Since the first time I read C.S. Lewis’ peculiar and beautiful memoir, Surprised by Joy, I have been fascinated by Lewis’ numinous experience of joy that came with his encounter between a moment in Wagner’s Ring Cycle and one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations. In a sense, A Pilgrim in Narnia has become a curated sandbox to think about the spiritual and artistic importance of this moment in Lewis’ life.  One of my early blog posts was, “Balder the Beautiful Is Dead, Is Dead: C.S. Lewis’ Imaginative Conversion.” I really should rewrite that piece. However, I was correct in making links to t ..read more

The Inklings and Paganism Before he became a Christian, C.S. Lewis was deeply inspired by ancient Pagan mythology, and he continued to value it as mythopoeia after his conversion, and seems to have sought to reconcile the Christian worldview with the ancient Pagan one (for example in That Hideous Strength). Lewis was also fascinated by the symbolism of astrology: a practice and worldview which started in Pagan antiquity and continued well into the Christian era. Lewis’ book, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, deals in part with astrological symbolism a ..read more

We discovered on Monday that Lewis mocked his best friend for comparing works that are as different as the Old English epic with the late Middle English romance by Malory. He then went on to do this very thing: set side-by-side the Beowulf poet not only with Malory, but also Austen, Morris, Shakespeare, and Brontë. Lewis’ mythic imagination is broad enough to draw from all these storytellers, but he deeply loved the legends rooted in the early dark ages as they find their way into the Beowulf poem and the grand Arthuriad. Conceived as a loose series, we are pleased to tug at the edge ..read more

My son and I have been talking about Ragnarök. Besides the super cool sound of this Norse word and the deep world behind it, we are being fueled by Neil Gaiman’s new book, Norse Mythology. I listened to the author read it when it came out, and Nicolas has just been able to land a (beautifully designed) copy from the library. That it is timed with a new apocalyptic-looking Thor film has kept the Twilight of the Gods on our minds. And, on top of all of this, I found out that Dr. Carl Anderson is offering a free three-part seminar at Signum University on Tolkien’s Sigurd and Gudrún ..read more

Universal final defeat was exactly what Norse mythology offered. What’s more, it was compounded by endless repetition. Ragnarök, the Norse apocalypse was cyclical: the giants destroy the gods and all humankind in a final battle only for the earth to rise again out of primordial waters, the gods to be reborn along with humans, and the cycle to begin afresh. Medievalist scholar and Tolkien expert Tom Shippey suggests Tolkien wanted to offer something more than this cycle of doom and was attempting to “retain the feel or ‘flavour’ of Norse myth, while hinting at the happier ending of Christian my ..read more

This is the book I never imagined would appear in this day and age. I first heard of Songs of the Metamythos at a reading circle in Massachusetts in 2014. I was attending my first Mythcon and late one night, after hitting a creepy doll’s head in a fast-food uniform with a mallet, a timid group of writers gathered together to read bits of their work. At least I was timid, even through the exhaustion of a conference weekend. While there was much that moved me that night, one story stuck out. It was the story of Maia and Luna, and it was a new myth. New in that they were new words and new stories ..read more

One day a young C.S. Lewis casually turned to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s death-dirge in the tradition of a northern epic poem, Tegner’s Drapa. He read these words that forever changed him: I heard a voice that cried, Balder the beautiful Is dead, is dead—— As a young man he was quite drawn to the experience of aesthetic pleasure. The pleasure of reading these words was quite different from other pleasures he had experienced as a youth, more “like a voice from far more distant regions….” In his autobiography, Lewis goes on to describe his experience of reading Norse saga: “I knew nothing abo ..read more