Narnia

[poliphilo]

The trailer for The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe makes it look just like LOTR.

Same gorgeous New Zealand landscapes.

I used to want to visit New Zealand. I don't any more. It's so fuckin' empty.

Somehow or other I've managed not to read the Narnia books. I don't quite understand how this happened. But I've dipped into them in adulthood and not noticed any stardust. Lewis talks down to kids, he's so goddam preachy...

...And he's very 1950s (see last entry.)

I've read other books by Lewis. I enjoyed The Great Divorce. But, as with other "religious" writers, he leaves me with a taste in my mouth like I've been sucking on a horseshoe- a sour, metallic taste. He doesn't trust his own perceptions and feelings, but dresses up in pretty images the cold, nasty, unfelt doctrines he's been showered with from some Northern Irish pulpit.

He says in his Autobiography that his favourite mythology was the Norse, followed by the Greek, with the Judaeo-Christian coming in a poor third, but because he believed, against his aesthetic instincts, that the Judaeo-Christian mythology was true, he opted to become a believer.

Keats would have set him right on that- "Beauty is truth, truth beauty...."

But Lewis was an establishment man through and through. He went where he perceived the power to be.

Traitor.

Comments

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

I seem to be the only person left who both enjoyed Narnia as a child and managed to re-read them with pleasure as an adult. I went through most of them last year and enjoyed them, although they weren't as powerful for me as when I first read them in fourth grade (I think I was about nine).

Ronald Hutton, who has written several books about the history of witchcraft and paganism, has a neat essay in his latest book about the pagan content of the famously Christian writers Lewis and Tolkien. The book is Witches, Druids, and King Arthur.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I love Ron Hutton's work and swear by the Triumph of the Moon. I'll have to get hold of a copy of this new book.....