Our theme this year is
oikophilia, the love of home; but as Christians we know that “this world is not our home.” From the Sea-longing of the Elves to
Leaf by Niggle, from
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe to
The Last Battle, one of the things that we are constantly reminded of by the Inklings is that the longing that we feel when we read of and experience their sub-created worlds is really our longing for Paradise, as Lewis said, for Heaven.
And so, what I would like to do today is to offer three toasts, centered around three passages from the Inklings that have always particularly evoked the desire for heaven in me. The first one comes from
The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1, which is a collection of the earliest stories J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in Middle-earth, which would eventually become
The Silmarillion. One of the delightful things about this book is that it contains much poetry (you may have thought there was a lot of poetry in
The Lord of the Rings, but it’s nothing compared to his younger days). It’s my general opinion that Tolkien is seriously underappreciated as a poet (and perhaps if I come out to Eighth Day in future years, I’ll do something to remediate that), and one of his poems that evokes a longing for Paradise the most within me is one called the
Trees of Kortirion, which describes the trees of a city in Valinor as they turn and change with the seasons. There is also a poignant sense of loss here, because in this very early stage of development the Lonely Isle of Tol Erresea becomes England after the passage of ages, and even here the Elves are a fading folk.
Toast 1: Alalminore Beneath the Elms
O ancient city on a leagured hill!
Old shadows linger in your broken gate,
Your stones are grey, your old halls now are still,
Your towers silent in the mist await
Their crumbling end, while through the storeyed elms
The River Gliding leaves these inland realms
And slips between long meadows to the Sea,
Still bearing down by weir and murmuring fall
One day and then another to the Sea;
And slowly thither many days have gone
Since first the Edain built Kortirion.
Kortirion! Upon your island hill
With winding streets, and alleys shadow-walled
Where even now the peacocks pace in drill
Majestic, sapphirine and emerald,
Once long ago amid this sleeping land
Of silver rain, where still year-laden stand
In unforgetful earth the rooted trees
That cast long shadows in the bygone noon
And whispered in the swiftly passing breeze,
Once long ago, Queen of the Land of Elms,
High City were you of the Inland Realms.
Your trees in summer you remember still.
The willow by the spring, the beech on hill;
The rainy poplars, and the frowning yews
Within your aged courts that muse
In sombre splendour all the day,
Until the firstling star comes glimmering,
And flittermice go by on silent wing;
Until the white moon slowly climbing sees
In shadow-fields the sleep-enchanted trees
Night-mantled all in silver-grey,
Alalminor! Here was your citadel,
Ere bannered summer from his fortress fell;
About you stood arrayed your host of elms:
Green was their armour, tall and green their helms,
High lords and captains of the trees.
But summer wanes. Behold, Kortirion!
The elms their full sail now have crowded on
Ready to the winds, like masts amid the vale
Of mighty ships too soon, too soon, to sail
To other days beyond these sunlit seas.
The poem goes on to describe the turning of the trees through Narquelion or “Sun-fading,” that is the tenth month of the Elvish year, and then through Hrivion or “Winter,” and then finally to Mettanye “the ending”:
I would not find the burning domes and sands
Where reigns the sun, no dare the deadly snows,
Nor seek in mountains dark the hidden lands
Of men long lost to whom no pathway goes;
I need no call of clamant bell that rings
Iron-tongued in the towers of earthly kings.
Here on the stones and trees there lies a spell
Of unforgotten loss, of memory more blest
Than mortal wealth. Here undefeated dwell
The Folk Immortal under withered elms,
Alalminore once in ancient realms.
I cannot explain why this poem makes me think so much of heaven, except that perhaps, in Lewis’s words, “it creates within me a longing which nothing on this earth can fully satisfy.” This, then, is our first toast: to loss, to longing, to all of those things which remind us that this world is passing away, and that there is a place where the trees do not wither.
Toast 2: Leaf by Niggle
One of the most beautiful ideas that belongs to Tolkien is the idea that all of our creative endeavors in this life will have a place in the life of the age to come, even if that place is “as like and unlike” as we ourselves hope to be versus what we are now. This is an idea that he talks about in his famous essay "On Fairy Stories." But Tolkien is a better storyteller and poet than he is an essayist. One of the stories that most beautifully explores this idea is his short story
Leaf by Niggle. It is the story of Niggle, a perfectionist painter who is not very successful, partly because of his tendency (like Tolkien) to “niggle” at his work, and partly because he always ends up having to interrupt his work to help take care of his short-sighted, prosaic, grumpy neighbor by the name of Parish. Niggle’s great painting, alas unfinished, is a tree, of which eventually only a single leaf survives. In the end, both Niggle and Parish die, and Niggle passes through a painful purgatorial period in a hospital, followed by a workhouse, during which time the wounds of life are healed and the selfishness is worked out of him. Only then, they are sent to some sort of “valley of the shadow of life,” where the remainder of their work is carried out in a paradisical garden reminiscent of the place the shades visit in C. S. Lewis’s
The Great Divorce. But here, there is work to do.
In this garden, Niggle finds his own tree, the one he had spent his whole life painting—here it is completed, and real, and growing beyond his own imagination. But there is much work to do yet, and Niggle and Parish set to work together, ordering and beautifying, until the time comes for them to move on:
As their work drew to an end they allowed themselves more and more time for walking about, looking at the trees, and the flowers, and the lights and shapes, and the lie of the land. Sometimes they sang together; but Niggle found that he was now beginning to turn his eyes, more and more often, towards the Mountains.
The time came when the house in the hollow, the garden, the grass, the forest, the lake, and all the country was nearly complete, in its own proper fashion. The Great Tree was in full blossom.
"We shall finish this evening," said Parish one day. "After that we will go for a really long walk."
They set out next day, and they walked until they came right through the distances to the Edge. It was not visible, of course: there was no line, or fence, or wall; but they knew that they had come to the margin of that country. They saw a man, he looked like a shepherd; he was walking towards them, down the grass-slopes that led up into the Mountains.
"Do you want a guide?" he asked. "Do you-want to go on?"
For a moment a shadow fell between Niggle and Parish, for Niggle knew that he did now want to go on, and (in a sense) ought to go on; but Parish did not want to go on, and was not yet ready to go.
"I must wait for my wife," said Parish to Niggle. "She'd be lonely. I rather gathered that they would send her after me, some time or other, when she was ready, and when I had got things ready for her. The house is finished now, as well as we could make it; but I should like to show it to her. She'll be able to make it better, I expect: more homely. I hope she'll like this country, too." He turned to the shepherd. "Are you a guide?" he asked. "Could you tell me the name of this country?"
"Don't you know?" said the man. "It is Niggle's Country. It is Niggle's Picture, or most of it: a little of it is now Parish's Garden."
"Niggle's Picture!" said Parish in astonishment. "Did you think of all this, Niggle? I never knew you were so clever. Why didn't you tell me?"
"He tried to tell you long ago," said the man; "but you would not look. He had only got canvas and paint in those days, and you wanted to mend your roof with them. This is what you and your wife used to call Niggle's Nonsense, or That Daubing."
"But it did not look like this then, not real," said Parish.
"No, it was only a glimpse then," said the man; "but you might have caught the glimpse, if you had ever thought it worth while to try."
"I did not give you much chance," said Niggle. "I never tried to explain. I used to call you Old Earth-grubber. But what does it matter? We have lived and worked together now. Things might have been different, but they could not have been better. All the same, I am afraid I shall have to be going on. We shall meet again, I expect: there must be many more things we can do together. Good-bye!" He shook Parish's hand warmly: a good, firm, honest hand it seemed. He turned and looked back for a moment. The blossom on the Great Tree was shining like flame. All the birds were flying in the air and singing. Then he smiled, and nodded to Parish, and went off with the shepherd.
He was going to learn about sheep, and the high pasturages, and look at a wider sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill. Beyond that I cannot guess what became of him. Even little Niggle in his old home [his life on earth] could glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture; but what they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them.
This, then, is the second toast: Let us drink to the poor labors of our hands in this world under the sun, which are only shadows of what they may yet be in the great Kingdom of God. Let us drink to the Mountains, and to what lies beyond: our True and Final Home.
Toast 3: Further Up and Further In!
Our final toast for the day comes not from Tolkien, but from Lewis. As far as I am concerned, when we are speaking of Paradise—either of hope and expectation as Christians, or of our experiences of it now in the love of family, the fellowship of believers, and in the Body and Blood of Christ which are given to us as the fruit of the Tree of Life which grew in Paradise of old—there was no more eloquent prophet or witness in the days of my childhood than Jewel the Unicorn. Who among us can hear his declaration in the final pages of
The Last Battle without feeling his heart stir within him?
It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it, if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different—deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there, you will know what I mean.
It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed and then cried:
"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!"
This, then, is our final toast: Further up, and further in!
*Toasts presented at 2020 Inklings Microbrewery Walking Tour in Wichita, KS.
