A Different Mythlore

In April 2000 the first issue of the revamped Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Mythopoeic Literature was published. It is now an 81-page academic quarterly journal edited by Theodore James Sherman of Middle Tennessee State University.

Two of the six essays in this issue are about C. S. Lewis: “Three Views of Faerie in C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Queen of Drum” by Joe Christopher, and “Balder the Beautiful: Aslan’s Norse Ancestor in The Chronicles of Narnia” by Salwa Khoddam.

Mythlore, 33-year-old journal of the Mythopoeic Society, was started in Los Angeles by Glen GoodKnight in 1967, just four years after Lewis’s death. Until GoodKnight’s resignation in 1999, Mythlore has been a reflection of his personality and style — a warm, informal, enjoyable blend of serious literary scholarship, mythopoeic artwork, and Society news. The new Mythlore is more compact than the original, with no artwork and with better proofreading. Editor Sherman intends to resume a regular schedule, something that was missing.

The contrast between the old Mythlore and the new is much like that between the old Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal and the new. Both were founded by creative, non-academic visionaries (Glen GoodKnight and Steve Schofield), and in their new manifestations both have become standard academic journals edited by professors (Roger Stronstad and Ted Sherman).

Chronology of C. S. Lewis Periodicals

1967: Mythlore
1969: CSL, Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society
1975: The Lamp-Post
1979: The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal
1980; Seven, An Anglo-American Literary Review
1989: The Lewis Legacy