Shadowlands
starring Anthony Hopkins
and Debra Winger
Posted on 11/10/2004 10:10:41 PM PST by LadyDoc
IT was a friendship that thrived on a complex fantasy world, created in an English pub, that produced some of the most memorable literary characters ever written. Now a new film by a Scottish-based director will celebrate the real-life fellowship of two literary giants, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.
CS Lewis: The Man Who Created Narnia aims to ride a wave of interest in Lewis that is anticipated to accompany the rel ease in 2005 of up to seven films based on his Narnia novels. .....
Norman Stone’s 54-minute drama, which starts shooting in Oxford this week, is a more modest affair. The film, being made for the Hallmark Channel will follow Lewis’s life from his troubled childhood to his fantasy workshops with Tolkien in an Oxford pub, where he dreamed up his Chronicles Of Narnia. ....
The film will also feature Lewis’s meetings with Tolkien and their much-derided fellow fantasy enthusiasts at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford.....
The screenplay has been written with the assistance of Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s step son. Stone has also asked for the guidance of Lady Jill Freud, who was one of four children who spent time as a second world war evacuee living in Lewis’s house in Head ington, just outside Oxford. The Chron icles are thought to have been partly written for and inspired by these children, who feature as Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter.....
this is an excerpt, so go to the link for the entire story...
The Parlours of the time must have been fascinating.
They also had Great Thinkers of every stripe, even athiests (I can't remember which ones hung out there with CS and JRR). Such a heady time. Such ability to think, reason (see "Mere Christianity" for fabulous logic).
How sad, we nowadays can't even construct a proper sentence, much less do actual intellectual swordplay.
Thank you.
Shadowlands
starring Anthony Hopkins
and Debra Winger
BTW, If you're interested in the ontological and epistemological dimensions of a serious (series) treatment of one of Lewis's most interesting conjectures, check this out: C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason . It's worthwhile.
don't get too discouraged. Lots of kids are home schooled. My 11 year old nephew is reading the LOTR...many of the words are unfamiliar, so he reads it with a dictionary and notebook...
And he already read the Narnia series.
Dan
Biblical Christianity web site
Biblical Christianity message board
Home schooling won't solve the problem. The culture itself is losing the capacity.
Ah, but it only takes a remnant with faith and gravitas to change a culture. I'm old enough to remember Goldwater's defeat. But Buckley and Reagan kept the idea of conservatism alive...
I also, although if you're old enough to remember that, you're also old enough to know that Buckley and his stalwarts at National Review predated Goldwater by a decade. Goldwater wasn't really temperamentally suited to soothe people's irrational fears of conservatism, as Reagan was. Buckley gets far too little credit here at FR. Had it not been for him "standing athwart history, and yelling 'Stop!'", there might be nothing but cinders left of the West.
Apart from that digression, I hope you're right. What passes for gravitas in the contemporary culture of "intellectuals" is depressing to say the least. A historical perspective probably gives some hope; Tolkien and Lewis undoubtedly felt the same way. "Well Tollers, if they won't write what we like anymore, we'll just have to write it ourselves," Lewis once said. Even in this present darkness, a great many people preferred what they--especially Tolkien--wrote, after all.
I have that DVD from Netflix. Haven't watched it yet, though.
One of my favorite non-LOTR books by Tolkien is his edited book of letters, letters selected by Christopher Tolkien, I believe. It's just fascinating to read them--though they left a lot out that concerned his wife, Edith, which would have been even more interesting . Tolkien seems to have been rather cranky, and did not much appreciate Lewis or Lewis's works. Lewis just adored Tolkien and every word he wrote. I think it may have had to do with the family pressures that JRRT was under, whereas Lewis didn't marry until late in life and after his marriage to Joy didn't seem to have much to do with JRRT anymore. JRRT in his letters is a Great Soul--but a grumpy soul, too.
I agree. I love Tolkien's letters, which I didn't buy for years since I thought they would be useless. But they are wonderful...
Tolkien was quieter than Lewis...they were great friends but in the mid 1940'a, according to Tolkien's biography, Lewis was influenced by Charles williams, and Tolkien didn't appreciate Williams type of fiction, so the friends gradually drifted apart...
In some ways it is sad, but unless the very private Tolkien family allows more published, we won't know the details, nor the details of Edith's frustrations as a wife and mother...the entire family seems to be touchy about privacy...since Christopher edited his father's letters, it is a blessing we know as much as we do.
Bring Kleenex. Mucho Kleenex.
I'll also take a couple of Advil before I watch it to stave off the crying headache!
Yep, I was going to suggest that, too.
It's a wonderful movie, but one I'll have to wait a few more years before re-watching. Just a bit too close to real life for me right now.
The Hopkins movie seemed to go out of it's way to present an ambiguous picture of Lewis's faith, as if he wasn't really sure of it. He was.
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