Tales Before Narnia

by Douglas A. Anderson

  He recovered his balance; he opened his eyes; both motions brought him into a new corner of that world. The odd black coat the thing had worn had disappeared, as if it had been a covering imagined by a habit of mind. The thing itself, a wasted flicker of pallid movement, danced and gyrated in white flame before him. Arglay saw it still, but only now as a dreamer may hear, half-asleep and half-awake, the sound of dogs barking or the crackling of fire in his very room. For he opened his eyes not to such things, but to the thing that on the threshold of this place, some seconds earlier or some years, he had felt and been pleased to feel, to the reality of his hate. It came in a rush within him, a fountain of fire, and without and about him images of the man he hated swept in a thick cloud of burning smoke. The smoke burned his eyes and choked his mouth; he clutched at it, at images within it—at his greedy loves and greedy hates—at the cloud of the sin of his life, yearning to catch but one image and renew again the concentration for which he yearned. He could not. The smoke blinded and stifled him, yet more than stifling or blinding was the hunger for one true thing to lust or hate. He was starving in the smoke, and all the hut was full of smoke, for the hut and the world were smoke, pouring up round, him from him and all like him—a thing once wholly, and still a little, made visible to his corporeal eyes in forms which they recognized, but in itself of another nature. He swung and twisted and crouched. His limbs ached from long wrestling with the smoke, for as the journey to this place had prolonged itself infinitely, so now, though he had no thought of measurement, the clutch of his hands and the growing sickness that invaded him struck through him the sensation of the passage of years and the knowledge of the passage of moments. The fire sank within him, and the sickness grew, but the change could not bring him nearer to any end. The end here was not at the end, but in the beginning. There was no end to this smoke, to this fever and this chill, to crouching and rising and searching, unless the end was now. Now—now was the only possible other fact, chance, act. He cried out, defying infinity, “Now!”

  Before his voice the smoke of his prison yielded, and yielded two ways at once. From where he stood he could see in one place an alteration in that perpetual grey, an alternate darkening and lightening as if two ways, of descent and ascent, met. There was, he remembered, a way in, therefore a path out; he had only to walk along it. But also there was a way still farther in, and he could walk along that. Two doors had swung, to his outer senses, in that small room. From every gate of hell there was a way to heaven, yes, and in every way to heaven there was a gate to deeper hell.

  Yet for a moment he hesitated. There was no sign of the phenomenon by which he had discerned the passage of that other spirit. He desired—very strongly he desired—to be of use to it. He desired to offer himself to it, to make a ladder of himself, if that should be desired, by which it might perhaps mount from the nature of the lost, from the dereliction of all minds that refuse living and learning, postponement and irony, whose dwelling is necessarily in their undying and perishing selves. Slowly, unconsciously, he moved his head as if to seek his neighbour.

  He saw, at first he felt, nothing. His eyes returned to that vibrating oblong of an imagined door, the heart of the smoke beating in the smoke. He looked at it; he remembered the way; he was on the point of movement, when the stinging heat struck him again, but this time from behind. It leapt through him; he was seized in it and loosed from it; its rush abandoned him. The torrent of its fiery passage struck the darkening hollow in the walls. At the instant that it struck, there came a small sound; there floated up a thin shrill pipe, too short to hear, too certain to miss, faint and quick as from some single insect in the hedgerow or the field, and yet more than single—a weak wail of multitudes of the lost. The shrill lament struck his ears, and he ran. He cried as he sprang: “Now is God: now is glory in God,” and as the dark door swung before him it was the threshold of the house that received his flying feet. As he passed, another form slipped by him, slinking hastily into the house, another of the hordes going so swiftly up that straight way, hard with everlasting time; each driven by his own hunger, and each alone. The vision, a face looking in as a face had looked out, was gone. Running still, but more lightly now, and with some communion of peace at heart, Arglay came into the curving road. The trees were all about him; the house was at their heart. He ran on through them; beyond, he saw, he reached, the spring day and the sun. At a little distance a motor bus, gaudy within and without, was coming down the road. The driver saw him. Lord Arglay instinctively made a sign, ran, mounted. As he sat down, breathless and shaken, “E quindi uscimmo,” his mind said, “a riveder le stelle.”

  THE DRAGON’S VISIT

  by J.R.R. Tolkien

  * * *

  C. S. Lewis met J.R.R. Tolkien for the first time at a discussion of Oxford University English faculty business in May 1926. Soon after this, Lewis joined a group, organized by Tolkien, reading and translating aloud for one another the Icelandic sagas. Within a few years, Tolkien was sharing with Lewis his invented mythology. Through the 1930s and into the 1940s they were very close friends, and though in later years they drifted apart, a real affection remained.

  It was a late-night discussion with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in September 1931 that was decisive in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. Lewis read The Hobbit in manuscript (and reviewed it twice on publication), and heard The Lord of the Rings read aloud to the Inklings over the many years of its composition (and reviewed it on publication as well). Lewis and Tolkien had a famous toss-up around 1936, when they decided that since there were so few stories with what they really liked in them, they would have to write some themselves. Lewis took the theme of space travel and produced Out of the Silent Planet, while Tolkien focused on time travel, ending up with only a few promising chapters called “The Lost Road” before leaving it incomplete. Hints of Tolkien’s work occasionally appear in Lewis’s—such as the direct reference in the preface to That Hideous Strength, where Lewis wrote that “those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.” The Screwtape Letters is dedicated to Tolkien. But Tolkien disliked his friend’s Narnia books for a number of complex reasons, not least of which being what he considered their hasty composition and their mixture of mythological creatures diminished from their original contexts.

  Tolkien’s short narrative poem “The Dragon’s Visit” was first published in the Oxford Magazine of February 4, 1937. Lewis also contributed many poems to this magazine, beginning in 1933. The dragon was a motif that Tolkien explored in many of his works, from The Hobbit and elsewhere in his invented mythology, to his academic criticism of the monsters in the poem Beowulf. Lewis wrote of dragons in the closing chapters of The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), even giving the Northern Dragon a song in the form of a poem, collected in his Poems (1964) under the title “The Dragon Speaks.”

  * * *

  The dragon lay on the cherry trees

  a-simmering and a-dreaming:

  Green was he, and the blossom white,

  and the yellow sun gleaming.

  He came from the land of Finis-Terre,

  From over the Blue Mountains,

  Where dragons live, and the moon shines

  on high white fountains.

  “Please, Mister Higgins, do you know

  What’s a laying in your garden?

  There’s a dragon in your cherry trees!”

  “Eh, what? I beg your pardon?”

  Mister Higgins fetched the garden hose,

  and the dragon woke from dreaming;

  He blinked, and cocked his long green ears

  when he felt the water streaming.

  “How cool,” he said, “delightfully cool

  are Mister Higgins’ fountains!

  I’ll sit and sing till the moon comes,

  as they sing beyond the mountains;

  And Higgins, and his neighbours, Box,
>
  Miss Biggins and old Tupper,

  Will be enchanted by my voice:

  they will enjoy their supper!”

  Mister Higgins sent for the fire brigade

  with a long red ladder.

  And men with golden helmets on.

  The dragon’s heart grew sadder:

  “It reminds me of the bad old days

  when warriors unfeeling

  Used to hunt dragons in their dens,

  their bright gold stealing.”

  Captain George, he up the ladder came.

  The dragon said: “Good people,

  Why all this fuss? Please go away!

  Or your church-steeple

  I shall throw down, and blast your trees,

  and kill and eat for supper

  You, Cap’n George, and Higgins, Box,

  and Biggins and old Tupper!”

  “Turn on the hose!” said Captain George,

  and down the ladder tumbled.

  The dragon’s eyes from green went red,

  and his belly rumbled.

  He steamed, he smoked, he threshed his tail,

  and down the blossom fluttered;

  Like snow upon the lawn it lay,

  and the dragon growled and muttered.

  They poked with poles from underneath

  (where he was rather tender):

  The dragon gave a dreadful cry

  and rose like thunder.

  He smashed the town to smithereens,

  and over the Bay of Bimble

  Sailors could see the burning red

  From Bumpus Head to Trimble.

  Mister Higgins was tough; and as for Box

  just like his name he tasted.

  The dragon munching his supper said:

  “So all my trouble’s wasted!”

  And he buried Tupper and Captain George,

  and the remains of old Miss Biggins,

  On a cliff above the long white shore;

  and he sang a dirge for Higgins.

  A sad song, while the moon rose,

  with the sea below sighing

  On the grey rocks of Bimble Bay,

  and the red blaze dying.

  Far over the sea he saw the peaks

  found his own land ranging;

  And he mused on the folk of Bimble Bay

  and the old order changing:

  “They have not got the wit to admire

  a dragon’s song or colour,

  Nor heart to kill him brave and quick—

  the world is getting duller!”

  And the moon shone through his green wings

  the night winds beating,

  And he flew back over the dappled sea

  to a green dragons’ meeting.

  THE COLOURED LANDS

  by G. K. Chesterton

  * * *

  Lewis called G. K. Chesterton “a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man.” Chesterton’s influence on Lewis was great—probably second only to that of George MacDonald. In Lewis’s 1962 list of the ten books that did the most to shape his vocational attitude and his philosophy of life, Chesterton’s apologetic history of humankind and Christianity, The Everlasting Man (1925), appeared at number two (following MacDonald’s Phantastes). In a letter written a few months before his death, Lewis noted: “To Chesterton I am much indebted as a controversialist, but not to fiction, tho’ I like his fiction.”

  Chesterton’s fiction includes the philosophical and fantastic novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), and the detective stories of a quiet Roman Catholic priest, Father Brown, collected in The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) and other volumes.

  “The Coloured Lands” is a perfect example of Mooreeffoc or Chestertonian fantasy as discussed in the introduction to this book, in that it captures the wonder of seeing things from an unfamiliar vantage. It was first published in Number Three Joy Street: A Medley of Prose and Verse for Boys and Girls (1925), and later in The Coloured Lands (1938).

  * * *

  Once upon a time there was a little boy whose name was Tommy. As a matter of fact his name was Tobias Theodore; the former because it was an old name in the family, and the latter because it was an entirely new name in the neighbourhood. It is to be hoped that the parents who called him Tobias Theodore, moved by a natural desire to keep it quiet, agreed to call him Tommy; and anyhow we will agree to call him Tommy. It is always assumed in stories that Tommy is a common name for a boy; just as it is always assumed that Tomkins is a common name for a man. I do not really know very many boys named Tommy. I do not know any man named Tomkins. Do you? Does anybody? But this enquiry would lead us far.

  Anyhow Tommy was sitting one very hot afternoon on a green lawn outside the cottage that his father and mother had taken in the country. The cottage had a bare white-washed wall; and at that moment it seemed to Tommy very bare. The summer sky was of a blank blue, which at that moment seemed to him very blank. The dull yellow thatch looked very dull and rather dusty; and the row of flower-pots in front of him, with red flowers in them, looked irritatingly straight, so that he wanted to knock some of them over like ninepins. Even the grass around him moved him only to pluck it up in a vicious way; almost as if he were wicked enough to wish it was his sister’s hair. Only he had no sister; and indeed no brothers. He was an only child and at that moment rather a lonely child, which is not necessarily the same thing. For Tommy, on that hot and empty afternoon, was in that state of mind in which grown-up people go away and write books about their view of the whole world, and stories about what it is like to be married, and plays about the important problems of modern times. Tommy, being only ten years old, was not able to do harm on this large and handsome scale. So he continued to pull out the grass like the green hair of an imaginary and irritating sister, when he was surprised to hear a stir and a step behind him, on the side of the garden far away from the garden gate.

  He saw walking towards him a rather strange-looking young man wearing blue spectacles. He was clad in a suit of such very light grey that it looked almost white in the strong sunlight; and he had long loose hair of such very light or faint yellow that the hair might almost have been white as well as the clothes. He had a large limp straw hat to shade him from the sun; and, presumably for the same purpose, he flourished in his left hand a Japanese parasol of a bright peacock green. Tommy had no idea of how he had come onto that side of the garden; but it appeared most probable that he had jumped over the hedge.

  All that he said was, with the most casual and familiar accent, “Got the blues?”

  Tommy did not answer and perhaps did not understand; but the strange young man proceeded with great composure to take off his blue spectacles.

  “Blue spectacles are a queer cure for the blues,” he said cheerfully. “But you just look through these for a minute.”

  Tommy was moved to a mild curiosity and peered through the glasses; there certainly was something weird and quaint about the discoloration of everything; the red roses black and the white wall blue, and the grass a bluish green like the plumes of a peacock.

  “Looks like a new world, doesn’t it?” said the stranger. “Wouldn’t you like to go wandering in a blue world once in a blue moon?”

  “Yes,” said Tommy and put the spectacles down with a rather puzzled air. Then his expression changed to surprise; for the extraordinary young man had put on another pair of spectacles, and this time they were red.

  “Try these,” he said affably. “These, I suppose, are revolutionary glasses. Some people call it looking through rose-coloured spectacles. Others call it seeing red.”

  Tommy tried the spectacles, and was quite startled by the effect; it looked as if the whole world were on fire. The sky was of a glowing or rather glaring purple, and the roses were not so much red as red-hot. He took off the glasses almost in alarm, only to note that the young man’s immovable countenance was now adorned with yellow spectacles. By the time that these had been f
ollowed by green spectacles, Tommy thought he had been looking at four totally different landscapes.

  “And so,” said the young man, “you would like to travel in a country of your favourite colour. I did it once myself.”

  Tommy was staring up at him with round eyes. “Who are you?” he asked suddenly.

  “I’m not sure,” replied the other. “I rather think I am your long-lost brother.”

  “But I haven’t got a brother,” objected Tommy.

  “It only shows how very long-lost I was,” replied his remarkable relative.

  “But I assure you that, before they managed to long-lose me, I used to live in this house myself.”

  “When you were a little boy like me?” asked Tommy with some reviving interest.

  “Yes,” said the stranger gravely. “When I was a little boy and very like you. I also used to sit on the grass and wonder what to do with myself. I also got tired of the blank white wall. I also got tired even of the beautiful blue sky. I also thought the thatch was just thatch and wished the roses did not stand in a row.”

  “Why, how do you know I felt like that?” asked the little boy, who was rather frightened.

  “Why, because I felt like that myself,” said the other with a smile.

  Then after a pause he went on.

  “And I also thought that everything might look different if the colours were different; if I could wander about on blue roads between blue fields and go on wandering till all was blue. And a Wizard who was a friend of mine actually granted my wish, and I found myself walking in forests of great blue flowers like gigantic lupins and larkspurs, with only glimpses now and then of pale blue skies over a dark blue sea. The trees were inhabited by blue jays and bright blue kingfishers. Unfortunately they were also inhabited by blue baboons.”