Stratofanatic's Emporium

Thanks to Andoni Cossio scouring the University of Leeds's Tolkien-Gordon collection, we have now discovered a new alliterative poem by C. S. Lewis: "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg"! This is the problem with research: I just published a whole anthology containing  all of Lewis's known alliterative poems, and now another one has been found! Grump grump. It's a pretty interesting poem, though ... Andoni actually showed it to me prior to publication, and we talked about its dating. The title refers to Beowulf , in particular the evil queen Modthryth ( although this isn't a proper name in Old English; Lewis sees the word instead as "Mood of Thyrth"). Despite the title, this 12-line text was written as a thank-you note to Eric and Ida Gordon, two philologists at Leeds, after having stayed at their home for a few days. According to Andoni, a poem by Tolkien dated June 26, 1935 references Lewis's earlier stay, which therefore puts "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg" to earl...

Having already discussed Poul Anderson, the Modern Revival’s most noteworthy early pulp poet, it only makes sense to now turn our sights on the Inklings, the two best-known “university” poets. And because most readers interested in such matters already know about Tolkien, let’s take the opportunity to give equal time to his friend and fellow Inkling, C. S. Lewis. Now, full disclosure: I’ve published a lot about Lewis’s alliterative verse, so there’s quite a few paths this blog post could take. Issues of national identity and English nationalism, for instance, or Lewis’s infamous disdain for modernist poetics. Or we might mention his preference for formalist poetry, his Christian apologetics, or the religious aspects of his fantasy. The man. The myth. The legend. But if people “know” one thing about Lewis’s poetry, they know that it’s … well … not very good. Now, that’s not my view, mind you, but even fans and scholars of Lewis tend to accept this assessment as the default conse...

It's official: my article revealing the first religious poem C.S. Lewis ever wrote, "Sweet Desire," is now published by English Text Construction . Here's the link: " Dating 'Sweet Desire': C. S. Lewis’s Education in Alliterative Poetics ." I've already blogged about my core argument here , but here's the gist: ....a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of  Caedmon's Hymn . For metrical geeks, however, the article's most compelling points will involve how one poet progressed in terms of his skill in writing Old English-style poetry. For anyone familiar with the alliterative meter, so...

Well, that  was lightning fast. Just ten days ago I achieved an unofficial academic rite of passage by getting accepted into Notes & Queries .... and now the article has been published online. N&Q is one of those quintessentially English-y things: short, fact based articles on random questions in literary and textual history. Not a big publication, but a classic one -- the journal's been around for 120+ years, and it was hilariously parodied in Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex . Anyway, my article (only 1700 words long) is called "A Tale of Two Essays: The Inklings on the Alliterative Meter." It's long been known that Tolkien wrote an essay on Old English meter called "On Translating Beowulf " in The Monsters and the Critics , and that this essay originated as a preface for a student edition prose translation of Beowulf in the 1940s. Well, Tolkien promised his publisher a "few words" only to end up submitting a 36-page document instea...

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon...

So, last year, the facebook page for the Southern California CSL Society asked if any scholars would like to present at their monthly meetings. Since I had just finished some work on Lewis, I emailed the fellow and we set something. Then it got delayed from double-booking, and then delayed again. They mentioned maybe doing something in September -- i.e. two months ago -- but never contacted me. I forgot about the whole thing and only remembered the other day. So I contacted the point person, who responded with an annoyingly brief and unapologetic message. He also asked what I'd be talking on ... when that had already been established last year. Scrolling down four message would have answered that question. So I just deleted the whole thread and said the hell with them. I only made the offer in the first place they their society specifically asked for scholars, but I really don't want to waste my time with an unprofessional group.

Just back from my first Mythcon! Well, my first in-person  Mythcon .... I attended the virtual one in 2021, which was my first year as Awards Steward. This year's event was held in Albuquerque, which isn't that far from Tucson, and the wife and I were doubly excited because of our admiration for Breaking Bad . By sheer coincidence, the city was unveiling statues of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman on the day of our arrival, and the actors, Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, were in attendance. We missed the statue unveiling, but we twice tried to reach the Convention Center to see the statues. The first time, the Center was closed (it was a Saturday), and the second time it had closed temporarily due to "lockdown" -- certainly, a weird thing. Who calls a threat to a Convention Center? Luckily, our first Uber driver told us that the actors were throwing out the first pitch in the Albuquerque Isotopes game, i.e., the Triple-A minor league affiliate for the Colorado Rockies, a...

Just happened to glance at the latest issue of Journal of Inklings Studies , and I immediately saw a reflection by A. C. Spearing on C. S. Lewis as a research supervisor while at Cambridge University in the mid-1950s.** This struck me for two reasons. First, I've been reading a shit-ton of Lewis's literary scholarship lately, and I HAVE THOUGHTS . Second, Spearing is one of the few medievalists whom I've actually read. Way back during my time at Ohio State, I encountered Textual Subjectivity (2005) while taking a medieval literature course, and now learning that Spearing had studied under CSL is mesmerizing me. Anyway, I loved Spearing's reflection, and I'd highly recommend it . There are several passages I want to comment on specifically, so I'll take them in order. p. 112: "As is indicated by the quotation marks round ‘supervisor’ in his letter, and by its general tone of reluctance, Lewis was opposed to the professionalization of literary research and t...

 Randomly browsing through C. S. Lewis's letter, and, in a letter to Warnie dated 22 Nov. 1931, he writes: To read  histories of literature, one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves--well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things that great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then .... Although the emphasis on "great men" might now count as among the "silly things," this sentiment, by and large, is still how I tend to read novels, and which I see little enough in contemporary literary criticism ...

 So, MythCon 51 is about halfway through its first day .... but, luckily for me, the roundtable I had to moderate is now complete! One of my little terrors about academic, in fact, is the challenge of moderating a conference panel or roundtable. On one hand, the task is super easy, and your main job is just to be invisible. On the other hand, the task is so easy that a moderator-induced catastrophe is all the more cringe-worthy. And moderating a roundtable isn't actually all that easy. For this one, we had a roundtable featuring 3 of last year's winners of the Mythopoeic Society Award, one critic and two novelists. Since I'd only read the critic, I had to hurry up and read the two author's books, plus do enough google-research to ask intelligent but open-ended questions of the panel. We managed to get through 3 of my 5 prepared questions, which I should perhaps have anticipated, before opening things up to the general Q&A. Anyway, since I did an insane amount of pre...

So, the Inklings at Oxford. There's a couple different well-known remarks about them by famous students, primarily after they revised the English Language Syllabus in 1931. This revised syllabus featured Anglo-Saxon rather heavily (even moreso than other British universities at the time) and excluded anything later than the Romantics. Auden, for instance, said that Tolkien's lectures on Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon mesmerized him. Less kindly, Kingsley Amis -- later author of the first academic novel,  Lucky Jim -- called Tolkien "incoherent and often inaudible."  But what did students think of the course-of-study itself? Well, I was breezing through the autobiography of John Heath-Stubbs, who attended Oxford in the early 1940s, and whose major work is the long epic poem  Artorius (1972). To my knowledge, I've not seen any Tolkien scholar ever peruse this source. Anyway, Heath-Stubbs isn't much read nowadays, but if his name rings a bell, it's probably because...

While admiring Brandon Sanderson's handling of Robert Jordan's material in the Wheel of Time series, which I'm finally reading, I grew curious about whom among modern fantasists tend to get the most academic attention. My hunch was that fantasy writers of the 1980s and 1990s -- or basically the guys who got me hooked on fantasy literature as a kid -- would come off poorly. (I was right). Overall, I've long suspected that the common narrative of doorstopper Tolkien-clone epic fantasy has led to academics treating some wonderful writers incredibly unfairly. So, as a way of testing my hypothesis, I searched through the MLA International Bibliography . I did a basic search on an author's name, then looked at "peer-reviewed articles," "book chapters," and "books." For most of the less popular writers, I excluded things like encyclopedia entries, which tended to inflate hits. This method, of course, isn't scientifically rigorous . . ....

Looking for some light reading after doing some dense critical theory, I decided to wander over the local Bookman's and grab myself a number of C.S. Lewis books: The Screwtape Letters The Abolition of Man** Mere Christianity . My thoughts? (1) Lewis is a remarkably clear writer, and his style is refreshingly pleasant. (2) He may not be a genuine philosopher, but he's funny, he's charming, and he writes with an incredible honesty. He's someone who I'd really like if I ever had the chance to meet him -- and that's not something I often contemplate when reading an author. Quite the opposite, actually. (3) On much of the practical advice that he gives, we're pretty simpatico. For example, he calls "gluttony" any situation where someone is overly picky about the food they eat. I might call it something else, but it's a tad too self-indulgent for my taste**** and also, if you're out in public, just plain bad manners. Likewise, ...

I'm not a fan of Charles Williams, but Grevel Lindop's biography of him, Charles Williams:The Third Inkling , has been widely praised, even winning a Mythopoeic award for Inklings Studies last year. About the only criticism of Lindop's book I've seen concerned it's name. Tolkien scholar David Bratman, for example, has argued that calling CW "the third Inkling" unfairly puts CW into the shadow of Lewis and Tolkien, whereas people interested enough in CW to read a biography of him would undoubtedly rank him higher. Thus I was startled to see a reference by Sorina Higgens in her edition of CW's verse drama,  The Chapel of the Thorn,  to Lindop's then-unpublished biograph:  Charles Williams: The Last Magician .  Off the top of my head, I suppose the name change came very late in the process, probably at the instigation of the publisher. A title linking CW to the Inklings, rather than to the occult, would probably sell a lot more copies. In terms o...

Common consensus seems to be that Lewis's poetry couldn't hold a candle to his prose, so imagine my surprise when I randomly began reading several poems in The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition  and saw 3 absolute gems out of the first 4 poem I read. The three poems: "Heart-breaking School," "And After This They Sent Me to Another Place," and "Old Kirk, Like Father Time Himself." After that, I quickly began to see the rationale behind the common consensus, but I wanted to take a moment and discuss "Heart-breaking School" at least. Here is the poem (parts highlighted for emphasis:     Heart-breaking school Received me, where an ogre hearted man held rule, Secret and irresponsible, out of the cll Of men's reproach, like Cyclops in his savage hall: For at his gate no neighbour went in, nor his own Three fading daughters easily won out alone, Nor if they did, dared wag their tongues, but, in a trice Their errand...

Biographies and I have a vexed relationship. On one hand, they're probably the most accessible types of scholarly writing out there. On the other hand, if you're already decently conversant in the subject of the biography, the ratio of "new facts" to "time invested" starts sinking rapidly. Thus, while I'd been hearing about The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Phillip and Carol Zaleski for a while, I've deliberately avoided it. I already know Tolkien pretty well, and the other Inklings aren't that vital to my research. (Plus, my brand of lit crit doesn't rate biography very highly, although I won't ignore it.) Anyway, I picked it up, and it's pretty good -- well-written with lively prose and story-telling. I'd been worried at first after seeing some snide remarks in a few on-line commentaries, but the book is generally impressive. All the Zaleskis' other books have to do with spiritual matters, and they even...

 . . . and by "reading" Lewis's Space Trilogy, I mean I sure as heck tried to read his Space trilogy. I got through  1 1/2 of the books. You see, I'd made the conscious decision a few months back to work my way through the Inklings besides Tolkien. My Charles Williams project didn't go very well (except maybe for War in Heaven ), so I was hoping to redeem myself with my Lewis project. I've actually read the Narnia series twice. I remember enjoying it during my first stint in grad school, back in 2007 or thereabouts, although I don't recall quite picking up on all the religious elements. They darn well punched me in the face during my second go-around, though. I re-read the series last winter break, and Lewis's didacticism and brazen certainly just got to me. But I get it -- I'm not the target audience. Well, it was more of the same with his Space trilogy. OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET I did get through this one in its entirely, and it had some def...