Lewis’s Sources

C. S. Lewis points out that the creativity in medieval literature is not generally found in dreaming up something new but in reworkingolder sources and doing new things with them.  In C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages, Robert Boenig suggests that Lewis himself follows the medieval pattern: most of his fiction reacts to or builds upon earlier sources.  Some are obvious; others are not.  But it would be interesting, and doubtless profitable, to pair up a reading of Lewis’s novels with a reading of their primary source document(s).

Which sources does Boenig have in mind?

The Pilgrim’s Regress is, among many other things, his take on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.  Perelandra is his retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost, composed after he heard Charles Williams’ 1940 Oxford lectures on Milton and penned his own critical work, A Preface to Paradise Lost.  Till We Have Faces retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass.

One can argue that the Arthurian romance The Quest of the Holy Grail, with some side glances at Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, is the major source for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  The Silver Chair is, among other things, an homage to George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie.  That Hideous Strength is his homage to the fiction of Charles Williams (79-80, paragraph break mine).

Boenig’s discussion goes on to focus on five books and their sources:

Out of the Silent Planet critiques H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon.

Prince Caspian engages with William Morris’s Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair (which, in turn, had appropriated the thirteenth-century anonymous Middle English romance Havelok the Dane), wresting the story away from the sensuality Lewis perceived in Morris as both an attraction and a danger.

The Great Divorce redirects the medieval dream vision best exemplified in The Romance of the Rose, which Lewis had explicated so forcefully in The Allegory of Love, away from human love toward the love of God.

That Hideous Strength juggles criticism of T. H. White [The Sword in the Stone, but also the rest of The Once and Future King] with celebration of Charles Williams.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe becomes a vehicle for Lewis to suggest an important theological statement; the prior text to which he is reacting is the famous 1931 book Christus Victor by the Swedish theologian Gustav Aulén (80, paragraph breaks mine).

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