C. S. Lewis, the Inklings, and Others

Christian Mythmakers: C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle,
J. R. R. Tolkien, George Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton, and Others
By Rolland Hein
Cornerstone Press Chicago, 1998
(303 pages, $14.95, paperback)

reviewed by David L. Neuhouser
republished by permission from
Wingfold (http://pages.prodigy.net/b_amell/wingfold1.html)

Rolland Hein has given us a good introduction to myth and Christian mythmakers. Although myth is hard to define, a foreword by Clyde S. Kilby, founder and first director of the Wade Center at Wheaton College, and an introduction by Hein give a good working knowledge of the word as used by C. S Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and George MacDonald. Kilby points out that because of the finitude of man and language, statements cannot hold all of reality. Through imagination stories can be created which become mythic. So, although myth cannot be defined, it “is a cosmic pattern which permeates man by some osmotic chemistry. Myth is one of the few means by which to understand and possess the blue flower, Sehnsucht, infinitude.” Hein states that

“We are concerned in this study not with ancient mythologies as such, but with what is better identified as mythopoeia: stories that are composed in time, but which suggest (however dimly) something covert but eternally momentous... Those who react [to a story] with a pause and catch of breath, as though something ‘of great moment’ has been conveyed, are encountering the dynamic of myth... It is not so much that they receive a message, but rather that they seem to have a fleeting contact with some remote unbroken world...”

Or, as MacDonald said at the end of The Wise Woman or the Lost Princess, “it is enough for those whom it has made look a little solemn and sigh as they close the book.”

The book has a chapter on each of John Bunyan, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. The last chapter is about four contemporary writers, Madeleine L’Engle, Walter Wangerin, Robert Siegel, and Hannah Hurnard. Lewis and MacDonald considered Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to be allegory instead of myth. and probably would have considered Hurnard writings as allegory also. However, Hein believes that, although they are allegories, they baptized their allegories in myth.

MacDonald is referred to more than any other writer, with the possible exception of Lewis. Hein shows the influence of MacDonald on most, if not all, of the other authors. He quotes Lewis “MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind [mythmaker] whom I know.” Hein says that MacDonald’s “mythopoeia demonstrates an imaginative reach towards Truth, achieving a splendid literary consummation.” The individual works examined in the MacDonald chapter are Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, The Golden Key, and Lilith.

Hein does a good job of showing the interrelationships between the various writers and how myth is one of the strongest cords connecting them. For example, he tells about how Lewis as a teenager, “Encountering [Phantastes’] mythic quality initiated the change in his life that culminated years later when, on a memorable night at Magdalen College, J. R. R. Tolkien convinced Lewis that myth was the very language of truth, and he was soon converted.”

Two useful features at the end of the book are a glossary and a selected bibliography. This book is a fitting way for Hein to share his insights into Christian mythmakers gained through his years of teaching literature at Wheaton College.

David L. Neuhouser is Director of the Center for the Study of C. S. Lewis & Friends, Taylor University
( http://www.taylor.edu/academics/supportservices/cslewis/)