Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
HogwartsProfessor.com Deputy Headmistress and C. S. Lewis scholar Elizabeth Baird-Hardy joined Keith Hawk and myself for another look at the influence of C. S. Lewis on Joanne Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. The occasion? The 50th anniversary observances of the Narnian’s death in 1963.
For more on that, our sister site, TheHogsHead.org, is hosting a month long discussion of this topic! Enjoy the podcast above and the posts!
I don’t get to see that many movies in the theater, although I do serve as our Hogwarts Film-Fancier in Chief. Now that we’re done with new Harry Potters and Twilight films (at least until the inevitable re-boots), I’m patiently waiting for Catching Fire this fall, but I did recently get to catch Star Trek into Darkness. I am an unabashed Star Trek fancier as well, having really enjoyed writing “Shakespeare (and the Rest of the Great Books) in the Original Klingon” for the newly released Star Trek and History. Though I enjoyed the film very much, I noticed that it was loaded with plenty of wonderful allusions to other pieces of the Star Trek universe, but somewhere along the way, had lost one of the most important features of that universe: its deft use of literary allusions. So join me in the transporter room as we beam around the beautiful and complex world of literary allusions and think about why it’s so troubling that we see them less and less these days, in both books and films, or that people don’t recognize them when they see them. Energize!
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My apologies for the lag time in posting; my excuse is talks I’m prepping or giving, applications I’m filling out, and Muggle work to pay the rent. As I’m beginning a seven week adventure in Monday night talks about each of the Chronicles of Narnia the first day of April — and I keynote the Potter watch 2013 and MISTI-Con fan conventions in that time frame, I’m afraid it isn’t going to get much better soon.
Having said, here is a note sent me today by a ‘Chris C’ that merits our attention, especially those of us neck deep in the Narniad:
Dear Mr. Granger,
I’m writing in concern about something interesting related to Michael Ward’s brilliant Planet Narnia.
In that book, Ward mentions a theologian named Austin Farrer, a friend of C.S. Lewis’s, and Farrer’s book, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse.
I bring it up, because curiosity killed the cat and I decided to look into what a friend of the Inklings had to say. What I discovered was basically that both Lewis and Dante weren’t the first authors to write about the “Seven Heavens”. It appears St. John, or rather Someone, beat both Lewis and Dante to the punch, and in a way even more “Inspired”, let’s say.
Perhaps the greatest lower case “revelation” (pardon the pun) of Farrer’s book is that it lays bare the “architechtural” foundations of St. John’s scripture and theology, especially in it’s relation to Jewish ideas of “The Temple”.
To give a very brief and inadequate summary: Farrer’s argument is that Revelation is structured around the Jewish calender of feasts and ceremonies, starting (I think) from the Jewish New Year, followed by Passover, then Tabernacles, Dedication, and once more back to New Year, structured as a kind of Ultimate Holy Week, in which the feasts and sacred days are revealed as a kind of pattern of Divine Providence written into the very fabric of the cosmos itself.
Also, like Dante and Lewis, St. John weaves the Seven Planets into the structure of his book, I think in a kind of guidepost or clock-like way, I’m not certain. [Read more…]
Last year, I had the great honor of writing the preface for a new and fascinating book by a delightful scholar. Unfortunately, since I wrote the Preface, it might be in poor taste for me to write the glowing review I would like post so that everyone would check out this fantastic contribution to Lewis Studies. So instead, I recruited my friend and fellow Narnian, the brilliant Ralph Lentz, to review the book. He produced this amazing essay, which I am proud to share. I believe his talents may be just as useful in English as they are in the History Department. We may steal him yet. Enjoy!
Reclaiming the “Discarded Image”:
Monika B. Hilder’s The Feminine Ethos in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia
A Theological Review by Ralph E. Lentz II, Appalachian State University
C. S. Lewis wrote, by his faith and his studies, from a pre-Modern thought-world that was not schizophrenic—from a world that did not divide faith and reason, the natural and supernatural, fact and value. As a Medievalist, Lewis had digested the Whole, from Thomas Aquinas’ notion that grace perfects nature, to Nicholas of Cusa’s idea of the “coincidence of opposites.” In her brilliant new book The Feminine Ethos in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (Peter Lang, 2012), Monika B. Hilder reveals Lewis’s dedication to this pre-Modern, orthodox Christian vision of an integrated world of beautiful paradox. And, following Lewis, she does it in a wonderfully imaginative and subversive way by focusing on what she calls “theological feminism” (12, et passim.). Through her analysis of all seven books of the Narnia series, Hilder demonstrates how Lewis, far from being chauvinist and misogynistic (as some critics have charged), actually challenges the pagan conception of power based on force and the twisted image of sexuality that it supports. In contrast, Lewis’s use of “theological feminism” points to “another City”[1] where the “sword between the sexes” has been cast away, and where the contraries of Male and Female can become one without confusion or contradiction (cf. Genesis 2:24). A model of careful analysis, comprehensive scholarship, and eloquence, the book itself merits a substantial review—particularly in light of its theological implications. Hence the purpose of the present essay.
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22 November 1963 was the day an extraordinary trio of men died: US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, philosopher and apologist C. S. Lewis died of kidney disease at the Kilns, and novelist Aldous Huxley expired high on LSD at the end of his battle with laryngeal cancer. Peter Kreeft‘s novel Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley is the story of their meeting in Purgatory to discuss issues of faith.
So what? Well, if you’re a C. S. Lewis fan, it was announced today that he will be honored on this date next year, the 50th anniversary of his death, with a stone in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. With Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Browning, Eliot, Tennyson, and a few other pikers.
Today is also the day that Harry is out of bounds late at night under the Invisibility Cloak seeing the dragons the Champions will face in the first TriWizard Task and meeting with Sirius Black between midnight and 1 am via the Flew Network in the Gryffindor Common Room. The chapter is ‘The Hungarian Horntail’ which is the center chapter of the fourth and central novel of the seven book series. I discuss this at greater length in my Goblet of Fire lecture (which you can see anytime you like!), but the fun part of it is just noting that, at the half way point in the series, Ms. Rowling sets the date and time as 11/22 (or 22/11, UK fashion) between 12 and 1 (12-1).
If you don’t see the pivot picture there in the numbers, ask a friend or, better, watch the ‘Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Goblet of Fire’ talk.
Happy Thanksgiving, All Pros!
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