CS Lewis

Perry Bramlett’s Lists

The 25 Best Books Written about C.S. Lewis Biographical George Sayer: Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis James Como (ed) – C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table W Hooper & R L Green – C. S. Lewis: A Biography Humphrey Carpenter – The Inklings Lyle Dorsett – A Love Observed (formerly And God Came In) Studies Chad Walsh Read More ›

Notes from the Dorothy Sayers Essay “Oedipus Simplx: Freedom and Fate in Folklore and Fiction”

Prepared by Kathryn Lindskoog 1. Freud interpreted the story of Oedipus allegorically in order to better communicate his theory that human males have an impulse to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. 2. Such use of old stories is natural and understandable; but it is an error to confuse the original story with the later allegory. The story of Read More ›

The Lewis Legacy-Issue 86, Autumn 2000 Notes

Cheating the Oracle for 3,500 Years The story of Joseph was supposedly written in about 1500 B.C. The story of Oedipus was told by Sophocles in 431 B.C. Virgil’s story of the trenchers was told in about 20 B.C. (The story of Segismund in the play Life Is a Dream was told by Calderon de la Barca in 1636 A.D.) Read More ›

Portrait of C. S. Lewis

by Clifford Morris (An address delivered on BBC Radio Oxford in 1971. First published in the Portland C. S. Lewis Chronicle.) As an ordinary person with no special qualifications, save that he called himself my friend, I want to share with you some of my memories of the late Clive Staples Lewis, Master of Arts, Doctor of Literature, Doctor of Read More ›

C. S. Lewis: Quick to Call a Fake a Fake

On December 18, 1912, when Lewis was fourteen years old, Charles Dawson, an attorney, and Arthur Smith Woodward, the British Museum’s leading paleontologist, announced to the world that they had discovered an early human fossil in a shallow gravel pit near the village of Piltdown in Sussex. This was promptly accepted as the earliest known human fossil and was the pride Read More ›

Lewis’s Helpful Hooker?

A startling inquiry appeared on the MERELEWIS listserve on 2 January 2000. Karen Welbourn reported that when C. S. Lewis was mentioned on another listserve, someone there responded with the following: I find C. S. Lewis a very interesting author. As you may know, he not only wrote for children, but he also wrote … [other genres] … and science Read More ›

Land of The Rising Sun: Japan and C. S. Lewis

The national symbol of Japan happened to be an important symbol to C. S. Lewis. In the last paragraph of The Great Divorce (1946) he wrote about the ultimate sunrise — “the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes.” (See also the ending of Till We Have Faces.) On Read More ›

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 Read More ›

Missing the Target: “The Furhrer and the Oxford Don”

David Payne’s first two plays about C. S. Lewis are now supplemented by “Target Practice.” Here is an excerpt from his advertising. [Note: Payne thinks the Screwtape Letters idea came to Lewis on 30 July 1940. But it came on 21 July, eight days before Hitler’s persuasive 29 July broadcast.] World War II was raging. Hitler was on the shores Read More ›

Special Underclothes: Were the Scrubbs Mormons?

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader C. S. Lewis described Harold and Alberta Scrubb, Eustace’s parents, as vegetarians, non-smokers, and teetotallers — who wore a special kind of underclothes. Fifty years later, readers are familiar with vegetarians, non-smokers, and teetotallers, but most are mystified by Lewis’s reference to a special kind of underclothes. Strict Mormons are teetotallers and non-smokers Read More ›