CS Lewis

Tolkien: A Celebration

Edited by Joseph Pearce (Fount HarperCollins, 1999, 204 pp, pb) From “Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: An Interview with Walter Hooper” (Joseph Pearce, April 1998) When and where did you first meet Tolkien? I met Tolkien in the first or second week of January 1964. Before that, when I was with Lewis in his house, The Kilns, in the summer Read More ›

The Wardrobe Wars and the Thirsks

Paul Willis’s delightful article “The Wardrobe Wars” appeared in the Winter 1998-1999 Lamp-Post. (Willis is an English professor and writer at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA.) In his account of the friendly rivalry between Westmont and Wheaton about which one has the real wardrobe Lewis had in mind as the gateway to Narnia, he mentioned how Westmont was able Read More ›

Publisher’s Note in Ireland

When I recieved a gift copy of Looking Backward, the first thing I read was the claim on the back cover that it included the first study of Lewis’s “Ulster novel.” I wrote to the publisher, the Institute of Irish Studies, and requested the insertion of a note to correct that. After an exchange of correspondence, the following note was Read More ›

A New Theory about the Origin of The Dark Tower

Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earthEdited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000) “The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis’s Time Travel Triad”by John D. Rateliff According to John Rateliff, the genesis of The Dark Tower is recorded in a letter that J. R. R. Tolkien Read More ›

The Dark Tower: A Challenge to Lewis Scholars

by Larry Gilman Larry Gilman has a doctorate in electrical engineering and a recent Master of Fine Arts degree. He says “I love Lewis, of course — he has always been a reliable spring of clean water, and when I was a teen he taught me almost single handedly what the words ‘intellectual honesty’ count for. I now re-read 4 Read More ›

Giant New C. S. Lewis Anthology

C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces HarperCollins, edited by Leslie Walmsley,894 pp, 135 selections, 25, about $39.25 U.S. The cover of this book shows the famous photo of C. S. Lewis with his cigarette erased. In her introduction Walmsley writes “For all this background information, as for so much else to do with the works of C. Read More ›

In the Footsteps of Leonowen

Anna and the King of Siam gave people the proper Victorian governesses and cruel Oriental potentates they wanted. This 1944 novel by Margaret Landon was promptly made into a film starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. In 1951 the story opened on Broadway as a successful Rogers and Hammerstein musical comedy, and then it became a film starring Yul Brynner Read More ›

What Did C. S. Lewis Say about Botticelli? And Who Said So?

This is the sidebar that supplements “Spring in Purgatory: Dante, Botticelli, C. S. Lewis, and a Lost Masterpiece” The Allegory of Love: a Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 83. “No religion, so long as it is believed, can have that kind of beauty [the beauty of pagan gods, ‘pure aesthetic contemplation of their eternity, their remoteness, Read More ›

An Open Letter to Patricia Batstone

5 Foxglove Close. Dunkeswell, Honiton, Devon EX14 4QE. 1987 doctoral thesis at Exeter College: “Shadow into Substance: Education and Identity in the Fantasy of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien” IN DEBT TO C. S. LEWIS: a collection of 200 accounts of how C. S. Lewis has influenced readers (1999). Saturday, February 5, 2000 Dear Patricia Batstone, A Read More ›

Narnia Performance

The Brookstone theatre company debuted ten years ago in Toronto. Brookstone is associated with Lamb’s Players of San Diego and connected with Toronto’s Walmer Road Church. It has launched seven original works like “Tent Meeting,” six Toronto premiers, and original versions of works like “Miracle Worker” and “Godspell.” “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was performed from 10 December Read More ›