we can call it that we can go there but for them the whole goal was to really engage in this thing now as the Inklings develop and as Lewis and Tolkien become incredibly world-renowned famous the Inklings began to take on a significantly more Christian tone Charles Williams steps away and then he dies at a young age oh and Barfield stays around he even though he never converts to Orthodox Christianity and then others start to come along as well Warnie Lewis's brother comes it's it's sometimes said that Dorothy Sayers was there she was not actually at the meetings that she was friends with them this kind of a thing so they would debate well during the debate one of the things that they would focus on is a phrase that has sort of entered the English language it would focus on things called mythopoetic now in a previous lecture I talked about the concept of myth right so I'm going to flesh that out one more step just some spoon-feeding this slowly so if in this world myth is doesn't mean fake if myth for Lewis and Tolkien means a worldview something that a text or a story or a series of stories that tells us about creation and what is good and what is true and are their gods or a God and who is he or she or them that's kind of a thing mythopoetic it meant bait essentially myths and stories and poetry they actually liked poetry a great deal more than then many of us might well mythopoetic aim they're kind of catch-all word for a great story or poem or something that conjures up a holistic view of the world so they would look at the Bible and they would say it's mythopoetic and they would describe the Norse mythology's as being mythopoetic it was just a generic catch all for what they were looking for they were looking for a full story and a full understanding of the worldview now I end this work it's used a lot in secondary sources actually I think the the existing like official Tolkien society is called the mythopoetic society you can go join and learn the handshake or something but the myth of but mythopoetic an is not the sense of how can we take biblical text and equate them with pagan sources but rather how do we approach any literary subject

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 55,106

Keywords: Inklings (Membership Organization), Mythopoeic Literature (Media Genre), C. S. Lewis (Author), J. R. R. Tolkien (Author), Hobbit (Character Species), Elf (Character Species), The Chronicles Of Narnia (Literary Series), Ryan M. Reeves

Id: TvnYs9FHaNk

Length: 24min 56sec (1496 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 28 2014