C. S. Lewis dedicated The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to Geoffrey Corbett,adopted son of Owen Barfield. When Corbett turned 21 he legally changed his name to Barfield, and in the new Collins edition of the book his name is given as Geoffrey Barfield. The only catch is that his name was never Geoffrey; it is Jeffrey. C. S. Lewis Read More ›
Why did Walter Hooper’s friends at the Manuscripts Department of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina abruptly withdraw his collection of C. S. Lewis-related correspondence from public access shortly after some of its incriminating and embarrassing content was revealed in 1995 in Light in the Shadowlands? A curious non-answer to that question is provided by Hooper in Read More ›
David Clarke, a Scottish accountant, has published an unusual article about C. S. Lewis in the January-February 1999 issue of CSL: Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society titled “CSL in the OED.” There he assembles and analyzes the use of quotations by C. S. Lewis in the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary. Clarke begins by stating that there Read More ›
by James O’Fee The Mourne Mountains lie in the southern part of County Down, Northern Ireland. The Carlingford Mountains are an outlier of the Mournes, separated by the narrow fjord-like sea inlet, Carlingford Lough. The Carlingford mountains lie in modern County Louth, in the Republic of Ireland. Once, however, the area was the homeland of the Ulster hero Cuchullain and Read More ›
“Somewhere in my Miracles (I can’t lay my hands on a single copy of it at the moment) you find a footnote telling you a little more about my view of myth and history in the Old Testament. There may, I suppose, have been two actual (i.e. physical) trees: but in what sense they could have been of life and Read More ›
In 1984 the Dramatic Publishing Company of Woodstock, IL, published a new one-hour play for children by Aurand Harris. Harris was at that time the most published and produced playwright for children, with 35 plays and 16 awards to his credit. His plays are for child audiences, not child actors. This one premiered at the University of Texas in Austin, Read More ›
by James O’Fee The Norman knight William de Warenne was one of the most powerful of William the Conqueror’s barons. (His bones lie in Battle Abbey.) De Warrenne was given lands in Sussex. He built Lewes (sic) Castle and is buried (I think) in Lewes Priory. (I lived in Lewes for a while, the county town of East Sussex.) William Read More ›
The Dark Tower manuscript is written on two kinds of paper. Pages 1-18 are on paper with vertical watermarks and 34 ruled lines. Pages 19-64 have horizontal watermarks and 35 ruled lines. Pages 19-64 are slightly narrower than pp. 1-18 and look newer. Perhaps a forger could not get enough sheets of the first kind of paper to complete the Read More ›
Five weeks after Lewis signed his will, he added the following afterthought. THIS IS THE FIRST CODICIL made the tenth day of December One thousand nine hundred and sixty-one to the will of me CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS of the Kilns Headington Quarry in the County of Oxford Professor of the University of Cambridge made the Second day of November One Read More ›
Douglas Gresham has revealed, “Because of a publisher’s error, The Screwtape Letters was at one time in the public domain in the USA. This allowed certain unscrupulous and untalented Americans to simply grab it and do whatever they wanted with it. I have not seen any Americanised version but I don’t doubt that someone did such a thing.” This raises an interesting question. Read More ›