For the Feast of the Holy Theophany, I wrote a post concentrating on the references to ‘crushing the heads of dragons’, and the connection between such language and Beowulf. Well, I was unable to post anything else that day, due to non-blogging-oriented obligations, and the next day I was simply forced to post in Dr Johnson. Anyway, I’ve finally gotten around to a post I’ve been planning for some time: ‘Apropos of Dragons’.
It’s simple, really. I mean to relate one of my favourite anecdotes of all time. The speaker is J.R.R. Tolkien, telling a story he heard from C.S. Lewis. The source I first read it in was Humphrey Carpenter's wonderful The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 58, although it can also be found in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 389.
It’s simple, really. I mean to relate one of my favourite anecdotes of all time. The speaker is J.R.R. Tolkien, telling a story he heard from C.S. Lewis. The source I first read it in was Humphrey Carpenter's wonderful The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 58, although it can also be found in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 389.
I remember him [Lewis] telling me a story of Brightman, the distinguished ecclesiastical scholar, who used to sit quietly in Common Room (in Magdalen) saying nothing except on rare occasions. Jack [i.e., Lewis] said that there was a discussion on dragons one night and at the end Brightman's voice was heard to say, ‘I have seen a dragon.’ Silence. ‘Where was that?’ he was asked. ‘On the Mount of Olives,’ he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.I for one can picture the entire scene in my mind—thanks in large part to the painting reproduced on p. 36 of C.S. Lewis: Images of His World, by Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977)—, and I'll never stop wishing I had been born 60 or 70 years earlier than I was just so I could have been there. The ‘Brightman’ mentioned was Frank Edward Brightman (1856-1932), a C of E liturgist who had gotten a First in Mathematical Moderations, Literae Humaniores, and Theology. He was an ordained Anglican cleric and librarian of Pusey House prior to his Magdalen fellowship. I found all of this here. Here’s one of Brightman’s books.
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