Lewis grew up amid sites like this one; the remains of the oldest man-made structures in Britain are in Northern Ireland. When I hiked to the top of Slieve Martin in Rostrevor, I found, as promised in a park brochure, a stone with fading petroglyphs and, not far off, a cairn, or pile of rocks, marking an ancient grave. A prodigious country walker like Lewis must have happened upon hundreds of such remnants as he and his friends tramped through the hills of England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.
Those experiences inspired the opening of Prince Caspian, a favorite scene among Lewis’s readers. The Pevensies, after being magically yanked from a railway platform in England onto a deserted island, make their way from the shore to the island’s center. There, amid the trees, they find a crumbling stone wall with an arched opening; through it, they walk into “a wide open place with walls all round it. In here there were no trees, only level grass and daisies, and ivy, and grey walls. It was a bright, secret, quiet place, and rather sad.” The children soon recognize this for the ruins of a castle, but it isn’t until Susan finds a solid gold chessman (an echo of Norse gods’ golden game pieces, found in the grass by the survivors of Ragnarok) that they realize that this is their castle, the remnants of Cair Paravel. Because of the incongruities in the passage of time between Narnia and our world, they’ve returned hundreds of years after their own reign.
Energetic promoters of Northern Ireland as a site for C. S. Lewis tourism have claimed that Dunluce Castle on the Antrim Coast was the model for Cair Paravel. Lewis himself never said as much, although he knew the place; his family often vacationed along the northern coast of Ireland in the summers when he was a child. Built on a tall, steep rock outcropping surrounded by rough surf, accessible only by a narrow bridge, Dunluce is gloomier than I ever imagined Cair Paravel being. (If you happen to have an old LP of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, you can see for yourself; Dunluce is the background for the gatefold photograph.) What’s left of the castle looks stolid and houselike, not especially evocative of the spires and gables that Pauline Baynes drew for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was, however, won over to the idea of Dunluce as Cair Paravel (sentimentally, if not rationally) by something far below the castle itself, at the foot of its massive basalt base: a little grotto, washed by the waves, called the Mermaid’s Cave. Mermaids and mermen, as some readers of Narnia will recall, sang at the coronation of Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Like the remains of Cair Paravel, Dunluce Castle is roofless, and its floors have been replaced by a carpet of grass. You can see a similarly carpeted ruin beside the Thames footpath in Oxford, the route Lewis and his friends took on their frequent walks to the Trout pub in Wolvercote. These walls, what’s left of Godstow Nunnery, are older even than Dunluce. Henry II’s popular mistress, Rosamund Clifford, was once buried in the convent’s church choir. That was too close to the altar for the liking of Saint Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, who had her tomb removed in 1191 as part of a campaign against “superstitious and magical abominations everywhere,” according to his hagiographer. The tomb was later destroyed in another religious purge when Henry VIII dissolved the Catholic orders and established the Church of England in the 1530s. At that point, the building was converted to a private house and occupied by a well-off local family — until the English civil war, when it was badly damaged during the fighting between Puritan revolutionaries and Anglican royalists. Eventually, the ruins became a picnic spot favored on sunny afternoons by, among others, Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell, and her sisters.
Look deep enough and many such places in England become spiritual palimpsests; each faith is written over the one that came before, leaving traces of the “Old Religion” still visible beneath. This was true back in the days of the Beowulf poet; even the dragon is a squatter in a structure built by somebody long dead. The difficulty with Tolkien’s plan “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own” was that by conceiving of that mythology as essentially Anglo-Saxon, rather than British, he tried not only to freeze a moment in that history but to airbrush out the past. The Anglo-Saxons, coming as they did somewhere in the middle of the long succession of peoples that have settled in Britain, never established an entirely “pure” culture there.
As for what Lewis called “England’s national epic,” Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, well, Tolkien had reservations about that. The Arthurian tradition was Celtic in origin and it was primarily preserved in the chivalric romances written by French poets in the Middle Ages. As a result, Tolkien disdained the stories of King Arthur and his knights on no less than three counts: first, for their Christianity, which, for complicated reasons, Tolkien felt compromised their mythic integrity; second, for the French elements (especially the “corrupt” code of courtly love), about which the less said the better; and third, for their Celtic roots.
Tolkien’s attitude toward Celtic culture was ambivalent to say the least. When, in the 1930s, his British publisher sent an early manuscript of The Silmarillion to a reader, a report came back that complained of the “eye-splitting Celtic names” and described Tolkien’s tales as conveying “something of that mad, bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in the face of Celtic art.” Tolkien, naturally, protested. His names and stories were not Celtic! “I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages, Irish and Welsh),” he wrote in reply, “and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright color, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’ as your reader says — but I don’t believe I am.”
The distinction is charged — politically, historically, personally, and (for Tolkien at least) linguistically. Tolkien believed, as did just about everyone at that time, that the English were descended mainly from the Anglo-Saxons. The rest of Britain — Wales, Scotland, and (especially) Ireland — constituted a “Celtic fringe,” whose ancestors had been pushed to the so-called outskirts by the invading Germanic tribes who overran the heartland after the Romans abandoned their British colonies in the fifth century. This idea had many uses for the English, all springing from the widely held conviction that the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts had fundamentally different temperaments as well as cultures.
The Celts were “mad”: moody, whimsical, flighty, and often charming, but prone to superstition, to drink, and to melancholy. The Anglo-Saxons were practical, energetic, and efficient, in accordance with the common stereotype of Germans. Anglo-Saxons got things done and hewed to a noble code of honor inherited from their warrior past. This explained why the Anglo-Saxons (that is, the English) rightfully dominated the people of the Celtic fringe; they were inherently superior and capable, uniquely fitted for leadership. Lewis himself subscribed to this view at times, characterizing his father’s Welsh family as “sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical.”
This doctrine of the two temperaments flourished in the nineteenth century, when prominent English experts equated Celtic ancestry with Catholicism and a general lazy backwardness that would have to be eradicated if the Irish (in particular) could ever hope to equal their English rulers. The prominent naturalist Robert Knox thought the Irish were incurable, and wrote, “The source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over historical facts…. The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. England’s safety requires it. I speak not of the justice of the cause; nations must ever act as Machiavelli advised: look to yourself. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for clearing the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts.”