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How Myths Get Started

The Lewis Legacy-Issue 77, Summer 1998 The C.S. Lewis Foundation for Truth in Publishing

“C. S. Lewis: Myth and Sensucht,” is one chapter in a forthcoming book about six major Christian mythmakers. Fortunately, a galley reader found seven minor errors in this chapter in time for them to be corrected.

1. When Lewis was 16 years old, he was supposedly a student in “an English boarding school.” But he was living in Surrey then with his private tutor, J. W. Kirkpatrick.

2. Lewis supposedly discovered George MacDonald’s Phantastes “on a bookstore shelf in a railway station.” But there was no bookstore in Leatherhead station; Lewis found the book in a bookstall (similar to a magazine stand).

3. Lewis was converted soon after a memorable all night conversation with J. R. R. Tolkien at Magdalen College. But Hugo Dyson was with them and stayed even later than Tolkien, trying to help Lewis see the truth of Christianity.

4. In Pilgrim’s Regress John “crosses the brook several times.” But John is merely warned about many crossings (symbolic deaths), and in the story he crosses (dies) only once.

5. In The Great Divorce “The visitors from Hell…. look with displeasure and final disdain upon [Heaven]. In their pride and self-centeredness they choose rather to return….” But in fact one of the visitors joyfully chooses to stay in Heaven.

6. A. N. Wilson’s flamboyantly inaccurate biography is cited in a footnote as if it is a reputable source, but the passage cited is highly fictionalized.

7. “His world was that of the rather secluded academic whose realities seemed almost exclusively intellectual.” But Lewis fought in the trenches in one war and did volunteer work in another, loved nature, was much involved with friends and relatives, and ministered personally to countless people.