Laura Miller (26 page)

Nevertheless, a tiny wedge of relatively unspoiled land on the hill has been set aside as a nature preserve, with a walk laid out for schoolchildren. At intervals along the path, placards have been set up next to representative trees, explaining that this is an elder, said to be the home of witches, or a hawthorn, said to be a harbinger of death. Farmers, visitors are informed, used to be afraid to invite bad luck by cutting down a holly and would leave the tree standing in the middle of their plowed fields. Another sign announces that this oak is a tree whose forebears brought “your” forebears to this island. Furthermore, a green man lives inside the oak, and every May he dances through the streets of Oxford. Most of the placards are illustrated with drawings of human figures personifying the various trees, a long-haired maiden for the birch and a crooked hag for the elder. The text on the signs is written in the first person, as if each tree were telling its own story.

The hippieish whimsy of the Hinksey Hill nature walk (the first placard promises an “enchanted forest” with “whispering trees”) must, I think, be due to the influence of Lewis and Tolkien. British folklore attaches great significance to trees, but (as Susanna Clarke assured me) rarely suggests that they contain anthropomorphic spirits or that a tree might also be a person. “Kat Godeu,” a poem from the fourteenth-century Welsh
Book of Taliesin,
describes a war fought by trees, but this seems to be a singular, magical event. The personified tree is a Greek idea, and in the Chronicles, the dryads and the hamadryads go by their classical names.

One of Lewis’s tree women looks after Jill in the castle of Cair Paravel at the beginning of
The Silver Chair.
She is “a delightful person . . . graceful as a willow, and her hair was willowy too, and there seemed to be moss in it.” (Jill doesn’t realize that her attendant is a tree nymph, but anyone who has read the other Chronicles will instantly recognize her as such.) Lucy, walking through the awakening woods in
Prince Caspian,
recalls the human forms of the silver birch — “it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl” — and the oak — “he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts” — exactly like the drawings on the Hinksey Hill placards.

The images are so appealing, such a pleasing blend of the homely and the otherworldly, it’s no wonder people would like to think that their ancestors believed in them long ago. According to historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists, however, what we regard as age-old “traditional” lore is often a more recent invention. Take the Green Man, who supposedly lives in an oak and has come out to dance in the May Day parade since time immemorial. The authors of the Hinksey Hill placards make a common mistake in identifying the Green Man as an ancient legend; in fact, the name was invented in the 1930s by a folklorist interested in British church architecture. It refers to a type of architectural ornament often found in Romanesque and medieval churches, a carving of a male face surrounded by foliage and sometime sprouting leaves and vines from its mouth and ears. This Green Man (which may or may not have stood for a character from folklore) has sometimes been confused with a pantomime figure called Jack in the Green. Jack in the Green, a local man who covers himself with foliage until he looks like a walking shrub, does indeed march in May Day parades, but he has been doing so only since the eighteenth century and he has no known connection to the Green Man motif.

Who is the Green Man? Is he a modern approximation of a pre-Christian nature elemental like the god Pan, recreated from clues found here and there — a village festival, a carving on an altar screen, the mysterious forest dweller from the medieval poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
? Or is he an example of wishful thinking, a concoction invented by modern Britons who want to reconnect with an indigenous religion that has been lost forever? Lewis and Tolkien thought they were woefully out of step with their time when they wrote fiction voicing their yearning for the old ways and a deeper imaginative connection with the land; instead, they turned out to be speaking for millions. It was in the 1970s, at the same time that
The Lord of the Rings
gained its first great success, that English villages began to revive the long-abandoned Jack in the Green processions, along with traditional morris dancing on May Day.

All this was the culmination of what the historian Ronald Hutton has called “a powerful tendency on the part of the English to search for a timeless and organic relationship with their country.” That desire’s roots lie in both the universal tug of nostalgia and the very real trauma of industrialization. Its modern manifestation, in the search for, say, the historical site of Camelot or the emergence of modern-day Druids, began not long after Lewis and Tolkien were born.

Of course, neither Narnia nor Middle-earth are real countries, even if some of Tolkien’s most fanatical readers seem to know more about the history of his invented world than they do about the one they actually inhabit. Unlike a real country, Lewis and Tolkien’s imaginary lands are literally built of stories, and stories, unlike rocks and soil and trees, are always
about
something. Part of what Narnia and Middle-earth are about is Britain, but not the Britain of the a34, electric teakettles, and New Labour, the Britain I tromped through, in an ultimately vain search for the original of Narnia. I suspect they are not even really about the idyllic Britain where both men grew up, or the Britain of the fourteenth century, the period Lewis might have chosen for his own if he were given the opportunity. That far country is a Britain of the mind, part real, but mostly fantasy, and, like Narnia itself, it remains always just out reach.

Chapter Eighteen

Northern Lights

L
ewis met J. R. R. Tolkien in 1926, but they didn’t become close until a few years later, when Lewis would write to Arthur Greeves describing Tolkien as “the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days.” Back in Belfast, Lewis and Greeves had come together over a mutual fascination with Norse legends. Someone suggested that the fifteen-year-old Jack Lewis ought to drop in on the boy across the street, who was convalescing (Greeves suffered from a heart condition that prevented him from working for most of his life), and there he discovered a copy of
Myths of the Norsemen
by H. A. Guerber. “Do
you
like that?” Lewis asked, and “Do
you
like that?” came the response from Greeves. So began the longest and most intimate friendship of Lewis’s life, initiated by the revelation that “both knew the stab of Joy, and for both it was shot from the North.”

“The North” played a role, too, in Lewis’s friendship with Tolkien, who in 1926 was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. They met at a gathering of the university’s English faculty, but several factors conspired against their immediately becoming allies, let alone friends. First, Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, and second he belonged to an opposing faction in their discipline. “At my first coming into the world,” Lewis wrote in
Surprised by Joy,
“I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.” As a philologist, Tolkien wanted the English syllabus to be redesigned to put more emphasis on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts; he belonged to what was known as the “Language” camp. Lewis, at that time, favored the “Literature” camp, which preferred to keep the focus on more recent works, effectively limiting English to the study of literary art, rather than regarding it as a language like Greek or Latin. (Eventually, Lewis came over to Tolkien’s side in that dispute.)

At the time, Lewis patronizingly described Tolkien as “a smooth, pale, fluent little chap. . . . No real harm in him, only needs a smack or so.” To make matters trickier, Tolkien hated Edmund Spenser, the Elizabethan poet Lewis adored and whose reputation he would eventually revive in
The Allegory of Love.
Tolkien’s stated objection to Spenser at the time was “the forms,” that is, Spenser’s mangling of the language in an effort to simulate old-fashioned diction; he also resented Spenser for maligning Catholics in his masterpiece,
The Faerie Queene.

What the two men shared, however, was a passion for what Lewis called “northernness.” Tolkien had formed a club dedicated to reading the Icelandic source texts for Norse mythology — the
Elder Edda
and the
Younger Edda
— in the original Old Norse (also known as Old Icelandic); he called the group the Kolbitar, after an Icelandic term for old men who sit close enough to the fire to gnaw on the coals. Lewis, intrigued by the idea of acquainting himself with the roots of his youthful obsession, joined, and soon he was writing to Arthur, enthusing about “what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of a god or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back fifteen years into a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music: only they are now even more beautiful seen thro’ a haze of memory — you know that awfully
poignant
effect there is about an impression
recovered
from one’s past.”

Lewis’s passion for northernness began with a scrap of cryptic verse; throughout his life he was always particularly susceptible to fragments of poetry or prose that hinted at things unknown and perhaps inexpressible. At the age of nine, he encountered one of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems written in imitation of the Norse sagas, entitled “Tegnér’s Drapa.” The first stanza catapulted him into a strange ecstasy:

I heard a voice, that cried,

“Balder the Beautiful

Is dead, is dead!”

He didn’t know who Balder was or who mourned him, but this handful of words, all by itself, made Lewis feel “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 . . . found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.” Northernness was from the very beginning a primary source of Joy.

Nevertheless, Lewis’s enthusiasm for things Norse went through a dormant period during his boyhood, his “dark ages” of “rubbish” and “twaddling school stories.” Then, in a schoolroom, at the age of thirteen, he stumbled upon a magazine that had reprinted some of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Wagner’s
Ring
cycle and with them the title
Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods.
“Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me,” Lewis writes of this moment in
Surprised by Joy,
although he still had no idea who Siegfried was and assumed that the twilight of the gods described some shadowy realm where they lived. Now, however, he was prepared to pursue these alluring hints to their source.

Rackham’s watercolor illustrations of the
Ring
legends (you can get them in a Dover Publications paperback) are autumnal, redolent of Lewis’s favorite of the four seasons, all stone and fallen leaves, white skies and gray water. In the early plates, Siegfried appears as a little savage, bare-legged, bare-armed, and shoeless, wearing only his animal skins, and until he discovers the sleeping Brünnhilde, he’s surrounded by nothing but caves, gnarled trees, and stunted, hairy dwarves. Rackham’s Fafnir is particularly earthy and well imagined, as much frog as lizard, with an amphibian’s thin, leathery skin and the nasty, flat head of a pike. The illustrations summon a hard, primitive world of cold nights and few comforts, and they filled Lewis with “a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity.”

Lewis always described “northernness” in such terms: it was cold, “severe,” even empty, yet beautiful: not a widespread aesthetic taste, though not a rare one, either. But, tellingly, the language Lewis uses to characterize his rediscovery of the Norse myths, while also environmental, calls upon another, very different, set of images. When he first laid eyes on Rackham’s pictures, “It was as if the Arctic itself, all the deep layers of secular ice, should change not in a week nor in an hour, but instantly, into a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafened with bird songs and astir with running water.” The Novemberish paintings, paradoxically, hit Lewis like the first day of spring. The result was a spiritual awakening of sorts, very much like the thaw that announces Narnia’s liberation from the White Witch.

“You will misunderstand everything unless you realize that, at the time, Asgard and the Valkyries seemed to me incomparably more important than anything else in my experience,” Lewis wrote in
Surprised by Joy.
His long walks and bicycling excursions through counties Antrim and Down became a quest for settings that struck him as worthy haunts for Siegfried, the Niebelungs, and Fafnir. The landscape he inhabited became doubly enchanted. He had heard about the creatures of Celtic folklore — fairies, leprechauns, and giants — as a little child, from his Irish nurse, Lizzie Endicott; “northernness” added the suggestion of something less familiar and indigenous.

From Arthur Greeves, Lewis learned to appreciate the virtues of “homeliness,” the word the two of them used for the humble and comfortable, what Americans might call “cozy.” The two of them took long walks and sampled the scenery like oenophiles sipping wine: “Best of all,” Lewis wrote in
Surprised by Joy,
“we liked it when the Homely and the unhomely met in sharp juxtaposition; if a little kitchen garden ran steeply up a narrowing enclave of fertile ground surrounded by outcroppings and furze, or some shivering quarry pool under a moonrise could be seen on our left, and on our right the smoking chimney and lamplit window of a cottage that was just settling down for the night.” However hearty and healthy their expeditions might appear to the casual observer, they were part of a dedicated pursuit of aesthetic rapture.