Great Tower of Elfland

A. Rhone Zachary

Description

Beginning in the mid-1950s, scholars proposed that the Inklings were a unified group centered on fantasy, imagination, and Christianity.Scholars and a few Inklings themselves supported the premise until 1978, when Humphrey Carpenter wrote the first major biography of the group, disputing a unified worldview. Carpenter dedicated an entire chapter to decry any theological or literary unity in the group, arguing disagreement in areas of Christian belief, literary criticism, views of myth, and writing style. Since Carpenter's The Inklings, many analyses of the Inklings-and even their predecessors-have continued to show disunity rather than unity in the group.This text overturns the misapplication of a divided worldview among two Inklings, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and their forerunners, G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. Analyzing their literary, scholarly, and interpersonal texts, The Great Tower of Elfland clarifies the unities of their thinking through five general categories: literature and language, humanism, philosophy of the personal journey, philosophy of history and civilization, and their Christian mythopoeia. After responding to scholarly arguments that diffuse worldviews, this text introduces some of the literary and interpersonal exchanges among the authors to demonstrate their relationships before examining the popular and lesser-known writings of each to clarify their literary and linguistic theoretical orientations.Rhone analyzes the Renaissance-like Christian humanism of these authors, their belief that humans should care for animals and nature, and their assertion of fallen humanity. Next, he takes readers through Tolkien's, Lewis's, Chesterton's, and MacDonald's perspectives of the human journey, analyzing literary motifs of pathways in their texts, roads used to demonstrate their perceptions of free will, fate, and the accompanying discipleship of companions along the way. After noting the individual human journey, Rhone articulates the group's vantages on humanity through civilization and barbarism, myth and science, and even political opinions. Finally, The Great Tower of Elfland recontextualizes the perspectives of MacDonald, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien in lieu of their Christian mythopoeia, the point on which their unity hinges.

Sujets

• Christianisme
• Royaume-Uni
• Great Britain
• Stephen Ireland
• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• Reino Unido

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 19 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631012747
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Great Tower of Elfland
 
THE GREAT TOWER OF
ELFLAND  
The Mythopoeic Worldview of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald     Zachary A. Rhone  
The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO
© 2017 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-329-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
21  20  19  18  17          5  4  3  2  1
For Maria, my companion on this journey
For Dad and Mom, my greatest supporters
For Charles, the Grey Wanderer whose staff nudged me out the door to discover this path
Contents
Foreword by Colin Duriez
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Language and Literature
2 All That Is Human
3 The Journey
4 Civilization and Origination
5 The Overarching Hypothesis
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Foreword
Colin Duriez
With any group of writers or artists, it is necessary to try to make sense of what holds together what almost inevitably is a disparate company of people, even if they are from the same social class or cultural background. This is true whether it is the Inklings, the Bloomsbury Group, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Lake Poets, the Clapham Sect, the Bluestockings Society of the mid-eighteenth century, or Dr. Johnson’s Literary Club and The Scriblerus Club of the same century.
Zachary Rhone has masterfully responded to the untidy nature of groups in this study of the two most central members of the Inklings, and two significant writers who influenced them, with his reverse approach to the usual one, in moving from the particular to the general and abstract. This allows the capture of the creative and imaginative without abandoning a patterned and ordered intellectual structure to these four writers as seen in abstraction.
This study is an important addition to the as-yet modest number of books that have undertaken a study of writers notable for their connection with the Inklings or as important influences upon group members. I know of no previous book which so definitely explores the worldview of these four related writers as its main focus, rather than finding one or more characteristic and unifying themes, important as these may be. C. S. Lewis, in the early days of the circle, simply spoke of members of the Inklings (such as himself and his friend Tolkien) as sharing a tendency to write and Christianity. As Rhone makes clear, Lewis didn’t see either his friendship with Tolkien or the Inklings group as an alliance of combatants consciously following a manifesto. I can imagine Lewis chuckling to himself as he might have conjured up mental pictures of his various friends in the club, as he called it. As a cheerful and combative debunker of overconfident errors of the modern age, it is easy, I think, to see how Lewis, at the center of the informal group, might be considered as such a combatant.
Dr. Rhone’s purpose is to convincingly set out a worldview in common between two of the Inklings, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who were at the core of the Oxford literary group of friends whose association lasted through the thirties, forties, and fifties. For cultural and historical context, G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald are explored in detail for their affinities with and strong influence upon the two writers particularly associated with the Inklings. Rhone’s conclusion is that there is a shared and unified worldview between all four. In the process, he explores the whole idea of their worldview as a rich coherence of intellectual and imaginative elements, encompassing art, belief, social thought, theology, philosophy, and culture. Rhone concludes that it is “on the foundation of Christianity, that these authors perceive time, progress, science, and civilization and write with the hope of creating eucatastrophe and joy in the human spirit.” He defines the worldview essentially as a mythopoeic (or myth-making) one, with all that this implies. The successful making of myth (in which all four participated) communicates deep truth through successful and convincing embodiment in literary art.
The book is marked by careful and attentive reading of the extensive works of the four authors and secondary works about them. As well as presenting new and little-known material, even familiar material (such as Tolkien’s essay on Beowulf ) contributes to a new understanding by treating it in an original and stimulating framework. For instance, as I mentioned, Rhone reverses the usual structure of introduction, exposition, and conclusion. Instead he proceeds in a creative, gestalt manner by exploring the main elements of the worldview the four writers have in common before gathering the pieces together into a full picture. This engages readers’ imaginations as well as reasoning, allowing them to anticipate what the conclusion might be. The conclusion is then made concrete and definite by the powerful unifying image of an elven tower, indicating the overview, which includes the reasoned and the imaginative. Rhone in fact appropriates and modifies for his purpose J. R. R. Tolkien’s famous image of the tower he used in the 1930s in his groundbreaking essay upon Beowulf .
An all-important feature of Rhone’s book, in my view, is that it does what all proper learning should do: it opens doors and windows to further exploration, in this case, of the place of their worldview in the quality or essence that identifies individual members, two of whom are central to the Inklings. The implication, to my mind, is that the Inklings was larger in its significance than even the two most well-known members explored by Dr. Rhone—Lewis and Tolkien. Other members could be fruitfully studied for what I would hazard to call their Inklings-ness, in the light of Rhone’s work in this book. An example of an Inkling member who would be illuminated by Rhone’s insights is Owen Barfield. He could be looked at either in relation to Lewis or to Tolkien. In both instances Barfield’s worldview, which he formed very early (evidenced in what he wrote in his twenties, History in English Words and Poetic Diction ), is what had such an impact on the whole nature of their thinking and writing. Barfield returned from Oxford to live in London, before the Inklings as such came into being, to work in his father’s law firm, forcing him to be an infrequent visitor to the circle. Yet there is an extraordinary impact of Barfield’s worldview on both Tolkien and Lewis. It can be seen, for instance, in his characteristic notion about language as having an ancient semantic unity, implying a profound participation in the natural world on the part of our ancestors, a notion which became an integral part of both Lewis and Tolkien’s deepest thinking.
Something that Lewis wrote about our changing human perception of the original universe, which is deeply indebted to Barfield, could in fact speak for Tolkien, and also for Chesterton and MacDonald, represented so well in Rhone’s book: “The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. … We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves personifications” (C. S. Lewis, “Preface” in D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe [London: Faber and Faber, 1952]).
Acknowledgments
I cannot go without first reverently acknowledging the work of those authors who provided the focus of this study: George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien. I would like to thank the scholars who have gone before me and those who, I hope, will find my work helpful in their endeavors. My sincere gratitude extends to the many scholars with whom I have engaged at the C. S. Lewis and Friends Colloquium at Taylor University and the British J. R. R. Tolkien Society’s conferences.
I offer my gratitude to those who reviewed my manuscript, in whole or in part, and those who provided guidance in my research: Charles Bressler, Colin Duriez, Bruce Edwards, Bonnie Gaarden, Don King, Chris Orchard, and the people at The Kent State University Press.
Many thanks to the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College for the use of its resources and to Laura Schmidt, especially, for her help. I would also like to thank Linda Shaughnessy of AP Watt at United Agents LLP on behalf of The Royal Literary Fund for granting permission to use the unpublished G. K. Chesterton materials for this book.
I extend my sincere thanks to Craig Fusco Jr. for his artistry on the book cover.
Finally, I would like to thank my Lord and Savior for the blessing of this project and the blessing that I hope it will be to others. May it be one way in which I am an elf-friend.
Introduction
T HE P ROBLEM AND THE P URPOSE
For nearly thirty years, from 1933 to 1963, a self-dubbed literary group called “The Inklings” met weekly in Oxford, England, in C. S. Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College, the Eagle and Child pub (otherwise known as the Bird and Baby), and, later, the Lamb and Flag pub, among other places. The semiformal group consisted of Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, Robert “Humphrey” Havard, Owen Barfield, Warren H. Lewis, and Christopher R. Tolkien, along with others at different times and at any given meeting. They had no formal membership—only invitation by word of mouth. Aloud, the friends read texts to one another: Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet , Williams and Barfield’s poetry, Tolkien’s The Hobbit , and even The “New” Hobbit, later published under the title The Lord of the Rings . A round of bitter or tea by a warm fire kept conversation lively, even when critiques were at their sharpest. Jack and Tollers—as Lewis and Tolkien were called—and Williams, once he moved to Oxford, often met several times eac