See you later allegorist!

It would be possible, and it might be edifying, to write a Christian cookery book. Such a book would exclude dishes whose preparation involves un-necessary human labour or animal suffering, and dishes excessively luxurious. That is to say, its choice of dishes would be Christian. But there could be nothing specifically Christian about the actual cooking of the dishes included. Boiling an egg is the same process whether you are a Christian or a pagan. -- Lewis 'Christianity and Literature'

On December 4th, The Sunday Times revealed the contents of a "previously unpublished" letter from C.S Lewis which "emerged ahead of this week's release of the Chronicles of Narnia movie" and "provided conclusive proof of the Christian message in the Narnia books."

 Things are always "emerging" in newspapers. I think it means "We just noticed" or "There is no actual story here, but we decided to report it anyway." The headline, too, was a classic example of the sub-editors art: Narnia's Lion is really Jesus. It has to say "Narnia's lion", because we might be too ignorant to know who "Aslan" is. 

 The article contains a few short quotes from the letter, a reply by Lewis to one of the many children who wrote to him: 

 "The whole Narnia story is about Christ".... 

"Supposing there really was a world like Narnia.and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?" 

 Now, Lewis wrote an awful lot of letters. One could wish he had written fewer. Indeed, one could willingly murder all those Yanks who sent him food parcels during the shortages after the war. Instead of writing each one a personal thank-you letter, why couldn't he have hired a secretary and written some more book! We've had two thousand-page volumes of 'Collected Letters' so far and he still hasn't met Joy Davidman or started to written a children's book. This letter comes from vol 3, due out next year. The 'Collected Letters' are published by Harper Collins, which, like the Sunday Times, is part of Rupert Murdoch's empire. So perhaps in this case "emerged" means "The proofs of volume 3 were lying on someone's desk, and we had a look at them"? 

So it is literally true that this letter is as yet "unpublished". However, it is complete nonsense to say that it sheds any fresh light on the religious content of the Narnia books. A much smaller selection of Lewis's letters was edited by his brother and published in 1966. In it, we find the following: 

 "But it is not, as some people think, an allegory. That is, I don't say, "Let us represent Christ as Aslan" I say "Suppose there was a world like Narnia, and supposing like ours, it needed redemption, let us imagine what sort of Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection Christ would have there." See?" 

And in another short volume called 'Letters to Children', we find him saying the same thing in the same words: 

 'I did not say to myself 'Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia'; I said 'Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen'. 

 'The Times' wants us to imagine some kind of controversy between people who think that they have found a religious sub-text in Narnia and people who deny it's there. There is no controversy or debate: Lewis's intentions are easy to find out from any standard work. 

This would not be especially interesting but for the fact that, in the run-up to the movie, a lot of people have been saying a lot of very silly things about "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." 

For example, Tilda Swinton, who has possibly been getting a bit too deeply into her role as the White Witch tells the BBC: 

 "Faith is in the eye of the beholder... the original book was more "spiritual" than religious...You can make a religious allegory out of anything if that's what you're interested in." 

Well, yes, indeed, you can, although it must be said that it is rather easier to do it to "The Pilgrim's Progress" than, say "Tellytubbies" or "Pulp Fiction". I have to say that I have never understood what people are talking about when they use the word "spirituality", and the idea of the spiritual as opposed to the religious baffles me even further.

 More worryingly, the producer of the film asserts: 

"When I first read it, it never occurred to me Aslan was anything more than a great lion. Christian themes were very important to CS Lewis and imbued everything he did, but he himself denied any religious implications." 

 Got that? Lewis denied any religious implications in the Narnia stories. This lie crops up again in an allegedly humorous "A - Z of Narnia" printed in Sunday's "Observer" magazine 

"C is for Christian allegory --Is it or isn't it? CS Lewis said it wasn't really, which seems a bit disingenuous." 

 The Australian magazine "The Age" prints the following astonishing excerpt from an interview with no lessor person than Douglas Gresham: "Won't it at least impart a subliminal Christian message to young audiences, I ask? ""I sincerely hope not," he snorts. "Because - and this is what people always get wrong - it's not a Christian film and the Narnia books aren't Christian novels...." 

 A couple of years back, Harper Collins were exploring the possibility of commissioning new stories using the Narnia setting, a silly idea of which very little came. An internal memo was leaked to the press saying that these books would play down any Christian symbolism; the usual process of Chinese whispers occurred, and before long, it was being widely reported as fact that Harper Collins was planning to censor all religious references from the text of the the existing books. (*) Douglas succinctly denounced this as a "wicked lie". To hear Douglas saying that "the Narnia books aren't Christian novels" makes me think that either 

 a: He has been murdered and replaced by a Slitheen or b: He was quoted out of context.

 The interesting question is not "Are the Chronicles of Narnia Christian books" – of course they are. The question is "How does the Christian element in them work?" Lewis, as we have seen, said that they were not "allegory": Aslan doesn't "stand for" Jesus; and the other characters certainly don't "stand for" anyone from the Bible or anywhere else. (Edmund is not given thirty pieces of silver; Peter doesn't deny Aslan three times; Lucy certainly doesn't anoint Aslan's paws with her tears, wipe them away with her hair or have seven demons cast out of her.) This is the point which the "Observer" writer misses: when Lewis said that the books were "Not a Christian allegory", he was denying that they were allegorical, not denying that they were Christian. "The Sunday Times" headline-writer managed to miss the point even with the text in front of him. Lewis did not say that "Narnian Lion is Really Jesus." What he said was that "In Narnia, the Word of God was incarnate in the body of a Lion named Aslan; analogous to the way in which, in our world, the Word of God was incarnate in the body of a human being named Jesus." Which, I grant you, would not have made such a snappy headline. 

When talking about the Narnia books, Lewis distinguished between his intentions as "an author" and his intentions as "a man". As an author, he had some images -- the Faun, the Witch riding a sledge -- which he wanted to use in a story; along with an inkling that he'd like to have a go at writing a fairy tale. This was the starting point. But "as a man" he developed the idea that such a story could be put to an edifying use. 

Christianity is embodied in a collection of stories, and one central story. Christ himself "never spoke without using a parable". Tolkien famously broke through Lewis's resistance to Christianity by telling him that it made sense as a story. But the central narrative of Christianity has become so familiar to us that we can't experience it as a story: we don't feel horrified when Jesus is killed, or afraid when his tomb is empty or amazed when he comes back to life. By presenting something very like the Christ-story in the context of an imaginary world Lewis thought that he could defamiliarise it and allow us to hear it for the first time. 

 Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associate with lowered voices, almost as it it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school association, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. 

 So the people who say "I read the books as a child without realising that there was anything religious about them" are reacting very much as Lewis wanted them to. And the people who feel that they have been tricked by the books have also got a point. If you're moved by Aslan's death and resurrection, then at some level, you've experienced a religious emotion. Maybe even done some kind of devotion to a being you don't believe in. It's harder for you to say "I don't understand what it is these funny Christian types think they're doing on Easter Sunday and Good Friday" – because at some level, you do. I can see why the books make the Polly Toynbee's and Phillip Pullman's of this world spit blood. They know that Christianity is hateful religion; they know that the-Christ-of-the-church is a monstrous figure; but when the Christ-of-the-church is presented to children, and even to many adults, disguised as a lion in a story, then a lot of them have the audacity to fall in love with him! Interestingly, Lewis never tries to press the point as an argument. He doesn't say "So, then, if you love my Narnia books, you are already, at some level, a Christian" or "Since this is a beautiful story, it must at some level be true". 

 When Lewis wrote "Voyage of the Dawn Treader", he was "quite sure" that it would be the last Narnia book, and it does read like the last volume of a trilogy. At the end of the book, Lucy and Edmund come to the edge of the world (Narnia appears to be a discworld) and encounter a Lamb. They ask the Lamb to show them the way to Aslan's country; the Lamb turns into Aslan, and tells them that for them, the way to his country is through their own world. In case this isn't clear enough, the Lamb offers them food:

 Come and have breakfast" said the Lamb...Then they noticed for the first time that there was a fire lit on the grass and fish roasting on it. 

 ("As soon as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid theron, and bread... Jesus saith unto them Come and dine."- John 21:9) 

Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund that this will be their last trip to Narnia: 

"And is Eustace never to come back here either? said Lucy "Child" said Aslan "Do you really need to know that?" 

("Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved, following...Peter seeing him saith to Jesus "Lord, and what shall that man do?" Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry trill I come, what is that to thee?"- John 21:22) 

Finally, Lewis puts his theological cards very firmly on the table: "It isn't Narnia you know" sobbed Lucy "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?" 

"But you shall meet me, dear on," said Aslan 

"Are--are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund. 

 "I am," said Aslan, "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." 

 To use a rather Lewisian extended metaphor. Imagine two people looking at a religious artwork: say, a painting of Jesus on the cross. One of them is a Christian, there other isn't. The Christian regards the painting as a devotional aid; he meditates on it, looks at it while he prays, and generally feels inspired by it. The non-Christian also admires the painting. He doesn't just admire the brushwork, but responds to the whole scene: he's horrified by the realistic way the painter has depicted a man being tortured and moved by the dramatic way he is conveyed a mother's grief at seeing her son hurt. But these are exactly the same emotions which the Christian feels when he looks at the picture. The only difference is that the Christian art-lover thinks that these emotions bring him closer to God, where the non-religious art-lover does not. (He might possibly call them "spiritual", but I still wouldn't know what he meant.) It is possible to imagine two other visitors to the gallery having more extreme reactions. One visitor might be so hostile to the whole idea of Christianity that they can't respond to the painting as a painting. They probably can't even see it. They're so overwhelmed by their conviction that the Atonement is an immoral doctrine that they couldn't even start to admit that they were looking at a very pretty picture. At the other extreme, someone might be so overwhelmingly moved by the picture that they decided to become a Christian on the spot. The hostile critic would have plenty of interesting things to say about his objections to Christianity, but would not be have anything useful to say about the picture. (He'd think that the image of Mary was an instrument of patriarchal oppression regardless of whether this one was well painted or badly painted.) But you probably couldn't blame the painting or the artist for manipulating or brainwashing the convert: he wasn't responding to the painting but the thing which he thought that it was a painting of. And winning converts probably wasn't in the artists head; he just wanted to paint a very truthful picture of what he imagined the crucifixion to have been like. 

 "By knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there." I don't think Lewis is really proselytising or writing propaganda. I don't even think he's writing one of those teaching aids which uses stories to explain the difficult bits of a religious idea. I think he's trying to provide something a lot like a devotional tool that different people will use in different ways. 

 Francis Spufford (**) says that even as a child he could see that 

 "Aslan was both a talking lion and something else at the same time: I already knew that the story of him being sacrificed and coming back to life was a kind of cousin of the story of Jesus." 

And really, it shouldn't be necessary to say any more than that. Aslan is like Jesus, but not exactly like Jesus. I may have spent several pages "stating and re-stating the terribly, terribly obvious." 

But when people closely associated with the forthcoming movie are being quoted or misquoted as saying that the "Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is "not a Christian story", "spiritual rather than religious" and that Lewis repudiated the story's specifically Christian significance the obvious is probably worth stating quite loudly. 

(*)It is said that fledgling political journalists are asked to prove their skill by taking a speech by John Prescott and editing it into English without changing its meaning. I suggest that "Re-write Narnia with the religious element removed, but without changing anything else in the story" could be a similarly challenging party game for wannabee editors. 

 (**) Chapter III of "The Child That Books Built" is the best thing which anyone has ever written about the Chronicles. "Some people" he says "feel got at by the Narnia books." 

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Lipstick on My Scholar

1: In the beginning....

The Devil I will leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I would wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. -- C.S Lewis "The Inner Ring"

According to the Bible, the first man and the first woman lived in a garden. God gave them only one rule:

"You are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it, you will surely die."

But there's also a Talking Beast in the garden(1). The Beast misquotes the rule, and thereby hugely extends YHWH's list of prohibited substances:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say 'You must not eat from any tree in the Garden?' "

You may eat of any tree except... You may not eat of any tree. The serpent knew that you only need to change a couple of words to turn a text on its head. He knew that in the presence of a misquotation, people very rarely go back and check the original. And he knew that if you repeat them often enough and confidently enough, the misquoted words will eventually become better known than the real ones.

2: Being for The Benefit of Mr Pullman.

Phillip Pullman writes books. Some children seem to like them, which is nice; and so do some adults, which is okay. His books are better written than J.K Rowling's, although they don't sell nearly so many copies.

J.K Rowling's books have been turned into hugely successful movies, with the result that she is richer than the Queen. Phillip Pullman's books have been turned into very serious plays by the English National Theater, with the result that he is admired by the Times Literary Supplement and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"His Dark Materials" has been compared with C.S Lewis's "Chronicles of Narnia" because it is a serious tale with literary and mythological allusions which uses symbolism to deal with profound religious questions. "Harry Potter" has been compared with the "Chronicles of Narnia" because there are seven books in the series.

When people ask Phillip Pullman what he thinks of C.S Lewis he always gives the same answer:

"Susan isn't allowed into the stable and the reason given is that she's growing up. She's become far too interested in lipstick, nylons and invitations. One character says rather primly: 'She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown up.' This seems to me on the part of Lewis to reveal very weird unconscious feelings about sexuality. Here's a child whose body is changing and who's naturally responding as everyone has ever done since the history of the world to the changes that are taking place in one's body and one's feelings. She's doing what everyone has to do in order to grow up".

"And it is a god who hates life because he denies children life. In the final Narnia book he gives the children the end-of-term treat of being killed in a railway accident so they can go to heaven. It's a filthy thing to do. Susan is shut out from salvation because she is doing what every other child who has ever been born has done - she is beginning to sense the developing changes in her body and its effect on the opposite sex."

J.K Rowling doesn't dislike C.S Lewis and God nearly as much Phillip Pullman does. After all, her books outsell Lewis's and she's richer than God. But her comments about Narnia have an oddly familiar ring:

"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex...I have a big problem with that."

Recently, the newspapers have been talking about C.S Lewis, because there is a new movie coming out, starring New Zealand and a computer. These articles become rather repetitive after a while.

"The reason Lewis gives for (Susan's) exclusion from paradise is that "she likes lipstick and nlyons and invitations". To Pullman this has suggested that Lewis considered a girl reaching sexual maturity to be such a terrible thing she should be banished to hell." (Times)

"Pullman has often spoken of his disgust at the exclusion of Susan from paradise at the end of the stories. She has started to become, not a sexless angel, but a young woman interested in evil snares such as "nylons and lipsticks and invitations." (Independent)

It's clear that nylons and lipstick are the most important things about which C.S Lewis ever wrote, and the offending passage deserves the closest possible analysis. It occurs at the end of chapter 12 of "The Last Battle", which is the final book in the Narnia series regardless of what order you read them in. Seven of the protagonists from the previous books have been re-united in Aslan's country, which they have entered through a magical doorway in Narnia.

"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?"

"My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "Is no longer a friend of Narnia."

"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.' "

"Oh Susan!" said Jill "She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grow-up."

"Grown-up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."

"Well, don't let's talk about that now," said Peter.

Can you see what has happened?

Lewis: "She's interested in nothing except nylons and lipstick and invitation."
Pullman: She's become far too interested in nylons and lipstick and invitations.
Rowling: She's lost to Narnia because she likes lipstick
Times: She's excluded from paradise because she likes nylons and lipsticks and invitations.
Independent: She's interested in evil snares such as nylons and lipsticks and invitations.

The sin of "liking nothing except lipstick..." has become the sin of liking it too much, which has become the sin of liking it at all. Finally, lipstick has become an intrinsic evil. It's rather as if you had read "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and concluded that, since the White Witch uses Turkish Delight to bribe Edmund to betray his siblings, Lewis thinks that confectionery is a great evil.

Pullman, to be fair, is trying to make a sophisticated point. He doesn't say that, in the story itself, Susan's sexual maturity causes her to stop being a friend of Narnia. Rather, he thinks that the story allows us to to infer things about C.S Lewis's unconscious attitude to sex. This game - discovering feelings that writers didn't know they had on the basis of things they didn't say - is great fun, and anyone can play it. (There's is a bit-part player in "Prince Caspian" called Mrs Prizzle. Well then, the fact that Lewis chose this name proves that he had an unconscious desire to spank women using the penis of a bull (2). See how easy it is?)

But Rowling and the two journalists have not understood Pullman's subtle point about Lewis's unconscious motivations. They've reproduced his comments without going back and checking the book. As a result "Susan is sent to hell as a punishment for her sexuality" has become one of those things which "everybody knows".

Did God really say...? Did God really say....?

3: What did C.S Lewis say about lipstick?

Lady, a better sculptor far
Chiseled those curves your smudge and mar,
And God did more than lipstick can
To justify your mouth to man -- 'Epigrams and Epitaphs'


It is probably fair to say that Lewis did not spend much of his career thinking about lipstick. Women have been painting their mouths since ancient times; Desmond Morris helpfully points out that artificially reddened lips resemble a vagina and are therefore very sexually arousing to men. But modern "lipstick" was first sold in 1915, when Lewis was 17. Obviously, women's tights couldn't have been made from nylon until the 1930s; but once they became available, they were greatly preferred to the unattractive and inconvenient cotton variety. "Nylons" were hard to come by and therefore greatly sought after during the war and into the 1950s. (In the film "Vera Drake" one pair of nylons is swapped for eight packets of cigarettes.) Lewis must have regarded both of them as relatively new-fangled items.

Lewis may not have quite approved of women's make up in general. Arguing that something is not necessarily important because it is in a newspaper, he remarks in passing that "a very commonplace protest against make-up would be News if it came from a film star."("Letters to Malcolm" XXII) So he evidentially thought that disapproving of cosmetic products was a unremarkable thing to do.

Perhaps this simply shows that Lewis was a little old fashioned, and still believed, like his Victorian parents tthat make-up was appropriate for prostitutes and actresses, but not respectable women. But he also felt that the cosmetics and fashion industries "manipulated" men's sexual tastes and encouraged women to aspire to an imaginary idea of "beauty" that it's impossible to live up to.

It's all a fake, of course, the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full grown woman to be. ("Screwtape Letters" XX)

Feminists would probably agree with him about the falsification of women's bodies for commercial ends; although they might doubt whether the Devil is creating "the beauty myth" in order to stop people from marrying the partners with whom "spiritually helpful, happy and fertile marriages are most likely." (Screwtape is, incidentally, very proud of the fact that most women now dislike men with beards. "There is more in this than you might think." Occasionally, Lewis says something so off-the-wall that I actually can't imagine what he means.)

So, 'she likes lipstick and tights' doesn't mean 'she wants to look nice and attract men'. It means 'she wants silly, expensive, new-fangled consumer goods in order to conform with what the fashion industry says is pretty this season.' Do Pullman and Rowling have an – er – unconscious belief that the only way a person can make themselves look nice is by buying stuff? That would amuse Screwtape no end.

4: What did C.S Lewis say about heaven and hell?

"It's all in Plato; all in Plato, bless me what do they teach them in these schools." -- "The Last Battle".


Lewis believed in a literal heaven and (up to a point) a literal hell. He also believed in purgatory, but let's not worry about that for the time being. He thought that whenever you desire something on earth, you are really desiring heaven; but that nothing on earth can ever really satisfy that desire. He believed that if you love heaven more than anything else, you will in fact, go to heaven; but if you love anything more than heaven, then you won't.

The idea that we should desire heaven and nothing else could be very austere and puritanical. Pullman, typically, says that it is a life-hating creed. In fact, the opposite is true. Lewis can come across as almost cloyingly romantic. He rejects asceticism, the idea that they material world is evil and we should turn away from it and seek heaven. The material world is good, because it is heaven's reflection. His image of "visionary gleams" shining on us from another world is pure Wordsworth:

"There have been times when I think that we do not desire heaven; but more often I have found myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desire anything else?....All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear.("The Problem of Pain" )

For Lewis, of course, these glimpses and promises came through Wagner, William Morris and the landscape of Southern Ireland; but he quite acknowledges that other people experience "joy" through different things -- through sport, or gardening, or hobbies such as woodworking or sailing. These are all Good Things. In "The Last Battle" it is strongly implied that Edmund is a railway enthusiast, and it isn't remotely suggested that this innocent pleasure is a barrier to him coming back to Narnia. They only become Bad Things when you start to love them instead of heaven. For Lewis, literally anything apart from heaven is an evil if it is allowed to become an end in itself, rather than the means to an end. The devil in Screwtape doesn't remotely care whether human beings are soldiers or pacifists, provided soldiering or pacifism become more important to them than heaven. Even love, according to Lewis, "ceases to a be a demon only when it ceases to be a God."

This idea is absolutely central to Lewis's thinking. You mustn't confuse means with ends; you mustn't confuse copies with realities; you mustn't confuse reflections for the original; you mustn't confuse a secondary, partial good with a primary or total good. "You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first." The idea pops up over and over again in different forms. He says that classical Paganism was a Good Thing in so far as it was a reflection or shadow of Christianity; but a bad thing otherwise. He say that, as a little boy he used to snaffle his father's tobacco, and because he wasn't an experienced smoker, came away with the idea that cigars are a second rate substitute for cigarettes. He says that the human race is like an ignorant child preferring to carry on making mud-pies in a slum because he has no conception of what is meant by a holiday at the seaside.

"The woman who makes the dog the center of he life loses, in the end, not only her human useful and dignity but even the proper pleasures of dog-keeping. The man who makes alcohol his chief good loses not only his job but his palate and all power of enjoying the earlier (and only pleasurable) levels of intoxication ....If Esau really got the pottage in return for his birthright, then Esau was a lucky exception."

To be damned, then, means to turn away from heaven and instead pursue some little earthly substitute -- which can't, by definition, have satisfy you. Hell is populated by little people who have become so atrophied as human beings that they have become incapable of wanting any kind of happiness. On no possible view does Lewis send Susan to hell as a punishment for liking lipstick. He may, however, define hell as "That state in which you would rather have pretty red lips than be Queen of Narnia."


5: What happens to Susan?

"I think that there are in the end only two kinds of people: those who like happiness, and those who really don't"

It is untrue to say that Aslan expels Susan from Narnia. Susan isn't present at Polly and Diggory's re-union dinner; presumably, because she choses not to be there. Since she isn't there, she doesn't witness the the phantom of King Tirian calling for aid. Therefore, she doesn't play any part in the scheme to recover the magical rings; so the isn't on the train which crashes, so she doesn't die. Since she isn't dead she doesn't go to heaven.

It is also quite untrue to say that Susan is sent to hell. By the end of the book Narnia has come to an end, and all the Narnian talking animals have been judged by Aslan. Those which don't please him are turned into dumb beasts, and disappear into Aslan's shadow. This is a sort of Narnian last judgment. But there's no hint that Susan has met this kind of fate. Our world hasn't yet come to an end; and Susan is presumably still alive and will have every opportunity of coming to Aslan's country by a more circuitous route. (When Lucy asks Aslan if he will tell her how to get into his country from our world, he replies "I shall be telling you all the time".)

Susan is not blamed for becoming an adult. We are told that of the seven "friends", only Jill and Eustace are young enough to be at school. It follows that Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensies must be at least 16 when she comes to Aslan's country. In fact, according to Lewis's "Outline of Narnian History" Peter is 22, Susan is 21, Edmund is 19 and Lucy is 17. So Aslan can hardly be singling Susan out because she has hit puberty.

Certainly we are told that children beyond a certain age can't enter Narnia; this is why the younger Eustace and Jill encounter King Tirian in the "old" Narnia, but the other four only see him in Aslan's country(3). However, this exclusion from Narnia does not represent any kind of punishment or loss of paradise. On the contrary, they are being sent back to their own world to learn to know Aslan under a different name and so find their way back to his country. (Lucy, incidentally, has taken this seriously: when she is shown the magic stable which in some way contains Aslan's country she immediately says "In our world too, a stable once had something in it that was bigger than the whole world": the only explicit reference to Christ in the whole saga.)

Granted, Jill says that Susan is "too keen on being grown up." (Not "grown up" or "keen on being grown up" but too keen on being grown up.) But Jill is herself still a child. Polly, a very old lady, corrects her immediately and says Susan's problem is not maturity but immaturity. ("Grown-up, indeed... I wish she would grow up.") Polly thinks that Susan was the kind of school girl who would rather have been in her 20s, and will carry on behaving like a 20 year old when she is 50.

So, we are left with the actual reasons that Lewis gives for Susan's absence from Aslan's country:

1: She denies that she ever really came to Narnia; she says that her experiences there were only part of a game that she and her siblings used to play as children.

2: She is interested in consumer beauty products and parties to the exclusion of everything else.

3: She is an air-head, fixated with staying at a "silly age", probably 21.

Susan has lived in Narnia; she has reigned as Queen of Narnia during its golden age. She and Lucy have had an intimacy with Aslan that ever Peter does not experience(4). She comforted Aslan during his agony before going to the Stone Table, and he let her stroke his mane. After his resurrection, she celebrated with him and he let her ride on his back. However, she now denies that any of this ever happened, and instead seeks joy exclusively through beauty products. Pullman wants us to believe that "Susan became interested in lipstick, and is therefore thrown out of Narnia." I think Lewis is really saying "Susan ceased to love Narnia, and therefore, became a pathetic figure -- a woman of 50, trying to be a girl of 21, capable of loving nothing apart from lipstick."

Susan is committing Lewis's cardinal sin: getting confused about what is real and what not. She choses to believe that Narnia is only a play-world, something which she and her three siblings made up. This reminds us of the scene in "The Silver Chair" where the Witch imprisons Prince Rillian in a cave and tries to convince him that there is nothing outside it: that Narnia was only ever a figment of his imagination. Indeed, there is a certain similarity between Susan's voice and that of the Witch:
.
'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'

'Well, 'tis pretty make-believe thou to say truth it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world. As for you, My Lord Prince, thou art a man full grown. Fie upon you! Art thou not ashamed of such toys."

Prince Rillian is saved by Puddlegum who tells him that even if the Witch is right "the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones." Whether anyone wakes up Susan, we don't know.

Susan's state of mind is also an an ironic inversion of that of Peter and the others. Peter has discovered that Narnia is "not really real"; in the sense that it is only a shadow or reflection of the real Narnia in Aslan's kingdom. Susan thinks that Narnia is "not real", in the sense that it is something made up or copied from the real world. For Peter, Narnia is "not real" because there is something more substantial above it; for Susan is is "not real" because it was only ever a fantasy. Susan thinks that Narnia was "just a story"; from the point of view of Aslan's country, our world and Narnia are both just the first page of a story which is now beginning.

You might compare Susan's and Peter's perspectives to the contrasting viewpoints of "allegory" and "symbolism" suggest by "Lewis" in "The Allegory of Love". The allegorist takes something in a story to point to something in the world outside the story. ("The dragon represents the Spanish Armada"). The symbolist takes something in the real world to point to something outside it, ("The Pelican is a symbol of God's love.") "To the symbolist, it is we who are the allegory."

Lewis's parable is intended to provoke a response. Parables often work like that. They don't so much instruct us try to provoke us into seeing the point for ourselves. We listen to this part of the story and say – don't be absurd. No-one, having run their hands through Aslan's mane, could possibly decide that they prefer parties. Yes they could, says the story teller – and every day people give up heaven for equally trivial reasons -- sex, booze, money, power...

Even readers who don't share Lewis's conviction that there is a source of "joy" outside of the material world can surely go some way with him on this point. Doesn't most of the human race spend most of its time giving away things which they know will make them happy in return for things which they know will not?

6: ....and Finally.

At the end of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", the Pevensie children are crowned kings and queens of Narnia. For many years, they govern it along Tory lines:

They made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being cut down, and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school, and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live....And they themselves grew and changed as the years passed over them."

Peter becomes a "deep chested man and a great warrior". Edmund is a "graver and quieter man". And as for Susan -- the Susan who Lewis wants to keep as an infantilised, asexual angel; the Susan who Lewis blames for wanting to look pretty and damns for becoming sexual:

Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet, and the king of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage.

Game, set and match, I think


A word from the author

Hello, fellow Narnians....

I wrote this essay more than a decade ago; it's by far the most-read thing I've ever written.

If you've enjoyed it, can I encourage you to have a look round the rest of this site. I'm currently writing an experimental commentary on Marks Gospel; before that I wrote about Spider-Man for two years!

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NOTES

(1) Genesis does not say that the Serpent is Satan; although certain New Testament passages imply that he is. Much depends, therefore, on the order in which you chose to read the books of the Bible.

(2) No, seriously. See "The Skeleton in the Wardrobe" by David Holbroke. This book also proves that Aslan is an unconscious portrait of the sadistic schoolteacher described in "Surprised by Joy". Oldie had a beard; Aslan has a mane. Q.E.D (I will grant you that "Pizzle" is the dialect term used in "Tess of the D'Urbevilles" to describe the "characteristic part" of a male pig.)

(3) If we go by the ages in the "Outline", then 13 would seem to be the cut off point: since Edmund and Lucy are 10 and 12 at the end of "Dawn Treader" when they learn that they are becoming too old to return to Narnia. (Peter and Susan, who missed that trip, are 14 and 15.) But this makes Eustace a full 4 years younger than Lucy, which is hard to reconcile with the rest of "Dawn Treader."

(4) My forthcoming book "The Cair Paravel Code" will conclusively prove that Lucy was Aslan's consort and the mother of his cubs.

What I did on my summer holiday (1)

Saturday morning -- The Cambridge Tolkien society are doing their dramatic reading (actually, a full scale performance with singing and sound effects) of highlights from the Brian Sibley radio adaptation of Lord of the Rings. We have got as far as Shelob's lair. And I'll need your star-glass Mr Frodo; you did lend it to me, and I'll need it, for I'll be always in the dark now... I glance around the audience to confirm I'm not the only person who appears (inexplicably) to have something in their eye.

Over the course of the convention, I think I attended a total of 33 (*) lectures on different aspects of Lord of the Rings. It is doubtless very interesting and important to learn about the root of the elvish word for 'tree', to wonder about the influence that Shakespeare or William Morris might have had Tolkien's writing; or to compare Melkor with Milton's Satan. (They were both evil. The end.) I am even prepared to own up to a little light filking. But it was nice to be reminded of why the 50^th anniversary of the publication of the Lord of the Rings is an event worth commemorating. Just how many books are there which, even on the twentieth reading, can still make you laugh and cry. Sometimes on the same page. Sometimes at the exact same moment. Now sir, you shouldn't laugh. I was being serious.

Saturday lunchtime -- Stagger out of Martin Barker's lecture on sociology, thinking 'I now have a spare hour to get some lunch.' Find printout pinned to door saying 'Extra talk: Michael Scott Rohan on Tolkien and Wagner.' It was that kind of weekend.

The root of the elvish word for 'Tree' is the same as the root of the elvish word for 'Light'.

Some people imagine Elvish to be an artificial language, the sort of thing that you could learn and have a conversation in, like Klingon and Esperanto. In fact, Tolkien left only a grammatical structure and a few hundred words of his made up languages. His primary interest was in philology. How language develop; how words form; how mythology informs language and language informs mythology.

(The award for 'lecture I understood least of' goes to the promisingly entitled 'Tolkien as I knew him', which turned out to be an elderly Swedish academic explaining the finer points of the Anglo-Saxon and middle English PhD that Tolkien had supervised him in. But it contained one fascinating scholarly anecdote: Tolkien met a French academic, and was able to say to him 'I expect in your dialect you pronounce such-and-such a word in such-and-such a way' -- purely by applying the rules of philology and sound change)

Within the mythos of the Silmarillion, 'the light that was before the Sun and the Moon' came from the Two Trees of Valinor: so of course 'tree' and 'light' are the same word... because they are the same concept. (c.f Gil-galad, star-light; Galadhrim, tree-people.) In a lecture entitled 'Galadhremmin Ennorath', John Christie pointed out that the images of 'trees' and 'light' are consistently connected in all of Tolkien's writings from the terribly early poems about Earendal down to the Lord of the Rings and beyond. And there is also an association between light and hair: (Galadriel's hair is said to resemble the light of the Two Trees) and between light and gems (Feanor captured some of the light of the Trees in the holy gems known as Silmarils). One example of the images appearing in conjunction occurs in Sam's song in Cirith Ungol – shortly after he has taken Galadriel's star-glass from Frodo:

Or there may be tis cloudless night
and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
amid their branching hair.

This kind of thing almost scares me. Lord of the Rings is so dense; Tolkien put so much into the book without drawing attention to it. In fact, he probably didn't 'put it in' at all: light and trees and hairs and jewels just come out together because he is thinking in Elvish. How much more of this stuff would there be to discover if I knew more Quenya?

Friday Night : The Cambridge Tolkien Society also revived their 'Reduced Silmarillion Company' revue, which was first performed at Oxonmoot in 2002. There are not too many social settings in which you could get uproarious laughter out of, say, the textual history of 'The Fall of Gondolin' while depicting the Silmarils as three cans of beer. The story of Beren and Luthien was done in pantomime style rhyming couplets, but it appears that some real lines from the 'Ley of Lethian' were smuggled in.

It was a lot funnier than I am probably making it sound.

But I wonder who had the brilliant idea of staging this satyr play first, and following it up with the Greek Tolkien society's extremely serious performance entitled either 'Oedipus and Turin' or 'Doom and Fate: where myths meet.' It will be remembered that both Turin and Oedipus marry a close family member, and both of them have a black sword, apart from Oedipus. I take my mithril coat off to the Greek people: can you imagine a group of Brits saying 'I know, when we go to the Athens Tolkien convention, we'll put on a play involving some excerpts from the Silmarillion and some excerpts from Hamlet. And in case that's too easy, we'll do it in Greek.' A fairly literal dramatisation of the last few pages of Turin's story made out a pretty good case for it structurally resembling a Greek tragedy (messengers coming in with terrible news and begging to be allowed to keep silent, and all that). The substantial excerpt from Oedipus Rex made better theater; presumably because Sophocles was a slightly better playwright than Tolkien. This successfully made the point about the difference between Doom and Fate. Turin marries his sister because the malicious dragon wants to harm in, and because Morgoth has cursed him. Oedipus marries his mother because...well, because life's like that and fate's a bastard.

But still, I felt sorry for the guy playing Turin. He walked onto the stage in a pretty good costume and started declaiming serious lines at a pasteboard dragon, and all anyone in the audience (well, me at any rate) could think of was the R.S.C version we'd seen ten minutes before in which Turin was depicted as an over-enthusiastic school-boy delivering lines like 'I know, I think I'll go forty leagues out of my way in order to commit a pointless act of genocide against a civilian population'!

Thursday: Inexplicably, all conventions have opening 'ceremonies'; equally inexplicably, people go to them. It's the only point at which all attendees are assembled in one place, and can be addressed by the convention committee. I'm glad I showed up this time. The 'one or two surprises' turned out to be a short speech by Priscilla Tolkien, the Professor's daughter. Priscilla sometimes feels a little like the Tolkien society's equivalent of the Queen Mother. At the Oxford conventions, the society committee is always very protective of her -- clearly, a very old lady doesn't want to be mobbed by fanboys, or more importantly, by journalists. According to tradition, I was briefly introduced to her at my first Oxonmoot, but it was nice to hear her make an actual speech, and even better, to hear her do a brief question-and-answer session in a packed lecture hall the next day. Not surprisingly, she politely avoided all controversial and scholarly questions -- but it was extremely moving to hear the little domestic details.

To think: we are actually in the same room as the little girl who first received the Father Christmas letters. All a bit overwhelming, really.

It appears that we have learned to stop worrying and love Peter Jackson.

Well, that may be an exaggeration. When we are consciously or specifically debating the movie, we are likely to be very critical of it. Priscilla told a story about having re-typed the early chapters of Lord of the Rings for her father, and being terrified to the point of nightmares by the Black Riders. Someone asked if she had seen the movies. With her very English (almost headmistressy) tact, she said that she would 'rather not go into that'. The questioner just wondered if she had still found the Black Rider's frightening in the film. 'Oh, good God no!' she exclaimed, adding something about 'spectacle and sensation'.

Thunderous applause.

On the other hand, Martin Barker gave a talk about a massive sociology project which he is involved with, researching the impact of and response to the movies. His statistics show that the more times someone has read the book, the more likely they are to like the movies. Applause from floor. 'I wonder why you applauded?' he asked.

Voice from floor: 'Because there is too much Jackson bashing!' More applause.

(He has also discovered that people who first read the book in the 1960s are more likely to miss Tom Bombadil than people who read it more recently...)

But in general, the movies seem increasingly to be accepted as another text; a fact to be taken into account, a piece of data that you need to refer to. An American academic talking about 'The theme of sacrifice' mentioned that Frodo says to Galadriel 'I know what I must do, it's just I'm afraid to do it'....and left the lecture room relatively unscathed. This would not have been the case three years ago. The aforementioned talk about light and hair used stills from The Fellowship of the Ring alongside texts from The Book of Lost Tales. A very helpful piece in the 'religion' stream pointed out that although a lot of the specifically Christian elements of the book vanished from Jackson's screenplay, the film retained a lot of very Catholic looking visuals. (The evenstar looks like a cross or a traditional star of Bethlehem; Minas Tirith looks like a cathedral; Aragorn's mum looks like a Madonna; and the Red Book looks like a Bible.)

People wishing to stay up all night had the opportunity to watch the extended versions of the movies on a projection TV. On Day 3, the sign outside the video room offered a 'prize for the best heckle'. So we obviously haven't all made friends with movies. Maybe it's more of a watchful peace.

(My entry in the clerihew competition failed to win a prize.

Elijah Wood.
Is not particularly good.
His fidelity to the text is not exactly slavish
But at least he isn't John Rhys-Davies. )

A film-studies lecturer gave a talk on a soft-porn movie called Lord of the G-Strings, and for the first time ever, the Tolkien society admitted the existence of slash fiction.

Saturday: That journalist was spot on about the way the audience spontaneously mumbled along with Tom Shippey when he quoted All that is gold does not glitter / not all those who wander are lost. This is called 'spotting a telling detail', and is, I guess, how one gets to write feature pieces for the Guardian.

I have often wanted to present certain of my colleagues with a diagram of a human figure, with two labels, clearly delineating the 'arse' and the 'elbow.' In the same way, certain academics seem to require recognition guides enabling them to clearly distinguish between 'wood' and 'trees'. A very interesting scholarly lecture made out a good case for the 'endless knot' or pentangle on the shield of Sir Gawain in the middle-English poem 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' which Tolkien edited and translated having been recognisable to medieval English people as a three-men's Morris board. (Pentangles engraved in church pews are therefore less likely to be pagan survivals and more likely to be a means of passing time in boring sermons.) Someone from the floor got in before me with the obvious question: 'Is it significant that Gawain has a game-board on his shield, given that playing games is so much what the poem is all about?'. 'That hadn't occurred to me' said Mr Speaker.

Mr Film-Studies Man was surprised that we laughed when he referred to a character called 'Ara-porn' in Lord of the G-Strings. 'It didn't really occur to me that this stuff was funny,' he said.

As the weekend progresses, I started to feel that I didn't need to hear any more about how Tolkien was influenced by, or the influence he may have had upon, Shakespeare, William Morris, G.K Chesterton, Phillip Pulman and a large number of people I had never heard of. I am also not sure that I need to be told that, say, the myth of the Ents and the Entwives in some ways resembles modern gender politics and in other ways doesn't.

One occasionally ended up feeling sorry for the academics. It must be rare enough for them to be addressing students who have actually read the text under discussion; and unheard of to have an audience who have all read it dozens of times. One speaker made the mistake of implying that Frodo only goes to the Undying Lands in spirit, and had to deal with quotes from the Silmarillion in the question and answer session. Another one asked how anyone could possibly know the Rhyme of the Ring, since it was spoken by Sauron on Mount Doom...and lots of people told him.

A ten year moratorium should be established on referring to Tolkien's metaphor of the 'soup of story' in lectures about sources and influence.

Most obscure subject for a talk: 'Middle-earth re-enactment in Estonia'.

Tolkien never quite made up his mind about Galadriel's back-story. In one version, Feanor asks for three strands of her hair (which, it will be remembered, resembled the mingled light of the Two Trees.) She refuses him. Centuries later, Gimli unknowingly makes the same request. Because of his courtesy, she grants it to him. He says that if he survives the War of the Ring, he will preserve the threes hairs in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of his house forever. At this point, Beth Russel, who was giving a talk entitled 'Galadriel and her lovers' speculated out loud; 'I wonder if he put them in one crystal, or in three.' I swear that there was a gasp of astonishment from the audience. Because, of course, three crystals, each containing a hair of Galadriel (which resemble the light of the Trees) would be an obvious symbol of the three Silmarils, which Feanor made, and which contain the actual light of the Trees. Given that Feanor made the Silmarils because Galadriel had refused him her hair, the symbolism is irresistible. I repeat. It scares me that Tolkien's legendarium (as we like to call it) has this much depth and complexity: that every time you study a passage, you find new connections which you hadn't spotted before.

'I bet there weren't any women there,' said a colleague by the water-cooler on Wednesday. Actually, I would have said the ratio of Ents to Entwives was very nearly 50/50; including married couples with kids; older looking people with grown-up children; aging hippies with scraggy beards; and someone with the badge-name 'Gramps.' On the other hand, despite the international flavour of the event it was, as the fellow said, hideously white. More people were inclined to begin sentences with '...at my church' or '...well, as a Christian, I...' than would probably be the case at a Star Trek convention. I was twice asked 'What's your field', expecting the answer 'What did you study at college?' not 'What's your job?'

Tolkien's books contain a lot of singing; and most of the songs have now got established tunes; I guess that everyone agrees the tune of Gil-Galad was an elven king is the one which Stephen Oliver wrote for it, despite that fact that someone demonstrated that it can be sung successfully to 'When the saints go marching in.'

At lunch time on the last day, there was an impromptu musical session in the canteen on the top floor. Some of it was more or less normal convention filking; Tolkien fans being as capable of silliness as anyone else. (Thar's been a courtin Pippin Took / On Ettenmoor bah t'at etc etc etc.) There's also been an outbreak of rather good Beatles filks which I sadly didn't get the words of. (All you need are rings, rings, rings are all you need.)

But before long, someone was doing a heartbreaking Bilbo's Last Song in a version I didn't know, and someone stood up and did In Western Lands un-accompanied.

The truth is, of course, that conventions are the normal and sensible part of life, and everything outside them is crazy. What could be more rational than an environment where everyone knows the same corpus of stories and wants to study them, talk about them, make up serious plays about, burlesque them, sing about them; where everyone can be assumed to be friends with everyone else because everyone loves the same things. It seemed rather a shame to have to go back to the weird fantasy world where you have to interact with people who don't love Lord of the Rings.

Quotes.

"The title of my talk is "Pennas Echuir Enydon", on the origin of the ents. Yes, I came all the way from America to show you my Pennas."

"Tolkien said that he cordially disliked allegory, which must have made writing Leaf by Niggle a very unpleasant experience for him."

"How is it that everybody says that they don't read slash, and then goes on to make generalisations about it?"

"I was doing some research into Star Trek fans....Don't laugh. People laugh at you."

"Well, he didn't like spiders, but I never heard him mention beetles..." (Priscilla, answering a question on Tolkien's attitude to the popular music of the 1960s.)

(*) Frodo as Sacrificial Hero; Tolkien: the critic and the fiction writer; Invented and Borrowed Myths; Tolkien and Williams; Wise Sayings in Lord of the Rings; Tolkien as I knew him; The Science of Lord of the Rings; Tolkien's lunar creation myth; Influence of Climate on myth; the loss of the Entwives; Tolkien's theory of reading; WWI and the passage of the Dead Marshes; Tolkien in Fiction; Tolkien and Oral Tradition; LOTR international audience project; Tolkein and Wagner; Peter Jackson and catholicism; Tolkien and Christianity; Satan and Melkor; An ecumenical approach to Tolkien; Tolkien the pagan; Tolkein Dirty: The Lord of the Rings and sexploitation movies; the Inklings in their political context; the Question of the Round Arda; Death and Mortality; 'Galadhremmin Ennorath; Sir Gawain's pentangle; Hobbit names aren' from Kentucky; They might have been giants (the origin of the ents) ; Snergs, Hobbits and Pygmies; Narratorial authority in Lord of the Rings; Tolkien and Shakespeare; Galadriel and Her Lovers; the Ace Copyright Affair; Tolkien in the 60s.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of Do Balrogs Have Wings?, which contains all my essays on Lewis and Tolkien, including some previously unpublished. Alternatively, please consider making a donation of £1 for each essay you have enjoyed.

I just realised that I haven’t written a review of Lord of the Rings in over a fortnight....

I learned one thing from watching the extended cut of Return of the King. Whatever else Peter Jackson may be, he is a very good editor. When he decides to consign something to the cutting room floor, the rest of the world should have the sense to leave it there.

The extended Fellowship of the Ring felt very much like, well, an extended Fellowship of the Ring. The same film, with a couple of new bits added. The opening “Bilbo does exposition” passage was a self-indulgent error, as was Sam’s recitation of his verse from “When evening in the shire was grey...”. But it was nice to get some back story about Aragorn’s mother, Beren and Luthien, and Elves going to the Grey Havens. The additional scenes also sorted out several point of internal continuity, such as “Why is everyone wearing elvish broaches in the second half?”

The extended Two Towers, on the other hand, was a very different film compared with the un-extended version. While most of my first order questions (e.g. “What the heck happened to Tolkien’s book?”) were left un-answered, most of my second-order questions, such as “What’s the deal with the horse?” were sorted out. The extended movie may not have had a great deal to do with the second volume of Lord of the Rings, but it did make sense on its own terms.

Digression.

One of the best bits of the extended Two Towers (hereafter X-TTT) is the flashback to Faramir and Boromir at the battle of Osgilliath. It is a very Good Thing to see Faramir and Boromir together as two brothers. (If they weren’t going to do a scene together, why not get Mr Bean to be do both roles?) It’s nice to see Denethor in a Daddy role to both of them. It established all the things we needed to know about the characters – Denethor is barking, Faramir and Boromir really love each other although they see each other’s faults; Denethor, quite unfairly, prefers Boromir. And it explains why Faramir speaks the line “A chance for Faramir son of Denethor Captain of Gondor to show his quality” as if it has some significance. (In the book, he’s quoting a remark made by Sam. In the theatrical Two Towers (T-TTT?) the line comes from nowhere and is pretty meaningless. But in X-TTT it turns out that he is remembering something his father said. Cool.) Of course, no such scene exists in the book, and arguably Denethor was never at Osgilliath. But that only demonstrates that you can be Very Faithful to Tolkien and still Make Stuff Up.

The X-TTT flashback shows Denethor sending Boromir to the Council of Elrond. This is also Good Thing. One of my complaints about FOTR was that none of the subsidiary members of the Fellowship are properly introduced. Legolas gets no back-story beyond “he’s an elf.” (Aragorn subsequently reveals that he comes “from the woodland realm” and Gimli calls him “a princling”, but that’s it.) So by all means, tell us how Boromir came to be at the Council. And ever skip over the “Seek ye the sword that was broken, at Imladris it dwells” part, if you like.

But, but, but, but, but.

In the flashback, Denethor already knows that Isildur’s Bane is a the One Ring; and he is specifically sending Boromir to Rivendell so he can bring it back to Gondor. This retrospectively changes Boromir’s character. The implication of the first film, as with the book, is that Boromir has major misgivings about the idea of destroying the Ring; but that he sincerely, albeit reluctantly, promises to fulfill the will of the Council, and in the end is tempted by the Ring and attacks Frodo. This new flashback implies that he was Denethor’s spy the whole time, under orders from Dad to pinch the Ring. When he promises that he will help Frodo go to Mordor; either he has his fingers crossed behind his back; or else he is consciously reneging on the promise he made to his father. This puts a whole different slant on the “Boromir picks up the ring in the snow” scene. He’s not a good man being tempted by the Ring’s intrinsic evil: he’s a hypocrite thinking “Should I obey Dad, or obey Elrond.” It means that Sam is largely mistaken when he tells Faramir that “He tried to take the ring from Frodo after he had sworn an oath to protect him.” It would have been more accurate if he had said “He tried to take the Ring from Frodo, because he had sworn an oath to his father to do so.” (Did Sean Bean know that this was his character’s motivation when he played out those scenes?)

Various people have compared Denethor with King Lear: both are old; both of them go mad; neither of them are blind; and both of them are Kings, except Denethor. But it occurs to me that the “mad-old-king who stupidly sends his good son away and puts his faith in his bad son” does have some resonance with the story of Lear and his daughters: more so with the Gloucester sub-plot. Is it possible that Tolkien had read Shakespeare?

End of digression. Back to Return of the King.

Nothing in X-ROTK radically changes the structure of the film. I was hoping that the extended version might clarify some of the grosser absurdities of the theatrical version, but I was mainly disappointed. The bit about “Arwen’s fate being tied to the ring” was gibberish in T-ROTK, and remains gibberish in X-ROTK. The new version adds a pointless scene in which Aragorn looks into the palantir and sees, first Sauron’s eye, and then Arwen lying mostly dead on the ground. I have no idea what this scene means. Neither, I imagine, does Peter Jackson. Some explanation must exist, because there is a bit in the trailer where Elrond says “You gave away your life’s grace...”, which was presumably going to tie Arwen’s illness back to her rescue of Frodo in FOTOR. But this doesn’t make it to either version of the movie. (Merry and or Pippin doesn’t ever get to say “We will see the Shire again!”, either.)

A couple of plot-lines are slightly fleshed out. There is an extra scene of Aragorn talking to Eowyn, which tends to confirm my impression that film-Aragorn is a bit of a cad. Book-Eowyn is basically living out an inverted courtly love story. She falls in love with someone far above her station; who is in any case promised to another: he does nothing to encourage her, but she pines and is devoted to him, until she finally transfers her love to someone else. Movie-Aragorn’s one true love has told him that she is sailing to the Undying Lands; and so he flirts with Eowyn on the rebound. He hears that Arwen has not left Middle-Earth after all and dumps Eowyn two minutes later. At least Faramir and Eowyn actually get to meet before falling in love, but the scenes are pretty perfunctory. It turns out that the wise women in the houses of healing like to have crap pop music playing in the background while they work.

Positively good scenes included a meeting between Faramir and Pippin; and a couple of scenes of Frodo and Sam in Mordor, including a quite affecting shot of them throwing their un-necessary gear into a crevasse. I was pleased to see Gandalf confront the witch-king, although I thought it was rather pathetic that they had to come up with an “action movie” motivation for it. (No scene can appear in a movie unless it represents an obstacle which the hero has to overcome. In the book, Gandalf blocks the Witch Kings way at the gate of the city. No obstacle for the hero. Bad. In the film, the Witch King blocks Gandalf’s way to Denethor’s funeral pyre. Obstacle for hero. Good. Is our view of story really so mindlessly simplistic?)

Tolkien-geek-Andrew was pleased to see Jackson’s miniatures team having a shot at visualising the broken statue of the king which Frodo and Sam see at the cross-roads. But movie-fan Andrew honestly wonder’s what it was there for. Frodo’s line about the king’s crown of flowers showing that the orcs cannot conquer forever is deleted, which, typically, seemed to remove the main point of the scene. Sam still gets to say “Look, the king has a crown again”, which begs the response “We can see that you fool.”

But an awful lot of the “new” scenes served only to slow down an already top-heavy film. I am really, really, sorry, Christopher: I know that you are fine actor, and that you speak fluent elvish, and might have been an opera singer if you’d had the Latin; I know that you once met the Professor personally and that Attack of the Clones wasn’t your fault -- but truly, Mr Jackson was quite right to cut your big moment. To begin Part 3 with death of the villain who was defeated in Part 2 does indeed feel tedious. Saruman’s death has no dramatic tension. In the book, the main point of Saruman is that his voice can bewitch people, so during the parley in the tower there is a real danger that he will corrupt the party – for a moment, those present think that Gandalf is going to go over to his side. This aspect of Saruman has almost vanished from the movie; so there is very little drama or threat in the scene. Nothing comes of it except that Saruman throws down the Palantir.

While Theoden and Saruman were shouting at each other, I half expected Saruman to reply “Now go away or I will taunt you a second time.” But the confrontation between Gandalf and the Mouth of Sauron was even more pythonesque. I take it that by “mouth”, Tolkien simply means “herald” or “spokesman”. Jackson decides, as ever, to take the text as literally as physically possible. Having interpreted “the eye of Sauron” as a huge glowy thing on top of the tower, he decide it would be a good thing to spend most of his time in extreme close up of the Mouth’s mouth, presumably so we can consider the results of failing to brush our teeth regularly with fluoride. The Mouth has a funny accent and a silly hat. It felt like a horrible hybrid of the Trade Federation from Phantom Menace, and Samuel Becket’s Not I. Of course, the parley with the herald at the gates of Mordor violates Jackson’s Second Rule: several seconds pass without anyone thumping anyone else. But Jackson has an ingenious solution to this problem. When the Mouth shows them Frodo’s mithril coat, Aragorn does what any chivalrous future-king would do under the circumstances, and chops his head off on the spot. Why oh why couldn’t the Mouth have said “Tis but a flesh wound, I’ve had worse” at this point? It would have been so much funnier than Gimli saying “Guess that concludes negotiations.” And humour is what you need at the climax of a twelve hour epic.

Ah, Gimli, Gimli, Gimli: a filmic catastrophe of Binksian proportions, undermining every, single scene he appears in. (Why the hell is he sitting in the stewards chair? Has he no respect for Faramir? Has Gandalf? Has Aragorn?) Yes, Peter Jackson, you were so, so right to cut out the “drinking competition” between Gimli and Legolas from T-ROK. What on earth possessed you to put it back in? When someone is drunk in a movie, why does it invariably happens that they say “I am perfectly sober” and then fall over backwards? Have you ever seen a real drunk behave like this? So why put it in your movie? It’s not big. It’s not clever. It sure as heck isn’t funny. Exactly the same cliché turned up in this years Vicar of Dibley Christmas Special, a programme which provided the final clinching argument for abolishing both the BBC license fee and the ordination of women.

Gimli is there, too in the extended build-up to the “Paths of the Dead” sequence. Spooky tendrils of mist form in the air and reach out to him, he blows very hard to disperse them, and they form again. He says “Ya-ya-ya-yoiks”, and Legolas throws him a Scooby Snack. He’s even there in the ruddy closing credits, making an anachronistic, vernacular “okay” sign. Showing his contempt for us all. Mocking us.

One could also mention the structural cock-up of showing us Aragorn boarding the Corsair’s ships, which served little purpose except to make his arrival at Minas Tirith a soupcon less dramatic. When he threatens to board them the pirate king says “You and whose army?” and Aragorn says “This army!” Making ancient world characters use modern turns of phrase is very funny in Carry on Cleo, here, it just gives the impression that you don’t give a shit.

Similarly, when Frodo tells Gollum that he swore on the Ring to obey him, the CGI sprite replies “Smeagol lied!” Does anyone want to enumerate how many movie-villains have made this joke over the last 20 years. (“But you promised.” “I lied”) If an oath taken on the Precious doesn’t mean anything to Smeagol, then a large chunk of the last 6 hours is rendered meaningless – Frodo wasn’t showing mercy to a pathetic character who was, at some level, trying “to be very good”, but being naively taken in by a conniving little liar. Which means that Frodo was wrong, straightforwardly, from the beginning, and Sam was right. Which totally undermines their characters. But who cares; it was a funny one liner. And funny one liners is what you need on Mount Doom.


Another thing which both increased and decreased my respect for Peter Jackson were the documentaries on the DVDs. I confess to only having ploughed through X-FOTOR so far. In the positive column, I was fascinated to learn about the massive amount of really thoughtful detail that had gone into the movies, asking questions like “What would Dwarfish weapons be like” and getting Tolkien experts and historians in to come up with good answers. But on the other – a slapdash disrespect for the world he is working with. Apparently, Alan Lee spent some weeks making sketches and models of what Moria ought to look like. But one of his sketches showed a hole in one of the stair-wells. Upon this hint, Jackson decided that there should be collapsing stairs, chasm leaps and, yes, dwarf tossing. None of which was in the original script.

“Make me the most detailed simulation of Moria you possibly can – and I’ll turn it into a sodding fairground ride, see if I don’t.”


People sometimes ask me why, if I feel this way about the movies, I watch them so carefully, so critically, and so, er, frequently.

The answer is rather obvious. Because of the good bits.


Has the idea of a camp parody of Lord of the Rings featuring Gandalf the Gay already been thought of? Is there at least a nightclub somewhere called the Gay Havens?

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