Dunsany, Lord (1878–1957)
Anglo-Irish writer, dramatist, and poet. Several of Dunsany’s earliest collections of short stories contain some of the very best fantasy stories in the English language. These collections include The Gods of Pegana (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales and Other Stories (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912), Fifty-one Tales (1915), Tales of Wonder (1916; U.S. title The Last Book of Wonder), and Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919). Of Dunsany’s novels, the best are The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926), The Blessing of Pan (1927), and The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). As early as 1916, Lewis expressed interest in Dunsany’s writings, particularly Tales of Wonder. In a letter from 1954 he noted that “Dunsany is a glorious writer in prose: try The Charwoman’s Shadow.”
Eddison, E[ric]. R[ücker]. (1882–1945)
British writer and civil servant. Lewis encountered Eddison’s first novel, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), in 1942, and soon wrote Eddison a letter of appreciation. Eddison replied and sent Lewis a copy of Mistress of Mistresses (1935). A correspondence developed, and Lewis hosted Eddison at a dinner party in Oxford on February 17, 1943. There Eddison met Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Lewis’s brother, Warnie. Eddison read aloud the chapter “Seven Against the King” from A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), then published only in the United States. He returned for a second gathering of the Inklings on June 8, 1944, reading a chapter from his work in progress The Mezentian Gate, which was eventually published posthumously in 1958, with a paragraph by Lewis in tribute to Eddison printed on the dust jacket.
Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte (1777–1843)
German writer and cavalry officer. Fouqué was probably the most widely read of all Romantic authors in the nineteenth century. The international popularity of his historical novels was eclipsed only by the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott. Besides his classic Undine (1811), Lewis also read Sintram and His Companions (1815). Fouqué’s other works include Aslauga’s Knight (1810), the long novel The Magic Ring (1812), and Thiodolf the Icelander (1815).
Grahame, Kenneth (1859–1932)
British writer and banker. Besides his classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows (1908), Grahame also wrote two classics of Edwardian childhood, The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). The latter includes Grahame’s famous fairy story “The Reluctant Dragon.”
Green, Roger Lancelyn (1918–87)
British writer and prolific authority on children’s books. Green wrote or edited a number of significant works on children’s literature and various writers, including Tellers of Tales (1946), Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography (1946), The Story of Lewis Carroll (1949), and Fifty Years of Peter Pan (1954). Green’s own children’s novels include The Wonderful Stranger (1950), The Luck of the Lynns (1952), The Secret of Rusticoker (1953), The Theft of the Golden Cat (1955), Mystery at Mycenae (1957), The Land of the Lord High Tiger (1958), and The Luck of Troy (1961). His retellings of traditional myths and legends were perhaps his most successful works. These include King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (1953), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1956), The Saga of Asgard (1960; later retitled Myths of the Norsemen), and Heroes of Greece and Troy (1960). His short adult fantasy novel From the World’s End (1946) was reprinted in 1971 in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, combined with a short novel by Edmund Cooper, under the collective title Double Phoenix.
Gresham, William Lindsay (1909–62)
American writer. Gresham is mostly known for his first novel, Nightmare Alley (1946). He was a frequent contributor to Blue Book Magazine, and his fantasy stories appeared in Fantastic, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Satellite Science Fiction.
Haggard, H[enry]. Rider (1856–1925)
British writer and civil servant. Though Haggard was a very prolific novelist, only his first two became world famous: King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She: A History of Adventure (1886), both of which have been filmed a number of times. Lewis’s comments on Haggard can be found in his review of Morton N. Cohen’s Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (1960), published in Time and Tide, September 3, 1960, and collected in Of This and Other Worlds. Lewis felt that Haggard had two major flaws: poor writing and intellectual defects. On the other hand, he also found Haggard an irresistible creator of myth: “Haggard is the text-book case of the mythopoeic gift pure and simple, isolated, as if for inspection, from nearly all those more specifically literary powers with which it so fortunately co-exists in, say, The Ancient Mariner, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or The Lord of the Rings.” In his letters, Lewis referred to many of Haggard’s novels, but his praise for the myth of She in particular stands out. Some aspects of Ayesha’s ambitions in She are found reflected in Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew.
Hall, Charles F.
British writer. Nothing is known about Hall, save for the fact that in 1938 he contributed two promising stories to the magazine Tales of Wonder, and then disappeared.
Hodgson, William Hope (1877–1918)
British writer. Lewis read Hodgson’s The Night Land (1912) probably around 1940; he enjoyed “the unforgettable sombre splendour of the images it presents” but found it was “disfigured by a sentimental and irrelevant erotic interest and by a foolish, and flat archaism of style.” Lewis had one other book by Hodgson in his library, The Luck of the Strong (1916), a collection of sea stories, most of which are unexceptional. It seems that he never encountered Hodgson’s masterpiece, The House on the Borderland (1908).
Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936)
British writer and poet. Kipling’s fantasies for children, including The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1896), and Just So Stories for Little Children (1902), are rightly acclaimed as classics. Additional works of fiction by Kipling that Lewis is known to have read include Plain Tales from the Hills (1890), The Light That Failed (1890), Kim (1901), Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Rewards and Fairies (1910), Debits and Credits (1926), and Limits and Renewals (1932). Lewis’s love–hate relationship with Kipling’s writings is discussed in his essay on Kipling, read to the English Association in the 1940s, and collected in Selected Literary Essays.
Knight, Damon (1922–2002)
American writer, editor and critic. Knight’s story “To Serve Man,” first published in the November 1950 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction and collected in Far Out (1961), provided a plot-point in chapter nine of The Silver Chair. “To Serve Man” was also televised in the series The Twilight Zone.
Lang, Andrew (1844–1912)
Scottish writer and editor. Lang is best remembered for editing (with significant assistance from his wife) twelve volumes of color fairy-tale books, ranging from The Blue Fairy Book (1889) through The Lilac Fairy Book (1910). The series was immensely popular. Lang’s own original fairy stories include Prince Prigio (1889) and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893), which make up The Chronicles of Pantouflia. Lewis thought these books “only fairly good.” Lang was a special favorite of Lewis’s friend Roger Lancelyn Green.
Lindsay, David (1876–1945)
British writer. Lewis read Lindsay’s most imaginative work, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), around 1936, on his friend Arthur Greeves’s recommendation, calling it a “shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work.” He later described it as “the real father of my planet books”—more so than the works of H. G. Wells—and said that “it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the ‘scientifiction’ appeal could be combined with the ‘supernatural’ appeal.” Elements of Lindsay’s novel can be seen in Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and the fragment “The Dark Tower.” Lewis himself noted that the idea of spiritual cannibalism in The Screwtape Letters “probably owes something to the horrible scenes of ‘absorbing’ in David Lindsay’s neglected Voyage to Arcturus.”
Some Lewis readers have found the Manichean elements of Lindsay’s novel repellent and succumbing to Lewis’s idea of the personal heresy, assumed
the author to be equally unpleasant. Lindsay’s novels, however, were philosophical explorations rather than tracts, and Lewis’s readers would likely find other novels by Lindsay (which share a number of similarities with the novels of Charles Williams) more to their taste—particularly The Haunted Woman (1922) or The Violet Apple, published posthumously in 1976.
MacDonald, George (1824–1905)
Scottish writer and minister. MacDonald was a very prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction. His fantasies include his first novel Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision (1864), and Lilith (1895), his last novel. His children’s books include At the Back of the North Wind (1870), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and its sequel, The Princess and Curdie (1883). MacDonald also wrote a large number of fairy stories that appeared in various collections. In 1947, Lewis edited George MacDonald: An Anthology, a volume of favorite passages culled from many of MacDonald’s books, particularly from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons (1867, 1886, and 1889) and various novels including Phantastes, Alec Forbes (1882), Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood (1967), Wilfrid Cumbermede (1872), Thomas Wingfold, Curate (1876), Sir Gibbie (1879), What’s Mine’s Mine (1886), and Lilith.
Macgowan, John (1726–80)
Scottish writer and Particular Baptist minister. His Infernal Conference: or, Dialogues of Devils (1772) is a precursor to Lewis’s Screwtape Letters.
Morris, William (1834–96)
British writer, artist, and poet. Morris is perhaps best remembered for his association with the Pre-Raphaelite movement and for the textiles, furniture, and wallpaper he designed. He was also especially interested in medieval literature, translating Beowulf and various Icelandic sagas. Though he wrote some fantasy short stories when young, he returned to fantasy in the last decade of his life, writing seven prose romances with medieval settings: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots of the Mountain (1890), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood Beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World’s End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), and The Sundering Flood (1897). Some of these were printed in gorgeous editions at Morris’s own Kelmscott Press. Lewis was particularly fond of Morris and of the late prose romances. Lewis prized the twenty-four-volume set, edited by Morris’s daughter May Morris, of The Collected Works of William Morris (1910–15) that he purchased in 1930. His essay on Morris, read to the Martlet Society in 1937, is collected in Selected Literary Essays.
Nesbit, E[dith]. (1858–1924)
British writer. Nesbit was an extremely popular author for children. Lewis wrote fondly of her first fantasy novel The Five Children and It (1902), which concerns a “Psammead” or sand-fairy, and its two sequels, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906); and her stories about the Bastable children, The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1902), and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). He considered his Chronicles of Narnia to have been written in the tradition of E. Nesbit. He even mentions the Bastables directly at the very beginning of The Magician’s Nephew, setting it “long ago when your grandfather was a child…and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.”
Oliphant, Mrs. Margaret (1828–97)
British writer. Her supernatural tales are mostly collected in a series of Stories of the Seen and the Unseen (1889, enlarged 1902). One story, “The Land of Suspense,” published in Blackwood’s Magazine in January 1897, has been suggested as an influence on The Great Divorce.
Orwell, George (1903–50) [pseudonym of Eric Blair]
British writer. Lewis called his Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) “merely a flawed, interesting book” but felt that Animal Farm: A Fairy Tale (1945) was “a work of genius.”
Peake, Mervyn (1911–68)
British writer, born in China. Lewis discovered Peake’s novels Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950) in early 1958, and wrote to the author expressing his pleasure. A related volume, Titus Alone, came out in 1959.
Potter, Beatrix (1866–1943)
British writer and illustrator. As a boy, Lewis “loved all” her books, particularly The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903); this interest let him to create his own childhood world, which he called Animal-Land.
Scott, Sir Walter (1777–1832)
Scottish writer. Lewis was a lifelong reader of Scott. In a 1948 letter to the fifteen-year-old son of his friend, Lewis wrote: “What an excellent thing to have read nearly all of the Waverley novels. At your age I had only read the medieval ones (Ivanhoe, Q. Durward, The Talisman etc.) and didn’t discover the more modern ones (Waverley, G. Mannering, Antiquary etc.) till I was at Oxford. I now like those in the second list better than those in the first, but I think both lots very good and never get tired of them. What I like is that Scott doesn’t skimp things, but tells you how everyone was dressed and what they ate and drank and what sort of houses they lived in, and the weather.” Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) was Scott’s first novel, followed by what became known as the Waverley Novels, including Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer (1815), The Antiquary (1816), and others. His historical novels include Ivanhoe (1820), Quentin Durward (1823), and The Talisman (1825). He wrote relatively few short stories, but his “Wandering Willie’s Tale” from the novel Redgauntlet (1824) is a notable horror story. Lewis’s 1956 paper on Scott is collected in his Selected Literary Essays.
Stapledon, Olaf (1888–1950)
British writer and philosopher. Lewis called Stapledon “a corking good writer” and read at least his first novel, Last and First Men (1930), and Star Maker (1937), though he regretted what his friend Roger Lancelyn Green called the “‘ghastly materialistic’ tenacity of Stapledon’s humans.”
Stephens, James (1882–1950)
Irish writer. Stephens is primarily remembered for The Crock of Gold (1912), about an Old Philosopher and his problems with leprechauns and Irish gods. Lewis called it “a perfect flower,” with “a beautiful sense of nature and open air” and “homely, Irish beauty.”
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–94)
Scottish writer, author of the classic Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), which Lewis recommended as a catharsis. Lewis also enjoyed The New Arabian Nights (1882) and Travels with a Donkey (1879), which he called “a glorious book if you could omit the Modes-tine parts.” He considered The Lay Morals and Other Papers (1911) “not only the best (non-fiction) book of his, but one of the best books by anyone I’ve ever read.”
Thisted, Valdemar [Adolph] (1815–87)
Danish priest and writer. His only work of relevance to Lewis is Breve fra Helvede (1866), published under the pseudonym M. Rowel. The first English translation also appeared in 1866, followed by an edited German version in 1883. This modified German version was in turn translated into English (the translation is credited to “L.W.J.S.”) and issued with a preface by George MacDonald in 1884. Titled Letters from Hell and with no author name given, this is the version Lewis read.
Tolkien, J[ohn]. R[onald]. R[euel]. (1892–1973)
British writer and academic. Lewis found great pleasure in Tolkien’s writings, particularly The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), but he also read (or heard read aloud) many manuscripts by Tolkien that were only published posthumously. Of particular interest to Lewis readers are the long narrative poems in The Lays of Beleriand (1985) and the future history of an Inklings-type literary group, “The Notion Club Papers,” published in Sauron Defeated (1992).
Wells, H[erbert]. G[eorge]. (1866–1946)
British writer. Lewis discovered Wells’s scientific romances in his schoolboy days, including The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901). The latter is often considered an influence on Out of the Silent Planet. Some critics believe that the character Jules in That Hideous Strength is meant to be a caricature of Wells, but Lewis’s friend Roger Lancelyn Green disputed the idea based on his own knowledge that L
ewis felt no animosity toward Wells.
White, T[erence]. H[anbury]. (1906–64)
British writer, born in India. Lewis found Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946) “excellent,” noting that “the vulgarity wh[ich] spoiled The Sword & the Stone [1938] (like a pencil moustache scribbled on the lip of a great statue) seems to have disappeared.”
Williams, Charles (1886–1945)
British writer. Williams wrote much nonfiction and poetry that Lewis would also have known, but his seven novels are War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1931), The Place of the Lion (1931), The Greater Trumps (1932), Shadows of Ecstasy (1933), Descent into Hell (1937), and All Hallow’s Eve (1945). Of Williams’s novels, Lewis wrote in 1936: “in the rare genre of ‘theological shocker’ which Chesterton (I think) invented, these are superb. On the first level they are exciting stories: beyond that, the philosophical implications are extremely interesting.”
FOOTNOTE
*1 Children have a kind of language, or gibberish, formed by adding letters or syllables to every word, which is called “crow’s language.”
Tales Before Narnia Page 40