A Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

A Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England
© 2014 Ian Mortimer
415 pages

Previously Ian Mortimer has offered readers with access to a time machine a handbook for medieval England. Perhaps mystery plays based on Scripture are not your interest, however, and you'd prefer dining with a little more variety. Come then to Elizabethan England, where the secular theater is in its ascendancy, and the rising merchant marine is bringing the world's produce to English plates. The Elizabethan era is commonly thought of as a golden age for England, between its triumph over the Spanish Armada and the appearance of luminaries like Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson.   Mortimer warns curious travelers, however, that this is still not an age for the cautious:  death  by disease, crime, war, or the law are never too far away, and Elizabeth's crown is so questioned that "Gloriana" must rule with a firm hand, using a zealous secret service keeping tabs on the population and dealing with those who would foment rebellion.

Although Mortimer breaks from his faux-guidebook style (regarding it as contrived if repeated), he still covers the whole of everyday life in England during its 16th century.  Covered at length are dress and occupations, architecture, law, and the evolution of the theater and literature. Material from the previous book which is still in effect - -the feudal ordering of society, for instance -- is  recapped but not plumbed in full again. Mortimer is forced by Elizabeth to focus an entire chapter on religion,  given that the legal union which gave her birth and rule was a religious and political controversy that led England to break from the Church, and cost many men their heads, from the noble to the base.  (Mortimer still focuses on the political aspects of religion, however, with little on religious practice;   it remains more of a background than a subject considered in full. I thought this was odd in a book on the medieval period, and it's still odd.)

As much interest as there in in the lives of those gone on, and of the structures they created which we still use, I also appreciated Mortimer's general appraisal of the age. He is strikingly empathetic of his medieval subjects, including those in an age which is not quite medieval but definitely not industrial-modern, and conveys this to the reader well. He gives the people who breathed and died in this age their full consideration -- sharing their verse and graffiti, imagining the smells and sights,  putting readers into their heads so that we may read the landscape as they did. To them, hills and rivers were not a Windows XP wallpaper, but places to keep the sheep that kept them alive, and the best transportation away.   Mortimer's final appraisal is that as dangerous and uncertain as their lives could be, we see in the Elizabethan age a growing self-confidence -- one that saw men throw themselves into the unknown expanse of the oceans in search of new lands and possibilities, and one that allowed intellectual knowledge to definitely surpass the aura of classical learning. Despite the perils and problems of the age, it  was also one of hope and ambition, one that spurred England to become the greatest maritime power yet seen.

Oh, earlier in the week Ian Mortimer did an "ask me anything" thread on reddit, inviting questions from the public. He answered questions on his sources, inspirations, etc.

Related:
The Life of Elizabeth I, Alison Weir
The Age of Faith and The Reformation, Will Durant
The works of Frances and Joseph Gies

The Birth of Britain

History of the English Speaking Peoples, Vol 1: The Birth of Britain
521 pages
© 1956 Sir Winston Churchill

I've been reading from Sir Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples the last few Read of Englands, but didn't previously have access to the first volume in the series.   The Birth of Britain covers the most storied aspect of British and English history, beginning with the invasion of the island by Rome and continuing to the end of the Hundred Years War.  We begin, then, with an island at the "end of the world" being invaded and connected to continental civilization, and developing through until at the end of the long conflict with France, England is again its own sceptered isle,  left to chart its own course. Although Celtic, Roman,  and Anglo-Saxon Britain all receive full attention here, most of the really memorable characters appear after the arrival of William the Bastard, the Duke of Normandy whose conquest of England would create a loosely bound cross-channel  empire -- later made greater by one of the Bastard's progeny marrying a French princess and creating the Angevin Empire. More than once, however, Churchhill comments that the Angevin realm was not a coherent state at all, but a loose collection of several with their own laws. The evolution of English law, and particularly the common law and the conviction that no one was above the law -- not tven the king --  is an important theme of Churchill's work,  and along with it is the rise of Parliament.  Not surprising given that Churchhill researched and wrote this amid the anticipation and then memory of World War 2, antagonism toward England's favorite enemy, France, is minimal, and Joan of Arc is celebrated just as Boudica is.   Churchill's skillful oratory still translates into historic narrative here.

I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack

Hello, dear readers! For the past week I've secretly been running around northern Arizona, leaving you with some scheduled posts in my absence.  I'm afraid I've read sod all in the last week, as after busy days hiking in the Grand Canyon and such I tended to collapse into bed around eight pm. If I read anything at all, it was only while eating or nursing old fashioneds in Flagstaff's downtown hotels.  I've got mounds of photos to process and sort, and will be sharing them in the days and weeks ahead. Expect comments for Churchill's first volume in his History of the English Speaking Peoples fairly soon, and then I'm on to A Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England. Hurrah!    I'll be sharing photos and such in the days and possibly weeks to come, but in the meantime here is a sneak peek.

Grand Canyon!

Hoover Dam!

Walnut Canyon!

Painted Desert!

Pretty Flagstaff!

A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War

A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and a Great War
© 2014 Joseph Loconte
256 pages

When some future Gibbon writes of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, he will have to devote a great deal of attention to the Great War.  However more numerous the deaths of its daughter, the Great War’s damage was more foundational, destroying as it did not only an entire generation of young men and leveling empires, but in derailing the western dream of unstoppable progress.  Western faith in itself and its ideals was fractured, and more damage would follow in the decades to come. The generation that followed was understandable cynical and lost, believing in nothing and pursuing only fleeting pleasures; a war opened with religious zeal ended in despair.  A Wardrobe, a Hobbit, and a Great War  examines the lives and work of two young men who fought in the war, but who survived it with their spirits intact -- who neither entered it as a crusade, or came out of it as jaded warriors.

The book is effectively a brief history of the war as experienced by Lewis and Tolkien, expressed as a two-part biography  that focuses on how the war shaped their writing.  The primary difficulty in supporting the authors' thesis, that Tolkien and Lewis developed ideas about heroism amid their war experience and later applied it to the worlds and stories they later created, is that neither man wrote a great deal about their war experiences.  What few references exist in their letters from the time, and their recollections later, are connected by Jenkins to passages or themes in their stories: Lewis' descriptions of combat in his own life and the depiction of the same in his Narnia stories; Tolkiens' description of Mordor and the corpse-filled bog around it are connected to the horrifying spectacle that was a trench warzone -- where men lived among the dead and the engorged rats that fed on them, sometimes seeing past battles' dead unearthed by artillery strikes.

Loconte's general thesis is that Lewis and Tolkien both rejected the 'myth of progress', that society was growing Better and that men were evolving to become superior beings. They did not counter this with a theory that things were growing worse, but rather shared the conviction of GK Chesterton that things simply were, that the nature of fallen man was such that he could never become anything  new-- he only exist to make his choices day by day, for good or ill.  Heroism, as described by Jenkins and illustrated through the Narnia and Middle Earth novels,  meant ever pushing to do the right choice, even when it was not easy, wise, or safe.

Ultimately, I don't know that there's enough evidence to support the authors specifically being inspired by the war to create the kinds of stories they did. However, I also don't know if there's an upper limit to how much I can read about Tolkien and Lewis, because they were old fogeys in their own time and thereby my countrymen. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

Further Up and Further In

Further Up and Further In: Understanding Narnia
© 2018 Joseph Pearce
200 pages

”The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets.” - The Last Battle

Christendom and Narnia are never far removed from one another, and in Further Up and Further In, Joseph Pearce takes us through the thin veil between them. He pores over the literary and theological references that deepen the world of Narnia, relying on his previous research into the life of Lewis, as well as his work on Lewis’ influences, Tolkien and Chesterton. Both are companions not just of Lewis, but of the reader here, as the three dwelt in the same moral and literary universe.

Most anyone who has visited Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe realizes its Christian connection. Aslan’s deliberate self-sacrifice to destroy the power of Death and revive not only Narnia, but redeem the withered soul of young Edmund, makes that obvious -- as does the Garden of Eden story seen in The Magician’s Nephew where the same white witch leads to the corruption of Narnia seven hours into its creation. And if anyone was missing the point, then in Voyage of the Dawn Treader Aslan explicitly tells the children that he is known by another name in their world, and that they were brought to Narnia so that they would know him better there.

Although Pearce expands on the multitude of links to Christian culture -- Aslan’s repeated use of “I am”, a la God’s reply to Moses in the desert, his treble use of the same phrase and other sets of three to bring to mind the Trinity, and so on -- Pearce also understands Lewis as a man deep in history, and particularly in medieval history. He points out Lewis’ allusions to other figures, like El Cid and Charlemagne, based not on dry history but on legends about these men, like “The Song of Roland”. Commentary stretches to the modern age, too, as Pearce points out how Eustace Scrubbs’ parents are caricatures of George Bernard Shaw, who loved “humanity” but disliked most people, and believed in progress for its own sake, rather than people for theirs.

More than anything else, Pearce shines a light on the moral universe that was Lewis’ made ‘physical’ in the land of Narnia. There delivered were his convictions about heroism and temptation, of the self-defeating nature of evil, of the dignity of creatures both great and small, both simple and clever. In The Magician’s Nephew we see condemned the will to dominate; in Voyage of the Dawn Treader we experience again Tolkien’s “dragon sickness”, the madness brought on by fixating on materials -- gold, in Eustace’s case, and secret knowledge in Susan’s. Each book has its lessons, and those who have experienced Narnia’s story and loved it will almost surely appreciate his look deeper into the wardrobe.

The Letters of CS Lewis

Letters of C.S. Lewis
© 2017 Harper Collins
Edited by Warren Lewis and Walter Hooper
688 pages

After the death of his younger brother, Warren Lewis released a collection of his letters for posterity’s sake. Perhaps it was to repay a debt, as Jack spent much of his adult years trying to keep Warren from drinking himself to death. The collection is rather a selection, a sampling of Lewis’ vast correspondence that reveals his captivity by literature, his wrestling with ideas, his debates and warm exchanges with friends. The original edition produced by Warren included his active mark as an editor, with improvements to word choice;  this edition by Lewis’ secretary Walter Hooper presents the original. It also incorporates excerpts from Lewis’ diary where correspondence was slight, as well as editorial comments in brackets to provide context for particular letters. 

Casual Lewis fans who are expecting something like Surprised by Joy will be in for more work than they anticipate, because the first half of this is a bit of a slog, really.  It’s tremendously helpful if you’re writing a paper on Lewis and want to incorporate something like first-hand sources,  but it’s lots of minutiae: Lewis talking about outings with friends, or going on and on and on about the virtues of taking this approach in school rather than that approach, and the English uni system at that time bewilders me -- it’s almost medieval, with students seeming choosing day by day if they want to go to this lecture by Dr. Waugh or that lecture by Dr. Granthum. The Great War is curiously muted, with the exception of its effect on Oxford. Even when Lewis is deployed in France, he mostly writes about books. 

Lewis is most famous for his reluctant conversion to Christianity, and thereafter becoming one of the foremost defenders of Christianity in the modern age until his death in November 1963 -- a death overshadowed by another Jack the same day --  but these letter don’t reveal much about his conversion. An early Lewis comments to his friend that of course all religions are alike, just made-up stories, and a later Lewis dashes off to his friend that some metaphysical concept in his head is quickly becoming rather like God, and if something isn’t done quickly he’s going to find himself in a monastery.  And then he’s a bestselling author and receiving letters asking for religious and personal advice.   This familiar Lewis enters about halfway through the volume, and then religious discussion mixes with the usual literary stuff and social banter.

If one only knows Lewis as the author of beloved stories and apologia, the letters here reveal the more human one -- and a very long suffering one.  He spends much of his adulthood caring for the mother of a friend who perished in the Great War (they’d promised the other that in the event of their dying, the survivor would look after the other’s parent);   once she passes, he has an alcoholic brother and a cancer-stricken wife to tend to. The few years of his marriage were among his happiest, however, and a brief respite from her pain allowed them both to visit Greece. He writes to a friend that the ancient splendor had him worried he might become a pagan once more and pray to Apollo.

I for one find “Jack” to be extremely pleasant company, with the effect that I often re-read his autobiography. After clearing the hurdle of his university days, the letters here were largely engaging or amusing,, particularly his advice to young students on writing, and his eternal literary discussion with his friends.

 This collection is of great interest to devoted Lewisians.

Rifleman Dodd and The Gun

The Gun, and Rifleman Dodd
© 1933 C.S. Forester
311 pages

"There was sorrow in Dodd's heart as he looked down on the pitiful scene, but it did not prevent him from turning away and setting himself to survey the next adventurous quarter of a mile of his route. There are many who give up, and many who procrastinate, but there are some who go on."

C.S. Forester is best known for his Horatio Hornblower stories,  naval adventures set in the Napoleonic Wars.   These two short works, The Gun and Rifleman Dodd, are less known but equally entertaining and detailed. Both are set in Napoleonic Iberia, as both a peasant resistance and the shattered remnants of the old Bourbon Army fight for Spain and Portugal's liberty from Napoleon,  with the generous support of English seapower and the Duke of Wellington.

The first story, The Gun,  follows an eighteen pound siege gun which abandoned on the field after a crushing Spanish defeat, but recovered by a priest and a few farmers, The gun passes from hand,  as many realize its incredible potential and attempt to shift it to the best place -- and those who particularly value it seize it by force. It does get put into action, however, fomenting rebellion on the plains and sending the French into retreat for the first time.

Rifleman Dodd pieces together the adventure of the eponymous rifleman after he is cut off from a retreat, and lost behind enemy lines. A hard-worn veteran of five campaigns, Dodd knows how to soldier and stay alive, and so when he encounters a group of Portuguese irregulars, he becomes their leader and becomes a phantom menace to the French, who are haunted by visions of a green Englishmen.  Even as they methodically begin sweeping and scouring the hills to destroy his hiding places, Dodd and a couple of survivors -- and finally, Dodd alone -- endeavor to put flames to Bonaparte's plans.

Although a sketch of their plots gives both of these novels an air of romantic air,  they're not fanciful in the least.  Forester does not shy from the brutal behavior of both parties, French and irregulars, as they fight tooth and claw with one another.  Forester also does not reduce the French to a distant enemy:  in Rifleman Dodd, he tells their story in alternate chapters, and every person Dodd kills is named as he falls.   There's no denying the adventurous drama of the last bit of Rifleman Dodd, however, as he beards the French lion in its den.  Good stuff!

As a bit of trivia, Bernard Cornwell mentions a missing rifleman named Dodd in one of his Sharpe novels, also set in Spain.   This is a deliberate reference to Rifleman Dodd, and one of Cornwell's stories about becoming a writer involves trying to find more stories like Dodd, and then realizing he'd have to write them himself.  Three cheers, then, for Rifleman Dodd, which was not only a great little story by itself, but one that gave us the force of nature that is Sharpe.

Rifleman Dodd was originally known as Death to the French. I speculated that the title was changed after the outbreak of World War 2, but Rifleman Dodd seems to have just been the American title.

Related:
Cornwell's Sharpe books
Forester's Horatio Hornblower sea stories