The Forgotten Fiction of Roger Lancelyn Green: The 5th HogwartsProfessor Christmas Gift Guide by Chris Calderon
Roger Lancelyn Green is not a well recognized name. He’s neither a household word, nor can he be found on any ‘Best Of’ lists. It’s a sad fate for the man who might be responsible for giving C.S. Lewis the necessary encouragement to publish The Chronicles of Narnia. Green has become one of history’s victims, the kind Lewis meant when he observed: “At every tick of the clock, in every inhabited part of the world, an unimaginable richness and variety of “history” falls off the world into total oblivion”. This prompted the learned scholar to ask a very pertinent follow-up question: “Is there a discovered law by which important manuscripts survive and the unimportant perish? Do you ever turn out an old drawer…without wondering at the survival of trivial documents and the disappearance of those which everyone would have thought worth preservation?”
This entry of the HogPro Christmas Gift Guide is at least one attempt to try and rescue a bit of valuable history from oblivion. Here will be found the scattered writings Green made for children, as well as anyone who is willing to encounter a well told tale, no matter what age. In setting out to write this piece, it should be noted that I in no way meant to step on the toes of John Fitzgerald, whose work on Roger Green’s anthology of world myths can be found here at Bruce Charlton’s Albion Awakening, a blog more than worth a look. I will use some of the info gleamed from those volumes, however, the books dealt with here are different from those works.
With that in mind, let’s take the plunge, shall we? [Read more…]
Recent Conversation