Weird Remarks about Ireland from Tolkien (possibly) and W. H. Lewis

[Extollager]

Tolkien, it's alleged, felt it. Go here for the quotation and some comments:

Sacnoth's Scriptorium: Evil Emanating (Tolkien on Ireland)

Now here is C. S. Lewis's brother Warren (from his diary entry for 9 August 1933); he is in Waterford County:

"There is something wrong with this country -- some sullen brooding presence over it, a vague sense of something mean and cruel and sinister: I have felt the same feeling in the hills behind Sierra Leone, and once in 1919 at Doagh in Co. Antrim. A beastly feeling. On the merely physical side, it was most depressing country. I have never seen any place so enclosed before: wherever you go, the grey road is flanked by old stone walls, and banks on the top of which grow thick hedges, the whole overhung by heavy motionless foliage on old trees and lidded with a grey brown sky. After a time the longing for any sort of escape from these everlasting tunnels became acute, and one almost fancied it to be accompanied by a sensation of choking from trying to breathe air from which the oxygen was exhausted. The natives were as depressing as their landscape: during the whole morning I did not see anyone of any age or either sex who was not definitely ugly: even the children look more like goblins than earthborns....I wonder can it be possible that a country which has an eight hundred year record of cruelty and misery has the power of emanating a nervous disquiet? Certainly I felt something of the sort, and would much dislike to see this place again....[Later in the day, after leaving Waterford on our run down the Suir River, we passed Ballyhack, where there were some early Norman castles.] There was [also] a long succession of big houses, all very shut in and desolate, of which J remarked that Walter de la Mare could write detestable stories: and we talked for some time about horror and its treatment in fiction."

(from Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Kilby and Mead, Harper and Row, 1982, pp. 111-112; "J" was Jack, i.e. C. S. Lewis)

Comments?

 

[Hugh]

I’d like to get some understanding of this.

I tend to forget how vexed the history of England and Ireland has been and still is. Maybe this has something to do with it.

 

[Extollager]

We're probably going to end up with more questions than answers.

Warren wrote, "I wonder can it be possible that a country which has an eight hundred year record of cruelty and misery has the power of emanating a nervous disquiet?"

So he would seem to be thinking of 1130 or so. Has anyone a sufficient knowledge of history to shed some light on what Warren might have thought happened in, or to, Ireland in the 12th century?

 

[Toby Frost]

Not me. From the excerpts, Tolkien and Warren both seem to be talking more about the landscape than the politics. I didn't know that the Normans got to Ireland, but I could well believe them running amok there, as they seem to have been a pretty vicious bunch.

While Ireland can be very beautiful (it's been used in the past as a stand-in for England in a wilder time), it could look pretty bleak if the weather was bad (the intro to Father Ted springs to mind!). That sort of grey stone can be quite grim in the wrong weather. The reference to hedges reminds me of the Cornish landscape, where the high hedgerows can make it all seem rather narrow, which I suppose could see oppressive in the wrong circumstances. Also, Ireland does have a reputation as "Celtic" and "Pagan", which might have coloured Tolkien's (alleged) remark about it being evil (did he perhaps say "heathen" rather than "evil"?). And of course in the early 30s rural areas would seem more remote than they do now, and I doubt the locals would be all that enamoured of an English country gentry type showing up. But to be honest I doubt there's much in it. It seems a rather odd thing to say.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

The Normans came to Ireland (Dublin) led by Strongbow in the 1100s, and John de Courcy then took the North. But the English never had an easy rule with only the area around Dublin in the South and Carrickfergus (my town) in the North held securely. These areas formed The Pale - beyond the pale the Celts lurked!

Since then there has been all sorts of atrocities, and the famine in particular left its mark - the English overlords left the Irish to starve. Now we have the divided island and all the Troubles that has brought.

Ireland is a weird country (I went out of my way to capture the dark beauty of the Antrim Glens in Waters and the Wild) but to say it is dark is not, I think, fair. Many areas are very very happy, the land is gorgeous and will steal your heart and it's a country more of warmth and openness than any darkness. For every quote about the dark aspects I could dig up ten to the contrary!

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Oh - and the 800 years is used all the time. '800 years of oppression' is a common term and it refers specifically to the English coming to Ireland (via the Norman invasion).

Apparently a lot of people were quite shocked when the TV series Victoria showed up some of the English means of dealing with Ireland over the years and, honestly, schools offer a very Anglo-centric view of history (she said, generously).

Try googling Cromwell and Ireland and reading about Drogheda. Or the Flight of the Earls and the plantation and how land was taken from the people. Google Glenveagh evictions as a great example.

Make no mistake and, without getting political, the current divisions in Ireland are more the legacy of the history of how the island was managed, settled and divided than anything to do with the Irish can't get on with each other.

So, yeah. Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland all had a lot to do with how, where and why we are where we are 800 years later.

 

[svalbard]

Well put Jo. No need to go into the detail because it can become quite emotive.

The landscape can be rather bleak at times but a Romantic Bleakness as opposed to an evil one. My part of the country Cork 'the Rebel County' boasts some spectacular coastline along the Beara Pennisula(which is the setting for Daphne De Maurier's novel Hungry Hill).

 

[Extollager]

Still -- what could Tolkien have meant?

"In a 1979 transcription of a discussion
on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis,
George Sayer tells a remarkable story
about Tolkien describing Ireland as
'naturally evil.' He could 'feel,' Sayer relates,
'evil coming up from the earth,
from the peat bogs, from the clumps of trees,
even from the cliffs, and this evil
was only held in check by the great
devotion of the southern Irish
to their religion.' "
--Burns, PERILOUS REALMS, page 19

I don't get the sense that Tolkien was lamenting the painful history of the Ireland, though that must have been part of W. H. Lewis's thought. (He was born in Belfast, which is where his parents lived and died.)

 

[svalbard]

I think the last paragraph holds the key and the rather insulting term 'southern Irish'. It is a call out to the Catholicism of the Irish holding back the savage paganism of their 'Celtic' heritage. It is an idea founded in ignorance, a blind devotion to the Catholic Faith and a bit of a superiority complex(thus refers to Warren's excerpt).

 

[Extollager]

Svalbard, I'm confused: you appear to be responding to the quotation about what Tolkien said, but add the remark about W. H. Lewis -- could you clarify? I imagine that you're objecting to what both WHL wrote in his diary, and what Sayer said Tolkien said, but could you comment on either or both distinctly? Thanks.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Have you been to Ireland @Extollager . Honestly, until someone has stood on a bleak hillside overlooking the crashing Atlantic Ocean and felt the place it's indescribable.

As @svalbard says - the quote is a politically divisive one. The Protestant Northerners (so that's half the population..) would take umbrage at the idea that only the Catholic religion (for, make no mistake that's what it implies) could hold back the evil in the land.

Luckily the Irish - North and South - crew here on the Chrons are pretty tolerant. On somewhere like boards.ie this would be bloody by now.

But for those posting here - the term Southern Ireland is not used (except by the Northerners who use 'down South' and are equally referred to as 'up North'). Either Ireland and Northern Ireland (or Norn Iron) or, at a push, ROI and NI.

 

[Extollager]

Jo, no, I haven't been to Ireland. Been to Middle-earth many times, but not to Ireland.

I wrote the "Extollager" comment (pasted below) on John Rateliff's posting that suggests Tolkien's remark might have reflected the traditional idea of demons in waste places and spiritual warfare with them conducted by the likes of St. Antony. That would be familiar to traditional Roman Catholics in Tolkien's day, I guess (a lot less so now?). It probably wouldn't have been familiar to Protestants. Thus I'm not sure Tolkien's remark is something that should offend Protestants. And of course the person to whom he was speaking, George Sayer, was a Catholic. My guess would be that Tolkien believed that Protestants such as his friend C. S. Lewis could pray and be heard, but that there were spiritual resources available to Roman Catholics that were not available to Protestants.

---Here is a speculation. If you go back to the "Desert Fathers," such as St. Antony of Egypt, you will see that they were understood as not going into the wilderness simply to escape the distractions of city life; they sought to engage in spiritual warfare with demons who infested waste places. See the hagiographical work by St. Athanasius and, if you have access to it, the entry on "Demons" in Everett Ferguson, ed. Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (Garland, 1990). An interesting treatment of the whole issue of spiritual warfare may be found in Gregory Boyd's God at War, where the author argues convincingly that it is present in the Old and New Testaments. Anyway, this concept may well have been part of Tolkien's understanding of the world and he may have meant what he is said to have said. From the point of view of secularism and secularized versions of Christianity it's a bizarre fancy, but Tolkien seems to have been alluding to a concept that is entirely orthodox. What would be at issue from that point of view is not the possibility of the presence of nonhuman evil, but Tolkien's personal sensitivity to it, etc.---

But I'm not sure that Tolkien was, in fact, alluding to demons in the St. Antony sense. What does "Naturally evil" mean if not something like "haunted by supernatural, evil things"? Tolkien is quoted as referring to

"evil coming up from the earth,
from the peat bogs, from the clumps of trees,
even from the cliffs."

This doesn't sound like the traditional understanding of demons (=fallen angels), but rather like some kind of bad "animistic' presence. In Middle-earth terms, something more like Old Man Willow than Morgoth or Sauron. I don't know. And Warren Lewis's independent remark was interesting too, though susceptible more readily of a "psychological" explanation. But he seems to have been aware of that (i.e. claustrophobia) and to have thought there was more to it than that.

 

[Ursa major]

First of all, the Tolkien.... The linked website has the following in its second paragraph:

recently for a piece I've been working on, I went back to one of Tolkien's statements we don't know first hand, or even second hand, but only third hand. I first learned about it from a quote in Marjorie Burns' excellent book PERILOUS REALMS, in which she quotes George Sayer as saying the following about "[Tolkien's] reaction to the Irish landscape"

followed, soon after, by

Unfortunately, as I said, we don't have any place where Tolkien himself wrote down anything like this, at least not that I know of. Nor did Sayer ever put this in his books or one of his memoirs, that I've been able to find. Our sole source for this seems to be a three-way discussion between Sayer, Humphrey Carpenter, and Clyde Kilby that took place at Wheaton in September 1979 -- and, just to complicate things a little further, no copy of the original audiotape of the event seems to survive, only a transcription published in a fanzine a few months later (the January 1980 issue of MINAS TIRITH EVENING STAR).

So basically, it's little more than gossip, and can be treated as such.

The question in the thread title could then be more usefully changed to: 'What was it about Warren Hamilton Lewis that made him "sense evil" when he was in some parts of Ireland?' Answering it couldn't be any less fruitful than trying, with zero experience of being in any part of Ireland, to determine why certain Irish landscapes make certain people sense evil.


Note: The sort of sunken roads that W.H. Lewis mentions are also to be found in England and Wales, including the county where I live (Dorset). I daresay that people in certain frames of mind could "sense evil" when travelling along such roads, probably at the same time as others are drinking in their intimate beauty.

 

[Extollager]

Ursa, I'm not sure if you are trying to shut down discussion of the topic or further it. The remarks about the provenance of the Sayer material are appropriate. The final sentence in your penultimate paragraph seems to me less helpful. Since I'm the only person commenting here who has said he hasn't been to Ireland, it appears to be directed at me. I don't accept that you are right to say that to me.

 

[Ursa major]

What I'm pointing out is that we are, without the Tolkein gossip, talking about one person's reaction to sunken roads in County Waterford... which seems to me to be the flimsiest basis on which to ask: 'What is (was) it about Ireland that gave a sense of evil?'

 

[Extollager]

I'm not convinced by your characterization of the Tolkien item as "gossip," though others might be. "Gossip" has a bad connotation that seems unjustified, though I agree with you that the item should be regarded with caution.

If one of the moderators believes this item is inappropriate for Chrons, it's fine with me if it is removed from the forum. Likewise, it's OK if the thread title is rephrased.

 

[Ursa major]

I'm not convinced by your characterization of the Tolkien item as "gossip," though others might be.

Gossip or not, something third hand, and even then not reported contemporaneously, is hardly unimpeachable, is it? Any nuance is lost.


EDIT: I've been to two business meetings in Dublin. My experience of the rest of Ireland is no greater than yours.

 

[Extollager]

(pounds on own head) I didn't say it was "unimpeachable," which is why I granted your point about provenance. Given that issue, one then forms an opinion about the likely accuracy of the remark. From my having read Sayer, I take him to be reliable. Going a little farther out on a limb, I regard the fanzine as likely to be reporting accurately.

Could a moderator retitle the thread?

Weird Remarks about Ireland from Tolkien (possibly) and W. H. Lewis

 

[The Judge]

Done.

 

[Ursa major]

I didn't say it was "unimpeachable,"

But when one is setting up a discussion about why** a whole country has a sense of evil hanging over it -- or seeping up from its soil -- surely one ought to be using unimpeachable sources...?


** - Putting it the way the original title did rather implies that the country does give a sense of evil... so I support the change in the thread's title.