Who is the Green Man? Is he a modern approximation of a pre-Christian nature elemental like the god Pan, recreated from clues found here and there — a village festival, a carving on an altar screen, the mysterious forest dweller from the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Or is he an example of wishful thinking, a concoction invented by modern Britons who want to reconnect with an indigenous religion that has been lost forever? Lewis and Tolkien thought they were woefully out of step with their time when they wrote fiction voicing their yearning for the old ways and a deeper imaginative connection with the land; instead, they turned out to be speaking for millions. It was in the 1970s, at the same time that The Lord of the Rings gained its first great success, that English villages began to revive the long-abandoned Jack in the Green processions, along with traditional morris dancing on May Day.
All this was the culmination of what the historian Ronald Hutton has called “a powerful tendency on the part of the English to search for a timeless and organic relationship with their country.” That desire’s roots lie in both the universal tug of nostalgia and the very real trauma of industrialization. Its modern manifestation, in the search for, say, the historical site of Camelot or the emergence of modern-day Druids, began not long after Lewis and Tolkien were born.
Of course, neither Narnia nor Middle-earth are real countries, even if some of Tolkien’s most fanatical readers seem to know more about the history of his invented world than they do about the one they actually inhabit. Unlike a real country, Lewis and Tolkien’s imaginary lands are literally built of stories, and stories, unlike rocks and soil and trees, are always about something. Part of what Narnia and Middle-earth are about is Britain, but not the Britain of the a34, electric teakettles, and New Labour, the Britain I tromped through, in an ultimately vain search for the original of Narnia. I suspect they are not even really about the idyllic Britain where both men grew up, or the Britain of the fourteenth century, the period Lewis might have chosen for his own if he were given the opportunity. That far country is a Britain of the mind, part real, but mostly fantasy, and, like Narnia itself, it remains always just out reach.
Chapter Eighteen
Northern Lights
Lewis met J. R. R. Tolkien in 1926, but they didn’t become close until a few years later, when Lewis would write to Arthur Greeves describing Tolkien as “the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days.” Back in Belfast, Lewis and Greeves had come together over a mutual fascination with Norse legends. Someone suggested that the fifteen-year-old Jack Lewis ought to drop in on the boy across the street, who was convalescing (Greeves suffered from a heart condition that prevented him from working for most of his life), and there he discovered a copy of Myths of the Norsemen by H. A. Guerber. “Do you like that?” Lewis asked, and “Do you like that?” came the response from Greeves. So began the longest and most intimate friendship of Lewis’s life, initiated by the revelation that “both knew the stab of Joy, and for both it was shot from the North.”
“The North” played a role, too, in Lewis’s friendship with Tolkien, who in 1926 was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. They met at a gathering of the university’s English faculty, but several factors conspired against their immediately becoming allies, let alone friends. First, Tolkien was a Roman Catholic, and second he belonged to an opposing faction in their discipline. “At my first coming into the world,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, “I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.” As a philologist, Tolkien wanted the English syllabus to be redesigned to put more emphasis on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts; he belonged to what was known as the “Language” camp. Lewis, at that time, favored the “Literature” camp, which preferred to keep the focus on more recent works, effectively limiting English to the study of literary art, rather than regarding it as a language like Greek or Latin. (Eventually, Lewis came over to Tolkien’s side in that dispute.)
At the time, Lewis patronizingly described Tolkien as “a smooth, pale, fluent little chap…. No real harm in him, only needs a smack or so.” To make matters trickier, Tolkien hated Edmund Spenser, the Elizabethan poet Lewis adored and whose reputation he would eventually revive in The Allegory of Love. Tolkien’s stated objection to Spenser at the time was “the forms,” that is, Spenser’s mangling of the language in an effort to simulate old-fashioned diction; he also resented Spenser for maligning Catholics in his masterpiece, The Faerie Queene.
What the two men shared, however, was a passion for what Lewis called “northernness.” Tolkien had formed a club dedicated to reading the Icelandic source texts for Norse mythology — the Elder Edda and the Younger Edda — in the original Old Norse (also known as Old Icelandic); he called the group the Kolbitar, after an Icelandic term for old men who sit close enough to the fire to gnaw on the coals. Lewis, intrigued by the idea of acquainting himself with the roots of his youthful obsession, joined, and soon he was writing to Arthur, enthusing about “what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of a god or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back fifteen years into a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music: only they are now even more beautiful seen thro’ a haze of memory — you know that awfully poignant effect there is about an impression recovered from one’s past.”
Lewis’s passion for northernness began with a scrap of cryptic verse; throughout his life he was always particularly susceptible to fragments of poetry or prose that hinted at things unknown and perhaps inexpressible. At the age of nine, he encountered one of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems written in imitation of the Norse sagas, entitled “Tegnér’s Drapa.” The first stanza catapulted him into a strange ecstasy:
He didn’t know who Balder was or who mourned him, but this handful of words, all by itself, made Lewis feel “uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then … found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.” Northernness was from the very beginning a primary source of Joy.
Nevertheless, Lewis’s enthusiasm for things Norse went through a dormant period during his boyhood, his “dark ages” of “rubbish” and “twaddling school stories.” Then, in a schoolroom, at the age of thirteen, he stumbled upon a magazine that had reprinted some of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Wagner’s Ring cycle and with them the title Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. “Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me,” Lewis writes of this moment in Surprised by Joy, although he still had no idea who Siegfried was and assumed that the twilight of the gods described some shadowy realm where they lived. Now, however, he was prepared to pursue these alluring hints to their source.