Atlantis/Lemuria/Numenor: "End of the Wine" Poem by C. S. Lewis

Here

C.S. Lewis - Articles/News: The Lewis Legacy-Issue 72, Spring 1997

you may find the text of "The End of the Wine," as published in the author's lifetime, and a slightly different version, "The Last of the Wine," as published posthumously in book form.



The poem was published shortly after Lewis's death in the July 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. My understanding is that, after its publication in the British magazine Punch, it was reprinted in the fanzine Niekas and then in the magazine shown.

I'm offering the poem here for discussion if anyone's interested.

In fact, the story is that Poul Anderson was reciting portions of the poem at a science fiction convention and a Niekas editor got the text from him. The poem had been printed 1947 in Punch, several years before Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was published. Then Niekas write to ask C. S. Lewis if the 'zine could reprint the poem. Lewis readily agreed and also said something about his use in the poem of Tolkien's "Numinor" and about Tolkien as a perfectionist and procrastinator, wo that it took hard midwifery to get LotR out of him. Lewis also mentioned that he was ill. Within a few weeks he had died.

I'm not sure how the step from fanzine to F&SF occurred, and I look forward to getting the issue of the magazine and seeing if it retained the misprint in the fanzine version, which uses "untamed" twice where "unnamed" should be used the second time in referring to Europe. I don't know if Niekas was perpetuating an error in Punch's version.