Sauron Defeated (38 page)

39. A. continues from this point:

on this sort of activity - the best bits and passages, especially, those that seem to come suddenly when you're in the heat of making. They sometimes fit with an odd perfection; and sometimes good in themselves don't really fit.

B. has here:

... on this sort of activity. Those scenes that come up complete and fixed, that I spoke of before, for instance. I think that those really good passages that arise, as it were, suddenly when you're abstracted, in the heat of making, are often long-prepared impromptus.

40. it's one I made up years ago: i.e., made up in dream.

41. In A, and (at first) in B, Ramer interpreted the first of his

'fragments' far more elaborately, giving the entire plot of the story. This is, as Ramer admitted, 'not very interesting'; and as B

was first written Loudham says (in answer to Ramer's 'Do you want another case?') 'Not particularly, unless it's better than the last, which I don't expect.'

42. Geoffrey of Monmouth (died in 1155), author of The History of the Kings of Britain, a chief contribution to the popularity, outside the Celtic lands, of King Arthur and 'the Matter of Britain'. Such a manuscript leaf as this in Ramer's dream-narrative would be of superlative importance in the study of the Arthurian legend.

43. Elvish Drama. In A it is Ramer himself who speaks of 'elf-drama'

('it is not writing but elf-drama'), and again in B, which has:

'... For it is not of course writing, but a sort of realized drama.

The Elvish Drama that Lewis speaks of somewhere.'

'Not Lewis, said Jeremy. 'It comes in one of those essays of the circle, but it was by one of the minor members.'

The passage in question comes from the essay On Fairy-Stories, which my father had delivered at the University of St. Andrews in 1939, but which was not published until two years after the writing of The Notion Club Papers, in the memorial volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford 1947). The passage is interesting in relation to Ramer's discourse and I cite a part of it:

Now 'Faerian Drama' - those plays which according to abundant records the elves have often presented to men - can produce Fantasy with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism. As a result their usual effect (upon a man) is to go beyond Secondary Belief. If you are present at a Faerian drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World. The experience may be very similar to Dreaming and has (it would seem) sometimes (by men) been confounded with it. But in Faerian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp.

To experience directly a Secondary World: the potion is too strong, and you give to it Primary Belief, however marvellous the events. You are deluded - whether that is the intention of the elves (always or at any time) is another question. They at any rate are not themselves deluded. This is for them a form of Art, and distinct from Wizardry or Magic, properly so called.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 1983, p. 142; cf. also p. 116 in that edition of the essay ('In dreams strange powers of the mind may be unlocked...').

44. of humane shape: texts B, C, and D all have humane; cf. p. 206

('humane forms') and note 55 below.

45. Cf. my father's letter to W. H. Auden of 7 June 1955 (Letters no.

163):

... the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the 'Downfall of Numenor' as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age.

By 'beginning with memory' I believe that my father meant that the recurrence of the dream went as far back in his life as his memory reached. - Faramir told Eowyn of his recurrent dream of the Great Wave coming upon Numenor as they stood on the walls of Minas Tirith when the Ring was destroyed ('The Steward and the King', in The Return of the King, p. 240).

46. This remark of Lowdham's is absent from B and first enters in C; cf. note 38.

47. In B the footnote at this point does not derive as in the final text largely from Mr. Green but entirely from Nicholas Guildford, citing Ramer: 'Later Ramer enlarged on this point, in the course of a discussion of the various kinds of "deep dreams", and how '

the dreamer could distinguish them. He divided them ...' What follows is closely similar to the later version of the note, but it ends thus: ' "Made for the Malefit of Men," he said. "To judge by the ideas men propagate now, their curious unanimity, and obsession, I should say that a terrible lot of men have thrust aside the Guardians, and are reading very maleficial stuff." N.G.'

There was thus at this stage no reference to 'Night 62' (see p. 222

and note 2).

The word maleficial is occasionally recorded, but malefit, occuring in both versions of this note, is a coinage echoing benefit, as if ultimately derived from Latin malefactum 'evil deed, injury'.

48. The world Emberu has not been named in A (see notes 28, 33), but at this point Ramer says in A: 'The one I told you about, Menelkemen' (Quenya, 'Sky-earth'). In this original text the description of Menelkemen is (though briefer) that given in the final text of Ellor Eshurizel, 'that immense plain with its floor of silver', ending with the account of the great waterfall, here called Dalud dimran (or perhaps dimron), with Eshil dimzor written above and Eshil kulu () kulo) in the margin. There is no mention here of the En-keladim. At the end of the description of Menelkemen Jeremy asks 'Where is it, do you think?', which in the final text he asks after Ramer's description of the third world, Minal-zidar (p. 199).

In B (as originally written) Ramer says 'The one I told you about, Emberu the golden', and here the description of Emberu is that of Minal-zidar in the final version:

'... I wrote that account (not the frame) some time ago, and all I'll have now is that, and stirrings and faint traces of what lies beneath: the first vision of Emberu: golden, absolutely silent and quiescent, a whole small world of perfect form, imperishable in Time...'

This description of Emberu ends, as does that of Minal-zidar in the final text, with 'made by what adoring mind I cannot tell'; then follows: 'And there was Menel-kemen.'

At this point in B my father stopped, struck out what he had written about 'the first vision of Emberu', and wrote instead: 'the first vision of Emberu: that immense plain with its silver Hoor all delicately patterned...' - which in the final text is the description of Ellor Eshurizel. Here the great waterfall is called Oshul-kulo, and Ramer says: I think the Enkeladim dwell there. My father then inserted in B, after 'the first vision of Emberu', the words

'"It is the same with Ellor. Ellor!" he murmured. "Ellor Eshurizel! I drew it once in words as best I could, and now it is words.

That immense plain with its silver floor ...'; and (all these changes being made at the time of composition) introduced at the end of the description of Ellor the third world, 'Minal-zidar the golden'.

Thus the images were developed and separated into distinct

'world-entities' in rapid succession. In A Menelkemen is the only world that Ramer describes, the world of the story that he had read to the Notion Club, the inorganic, harmonious world of metal, stone, and water, with the great waterfall. In B the world that Ramer described in his story is Emberu (replacing Gyonyoru of the earlier parts of the manuscript), the silent 'golden' world; but this was changed immediately (reverting to A) to make Emberu 'that immense plain with its silver floor', and then changed again to make this description that of a second world, Ellor Eshurizel, while the 'golden' world becomes a third scene, Minal-zidar. The final stage was to call the first world Green Emberu, 'where there was a kind of organic life, rich but wholesome and longeval.'

49. On the En-keladim see p. 206 and notes 64, 65, and pp. 397, 400.

50. the Fields of Arbol: the Solar System in Lewis's novels (see note 13).

51. In A it is Dolbear, not Loudham, who asks: 'Where do you get all these names from? Who told you them? That [would] interest me more really than the geometry and landscape. I should, of course as you know, use my chance if I got into such a state for language-research.' In B this was still said by Dolbear, changed to Guildford and then to Loudham. See p. 151.

52. At this point both A and B continue with an account of Jeremy's attempt to arouse interest in the works of Lewis and Williams, which in the final text is put into a footnote of Guildford's here. I give the text of B, which follows that of A very closely but is clearer.

'Arbol is "Old Solar" for the Sun,' said Jeremy. 'Do you mean that you can get back to Old Solar, [struck out: or Old Universal,] and that Lewis was right?'

Jeremy was our Lewis-expert, and knew all his works, almost by heart. Many in Oxford will still remember how he had, a year or two before, given some remarkable lectures on Lewis and Williams. People had laughed at the title, because Lewis and all that circle had dropped badly out of fashion. Old Bell-Tinker, who was still Chairman of the English Board then, had boggled and puffed at it. 'If you must touch such a subject,'

he snorted, 'call it Lewis and cut it Short.'

Jeremy had retorted by offering to change the title to 'Lewis and Carolus or the Oxford Looking-glass'. 'Or "Jack and the Beanstalk", if you like,' he added, but that was too recondite a joke for the English Board. I believe, before Jeremy spoke up, few even of the Twentieth Century experts could have named any work of Williams, except perhaps The Octopus. That was still occasionally played, because of the great revival of mis-sionary interest after the Far-eastern martyrdoms in the sixties.

The Allegory of Love was all of Lewis that the academicians ever mentioned (as a rule unread and slightingly). The other minor lights were only known by the few who read old C. R.

Tolkien's little books of memoirs: In the Roaring Forties, and The Inns and Outs of Oxford. But Jeremy had made most of our club read some of those people (the Public-house School as it was called); though beside Jeremy only Ramer and Dolbear bothered with Tolkien pere and all the elvish stuff.

' "Old Solar"?' said Ramer. 'Well, no....

'Old Bell-Tinker' derives his name from a book of translations of Anglo-Saxon literature by Bell and Tinker. His very bad joke 'call it Lewis and cut it Short' refers to the Latin Dictionary by Lewis and Short. The title of Jeremy's lectures, which aroused laughter, is omitted, but was presumably the same as in the final text, The Public-house School (because the Inklings met in pubs). 'Few bothered with Tolkien pere and all the elvish stuff' was doubtless no more than a self-deprecating joke - but implies that the 'elvish stuff' had at least been published! (cf. p. 303 and note 14). In the Roaring Forties is a pun on the name of the regions of the southern oceans, between forty and fifty degrees south, where there are great winds.

53. Since Ramer's criticism of the standard of linguistic invention characteristic of tales of space-travel and time-travel follows immediately on his denial that there could be any such language as Old Solar, he appears to be including Lewis in his criticism.

Some years before, however, in his letter to Stanley Unwin of 4 March 1938 (Letters no. 26), my father had said of Out of the Silent Planet:

The author holds to items of linguistic invention that do not appeal to me ...; but this is a matter of taste. After all your reader found my invented names, made with cherished care, eye-splitting. But the linguistic inventions and the philology on the whole are more than good enough. All the part about language and poetry - the glimpses of its Malacandrian nature and form - is very well done, and extremely interesting, far superior to what one usually gets from travellers in untravelled regions. The language difficulty is usually slid over or fudged.

Here it not only has verisimilitude, but also underlying thought.

54. Glund: the name of Jupiter in Old Solar (also Glundandra).

55. I think there might be an Old Human, or Primitive Adamic...: A has here: 'But I think there might be, certainly was, an Old Humane or Adamic. But it could not possibly be the same as the Prime Language of Hrossa, Hressa-hlab.' This was retained in B

(with Old Human for Old Humane: see note 44). The Hrossa were one of the three totally distinct kinds of hnau found on Malacandra; the language of the Hrossa was Hressa-hlab, which is 'Old Solar': see note 14.

56. Old Universal: see the beginning of the passage given in note 52.

57. En: this name appears already in A, with various predecessors, An, Nor, El, all struck out immediately.

58. Gormok, Zingil: in A Ramer's name for Mars is the Elvish word Karan ('red'); Venus was Zingil in A, though immediately replacing another name that cannot be read.