C. S. Lewis the Medievalist: Baldr, Brunanburh, Athelstan, and Edmund the Just

King Athelstan in a tenth-century manuscript (image from wikipedia)

Today the internet is full of people paying tribute to C. S. Lewis, who died fifty years ago on 22 November 1963. It's difficult to say anything about Lewis that hasn't been said before, but I wanted to pay my own tribute anyway; he's been important to my imaginative life ever since I learned to read, and (although I only realised this rather late in the game) he was a big part of the reason I became a medievalist.  The Chronicles of Narnia are a splendid introduction to medieval literature, because Lewis delighted in cramming in as many allusions as possible from all kinds of literary sources, often, it seems, just for his own scholarly amusement. I've talked about this before in reference to Lewis' wonderfully playful attitude to literary language in the Chronicles; the language soars far above the average child reader's vocabulary to experiment and luxuriate and delight in different registers of literary discourse. Today I went and re-read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in the Bodleian - quite without shame, because I'm old enough to read fairy tales openly now! - and was pleased to be reminded of one lovely instance of this: by the end of the book, when the children have reached adulthood in Narnia, they've started to speak in the most ridiculously brilliant medievalese:

Then said King Peter (for they talked in quite a different style now, having been Kings and Queens for so long), "Fair Consorts, let us now alight from our horses and follow this beast into the thicket; for in all my days I never hunted a nobler quarry."

"Sir," said the others, "even so let us do."

So they alighted and tied their horses to trees and went on into the thick wood on foot. And as soon as they had entered it Queen Susan said, "Fair friends, here is a great marvel, for I seem to see a tree of iron."

"Madam," said King Edmund, "if you look well upon it you shall see it is a pillar of iron with a lantern set on the top thereof."

"By the Lion's Mane, a strange device," said King Peter, "to set a lantern here where the trees cluster so thick about it and so high above it that if it were lit it should give light to no man!"

"Sir," said Queen Lucy, "by likelihood when this post and this lamp were set here there were smaller trees in the place, or fewer, or none. For this is a young wood and the iron post is old." And they stood looking upon it. Then said King Edmund,

"I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream."

"Sir," answered they all, "it is even so with us also."

Absurd, but so much fun! The narrator plays along too - 'answered they all' is straight out of Le Morte d'Arthur. And then the first thing that comes back to them as they return to England is their ordinary everyday language:

So these Kings and Queens entered the thicket, and before they had gone a score of paces they all remembered that the thing they had seen was called a lamppost, and before they had gone twenty more they noticed that they were making their way not through branches but through coats.

Within a sentence the narrator has switched back from 'a score of paces' to just 'twenty more'; we are back in the modern world.  I adore this kind of thing, and it's a fantastic introduction to the idea of literary language and appropriate styles of discourse; Lewis was forming his child readers into little literary critics.

This is true on another level too, because - rather like the Canterbury Tales - the Narnia books are a compendium of literary genres, a joyous introduction to all the different kinds of things literature can do. The Magician's Nephew plays in the world of E. Nesbit's children's stories, The Horse and His Boy in the world of the Arabian Nights; Prince Caspian offers the dynastic conflicts of Shakespeare's history plays, its hero a fine Tudor prince properly educated in the quadrivium (!); The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is all Mandevillian 'Travels in the East', complete with sea-serpents and monopods; The Silver Chair starts with Middle English romance (Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and gets progressively more Norse as the story goes north, until we end up in the Prose Edda; and The Last Battle takes us to apocalypse by way of Brave New World.  This is something deeper than pastiche; it's born of a great love of literature and its many possibilities. From a spiritual point of view, Lewis famously talked of the 'baptism of the imagination' which literature could provide; he envisaged the Narnian stories producing an effect which was only to be fully realised in later life, when the reader encountered an idea (or image or story) which they recognised as having met before. According to his biographer:

His idea, as he once explained to me, was to make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life. He hoped that they would be vaguely reminded of the somewhat similar stories that they had read and enjoyed years before. 'I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child's imagination.'

But this 'pre-baptism' works on a literary level as much as a religious one; reading the Chronicles of Narnia as a child prepared me to appreciate a whole range of genres before I knew what genre was, to love literary exploration and experimentation before I had much idea what 'literature' consisted of. "So is there in us a world of love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be" - as Lewis, quoting Thomas Traherne, heads the chapter in Surprised by Joy where he talks about his own childhood reading. It's a particularly good baptism for a medievalist, and I know that in some indefinable way Narnia (especially the three books of Narnia's Middle Ages, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair) prepared me for the work I do now.

So it occurred to me that today I might post one thing I stumbled across in my medieval reading which made me think of Narnia (here's another I posted about previously).  If this parallel has been pointed out by anyone else, I would like to know - I don't keep up with Lewis scholarship!  It is, I think, the only bit of Anglo-Saxon literature to feature in Narnia - though I could be wrong...

Unlike Tolkien, Lewis was a late-medieval/Renaissance scholar by taste and training, and most of the medievalism in the Narnia books reflects that, apart from an occasional nod to the Norse texts which had inspired in him, as a child, a deep love of 'pure Northernness'. It seems to me that the moments of Northernness, although rare, actually occur at some of the most emotionally significant moments in the books: consider what it means that in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the witch's reign is one long fimbulvetr, and that the return of Aslan is accompanied by a thaw such as that which, according to Norse myth, would have wept the god Baldr back to life again. It was Baldr - specifically, a line from Longfellow's Tegner's Drapa, 'I heard a voice that cried, "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!"' - who gave Lewis one of his earlier experiences of Joy:

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

Lewis' love for Norse mythology was far more than literary appreciation; he continues in Surprised by Joy:

At the time, Asgard and the Valkyries seemed to me incomparably more important than anything else in my experience—than the Matron Miss C., or the dancing mistress, or my chances of a scholarship. More shockingly, they seemed much more important than my steadily growing doubts about Christianity. This may have been—in part, no doubt was—penal blindness; yet that might not be the whole story. If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude toward it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not. It was not itself a new religion, for it contained no trace of belief and imposed no duties. Yet unless I am greatly mistaken there was in it something very like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object which securely claimed this by simply being the object it was. We are taught in the Prayer Book to "give thanks to God for His great glory," as if we owed Him more thanks for being what He necessarily is than for any particular benefit He confers upon us; and so indeed we do and to know God is to know this. But I had been far from any such experience; I came far nearer to feeling this about the Norse gods whom I disbelieved in than I had ever done about the true God while I believed. Sometimes I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself.

It's no surprise, then, that when Lewis came to write his own myth he drew quite openly on Norse motifs, circling round again to the literature which had first baptised his imagination. [ETA: for discussion of Lewis' lifelong engagement with Old Norse myth, see now this book.] By comparison, Anglo-Saxon literature is not well represented in the Narnia books; I don't get the impression that it had the same emotional or spiritual resonance for Lewis as the Norse texts did (or as Old English literature did for Tolkien, whose direct and indirect 'quoting' of Old English poems like The Wanderer and Christ I held a deep personal significance). But there is one exception, which may or may not exist only in my own head.  See what you think.

It's about Peter and Edmund, or rather, about their names. Now, the inspiration for the name of Peter is obvious; Wikipedia helpfully observes that it was the only one of the four children's names to be there from the early stages of planning The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and it must have seemed like a natural choice for the boy who was to be High King. If Aslan is Christ, Peter is - well, St Peter; a High King over other kings is prima inter pares. That's straightforward enough - one of the most common English male names, and one full of Christian meaning. 

Edmund, however, is not anywhere near as common (even in the early twentieth century, when it was more popular than today). It's an Anglo-Saxon name, and there are three famous Anglo-Saxon Edmunds to whom we might look as Edmund Pevensie's namesake. St Edmund of East Anglia, king and martyr, is perhaps the best-known, but in the Anglo-Saxon sources he is so simply purely virtuous that he doesn't have much in common with the more human Edmund, the traitor. Then there's the valiant Edmund Ironside, but this too doesn't feel quite right: the fictional Edmund is not known for his skill in battle, but for his hard-won wisdom. I think instead we should look to another King Edmund, brother of King Athelstan, because it may have been that brotherly relationship which inspired Edmund's name.

Wordplay on St Peter's name is a key part of his story: Peter means 'rock', and thus, 'You are Peter, and on this rock will I build my church'. Etymological wordplay of this nature was dear to the medieval mind, as Lewis knew very well; names mean things, and those meanings tell you something about the person who bears the name. Take the wordplay one step further into Old English, and there is no better equivalent for 'Peter' than Æthelstan, a name which means 'noble stone'. Athelstan is less well-known today than some other Anglo-Saxon kings (notably his grandfather, Alfred the Great) but he had a truly magnificent reputation in the Middle Ages, as a wise and pious king who was also triumphant in battle. He appears in later medieval chronicles as the greatest of the English kings, and also features in a Middle English romance or two; his reputation endured.

Athelstan's most famous triumph was his victory at Brunanburh in 937 over the combined forces of Constantine of Scotland and Óláfr Guðfriðsson. This is perhaps the greatest victory in Anglo-Saxon history and it is commemorated in an important Old English poem, The Battle of Brunanburh, known to every student of Anglo-Saxon literature. Lewis would certainly have known this poem. Apart from being a standard text, it had obtained some degree of popularity in the nineteenth century, as witnessed by the fact that Tennyson wrote a poetic version of it (which this useful site compares with the Old English poem). The poem is preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and is the only surviving example of an Old English poem celebrating victory in battle (rather than glorious defeat!). It begins like this:

Æthelstan cyning, eorla dryhten,
beorna beahgifa, and his broþor eac,
Eadmund æþeling, ealdorlange tir
geslogon æt sæcce sweorda ecgum
ymbe Brunanburh.

Æthelstan king, lord of earls,
ring-giver to men, and his brother also,
Edmund the prince, eternal glory
won in battle with the sword's edge
around Brunanburh.

This poem is a panegyric, an unabashed glorification of the kings of Wessex - and key to it is the mutual triumph of Athelstan and his brother, joint-victors in this crucial battle. This praising of king and prince together is unusual in Old English poetry and springs probably from the poet's desire to extol the whole royal line; since Athelstan had no children, Edmund inherited the kingdom from his brother. The brotherly relationship struck some later medieval historians as significant: William of Malmesbury, who esteemed Athelstan very highly because he was buried at Malmesbury, claimed that Athelstan was notable for his kindness to his brothers. (Athelstan is also famous among medievalists for marrying his sisters to foreign rulers, something earlier Anglo-Saxon kings had not really done - and which forms a plot point in The Horse and His Boy.)  So if Lewis, having chosen the name Peter for all its many associations, was musing on an appropriate name for the king's brother, 'Eadmund aetheling' would be a natural namesake.

I don't know whether these two brother-kings and their victory at Brunanburh were really in the back of Lewis' mind as he wrote The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, but two more details make me think they might have been. One, we are told that after many years in Narnia Edmund becomes known as 'Edmund the Just' - a name also given to King Edmund by some later historians Lewis might have known (here's an example).  And two: although the battle which Peter and Edmund fight together receives little attention in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (far less than in the recent film), we do learn that it takes place at Beruna - close enough to 'Brunanburh' for me!

Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry

Yesterday I took a walk to Headington Quarry, an area on the outskirts of Oxford where C. S. Lewis lived for the last thirty years of his life, and where he is buried. I've visited his grave in the churchyard before, but have never managed to see the church, which is usually closed. Yesterday I googled it and saw from the church website that it would be open for a few hours in the afternoon, for the last time this year. So I decided to go and explore, and here are the photographic fruits of my expedition.

Although buses from the centre of Oxford to Headington Quarry are both plentiful and frequent, I decided to walk yesterday, just to make it more challenging. (I was going to say 'more interesting', but the route really isn't interesting at all - all suburban roads!). It took just under an hour, and it only rained twice on the way, which seemed like good going. By the time I got there, the sun was shining beautifully and I was oddly excited - as if making the effort of walking, and having to hunt the place out, made it more like a quest. That can be the only explanation for the fact that I took this entirely unnecessary picture of the sign on the lane leading to the church:


And this one of the sunny lane:


And this one:


'Church open' is one of those signs which delights the visitor's heart; sadly, in this case it proved to be a false hope, a snare and a delusion, if you will. For alas, the church was not open. At least, there was a wedding going on, and from the lusty singing of 'Lord of the Dance' which greeted me when I arrived at half past two, it seemed likely to continue for some time.

So I took this picture of the porch (aren't you glad you can't hear 'Lord of the Dance' while you look at it?):


And this one:


(You'll notice I was trying to avoid standing in front of the doorway!)

And then I went in search of C. S. Lewis' grave, which is in a delightful spot, under a tree:



I really liked how the shadows of the branches fell upon it, and the tree roots had reached out to embrace it:


And how, from a distance, the whiteness of the stone meant that the sun gleamed upon it:


And how the neighbouring grave, overflowing with flowers, seemed to be lending some to Lewis:




Nearby is buried Mrs Moore, the mother of Lewis' friend, who lived with him and his brother at 'The Kilns':


Also buried nearby - and this was a pleasant surprise to me - is a man who was a key figure in the revival of English folk music at the beginning of the twentieth century. William Kimber played the concertina for the Headington Quarry Morris side, who, on Boxing Day 1899, gave Cecil Sharp his first introduction to English folk dance. Sharp noted down his first Morris tunes from Kimber's instruction, and when Sharp began to lecture on folk music, Kimber would demonstrate the music and dances; Sharp said that without Kimber's "practical instruction and capital demonstrations in public, the movement would never have been launched". At the time Morris dancing in England was on the way to extinction, and if it hadn't been for that meeting at Headington Quarry it might well have died out altogether. Through the magic of youtube, you can hear William Kimber playing the concertina here, and his grave is absolutely lovely - look:


The inscription reads 'William (Merry) Kimber, Father of English Morris, 1872-1961' - and yes, that's a concertina! It's beautifully detailed:


Those things beneath are the rows of bells worn by Morris dancers (see here for a picture). I think the stops and straps are my favourite part:


Kimber's grave with Lewis' gleaming in the background:



As the wedding was still going on (they had reached the John Rutter stage of proceedings), I took some more pictures of the outside of the church:






Although it has a medieval look to it, the church was actually built in 1848-9, since Headington Quarry (a settlement which had grown up around the stone quarry, as you probably could have guessed!) then had no church of its own. It was designed by George Gilbert Scott, and fits quietly and unobtrusively in its surroundings; you might easily believe it had been here for a thousand years.

The quiet (broken only by the strains of 'Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising') was shared by an assortment of creatures in the next field:


Random chickens and horses - why not? This is not actually rolling countryside at all (the Oxford bypass is just the other side of the hill) but it feels a lot like it.





Dum-de-dum, waiting, waiting... gosh, weddings are long. The churchyard is small, but there's really nowhere else to go in the vicinity of the church, and having walked so far, I wasn't inclined to give up and go home. But by this time there were some ominous rumbles of thunder and the brief window of glorious sunshine had disappeared. At last the little bell dinged, the wedding party emerged from the church, and the picture-taking process began. I lurked out of sight, trying not to look like Banquo's ghost. Also lurking were various other people who were waiting to see inside, having, like me, made the fatal error of trusting a church website to give accurate opening times. (Never trust a church website! Rookie mistake...)

Then the heavens opened and there was a downpour. It was much worse for the poor wedding people than for me, because I just stood under a tree and got very wet, while they stood outside the porch (why not inside the porch, I couldn't help asking myself) and got very wet, and in their pretty dresses too. I hope you'll understand why I didn't take any pictures at this stage of the proceedings. One by one the wedding people made a dash for it to their cars, and at last there were few enough of them that I thought it wouldn't be rude to try and get into the church. (If they protested, I was planning to make an appeal to them on humanitarian grounds, as soaking wet person to soaking wet person.)

They did not protest, and so finally, after more than an hour of skulking around in the churchyard, I was inside the church. I'll be honest: I was not, by this stage, in quite the right mood to appreciate its beauties, being wet and bored, and annoyed at myself for walking for an hour to get to a place which wasn't going to be open for another hour (again: never trust a church website). I was no longer 'excited Lucy entering the magical land of Narnia', as I had been at the top of the church lane, and more 'fed-up Eustace after a few days on the Dawn Treader'. However, I took pictures anyway:


(I hope you appreciate how I managed to make it look like the church is empty in this photo, although in fact it contained several fellow-skulkers from the churchyard, a variety of church personnel, and a bride.)


The east window is by Ninian Comper.




This was the window I had really come to see, which is near the pew where C. S. Lewis (or G. S. Lewis, if you believe the church leaflet) used to sit:



It was installed in 1991, and the engraved glass depicts various elements from the world of Narnia.









Beautiful! But by this time my wet feet and I were in need of some of Lucy's magic cold-preventing cordial, so I betook myself home. In conclusion: Headington Quarry is very pretty when the sun is shining, but "ware danger", as the Narnians say - by which I mean, rain storms, weddings, and church websites...

Gilt on Graves, Light, and Some Lewis

I'm in the mood for some pictures. These are from the church of Dennington, Suffolk, about which I don't have very much to say; you can read about it (and see better pictures) here. I think of this as 'the church where the sun came out', because I went in on a grey March day, and so found a dark, grey church; but half-way through my visit the sun suddenly came pouring through the windows, right on to this glorious golden tomb:

So these are mostly pictures of sunlight, in various guises.


This is the tomb of William Bardolph (d.1441) and his wife. It's made of alabaster, a medium in which English artists of the Middle Ages excelled (there are some wonderful examples here in Oxford at the Ashmolean, and see pictures here, here and here).



"Side by side, their faces blurred..."

Their heads are pillowed on cushions borne by angels -

- with such delicate hands!


Look at the tassel on the cushion - and the buckles on his shoes:


Outside the chantry chapel, the sunlight comes through modern windows:


And Victorian ones:

As will have become evident if you have ever seen my church posts before, I love shots which show light coming through stained-glass windows. I can never get enough of pictures like this:


And this:


More lights:


One last thing: Dennington has the only carved English depiction of a sciapod, perhaps better known (to me at least) as a dufflepud:

'They were certainly very like mushrooms, but far too big - the stalks about three feet high and the umbrellas about the same length from edge to edge. When [Lucy] looked carefully she noticed too that the stalks joined the umbrellas not in the middle but at one side which gave an unbalanced look to them. And there was something - a sort of little bundle - lying on the grass at the foot of each stalk. In fact the longer she gazed at them the less like mushrooms they appeared. The umbrella part was not really round as she had thought at first. It was longer than it was broad, and it widened at one end. There were a great many of them, fifty or more.

The clock struck three.

Instantly a most extraordinary thing happened. Each of the "mushrooms" suddenly turned upside-down. The little bundles which had lain at the bottom of the stalks were heads and bodies. The stalks themselves were legs. But not two legs to each body. Each body had a single thick leg right under it (not to one side like the leg of a one-legged man) and at the end of it, a single enormous foot -a broadtoed foot with the toes curling up a little so that it looked rather like a small canoe. She saw in a moment why they had looked like mushrooms. They had been lying flat on their backs each with its single leg straight up in the air and its enormous foot spread out above it. She learned afterwards that this was their ordinary way of resting; for the foot kept off both rain and sun and for a Monopod to lie under its own foot is almost as good as being in a tent...

The Duffers were also very pleased with their new name of Monopods, which seemed to them a magnificent name though they never got it right. "That's what we are," they bellowed, "Moneypuds, Pomonods, Poddymons. Just what it was on the tips of our tongues to call ourselves." But they soon got it mixed up with their old name of Duffers and finally settled down to calling themselves the Dufflepuds; and that is what they will probably be called for centuries.'

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, ch.11