Influences On The Work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien

press release: 

Saturday, September 23, 2017, 10am-4:30pm, Upper|House, 365 E Campus Mall #200

$10 at the door (lunch on your own)

contact Sharon Redinger, 608-256-6282

Sponsored by the C.S. Lewis Society of Madison, The Bradshaw/Knight Foundation and the Tolkien and Fantasy Society at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Planet Narnia: C.S. Lewis and the Seven Heavens.

by Michael Ward

Though Lewis is best-known for the Chronicles of Narnia, he was not professionally a writer of fiction, but rather a literary critic and historian who specialised in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. His longest academic work, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, opens with a discussion of the ‘new astronomy’ brought in by Copernicus.  His last academic work, The Discarded Image, closes with a detailed discussion of cosmological models.  If we are to understand Narnia correctly, we need to pay close attention to Lewis’s fascination with pre-Copernican cosmology and in particular the imagery of the seven heavens, which he described as “spiritual symbols of permanent value”.  In this lecture, Dr. Ward, drawing upon his best-selling and award-winning book, Planet Narnia, shows how the Chronicles are structured to embody and express these seven spiritual symbols.

Michael Ward is a Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, England and Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University, Texas.

Tolkien's Modern Sources: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages.

by Holly Ordway

Tolkien is widely regarded as a man steeped in medieval literature and language; this is indeed true, but his biographers, critics, and readers have often focused so closely on his medieval-mindedness as to miss the fact that he was also deeply engaged with the modern world - in some ways even more so than his friend and fellow Inkling, C.S. Lewis. Similarly, the common view of Tolkien is one of an isolated writer, impervious to influence - but recent scholarship has shown that this, too, is an oversimplification. In this lecture, Dr. Ordway presents a case for Tolkien as a richly complex figure whose creative work we can better appreciate and more fully understand if we recognize his interaction with modern sources and influences. Holly Ordway is professor of English and faculty in the M.A. in Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.