Tolkien would never have condoned this sort of racism, even if it hadn’t come laced with a large dose of anti-Catholicism, but he was prone to the fantasy of racialism all the same. Each language has a distinct flavor, as he saw it, and his own immediate recognition of Anglo-Saxon constituted, in his opinion, “as good or better a test of ancestry as blood-groups.” Blood explained why he “took to early West-Midland middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it.”
In this belief, incidentally, Tolkien was almost certainly wrong. Recent advances in the analysis of DNA have made it possible to determine the distant genetic roots of contemporary individuals. Samples taken from the population of Britain revealed, to the surprise of many, that the modern English are mostly not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. “Overall,” wrote the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes, who oversaw the studies, “the genetic structure of the Isles is stubbornly Celtic, if by that we mean descent from people who were here before the Romans and who spoke a Celtic language.” In some parts of England, the proportion of people who can claim Anglo-Saxon ancestry does run as high as twenty percent, but that is along the eastern coast. Tolkien’s beloved homeland, the West Midlands, is almost entirely populated by the descendants of Celts, and on his mother’s side (the only branch of his family that mattered to him, and the source of his perceived Anglo-Saxonism) he too was most probably a Celt.
Tolkien did waver in his “distaste” for things Celtic. As a boy, he found the Welsh names painted on the sides of railway cars both mysterious and evocative, and the elvish language Sindarin is based on Welsh, one of his favorite tongues. He wrote (or at least began) a few poems on Arthurian subjects, despite his apprehensions about the non-English roots of the tradition. And one of the major works of his career as a scholar was a translation, with E. V. Gordon, of the fourteenth-century Middle English Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien’s introduction (with Gordon) to that work praises it for not being as “rambling and incoherent” as “older Celtic forms.”
As for his own tales, Tolkien wrote that he intended them to convey “the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things).” Most likely, he found the Celtic legends preserved in the Irish cycles and the Welsh Mabinogion — rife as they are with promiscuous women, arbitrary violence, and bodily fluids, as most myths tend to be toward the root — too coarse for his taste. His new mythology for England would instead be “‘high,’ purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry.”
Lewis, of course, would sometimes count himself among the Celts, but that did not necessarily keep him from agreeing with his friend on the problematic aspects of Celtic culture. He did, however, draw the line between the “flavors” of Celtic and Germanic myth with a greater, less punitive delicacy, in a letter to Arthur Greeves:
I noted that the Celtic was much more sensuous; also less homely:
also, entirely lacking in reverence, of which the Germanic was full. Then again that the Germanic glowed in a sense with the rich somber colors, while the Celtic was all transparent and full of nuances — evanescent — but very bright. One sees that Celtic is essentially Pagan, not merely in the sense of being heathen (not-Christian), as the Germanic might be, but in the sense of being irredeemably pagan, frivolous under all its melancholy, incapable of growing into religion, and — I think — a little heartless.
Some of these words — “transparent and full of nuances — evanescent — but very bright” — could well describe Narnia, while the “rich somber colors” and “reverence” of the Germanic sounds more like Middle-earth. At times, Narnia does feel like a heroic and not entirely successful attempt to inject “religion” (that is, Christianity) into an “irredeemably pagan” (pan-pagan, really) realm that its convert author cannot bear to leave behind. But harping on the division between Germanic and Celtic (or for that matter, classical) paganism was characteristic of Tolkien, not Lewis. Lewis never felt the need to choose between the two mythologies, for as he went on to say in that letter to Arthur Greeves, “I don’t want to give up either: they are almost one’s male and female soul.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Riches All About You
Lewis’s magpie aesthetic made Narnia a grab bag of every motif that had ever captured his fancy. Susanna Clarke told me that she’d once heard Narnia called just that, a “fancy,” in comparison to Tolkien’s fully articulated “fantasy.” The distinction, she said, originated with an academic critic of contemporary genre fiction, Gary Wolfe, author of the book Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship. I wrote to Wolfe to find out more, and he kindly replied, explaining that although he’d never actually applied the distinction to Lewis and Tolkien, he could see how someone else might. He’d based it on Coleridge’s conception of the difference between fancy and imagination, as described in Biographia Literaria, the philosophical and aesthetic autobiography Coleridge published in 1817.
According to Biographia Literaria, imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” Fancy, by contrast, only rearranges preestablished “fixities and definites,” and is really no more than a “mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space.” It is the difference between rearranging the furniture in your mind and building it from scratch. “So by these standards,” Wolfe wrote in his e-mail to me, “you could make an argument that Tolkien inventing a new world and language that is not a direct mirror or allegory, is a better representative of Coleridge’s ‘imagination’ than Lewis, who employed Christian allegorical elements and familiar figures from myth and folklore in a way that more or less equates with ‘fancy.’”
Here we come to one aspect of the Romantic creed that Lewis found myopic: the cult of individual genius and its corollary preoccupation with originality. Lewis knew that the high valuation placed on artistic novelty was itself fairly recent. The writers he studied regarded new material and ideas as precarious; far better to found your text on established authorities, as the great writers of the past were called. But contrary to what a modern reader might conclude, Lewis believed that this attitude didn’t necessarily reduce the work of medieval writers to the mere parroting or imitation of other authors.
When Chaucer “works over” a poem by Boccaccio, Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, his delightful book on the medieval mind, “no line, however closely translated, will do exactly what it did in the Italian once Chaucer has made his additions. No line in those additions but depends for much of its effect on the translated lines which precede and follow it.” As he saw it, the miracle of medieval literature was that its great writers, without attempting to do anything unprecedented, and in the act of what appeared to be no more than touching up some venerable source, nevertheless transfigured their materiaclass="underline" “they handled no predecessor without pouring new life into him.”