That close friendship and its disintegration, and Narnia’s role in the sad conclusion, continue to invite comparisons of the two men’s imaginary worlds. It was much the same with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose intimacy and estrangement have long prompted readers to “side” with the poetry of one or the other. For many years, Wordsworth routinely came out ahead; The Prelude was weightier, more philosophical, more overtly “serious” than any of Coleridge’s verse. Lately, now that Victorian sobriety has gone thoroughly out of fashion, Coleridge’s visionary idiosyncrasy has gained the edge over Wordsworth’s poetic essays. Perhaps Lewis would be due a similar reassessment if most of the people making the comparison weren’t still primarily interested in trying to vindicate the fantasy genre itself. They tend to be Tolkien fans, and they are upset that he is not taken as seriously as they feel he ought to be. His masterpiece should not be equated with a handful of derivative children’s books!
Perhaps for this reason, Tolkien’s alleged objection to the rampant syncretism of the Chronicles, and to his friend’s deficiencies at “world building,” has been given extraordinary weight. Even people who don’t respect either man’s fiction — critics like John Goldthwaite and Philip Pullman — repeat the complaint that Narnia is thin and miscellaneous, a patching together, seams out, of various mythologies and narrative tones. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a version of the Christian Passion, set in a variation on the Renaissance notion of Arcadia, populated by figures from classical and Norse legend, mingling as incongruously as the costumed actors on a film studio back lot. Furthermore, it borrows its voice from the children’s fantasies of E. Nesbit and Peter Pan, its talking animals from Beatrix Potter, its chivalric trappings from Malory. Goldthwaite calls Narnia a “Platonic ‘shadowland’” constructed with “an utter disregard for the laws of consistency that must be observed when writing any fantasy.”
At least Tolkien could be thankful that by the time Narnia came along, Lewis knew better than to work bits of Middle-earth’s mythology into his new invention. Or perhaps Tolkien had to ask him not to. Such a request might indeed have been necessary, because although Tolkien could have found no better audience for his lost tales and histories, no reader more willing to enter into his imaginary world, no mind better equipped intellectually to appreciate it, Lewis simply didn’t subscribe to Tolkien’s preoccupation with cultural integrity.
Why should he? Behind the two men’s shared fondness for medieval literature, for romance, for England, lay some important differences. Lewis had long understood the Middle Ages to be a period not of pristine simplicity but of rampant cultural admixture and amalgamation. Christianity and pagan mythology, science and theology, history and poetry, were all wrestled by those great medieval codifiers into a single, overarching system. Everything went into the pot; everything had to, to validate God’s plan. It never seems to have occurred to Lewis to regard the result as polluted. There’s little evidence that, whatever his youthful prejudice against the French, he shared Tolkien’s view of the Norman Conquest as a tragedy. Lewis adored his friend’s “private mythology” but gave no sign of agreeing that it represented the true, immaculate soul of England. And on that count, Irishman though he was, he came closer to the truth.
Chapter Twenty-three
The Old Religion
On the second floor of the British Museum in London is a small chest known as the Franks Casket. Made of whalebone ivory, it’s roughly the size of two small cigar boxes stacked on top of each other and elaborately carved on all four sides as well as on the lid. The Franks Casket dates from the eighth century and is thought to have been made for a prince of Northumbria, a northeastern kingdom in Anglo-Saxon England, although the carvings suggest a theme of exile, so it may not have been made there. Perhaps whoever first owned it used it to store rings and other golden items, the sort of treasure with which the leaders of the Danes and Geats secure the loyalty of their men in Beowulf. The casket is about the same age as the poem, made at the moment in English history that Tolkien idealized. The runes inscribed on the casket include some of the oldest surviving lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the images resemble Pauline Baynes’s illustrations for Farmer Giles of Ham.
The Franks Casket is also unabashedly syncretistic. The right side depicts a Germanic warrior meeting a strange animal goddess, possibly the spirit of a sacred grove, possibly a Valkyrie, but in any case a figure from Norse paganism. The left side shows Romulus and Remus, the twin brothers who founded Rome. The Adoration of the Magi shares the front panel with images of Weland the Smith, a semidivine artisan figure from Norse mythology who resembles the great elvish metalworkers of The Silmarillion. On the back is carved the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman general Titus. The images on the lid portray an archer, probably from the Norse sagas. The maker of the casket apparently found it advisable to cover every religious base, pagan as well as Christian, with a dash of lore from the receding empire thrown in for good measure. This mélange commemorates a particularly fluid time in England’s religious history, a period when a new faith was replacing an older one.
Such moments were hardly rare in Britain. A few hundred years after the Franks Casket was carved, the ascendant Catholicism of the eighth century would become “the Old Religion,” persecuted by the officials of the new Church of England and practiced in secret by families forced to build priest holes in their houses in order to hide “recusant” Catholic clergymen. Before the Anglo-Saxons, the Celtic Britons had their own polytheistic beliefs, with gods called Lugh, Sulis, and Toutatis; the occupying Romans would summarily rename these Mercury, Minerva, and Mars. Long ago, before even the Celts arrived, there were the Neolithic peoples who erected Stonehenge (“the oldest place in the old,” as Lewis once described it in a letter) and left Britain and Ireland peppered with their tombs and standing stones. What gods they worshipped, we will never know. According to Beowulf, it is one of their earthwork tombs or barrows — built, the poet explains, by “somebody now forgotten” — that houses the dragon whose venom will ultimately kill the epic’s aging hero. After defeating the monster, the poisoned warrior king stares up at the stone arches supporting the barrow’s inner chamber, ancient even then, realizing that his own end, too, is near.
The first time I visited England I went for a walk with a friend over the headlands of the Isle of Wight off the southern coast. We happened upon a group of barrows, and hiked over the edge of the tallest. The top of the mound had collapsed long ago, leaving a grassy bowl. We lay down inside and listened as the wind blew up over the hill from the sea, while in that small shelter all was still. I tried to imagine the people who’d built the mound, thousands and thousands of years ago, a race whose very name has been lost, but who, like people everywhere, made a ceremony of burying their dead. I felt a sensation of plunging, not through space but through time, a feeling both giddy and solemn. I may even have held my breath for a while. When the moment passed, I turned and began to describe it to my friend, who, I learned to my surprise, had experienced much the same thing.