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This was on @whatareyoureallyafraidof's post where they put up this:

And I responded with this image:

and promised in the tags to elaborate if asked. And, @frodo-the-weeb, I will. But it's going to get long and I'm going to have to split it up into several reblogs.

First of all, since not everybody in the world is a Silmarillion enthusiast, let me explain what we're referring to.

One of the stories in the Silmarillion, and possibly the one Tolkien cared about the most, is the tale of Lúthien and Beren; a highly condensed version of a narrative poem called the Lay of Leithian, which Tolkien began writing in the 1930s and tried to get his publisher interested in after the success of The Hobbit.

(Their readers said no, and they tactfully asked him to focus on his Hobbit sequel instead. "The result," in Tolkien's own words, "was The Lord of the Rings.")

The skeleton of The Lay of Leithian is as follows; I'm intentionally leaving out a bunch of information that weaves it into the overarching story of the Silmarillion but isn't relevant to the thesis I'm advancing here.

Lúthien, an Elven princess and enchantress, falls in love with a mortal man, a ranger called Beren. Her father, the Elven King Thingol, disapproves and sends him Beren off to fetch one of the jewels from the crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth. Lúthien tries to join Beren but her father imprisons her in a tower to stop her, only it's actually a treehouse because they're forest elves. Lúthien magically grows her hair long and uses it to escape. By the time she catches up with Beren he is chained in the dungeons of Morgoth's second-in-command, Thû (whom Tolkien later renamed Sauron). She rescues him with the help only of a dog, who defeats Thû himself in single combat. They then live in the forest together for quite some time, but Beren feels bad about being the reason she can't go home to her family, and still intends to finish his mission and get the jewel. He leaves one morning while she's still asleep, so as not to put her in danger, and then when he's on the threshold of Morgoth's underground fortress in the far North of Middle-Earth she catches up with him again and he accepts that she's not going to be put off. Together they enter Morgoth's fortress and make their way to his throne room. They are in disguise but Morgoth is not fooled and uncovers Lúthien in front of everyone, declaring his intention to make her one of his many slaves. Lúthien offers to sing and dance for him, which is the way she works her magic. She puts everyone in the throne room to sleep, including both Beren and eventually Morgoth. She wakes Beren and he takes the jewel and they flee, but as they get to the outer door they are stopped by Morgoth's guard-wolf, who bites off Beren's hand holding the jewel.

That's as far as Tolkien ever got with the poem, but we have the synopsis in the prose Silmarillion to tell us the rest of the story; again cutting it down to the quick, Thingol accepts Beren as his son-in-law, Morgoth's guard-wolf attacks Doriath, Beren goes and hunts it but is mortally wounded, his spirit goes to the Halls of Waiting in the Undying Lands where the dead in Middle-Earth go, Lúthien also goes there and, again through her magical song, persuades Mandos the god of the dead to let him come back. Mandos offers her a choice: live on immortally as an Elf without Beren, or return to Middle-Earth with Beren but both of them will grow old and die. She chooses the latter.

Tolkien created Lúthien as a portrait of his wife Edith, which makes Beren a picture of himself. We know this for a fact because he had LUTHIEN written on her grave when she died, and when he joined her in it two years later the name BEREN was written for him:

Now on the lower right side of my response image you'll see Pauline Baynes' illustration of the Lady in the Green Kirtle from The Silver Chair, one of C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories. A quick synopsis of the Lady of the Green Kirtle's part in the story:

The Lady is a witch who rules a gloomy kingdom underneath Narnia, accessible through a fissure in the earth in an old ruined city far to the North. Before the story opens she has enspelled and kidnapped King Caspian's son Prince Rilian, whom she intends to send leading an army to conquer Narnia in her name. For twenty-three hours a day he is her willing slave and lap-dog; to maintain the spell, he must be bound to the titular silver chair for the remaining hour, during which he is sane and aware of his imprisonment. The protagonists, Eustace and Jill and their guide Puddleglum, meet her and Rilian unawares on their journey to the North; she sends them astray and almost succeeds in getting them eaten by giants. Eventually they rescue Rilian from the chair, but she sings a magical song which very nearly puts them all to sleep but for Puddleglum's intervention. Foiled, she transforms into a serpent, attacks them, and they kill her.

It is my contention that the Lady in the Green Kirtle is Lewis's caricature of Lúthien, with the enslaved and befuddled Prince Rilian representing Beren; and further, that Lewis knew or recognised that Lúthien and Beren were a literary portrait of the Tolkiens, so that The Silver Chair is ultimately a nasty commentary on their marriage.

In forthcoming reblogs I will lay out my evidence for this thesis.

nochd

First, let's talk about C. S. Lewis and his attitudes to women.

C. S. Lewis's religion, philosophy, aesthetic, and politics, were all built around two core beliefs: Platonic essentialism, and a hierarchical universe. Either one could be a whole essay in itself, but let's focus on how he applied them to gender.

Platonic essentialism: Lewis believed that masculinity and femininity were pre-existing spiritual realities of which biological maleness and femaleness were merely physical manifestations. Hierarchy: Lewis believed that masculinity was spiritually superior to femininity.

An angel is, of course, always He (not She) in human language, because whether the male is, or is not, the superior sex, the masculine is certainly the superior gender.

---A Preface to Paradise Lost p. 113

Accordingly Lewis believed, and openly taught (in Mere Christianity for example) that women ought to be subservient to their husbands. Husbands ought meanwhile to take charge as head of the household.

The following passage is also from A Preface to Paradise Lost and is strictly speaking about Milton's philosophy, not Lewis's, but Lewis does not attempt to disguise his agreement with it. I'm quoting it mainly for the sake of one revealing phrase:

The goodness, happiness, and dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its natural inferiors. When it fails in either part of this twofold task... by stepping out of its place in the system (whether it step up like a rebellious angel or down like an uxorious husband) it has made the very nature of things its enemy. It cannot succeed.

"Uxorious" means "very devoted and possibly submissive to one's wife". Wiktionary gives "doting" and "whipped" as synonyms. Lewis will use the word once more in A Preface to Paradise Lost, to name the fault in Adam that leads him to sin (Eve's fault being pride).

For much of his life Lewis held that women were intellectually inferior to men. You can find again and again in his writings little barbed complaints about women infiltrating male spaces and bringing the conversation down.

In 1952 Lewis met Joy Davidman, who proved to be his equal in both humour and intellect. He would go on to marry her twice; first in a civil marriage in 1956 so that she could gain UK residency, and then in a Christian marriage in 1957 at her hospital bedside. Thereafter his views on women became more moderate. In 1960, in The Four Loves, he wrote a lengthy complaint about specifically uneducated women infiltrating (educated) male spaces and bringing the conversation down.

Lewis's views, and the shift as he got to know Davidman, are very evident in his fiction. In Perelandra (1943) a Satanic being tries to tempt a new Eve, the queen of Venus, into rebellion by teaching her feminism. But never fear, folks, she is properly subservient when her Adam arrives at the end of the book. That Hideous Strength (1945) is, underneath the fantasy, the story of a regrettably modernized woman learning to accept her proper place beneath her husband. The narrator character of Till We Have Faces (1956) survives abuse at the hands of her father to become a warrior queen.

The Silver Chair will get its own post later in this thread, but it belongs emphatically to the pre-Davidman period of Lewis's career.

nochd

We have less direct evidence about Tolkien's attitudes to women, or to gender issues; unlike Lewis his non-fiction writings don't delve into theology or philosophy or relationship dynamics, but stick strictly to matters of language and literature.

And let's face it, if you're coming to a conservative Catholic 1950s Oxford professor looking for 21st-century intersectional feminist theory, you're going to be disappointed.

When Treebeard describes how the Entwives were more practical but less imaginative than the Ents, and how they went about civilizing and domesticating the world while the Ents would have been content to exist in the wilderness, I think we're seeing some of Tolkien's real gender philosophy; possibly making the common mistake of universalizing his own experiences in his marriage, in which he was certainly the more imaginative and less practical partner.

There are no female characters at all in The Hobbit. In The Lord of the Rings you can count them all on your fingers and have some left over, and only two, Galadriel and Éowyn, get more than about half a page each. (Well, OK, three if you count Arwen in the Appendices. Four if you count Shelob.) Even in the Silmarillion, which is a bit closer to balanced in this respect, Tolkien has a habit of pedestalizing his women.

Both Galadriel and Éowyn are worth taking a closer look at. Galadriel, rather than her consort Celeborn, is evidently the one who makes the decisions in Lothlórien; she overrules his misgivings about Gimli, for instance. She is feared in Gondor and Rohan, where men like Boromir and Éomer believe her to be a wicked witch. And the fascinating thing is they're right. She fits nearly every aspect of the fairy-tale Wicked Witch trope. She has magical powers, she's ambitious, she lives deep in the forest, she draws travellers in and determines their destiny. Yet Tolkien chides her detractors' fears as ignorance, holding her up for us to admire.

Then there’s Éowyn. When Tolkien first introduced her into the drafts of The Lord of the Rings, she was to have been Aragorn’s love interest. In the finished work, her love for him is unrequited, and she falls into despair. But here again Tolkien subverts a trope from the heritage he drew on. In mediaeval romances, in folk-tales and ballads, ladies who despair of love pine away and die picturesquely; Éowyn makes a rather different choice, to put it mildly. And it's not so clear that her trouble is lovesickness as such. Gandalf diagnoses her as follows:

"My friend," said Gandalf [to Éomer], "you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.”

That is, Éowyn chafes at the limits imposed on her life by the gender structure of the Rohirric court, and sees marriage to the King of the West as her ticket out of there.

All of this is quite beyond C. S. Lewis, even in Till We Have Faces. But the fact that I have to argue for it, winkling out convenient passages like potatoes from mud, tells you that it's hardly clear or obvious. At the conclusion of their respective arcs, Galadriel submits to "diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel"; and Éowyn realizes that "No longer do I desire to be a queen," and puts aside her weapons to become a healer.

I'm not finished arguing, of course. Galadriel's submission is an act of strength, of withstanding the temptation of the Ring, to which more than one male character will later succumb; it turns on their heads the myths both of Pandora and of Eve. And we know Éowyn never wanted to be a queen, because the male-imposed duty that she ran away from to go to war was the duty of being queen regent of Rohan. She wanted to save people, not rule people. But I can't claim that my case is obvious; not in The Lord of the Rings.

It is only in Lúthien's story in the Silmarillion and, still more, the Lay of Leithian, that Tolkien draws out this subtle theme and proclaims it to the skies. Lúthien begins by subverting the story of Rapunzel, becomes a knight-errant rescuing a male damsel-in-distress from a dungeon, and proceeds to gender-flip the myth of Orpheus. Undergraduate courses on English literature will tell you that feminist subversions of fairy-tale tropes began with Angela Carter in the 1970s; well, Tolkien was doing it in the 1930s, if only he could have found a publisher willing to chance it.

I'd like to quickly note that, in all of Middle-Earth, we never meet a married couple where the wife is of a lower social rank than her husband, and in nearly all cases she's his superior. Galadriel is senior to Celeborn. Éowyn is a daughter of kings where Faramir is merely a steward; at the earlier stage of composition when she was to be paired up with Aragorn, Aragorn was just a ranger. When Aragorn became the lost King of Gondor, he had to be given an Elven princess for a bride, in a repetition of the situation between Lúthien and Beren.

Now read the post above about C. S. Lewis's gender philosophy again, and imagine how he would have felt about all this.

I could go on -- in other places I have gone on, and on, and on -- about how Tolkien reverses the typical fantasy clichés to code evil as masculine and good as feminine. But I'm here to make a case about the relationship between the Lay of Leithian and The Silver Chair, and I think I have said sufficient about their respective authors' attitudes to women to move on to another point in the next reblog.

nochd

Tolkien and Lewis's friendship is exaggerated on social media these days. No, they were not "besties". No, Tolkien did not call Lewis "Jack" despite that being the name Lewis used among people with whom he was on first-name terms, because Lewis and Tolkien were never on first-name terms, that having been a much more exclusive degree of intimacy in their world than it is in any present-day English-speaking community. (Lewis, who came up with nicknames for everybody, did call Tolkien "Tollers".)

But they did know each other about as closely as people can whose main social connection is work. Lewis wrote extensively on the kind of affection one can have for someone on the basis of a shared interest, hobby, or purpose, and it's not hard to see Tolkien in those passages.

He also wrote, repeatedly, about how awfully annoying it is when you meet up with a friend like this and they bring someone else along without telling you and you can't have a conversation about your shared interest because that would be leaving the other person out and instead you have to spend the whole time making small talk.

Which is where Edith Tolkien comes in. It's been some years since I last had a copy of Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Tolkien in my hands, and there isn't one readily available online, so I'm telling you this next bit from memory. Edith was not one for philosophy or theology or technical discussions, her conversation being more at the level of what their children were up to and the price of groceries; when she was present, Tolkien accommodated her interests. Separately, Carpenter also mentions her mysterious dislike for Lewis, speculating that she considered him an intruder into their family life.

Carpenter doesn't connect the dots here, but I'm not the first person to have done so.

nochd

How well acquainted was C. S. Lewis with the Lay of Leithian? Possibly better acquainted than anyone but Tolkien himself.

At some point during the composition of the Lay, Tolkien typed out what he had done so far and gave it to Lewis to read and critique. Lewis's critique, so much as was left of it when Christopher Tolkien came behind to document his father's writing process, got as far as the part where King Thingol demands Beren bring him the Silmaril as the price of Lúthien's hand in marriage. But from their correspondence we know he had read at least as far as the part where Beren and Felagund and his warriors disguise themselves as Orcs in a failed attempt to sneak through Thû's lands without getting caught.

So Lewis on this occasion seems to have got just about as far as the point where it becomes clear that Lúthien is the rescuing hero and Beren the damsel-in-distress rather than the other way about, is what I'm saying.

Now Lewis's commentary is detailed, down to the individual word choices in some lines of the poem. Tolkien implemented many of his suggested changes, and with many of the others he changed what he had written even if it wasn't to make it the way Lewis suggested.

Some of Lewis's wording carries forward into Tolkien's later work. Christopher Tolkien picks out the many-pillared halls of stone in Gimli's poem about Moria in The Lord of the Rings: this phrase was originally used in the Lay for King Thingol's hall in Doriath, and the word many-pillared came from a suggestion of Lewis's.

Fans of The Lord of the Rings who like the framing device of it being an ancient manuscript of which Tolkien was merely the translator? You have Lewis to thank for that conceit. Lewis framed his critique of the poem as an academic paper, pretending the manuscript Tolkien had given him was an ancient, fragmentary document, of unknown authorship, with multiple scriptual variants (in which he professed to find his alternative suggestions), much debated by the fictional scholars Peabody, Pumpernickel, Schuffer and Schick. He even had Felagund's fortress Nargothrond survive into the present as an English town, complete with public library, called "Narrowthrode".

Tolkien and Lewis had some idea, or at least Lewis had some idea and tried to get Tolkien into it, of joining up their fictional universes so that Middle-Earth and the Ransom Trilogy would form a single continuous history, which is why Númenor is the true name of Atlantis known to Ransom and Merlin in That Hideous Strength -- spelt Numinor because Lewis had heard Tolkien read the name aloud but not seen it written down.

(For those who came in late: Lewis and Tolkien were members of an informal Christian literary circle in Oxford through the 1920s and 30s, called the Inklings, who would meet in the pub to read aloud what they had been writing for the group to comment and discuss. Other members included Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Roger Lancelyn Green, and the physicist Hugo Dyson, who on one occasion interrupted Tolkien's reading of a Silmarillion passage with the cry "Not another fucking elf!")

So Lewis was closely familiar with the Lay of Leithian. Even if he didn't finish reading the manuscript Tolkien gave him, he knew the story from Tolkien's readings to the Inklings. He knew that Lúthien rescued Beren from the dungeons of Thû / Sauron; he knew they travelled to the far North of Middle-Earth, and then descended deep into an underground fortress, to confront Morgoth; he knew that, at the story's climax, Lúthien put Morgoth to sleep through the enchantment of music.

Next time I'll look at The Silver Chair in detail.

nochd

Confession time: I am an adherent, albeit a cautious one, of the theory that C. S. Lewis structured the seven Chronicles of Narnia around the Seven Planets of classical astrology. This theory is the brain-child of a guy called Michael Ward, who constructs all kinds of theological and philosophical ornamentation out of it, not all of it particularly convincing.

What inclines me to the theory is primarily Lewis's demonstrable obsession with astrology throughout his other works -- fictional, religious, and scholarly. If he didn't put the planets into the structure of the Narnia series, that was a piece of unusual forbearance on his part. But you don't have to agree with me about that, to follow this. I'm going to talk about the themes of The Silver Chair; the hypothesis that these themes were connected in Lewis's mind by a shared association with the Moon and its place in the Ptolemaic view of the universe informs my discussion but is not a necessary premise for it.

I'll be referring again more than once to the chapter on hierarchical thinking in Lewis's Preface to Paradise Lost, because many ideas that Lewis worked into the story of The Silver Chair as themes or motifs he first discussed explicitly in that chapter. Compare

For a second they looked as if they were moving anyhow; then she saw that they were really doing a dance -- a dance with so many complicated steps and figures that it took you some time to understand it... This is called the Great Snow Dance and it is done every year in Narnia on the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground. Of course it is a kind of game as well as a dance, because every now and then some dancer will be the least little bit wrong and get a snowball in the face, and then everyone laughs. But a good team of dancers, Dwarfs, and musicians will keep it up for hours without a single hit. On fine nights when the cold and the drum-taps, and the hooting of the owls, and the moonlight, have got into their wild woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak. ---The Silver Chair

with

For this is perhaps the central paradox of [Milton's] vision. Discipline, while the world is yet unfallen, exists for the sake of what seems its very opposite -- for freedom, almost for extravagance. The pattern deep hidden in the dance, hidden so deep that shallow spectators cannot see it, alone gives beauty to the wild, free gestures that fill it, just as the decasyllabic norm gives beauty to all the licences and variations of the poet's verse. The happy soul is, like a planet, a wandering star; yet in that very wandering (as astronomy teaches) invariable; she is eccentric beyond all predicting, yet equable in her eccentricity. The heavenly frolic arises from an orchestra which is in tune; the rules of courtesy make perfect ease and freedom possible between those who obey them. ---A Preface to Paradise Lost

The Silver Chair opens with Jill Pole crying behind the gym because she is being bullied. The administrators of the school "had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked. And unfortunately what ten or fifteen of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others." The situation reflects the passage in A Preface to Paradise Lost where Lewis refers to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: "If you take 'Degree' away 'each thing meets in mere oppugnancy', 'strength' will be lord, everything will 'include itself in power'. In other words, the modern idea that we can choose between hierarchy and equality is... mere 'moonshine'. The real alternative is tyranny; if you will not have authority you will find yourself obeying brute force."

This theme echoes throughout The Silver Chair. Aslan is the supreme authority throughout the Narnia Chronicles, obviously; but only here does he introduce himself by issuing a set of arbitrary commands and then sending the protagonist away.

(Arbitrary, I would say, and obscure to the point of being clearly designed to set Jill and Eustace up to fail and repent. So perhaps a more apt parallel for Christianity than Lewis intended.)

Physically speaking, the journey Jill and Eustace must undertake has more vertical layers than any other Narnian quest. They go up through the door in the school wall to find themselves in Aslan's Country, which is at the top of a high cliff above the clouds. They descend from Aslan's Country to Narnia, from Narnia via the Northern Waste to Underland, and glimpse the layer below Underland which is Bism; then up again to Narnia, up again to Aslan's Country, and down through the wall again to their school, where Aslan and the regenerated King Caspian re-establish godly authority and punish the bullies.

Whether or not the Narnia Chronicles as a whole are structured according to the Ptolemaic cosmos, this particular element of this particular book is a strong piece of the case for it: worlds above worlds above worlds, just like the heavenly spheres. For Lewis it's another symbol of cosmic hierarchy.

Whereas height symbolizes genuine God-ordained authority, the symbol for the alternative -- tyranny, rule by strength -- is size; as the bullies are bigger and stronger than the other children, so the giants of Harfang are bigger and stronger than the protagonists. In Perelandra, I think it is, Lewis has his protagonist decry modern astrophysics for emphasizing the size, distance, and number of celestial objects and thereby demanding that he "bow down before bigness".

The atheistic, scientific worldview is undisguisedly the target in the climactic temptation scene, where the Lady attempts to enchant the protagonists into believing that Underland is the only real world and the higher levels don't exist. More subtly, Lewis is saying that what's wrong with the scientific worldview is that it purports to flatten the Ptolemaic hierarchy.

Next time I will focus on how The Silver Chair treats gender, with especial reference to the relationship between the Lady and the Prince.

nochd

When I was a kid, the bit at the end of The Silver Chair where C. S. Lewis invites us to laugh at the Head of the school panicking when Eustace and Jill and Caspian come back through the wall and start beating up the bullies, and takes care to inform us first that the Head "was, by the way, a woman"... well, that seemed jarringly sexist and out of tone with the rest of the story.

(Oh, don't you worry, at the time I was absolutely fine with the idea of beating school bullies with riding-crops and the flats of swords; just like many people today seem to be perfectly fine with the idea of murdering health insurance executives. It wasn't until a lot later that I realized that, of the three schools I went to, the one with the strictest discipline was the one with the worst bullying problem.)

Only about ten years ago, when I was re-reading the series much more carefully, did I recognise that the misogyny of the scene is in fact in perfect keeping with the rest of the story.

Yes, The Silver Chair has a female protagonist. Yes, uniquely among the Narnia Chronicles, that female protagonist remains the viewpoint character from the beginning of the book to the end. And no, it's not unique among the Narnia Chronicles in teaching the message "do as you're told" rather than "think for yourself".

But let's look at Jill's character arc, shall we? Her first mistake, the wrong choice that shows her character flaw, is to ignore Eustace's (male) voice of reason and stand too close to the edge of the high cliff, thus causing Eustace to fall off. She is rebuked by Aslan and submits to obey him, but later endangers the mission by trusting the Lady instead of listening to their (male) guide, Puddleglum.

When they get to the ruined city but only Puddleglum sees that it is the ruined city, Jill is the one who urges them to keep going and reach the comforts of Harfang. This apparently counts as disobeying Aslan despite the fact that he said nothing about it, and he rebukes her again. She then has to perform childish femininity to distract the giants so they can escape the castle, and Lewis remarks that "girls do that kind of thing better than boys".

In Underland they meet the man who will turn out to be the Prince they are there to rescue, but he's under the Lady's spell. He reveals that she plans to make him lead a war of conquest over a surface country, and then we get this exchange:

"I don't think it's funny at all," said Jill. "I think you'll be a wicked tyrant." "What?" said the Knight, still laughing and patting her head in a quite infuriating fashion. "Is our little maid a deep politician? But never fear, sweetheart. In ruling that land, I shall do all by the counsel of my Lady, who will then be my Queen too. Her word shall be my law, even as my word will be law to the people I have conquered." "Where I come from," said Jill, who was disliking him more every minute, "they don't think much of men who are bossed about by their wives." "Shalt think otherwise when thou hast a man of thine own, I warrant you," said the Knight, apparently thinking this very funny.

Later I'll come back to what this says about Rilian and the Lady; for now let's focus on what it tells us about Jill. She doesn't tell him not to patronize her or call her "sweetheart" (in fairness I suppose he is an adult talking to a child, not just a man talking to a woman). She does tell him that he's doing masculinity wrong by letting his romantic partner tell him what to do.

During the enchantment scene it's Jill who invokes a higher power -- the male, hypermasculine Aslan -- to try and counter the Lady's statement that nothing exists outside of Underland. When Puddleglum breaks the spell and the Lady turns into a snake and they have to fight, Jill sits down on the floor and tries not to faint. For the remaining four chapters, she does nothing that she is not instructed to do except ask for help. She transforms from an active protagonist to a passive one.

I thought I was going to be able to cover everything The Silver Chair says about gender in one post, but this is getting long enough. Next time we'll look at the other female characters, and especially the Lady and her relationship with Rilian.

nochd

First let's quickly deal with what other female characters there are in The Silver Chair; this won't take long. The only ones that have any real impact on the story are the giantesses of Harfang and the Head of the school.

Not that it makes up for his misogyny, but Lewis was a lifelong advocate for treating younger people, including children, with the respect due to fellow human beings. The giantess Queen is of the opposite inclination, ordering her servants to "Comfort the little girl. Give her lollipops, give her dolls, give her physics [=medicine], give her all you can think of -- possets and comfits and caraways and lullabies and toys." The old nurse giantess assigned to the task is even more patronizing, calling Jill "precious poppet". In fact all the giants infantilize the protagonists until we learn that they intend to eat them; but the giantesses in particular feed into stereotypes about gushing feminine sentiment.

The Head is mentioned on the very first page of the book, but we are not told that she is a woman until almost the very last page. What we are told right at the beginning is that she talks to bullies instead of punishing them, and that this doesn't work. At the end, when Aslan and Caspian and Jill and Eustace invade the school and start assaulting the other children, she has "hysterics" (Lewis's word) and is found "behaving like a lunatic" (Lewis's phrase).

After that, the Head's friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.

Which I have to admit is funny, but the joke is soured by the misogyny (and also by what I know about Lewis's attitude to democracy, which is too big of a sidetrack to get into here).

We are not given the name of any female character from the Narnian world in this book, not even the main villain, who remains "the Lady of the Green Kirtle" or else "the Queen of Underland" or "the Witch", throughout. (On the other hand we are given the names of all the English bullies, and two of them are called Edith.)

The first we hear of the Lady is in the story told by the Owls, how she first killed Rilian's mother in front of him (in serpent form) and then seduced him away from Narnia (in human form), having met him in a forest glade by a fountain. The cadences of language used in this story somehow feel like Tolkien's writing; I can't explain what I mean except by pointing you to read it and going "See?" Lewis does use archaic language elsewhere in the Narnia Chronicles, but this is the only place where he sounds like Tolkien. Maybe I'm overthinking that.

The protagonists first meet the Lady in the northern wastes, riding alongside a knight in black armour who never speaks (later revealed to be Rilian). Lewis emphasizes her beauty and the loveliness of her laugh. She laughs off Puddleglum's suspicions and directs them to Harfang for the Autumn Feast without revealing that they are to be the main dish. As a result, now that they have hopes of worldly comfort, Jill and Eustace lose their focus on their Aslan-given mission and become more short-tempered with each other. Again there's a whole wealth of insight into the conservative worldview there that I don't have time to explore.

What isn't clear is why she does this. At Puddleglum's insistence, the protagonists don't tell her anything about their quest. She has an army of gnomes at home in Underland if three people were to find their way down into her domain. What threat are they to her? What does she gain by feeding them to giants? We're never told.

After Harfang the protagonists sink down to Underland and are taken to the Lady's castle, but she is not there; instead they meet the bewitched Prince Rilian. He remembers nothing of his former life and talks constantly, monotonously, about how good and kind and wise the Lady is and how deeply he owes her all his obedience. Lewis both tells and shows us that there is something wrong with him mentally. This is where we get the lines quoted above about how men shouldn't be bossed about by their wives.

Then comes the one hour of the day when the enchantment does not hold, and he has to be bound into the silver chair. He still remembers only fragments of his past life until they free him, but he is sane and aware of his condition, and he calls the Lady "the most devilish sorceress that ever planned the woe of men".

The Lady returns, to find her spell broken and the Prince declaring his intention to leave her service and go home. She responds immediately by casting another spell on all of them, using music (but "monotonous, thrumming" music) to make them forget the existence of the above-ground worlds. Again Lewis notes her lovely laugh. When they remember things like the Sun and Aslan, but can only describe them with reference to Underland things like lamps and cats, the Lady responds that this proves they are just inventing the above-ground objects by mythologizing the underground ones.

Puddleglum defeats the enchantment by invoking the Ontological Argument -- we have Lewis's word for it, in a letter to a reader -- and yet again I find myself forced to pass by what could have been a fascinating sidetrack. The Lady transforms into a serpent and the male characters kill her. Rilian remarks that he's glad she transformed because "It would not have suited well either with my heart or with my honour to have slain a woman."

Thematically, then, the Lady denies the existence of any cosmic hierarchy above herself; she ensnares the man who should have ruled the level above her so that she may instead rule over him. Weaving this theme together with Jill's progression from quarrelsome to compliant, The Silver Chair is a symphony of patriarchal misogyny.

In the next reblog -- which should be the final one, but I make no promises -- I shall make plain the comparison between the Lady and Prince Rilian, Lúthien and Beren, and Edith and J. R. R. Tolkien.

nochd

Let me start with a minor correction. I've been saying Tolkien wrote the Lay of Leithian in the 1930s; in fact he did a lot of the work in the 1920s, and Lewis saw it in 1930.

And I should have told you one more detail about it -- though I imagine most people who've got this far into the thread are already familiar enough with the story to know this: Lúthien and Beren first meet by a stream in the forest, where she is dancing in the starlight and Beren happens upon her, a weary traveller escaping the destruction of the band of rangers who were his family.

What most of you probably don't know, what I certainly didn't know until I was looking things up for this thread, was that this story element was inspired by a specific moment in Tolkien and Edith's life. It was 1917, he had come back from France and was stationed in Kingston-upon-Hull. They went on a walk in the woods in the country not far from the sea, and Edith danced for him in a clearing full of white flowers, of a sort that Tolkien called "hemlocks" (not the poisonous kind), growing in an arrangement that botanists call umbels.

Now it befell on summer night upon a lawn where lingering light yet lay and faded faint and grey, that Lúthien danced while he* did play. The chestnuts on the turf had shed their flowering candles, white and red; there darkling stood a silent elm and pale beneath its shadow-helm there glimmered faint the umbels thick of hemlocks like a mist, and quick the moths on pallid wings of white with tiny eyes of fiery light were fluttering softly, and the voles crept out to listen from their holes; the little owls were hushed and still; the moon was yet behind the hill. The Lay of Leithian 511--526 *"He" refers to Dairon, an Elven musician who loves Lúthien (unrequited), and will later tattle about her and Beren's affair to King Thingol.

Even Aragorn's song in The Lord of the Rings retains the detail of the hemlocks and their umbels:

The leaves were long, the grass was green, The hemlock-umbels tall and fair, And in the glade a light was seen Of stars in shadow shimmering. Tinúviel* was dancing there To music of a pipe unseen, And light of stars was in her hair, And in her raiment glimmering. *Tinúviel is the name Beren gives Lúthien: Tolkien tells us it means "nightingale".

The horrors that Beren has already passed through at this point may be a reference to Tolkien's wartime experience.

Their marriage was not perfect. All Tolkien's friends were scholars and Edith had little interest in intellectual subjects, so she had difficulty joining in their conversation, which often left her lonely. Additionally, there was the matter of religion. Edith converted to the Catholic Church when they got engaged, at the cost of being turned out of her home of the time; but she did it for Tolkien, not for any actual change of belief, and after several angry quarrels with him she stopped going to confession in the 1940s.

But they loved each other enough to work through these difficulties. Tolkien was still telling people decades later how grateful he was that she would leave everything behind for a man whose only realistic prospect, at that point, was to get killed in the war.

(Oh, yeah, another detail. When they were first going out together, Tolkien's Catholic guardian disapproved of the relationship and forbade him to contact Edith until he was twenty-one; an injunction which he obeyed to the letter, writing to her on the evening of his 21st birthday. She by that time was engaged to another man, but she immediately broke it off to marry Tolkien instead. And changed her religion and got kicked out of her house. Lúthien's instant, rebellious devotion to Beren didn't come out of nowhere.)

...I promised this would be the reblog that drew it all together. It's getting a bit long to launch a new topic now. I should have talked about the Tolkiens' marriage a lot earlier. But now I think we have all the background we need. Next time.

nochd

Let's lay out the similarities between the Lay of Leithian and The Silver Chair. I wish tumblr would give you an option for putting text in columns. Never mind.

Lay of Leithian: Beren meets Lúthien dancing in the woods near a stream, after surviving the horror of losing his father and his whole ranger band at the hands of Morgoth's hunters. The Silver Chair: Rilian meets the Green Lady in the woods near a spring, after surviving the death of his mother at the hands, or rather the teeth, of the Green Lady in the form of a serpent.

Lay of Leithian: Lúthien is a badass rebel who gender-flips folkloric and mythological tropes, in particular acting as the Rescuing Hero to Beren's Damsel-in-Distress. The Silver Chair: The Lady is a rebel against rightful male authority, who pretends to have rescued Rilian from the fate she is in fact bringing upon him.

Lay of Leithian: The protagonists have to journey to the far north of Middle-Earth to find the underground fortress of Angband, stronghold of the Dark Lord Morgoth. The Silver Chair: The protagonists have to journey to the far north of the Narnian world to find the entrance to the underground country of Underland, ruled by the Green Lady.

Lay of Leithian: At the climax, Lúthien uses music to cast an enchantment over Morgoth and put him to sleep. The Silver Chair: At the climax, the Green Lady uses music to cast an enchantment over the protagonists and (nearly) put them to sleep.

Now if that were all, if there were no real-world connection between Lewis and Tolkien, I would file this under "intriguing coincidence". But...

We know Lewis and Tolkien were closely familiar with each other's work.

We know Lewis saw several drafts of the Lay of Leithian and can reasonably infer that he heard other parts of it read aloud.

We know that Lúthien in the Lay of Leithian is a portrait of Edith. We can infer that Lúthien's willingness to break rules and take risks to be with Beren reflects Edith's similar love for Tolkien.

We know Edith disliked Lewis. We know she wasn't interested in philosophy or literature. We know Tolkien accommodated her interests when she was present.

We know Lewis hated when his intellectual friends would do small-talk instead of intellectual discussion to accommodate a partner.

We know Tolkien was a loving, devoted husband, and grateful all his life for Edith's love.

We know Lewis, at the time he wrote the Narnia books, considered "uxoriousness" -- devotion and potentially submission to one's wife -- to be a moral failing in a man, an abdication of rightful authority.

We can infer that rightful authority in general, and the authority of men over women in particular, is a major theme of The Silver Chair.

We can infer that Rilian's insane obsession with the Lady whilst under the enchantment represents "uxoriousness".

On the preponderance of the evidence, therefore, I conclude that The Silver Chair is (at the least) very likely to be a response to the Lay of Leithian and, through it, a caricature of the Tolkiens' marriage.

Basically he's saying I wish Tolkien would put that woman in her place.

I confess, I can still find much to admire in C. S. Lewis. I've already mentioned his respect for children. His work is admirably body-positive for a traditional Christian; though not quite a naturist he was a lifelong skinny-dipper, and nudity is generally (though not invariably) a positive symbol in his fiction. He was about as pro-gay as you could reasonably expect of a 1950s conservative; he thought sexuality was none of the police's business. And he did, late in life, moderate his misogyny; when I get sick of it in Narnia I do have Till We Have Faces to turn to for reassurance.

But I'm glad he's not still around and I don't have to distance myself from his entire opus just so as to avoid enabling him to promulgate his bigotry.

(As I do with certain other authors of seven-part British children's fantasy series.)

#reblogs #tolkien #cs lewis #narnia #this post is like seeing a pristine limo pass by you in traffic #2025