by Lirenel » April 6th, 2009, 9:38 pm
I know this topic's been dead awhile, but I came across another point of view and was wondering what people think about it. It's an article by Eric Seddon titled "Letters to Malcolm And the Trouble With Narnia: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their 1949 Crisis" in the journal...Mythopeia, I think. Anyway, Seddon pondered the question on why Tolkien disliked Narnia with quite a few points, only some of which I'll mention here. He also tried to disprove some of the assumptions behind the disagreement.
* Assumption 1: That Tolkien was jealous of Lewis's fast writing - Seddon basically says that Tolkien knew Lewis could write fast, and that he'd been doing it forever and there wasn't a hint that Tolkien was jealous of this.
* Assumption 2: Tolkien disliked the eclectic mythologies that Lewis used - Seddon points out that Tolkien had no problem with the Space Trilogy's mix of "Plato, Arthurian legend, direct parallels to Christian theology, and a multitude of stylistic and philosophical sources...". Basically, he says that Tolkien already knew that the mixing was just Lewis's style and had seen, and approved of, it before.
Seddon then goes on to examine Letters to Malcolm and tries to establish that Lewis became more outspoken about his disagreements with Catholic theology later in his life. I've never read Letters to Malcolm, so I can't comment on this, though the quotes he used seem to help his argument (of course, I know that quotes without complete context can be taken pretty much any way you want).
Then Seddon turns to Narnia and gives his opinions about what some of Tolkien's objections to LWW and Narnia might have been. One was the lack of a Eucharist element in LWW, since the Eucharist was very important to Tolkien and a key element of Catholicism. He quotes Mr. Beaver talking about how Aslan is here one day and gone the next as specifically implying that Christ is not always 'present', which is impossible in a Catholic context. Seddon admits, though, that the quote could be talking about cycles of spiritual dryness or something else more allegorical.
Anyway, the point I thought most intriguing was Seddon's thoughts on the nature of Aslan. He says "Simply put, if Aslan is supposed to be Christ himself, operating in a parallel universe, than Lewis has presented Christ with an illusory body, appearing here as human, there as lion," which objects to the orthodox Christian theology that Christ is fully God and fully human and his "body is not arbitrary, nor illusory, but real." Basically, that Christ can't be a Lion in another universe, because the definition of Christ is the man-who-is-God who was born of the Virgin Mary in Palestine during the reign of Augustus. Seddon thought that Tolkien would find this "profoundly disturbing", even if he couldn't articulate why he didn't like it, and that is one of the reasons he just disliked LWW and Narnia in general.
Not sure what I think of the argument. Most of the time, I don't take literary criticism of fiction seriously because it's just a story and sometimes an apple is an apple. But since Lewis did make Narnia semi-allegorical, or supposal, I thought it deserved some thought.
The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1
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