books from the Lewis conference

George Fox University, where the conference was held, is a small campus with an even smaller bookstore. A single room with not much but textbooks and campus-themed clothing, it did put out a table filled with plenty of copies of special-ordered books by conference presenters. A few more books drifted in on the second day of the conference, but more of them, though promised and expected, did not appear before the end of the event

Most of the books on display I already had, but there was one new one I eagerly purchased, and one of the non-arrivals I simply ordered online after I got home.

Tolkien's Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway (Word on Fire, 2023)
Some readers - fewer these days than formerly - are unaware that there's a Catholic dimension to The Lord of the Rings at all. Some writers - more these days than formerly - are Catholic enthusiasts practicing landsmanship on Tolkien and claiming The Lord of the Rings as a Catholic allegory dripping with intentional religious symbolism in a C.S. Lewis mode.
Both these ideas are misled. Ordway is trying to steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis here; I detected as much from the first chapter and, having read that far, wished the author good luck at it when I met her at the conference. In the end, she'll succeed if readers attend closely to what she's saying, which they don't always do, cf the consistent misreadings of Christopher Milne's memoir.
This is a full biography of Tolkien: it's very long (365 pages in main text) and covering his whole life in detail, but only in its religious and spiritual aspects. There's nothing beyond a few context-providing sentences about his academic life or scholarly work, his World War I service, or even the writing of his fiction. The last, mostly LR, makes scattered appearances to show only how Tolkien's deep religiosity informed his creative thinking. Thus Galadriel obviously resembles Mary in aspects, but in the farewell scene her words echo Christ at the Last Supper, so there's that aspect too. Ordway's conclusion is that Tolkien's characters are not allegories of Christianity but types of Christ or other figures, in imitation of Christ as Thomas à Kempis put it: an observation first made in regard to Tolkien by Gracia Fay Ellwood in 1966, so Ordway is on solid ground here.
The book's major focus is on placing Tolkien's faith in context. So when Ordway says that Tolkien liked to say particular prayers, she goes into detail on exactly what those prayers say and what it meant to a Catholic believer in Tolkien's day. There's an appendix with the full texts of the prayers in Latin (which Tolkien used in prayer, even after the vernacular reforms) and English. There's a whole sequence of biographical paragraphs on the priests of the Birmingham Oratory whom Tolkien would have known when he was receiving his childhood religious training there. There's even longer discussions of saints Tolkien especially venerated, and of the godparents of all of his children - a significant clue as to what was important to their parents. There's physical descriptions of the churches Tolkien attended, noting that the old churches in England had all been claimed by the Anglicans, and that most Catholic churches were drab functional buildings, sometimes claimed from other uses, until new ones of better aesthetic quality were built.
Despite all this detail, Ordway assumes that the reader knows absolutely nothing. She explains what the Old Testament is. She even explains what Christianity is. This smoothly blends into discussions of the anti-Catholic environment of England at the time, as reflected in those makeshift churches. She notes, which I think previous biographers have not, that Tolkien was initially one of only four Catholic professors at Oxford, and that the four of them carried the sacred canopy in the first Catholic procession in Oxford for centuries in 1934.
All of this works very well. Yet it doesn't always do so. Some reviews have called this book a hagiography, despite Ordway's specific denial; I wonder if anyone making that charge has ever seen an actual hagiography. But there is a tendency to skim over or argue against negative aspects. That Tolkien came close to lapsing from his faith in early adulthood, and that his wife was at times resentful that he'd made her convert, are mentioned, but there's very little detail on these. Perhaps there's none to be had, though in other respects Ordway is a remarkably diligent researcher.
More serious is the case of a chapter on Tolkien's racial views, which is mostly about his opposition to anti-Semitism and on the reflection of the Jews in the Dwarves. This reflection is framed as complimentary, so there's nothing about how the Dwarves in the earlier legendarium are basically evil. It's also unconscionable at this late date to discuss Tolkien and racism without noting his reflexive acceptance of negative stereotypes about Asian peoples and their reflection in the Orcs.
Later on, there's a rather strained and desperate argument that Tolkien wasn't really as much opposed to the reforms of Vatican II as he's usually depicted, and an even more strained and desperate argument that Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis wasn't really as anti-Catholic as he's usually depicted. Lewis combined deep personal friendship with individual Catholics with a reflexive anti-Catholic general attitude that often pained Tolkien and which probably descended from Lewis's Ulster Protestant childhood. This makes Lewis a perfect example of why "Some of my best friends are X" is a worthless defense of oneself against charges of prejudice.
I finished this book less happy with it than I'd been halfway through.

C.S. Lewis's Oxford by Simon Horobin (Bodleian Library, 2024)
I was especially anxious to read this detailed account of Lewis in Oxford, because I wondered what it would say about the Inklings. Many writers tend to jump to unwarranted conclusions about the history of this poorly-documented group. Horobin doesn't. He lays out the known facts, and doesn't speculate beyond them.
This is a marvelously researched book, delving into plenty of detail, particularly uncovering material about Lewis's interaction with his tutorial pupils from his comments on their essays, preserved in his papers in the Bodleian - something I can't recall seeing previous writers do. He's also wise and judicious on the dicey matter of Mrs. Moore.
The Inklings chapter does not reveal anything new, but at least it sticks to what is known. I was particularly pleased with lines like "Although Thursday-night meetings petered out at the end of the 1940s," because that's exactly how much is certainly known, no more. It's so reliable that two tiny errors stood out glaringly. Horobin calls the Cretaceous Perambulators, Lewis's walking group, "a subset of the Inklings," which they were not: the overlap between the groups was minimal. And he writes of "one August evening in 1940, when the group met at Tolkien's home." In fact, as is shown elsewhere in the letter by Lewis that Horobin quotes from (offering Lewis's paraphrase of Tolkien as Tolkien's words), Lewis and Havard going to Tolkien's home was a substitute for a meeting not held because nobody else (including Tolkien) could come to Lewis's college rooms that evening.

language lesson

Mikey, what's that?

clown

It's a cloud, Mikey. Can you say cloud?

clown

Mikey, say k.

k

Now say loud.

loud

Now say k-loud.

k-loud

Now say cloud.

clown

the other Lewis

The Tolkien conference in Seattle having been Saturday the 31st, and the C.S. Lewis conference outside Portland not beginning until the next Thursday, and only a 5-hour drive between them, what was I to do with the rest of my four days? I could spend them pleasantly just hanging around Seattle and Portland, but I had another idea.

A few years ago I spent an enjoyable week following the trail of another Lewis - Meriwether Lewis - and the Lewis and Clark Expedition around western Montana. Why not explore the western extent of their journey down the Snake and Columbia Rivers? Unlike the Montana sites, I'd seen most of this before, but not as a continuous journey.

So on Sunday I drove up and based myself in the Tri-Cities (Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick), and on Monday drove up along the Snake as far as the Nez Perce villages east of Lewiston, Idaho, and back again. Tuesday I went down the Columbia as far as Portland (arriving in time to make a visit to Powell's) and then checked into my hotel for the CSL conference. Wednesday I drove back to the river and down it to the coast, then back up by the direct road.

Mostly I was watching the scenery. The Clearwater and Snake in western Idaho and eastern Washington are huge flows of water through dry, desert landscapes, often with dramatic cliffs framing the water; further down on the Columbia, the cliffs become even more dramatic, and demonstrative of geological layers, about the point that the Oregon border hits the river. The mid-Columbia has gentler shores, but in Lewis and Clark's day it was full of hazardous rapids, since smoothed out by a system of power-generating dams. Coming down from Portland on the Oregon side of the river, the town of Rainier is the first one that looks and feels like it's near the ocean, and from then on the salt air is palpable.

I stopped along the way at every museum and historic site that my guidebooks listed as having a Lewis and Clark reference, and wound up reading a vast number of independently written descriptions of the expedition, most with some special reference to the site they were at. I was most concerned to get to the Interpretive Center at Cape Disappointment on the Washington shore, because it was still being constructed the last time I was there. I arrived, having come down that side of the river past Dismal Nitch (which I'd been to before, but it hadn't yet had that name - taken from Clark's description of the place in the November weather - on the signs then), at about noon, only to find that the tiny parking lot was entirely full. I gave up and, the local town having nowhere to eat, drove across the estuary bridge - four miles long - to Astoria on the Oregon side. Astoria is full of eateries with excellent clam chowders. Then I went down to Fort Clatsop nearby, where the explorers had finally settled in for the rest of the winter. The replica fort has been rebuilt, in a more authentic style (logs hewn by axe instead of chain-saw, for instance), since I was last there long ago.

At about 4 pm I headed back across the river to try Cape Disappointment again. This close to closing there were parking spaces, but the path up the hill to the center was steep and exhausting. Aside from the requisite expedition history and some impressive ocean views, there wasn't much to it, but I'm glad to have been there and seen what it was like. That their admission desk only takes cash while the one in Oregon only takes credit cards, though they're both NPS facilities, is just a little mystery.

The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference

Much of a week's gap in my posting here was due to my attendance at a conference of this title, held at George Fox University, a Quaker institution in Newberg, Oregon, a town between Portland and Salem. The Cascade Moot in Seattle of which I'd previously written having been the previous weekend, a combination trip by car seemed feasible.

I was one of a few Tolkienists among the 250 Lewisians at this conference, and probably (I didn't ask) the only non-Christian in the entire number, so what was I doing there? Well, you don't have to be a Christian to enjoy the work of C.S. Lewis. I find his to be a mind of intense interest that I enjoy engaging with. Lewis's Christianity was a substrate that underlay everything he did, as was also the case for Tolkien; it was more prominent in Lewis mostly because he wrote theology and apologetics, and it's also more detectable in his fiction, but it doesn't shake the reader as some other Christian novelists do. And in so much of his other work, particularly literary history and criticism, his intellectual curiosity is primary and while his religion remains present, it's that substrate which informs his work.

The presenters at this conference were the same way. Intellectual curiosity about Lewis, even his openly religious works, was the constant theme. There was little preaching and no berating, if only because they are secure in their beliefs and assumed that everyone agrees with them. I accepted the context for the purposes of attending the conference, same as I did when I attended gatherings of Peter Jackson movie fans. In other words, it was totally unlike a typical Christian radio station.

The conference lasted three days spread across four calendar days, and it was busy. Meals were included for those who cared to pay the fee, and plenary sessions, including six keynote speakers, were held in the same large private dining room in the cafeteria building where we took meals, except for two theatrical presentations in the evenings. Between plenaries, we scattered to classrooms across campus - this was during term, so on Thursday and Friday things had to be squeezed in - for any of usually five paper sessions going on at once.

The main theme of the conference, perhaps the reason it was dubbed "Undiscovered," was the description of an immense number of unpublished, and generally unknown, Lewis works in manuscript. I'd been aware of the unpublished section of the preface to The Screwtape Letters tying it into the world of the Ransom trilogy, but I didn't know of the trove of sarcastic poems that Lewis wrote in his own copies of books by a philologist whom he found particularly irritating (you can read the full article by the presenting scholar), or of the report of his year as Vice-President of his Oxford college, an administrative job for which he was totally unsuited, which he put in the form of a facetious verse play, handwritten in a book of such reports, where nobody but succeeding Vice-Presidents was ever likely to see it. It was titled "The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald." There were also discussions of other annotations Lewis wrote in books he owned, and the attempt to date them according to his changing handwriting; and a collection of the publishing blurbs he wrote for his own and others' books.

But the best keynote presentations were two detailed scholarly analyses, based on divergent scholarly principles. Holly Ordway, the only Tolkienist among the keynoters, did a stunningly careful source analysis of exactly what evidence survives of Tolkien's opinion of Lewis's Narnian stories. It turns out that every negative comment Tolkien is credited with are all responses to Lewis having read him drafts of the first two chapters of the first book, so depictions of this as a sweeping condemnation are unwarranted. It's true that, later on, he didn't care for Narnia as a whole, but he framed that as a matter of personal taste, it did not affect his friendship with Lewis, and he was happy to recommend the books and give copies to his grandchildren.

Then Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, explored the origins of the name "Narnia" in Lewis's mind. We have two writings by Lewis giving different sources; one the name of a Roman town and the other derived from the Latin word inane, which differs both in pronunciation and meaning from the English word. The two are not necessarily incompatible. But that's all we know, so Ward proceeded to speculate on the implications of these, but unlike most speculating scholars he had his feet firmly planted in the known facts.

And there was much more. There were only about four other people there I knew, but it was easy to strike up conversations, because we were all there for the same purpose. I was staying at a hotel in the next town down the road, and there wasn't much time between conference session to do much other than ablutions and sleep, so that's why you didn't hear from me. I was engrossed in Lewis.

debate

I didn't watch the debate. (It seems to have been blacked out on our tv anyway, and I would have had to use the computer.) The reasons for not watching it were two: I was too nervous about it, and I didn't want to have to sit through DT ranting.

Instead, I've read and watched commentaries and clips. And that seems to have been enough to convey the gist. DT is so full of himself, so sure he's wonderful, that he figures he can just walk through it against an experienced prosecutor. He can't.

Oregon

The most surprising thing I learned in Oregon is that it's no longer illegal for drivers to pump their own gas there.

US road warriors have long known that two states, Oregon and New Jersey, required attendants to do it, as was the custom everywhere before the first gas crisis of 1973. I suppose it was a combination of a job creation program for gas station attendants and a fear that drivers wouldn't do it right. (Indeed, driving off with the hose still in the tank is an oops known to happen.)

The first time I filled the tank in Oregon on this trip, I didn't know the law had changed: there was still an attendant to do it, a practice I suppose will stick around for a while and gradually fade away. But the second time, there was no attendant, and when I went in to the shop to ask, I was told the law had changed over a year ago. This is the sort of news that should have produced banner headlines in the AAA magazine, but I didn't see anything there.

Here's the rules, though it doesn't seem to fit the discount station I was at, where they told me an attendant doesn't come in until mid-afternoon. This was in Yamhill County, which is one of the more populous counties where stations are required to offer attendant service at all times. But there was no attendant and no signs.

Cascade Moot

It was a whim, of sorts. I spent Saturday in Seattle at Cascade Moot, one of the numerous regional meetings sponsored by Signum University, Corey Olsen's Tolkien-oriented study group, and presented the John Wain paper I'd written for Mythcon. The moot's theme was "The Importance of Secondary and Tertiary Characters," so I retitled it "John Wain: A Tertiary Inkling."

About 35 people, some older but mostly 30s-40s by the look of them, gathered in a ground-floor classroom in what is otherwise mostly a dormitory (though you wouldn't know it from what we saw of it) of the University of Washington, but it wasn't really necessary to be there, because there was also a large Zoom attendance. In fact six of the ten papers were given over Zoom, which is why it was a whim for me to travel this far.

Five of the ten papers, not counting mine, were Tolkienian in topic. Despite some of the presenters confessing nervousness at giving a presentation, they were fine, though more than one presenter pronounced "Aragorn" as "Aragon." The best papers were close readings of the texts of minor characters' appearances, squeezing out what could be fairly deduced about them: a theory that Goldberry is the personification of a yellow water lily; a comparison of three encounters with gatekeepers in LR, each introducing a new culture to the story in what are quite different expressions of the same basic concept. The same was true of some of the non-Tolkien papers: the very little that's said of Mrs. Hudson, the landlady, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but she's been expanded on in pastiches and film adaptations; and the evolution of the concept of a "Scooby gang" and how it differs from an Avengers-like collection of heroes or a hero-and-sidekick situation. Besides Scooby-Doo and Buffy, The Goonies and Stranger Things (neither of which I've seen) were cited as having the distinctive characteristics of a collection of diverse misfits who contribute individual skills to form a protagonist group greater than any of them.

More broadly, we had a firm reading of Eowyn from a woman who understood that her driving force was despair, and who suggested that victory opened the future for her and offered Faramir as a non-military role model, thus leading to her change of heart; and an even firmer reading of absent mothers, mostly in the Silmarillion, and how they're blamed for their children's misdeeds. Somewhat more dubious was a paper on Beregond which ran out of time to address the character's distinct appeal and human qualities after having spent an enormous amount of time on categorical throat-clearing of unnecessarily trying to distinguish primary, secondary, and tertiary characters in LR: why are you obsessed with these fine distinctions? what difference does it make?

The day got off to an awkward start when it turned out the AV setup hadn't been tested beforehand, and what was supposed to be the 15-minute introduction turned into 20 minutes of computer troubleshooting, and we only got back onto schedule when one paper on some minor character in some book I didn't know turned out to be so minor the paper was exceedingly short. But it mostly worked out well, and my own paper, which came last, attracted some interest and a few favorable comments, as well as a number of people now determined to read Diana Glyer's The Company They Keep.

I took the light rail in from the suburbs where I'm staying. Parking at the station was dicey as the lots have been hijacked by people using them as free airport parking for the holiday weekend (there's a station at the airport), but a few spaces had appeared early Saturday morning and I was on my way.