Quotations
and Allusions
in C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
compiled by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The
Netherlands)
C. S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra
(1943), like most of his books, contains a great number of allusions to
unspecified books and situations. Here is a listing by chapter and sub-chapter
of many such words and phrases with brief references to what I have found to be
their sources. I have also included a few other items where a short explanation
may be of use to some readers. The list is based on notes I made for my Dutch
translation of this book, published in 2006.
Double question marks in bold
type ( ?? ) mark those places where I am still hoping to find relevant
details. Additions, corrections, and proposals for new entries are welcome.
Page numbers in square
brackets refer to the first edition.
DEDICATION
some ladies at Wantage
These “ladies” are the nuns of
the Community of St Mary the Virgin, founded in 1848 as one of the first Anglican religious orders. They lived
in a convent at Wantage, a place some 25 km south of
Oxford. One of them, sister Penelope,
wrote to Lewis in August 1939 to thank him for his first science-fiction book, Out
of the Silent Planet. A fruitful pen-friendship followed. The Mother
Superior invited Lewis to come and talk to the Junior Sisters in April 1942,
when he had nearly finished writing Perelandra. Two years later he wrote
an introduction for Sister Penelope’s translation of Athanasius, De incarnatione Verbi (The
Incarnation of the Word of God, 1944). Lewis’s Collected Letters
contain 41 letters to her from the years 1939–1957.
CHAPTER
1 [pp. 7–20 in the first edition]
creatures called eldila [7]
“Eldil”
is one of several names and words in the Ransom trilogy which Lewis probably
borrowed, loosely, from his friend J. R. R. Tolkien long before The Lord of the Rings was finished. Tolkien later pointed out that
“the Eldils ... owe something to the Eldar in my work” (letter of 17 July 1971 to Roger Lancelyn Green, quoted in Green & Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, revised ed. 2002, p. 210).
H. G. Wells [9]
Wells (1866–1946) was a
pioneer of English science fiction and, as such, an inspiration for C. S.
Lewis. Lewis acknowledged his debt in a prefatory note in Out of the Silent
Planet.
Selenites [9]
A name for the inhabitants of
the Moon in H. G. Wells’s novel The First Men in the Moon (1901); derived from the Greek word selene, “Moon”.
Tellurian [10]
from a Latin word for the
planet Earth, tellus.
archon [18]
from the Greek word archôn, “leader” or “director”, a general title for high magistrates in
ancient Greece. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the name
was used by the Gnostics for the seven rulers of the seven celestial spheres,
each of which was linked up with one of the known planets, which included the
Sun and the Moon.
Natvilcius [19, note]
a fictitious name for a
fictitious figure; it is a Latinized form of Nat Whilk, Anglo-Saxon for “I know not
who”. Lewis occasionally used “Nat Whilk” or “N.W.”
as a pseudonym when he published a poem. The personal notes he made after the
death of his wife in 1960 (A Grief
Observed, 1961) were initially published under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk.
your familiar [20]
i.e.
“familiar spirit” – a kind of
spirit which often assumes animal form and is supposed to attend and aid a
witch, wizard etc.
CHAPTER
2 [first ed. pp.
21–34]
photosome [23]
A fancy Greek word for
“light-body”.
the defence of Moscow [24]
Lewis began writing Perelandra
in the autumn of 1941, when the German invasion of Russia began to falter as
the winter set in before Moscow was captured.
powers and principalities [24]
Ephesians 6:12.
Schiaparelli ... is all wrong
[27, 33]
Finding out the rotation
period of Venus has indeed long been impossible because of the cloud cover.
From the 17th century till the 19th, estimates varied from about 23 hours to
about 24 Earth days, until Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910)
concluded from his observations in 1877–1878 that Venus rotates on itself in
the same time as its revolution around the Sun (224.7 days). The truth at last
came out by radar observations in 1962. The plante’s
rotation on itself was found to be retrograde and take 243 days – slower than
its journey round the Sun. This means that a day on Venus begins in the West
and has a duration of 116 Earth days.
hopes deferred [32]
Proverbs 13:12.
all the earth became full of
darkness and cruel habitations [32]
Psalm 74:20.
CHAPTER
4 [first ed. pp. 49–65]
garden of the Hesperides [49]
In Greek mythology, this is a
garden at the foot of the Atlas Mountains in North-West Africa, present-day
Morocco. There the Hesperides, daughters of Atlas and
Hesperis, were guarding a tree with golden apples and
were helped in this task by a dragon.
Cyclops [49]
One-eyed giants in Greek
mythology.
the verse in Pope, “die of a rose in aromatic pain” [52]
Alexander Pope
(1688–1744), An Essay on Man I, 200.
“Sober certainty of waking bliss” [55]
John Milton (1608–1674), Comus, 263.
Circe or Alcina
[61]
In Greek mythology, Circe is a
well-known sorceress. She lived on the island of Aeaea,
where she had the habit of turning visitors into animals. Alcina
is an wicked sorceress in Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) with a role roughly similar to
that of Circe.
a Titian satyr [62]
Half-human creature in Greek
mythology as depicted by the Italian painter Titan (c. 1490–1576).
CHAPTER
5 [first ed. pp. 65–79]
walking before him as if on the other side of a brook, was the Lady
herself... [65]
Cf.
Dante, Purgatorio
XVIII, 34–42. Lewis pointed out the parallel between his Green Lady and Dante’s
Matilda in a letter of 29 October 1944 to Charles A. Brady (Collected Letters II, p. 630).
Artemis [72]
Nature goddess of the ancient
Greeks. In Ilias
(XXI, 470) she is called the queen of wild beasts; in classical literature she
often appears as the goddess of hunting. The Romans identified her with Diana.
Mænad [72]
in ancient Greece, a female
participant in festivities in honour of the god
Bacchus (Dionysos).
Only my spirit praises Maleldil who comes down from Deep Heaven into this lowness
and will make me to be blessed by all the times... [74]
There is a strong resemblance
here to the “Magnificat”, the song of Mary in the Gospel of Luke 1:46–55.
Maleldil Himself wept when He saw
it [75]
Cf. Gospel of John 11:33–38,
where Jesus “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled”, and “wept”, at the sight
of the people who wept over the death of Lazarus.
CHAPTER
6 [first ed. pp. 79–96]
Giant’s Causeway [81]
A part of the north coast of
Antrim, Northern Ireland, with thousands of basalt columns.
Something like a shooting star
seemed to have streaked across the sky [85]
Cf. Luke 10:18, “I beheld
Satan as lightning fall from heaven’; and Revelation 8:10–11, “And the third
angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a
lamp ... and the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the
waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made
bitter.’
The sea beside the island was
a mass of the large silver fishes [86]
As the Green Lady’s first appearance
mirrors an episode in Dante (see note to chapter 5, p. 65), so the present
scene might be an echo of what Lewis read in De planctu
Naturae, “The Complaint of Nature”, by
12th-century author Alanus ab
Insulis. In The Allegory of Love,
chapter II.6, p. 107, Lewis translated a passage describing how the whole world
rejoiced at the coming of the virgin Natura: “...The
fishes, even, swimming up to the eyebrows of the waves, so far forth as the
lumpish kind of their sensuality suffered them, foretold by their glad cheer
the coming of their lady...”
CHAPTER 7
[first ed. pp. 96–111]
inter-sidereal [101]
“between the stars” or
possibly “between the galaxies”; derived from sidus,
a Latin word for star or constellation.
emergent evolution [102]
Title of a book, Emergent
Evolution (1923) by C. Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936), where it is argued
that physical and psychic events are all part of a single natural order and,
further, that this order does not evolve gradually – as Darwin thought – but
through sudden and unpredictable phenomena, called “emergents”.
Morgan borrowed the word from George Henry Lewes, a nineteenth century author
who used it in his Problems of Life and Mind (1873–1879).
God is a spirit [103]
John 4:24.
nisus [106]
Latin word for “exertion” or
“forward urge”. In the present context Lewis is almost certainly borrowing the
word from Space, Time and Deity (1920) by the Australian philosopher
Samuel Alexander, who professed a type of “emergent-evolutionism”. While Lewis
remained unimpressed by Alexander’s main argument, the book played a small but
vital part in his conversion to Christianity, as described in his autobiography
Surprised by Joy, chapter 14.
CHAPTER 8
[first ed. pp. 111–121]
when the morning stars sang
together [121]
Cf. Job 38:7, God answering
Job “out of the whirlwind”: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the
earth ... when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted
for joy?’
CHAPTER
9 [first ed. pp.
122–141]
a man who had been on the Somme [123]
i.e. a man who as a soldier in
the First World War had taken part in the great and calamitous battles in the
area around the Somme river in northern France, in the summer of 1916, where
hundreds of thousands of young men were killed.
it is for this that I came
here, that you may have Death in abundance [130]
Cf. John 10:10, “I am come
that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
More or less the same play on
these words is made by G. K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, chapter
VI, “The Five Deaths of the Faith”, par. 8, when he is describing the Albigensian heresy as “Schopenhauer hovering over the
future; but it was also Manichaeus rising from the
dead; that men might have death and that they might have it more abundantly.”
Felix peccatum Adae [138]
“Happy sin of Adam”; see also
chapter 17 [p. 248]. The phrase seems to be loosely borrowed from the Exsultet (or Exultet),
an ancient Easter hymn from the Roman Catholic liturgy. The relevant lines are:
O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est!
/ O felix culpa, quae talem
ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem! (“O truly
necessary sin of Adam, which the death of Christ has blotted out! / O happy
fault, that merited such and so great a Redeemer!”). Green & Hooper in
their Biography (revised ed., p. 200) appear to be tracing back the
expression to St Augustine but do not locate it exactly. In De civitate Dei, XIV.11–13, Augustine does talk about
Adam’s sin or transgression, but without calling it felix,
“happy”.
CHAPTER
10 [first ed. pp. 142–158]
the Prince of Darkness is a
gentleman [146]
Shakespeare, King Lear, III.4.
Mephistopheles [146]
A demon with a pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Hebrew name, first
appearing in the late medieval German legend of Dr Faustus. Lewis/Ransom must
be thinking of the way he appears in Goethe’s play Faust, as “the
sneering, jeering, leering tempter” (Brewer’s Phrase and Fable). At the
beginning of the second “Study” scene, Mephistopheles says to Faust:
|
So gefällst du mir. Wir werden,
hoff ich, uns vertragen; Denn dir die
Grillen zu verjagen, Bin ich als
edler Junker hier, In rotem,
goldverbrämtem Kleide, Das
Mäntelchen von starrer Seide, Die Hahnenfeder
auf dem Hut, Mit einem
langen, spitzen Degen, Und rate nun
dir, kurz und gut, Dergleichen
gleichfalls anzulegen; Damit du,
losgebunden, frei, Erfahrest,
was das Leben sei. |
That I like to hear. We shall, I hope, bear with each other; For to dispel thy crotchets, brother, As a young lord, I now appear, In scarlet dress, trimmed with gold lacing, A stiff silk cloak with stylish facing, A tall cock’s feather in my hat, A long, sharp rapier to defend me, And I advise thee, short and flat, In the same costume to attend me; If thou wouldst, unembarrassed, see What sort of thing this life may be. (transl. Charles T. Brooks, 1868) |
Paradise Lost [146]
Main work of John Milton
(1608–1674), English poet. Lewis discussed Satan’s character as presented by
Milton in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), chapter XIII.
Agrippina [151]
Iulia Agrippina or “Agrippina
minor” (15–59 c.e.), second wife of the Roman emperor
Claudius, who was her third husband and was probably poisoned by her; mother of
Nero, who put her to death after she had helped him to become the next emperor.
Like Messalina, Claudius’ first wife, she was notorious for her ambition and
cruelty.
Lady Macbeth [151]
wife of the tragic hero in
Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. She encourages him to murder his
King and succeed to the throne; after this she maintains self-control for some
time but in the end the consciousness of her guilt drives her mad.
CHAPTER
11 [first ed. pp. 159–171]
“’Tis not in mortals to command success” [161]
Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Cato, I.2, 43.
Horatius stood on the bridge [162]
Horatius Cocles
(“the one-eyed”), a legendary hero of early Roman history. He defended, all
alone, the wooden bridge over the Tiber against approaching enemies so that the
Romans were able to demolish the bridge. He then lept
into the river and crossed it swimming. The usual way for this story to reach British
people of Ransom’s generation would be through Lord Macaulay’s poetic rendering
in Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).
Constantine [162]
Constantine the Great (c.
280–337), Roman emperor. During the time (306–324) of his struggle for power
over the whole empire he became a champion of Christianity. He was baptised shortly before his death.
“fallings from him, vanishings” [165]
William Wordsworth
(1770–1850), Ode. Intimations of
Immortality, IX (“Fallings from us, vanishings...”).
lose his nerve as St. Peter
had done
[167]
Matthew 36:69–75.
sat before Him like Pilate [169]
Matthew 27.
the slaying before the
foundation of the world [169]
Cf. Revelation 13:8.
CHAPTER
12 [first ed. pp. 171–183]
“When I wake up after Thy image, I shall be satisfied” [172]
Psalm 17:15.
“Eloi, Eoli, lama sabachthani”
[174]
Matthew 27:46.
The Battle of Maldon [177]
Old English poem, probably
dating from the tenth century.
The idea that something which
had once been of his own kind ... might even now be imprisoned in the thing he
was pursuing redoubled his hatred
Cf. George MacDonald in Unspoken
Sermons I, on “Love thine enemy”: “It is the very
presence of this fading humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it
were an anmial only, and not a man or a woman that
did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill. We hate the man just
because we are prevented from loving him. We push over the verge of the
creation – we damn – just because we cannot embrace.”
My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, so flew’d
so sanded... [181]
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV.1.
CHAPTER
14 [first ed. pp. 197–210]
Æneid [199]
Main work of the Roman poet
Virgil (70–19 b.c.).
Chanson de Roland [199]
“Song of Roland”, Old French
epic poem about an episode in the exploits of Charlemagne and his faithful in
Spain.
Kalevala [199]
Finnish national epic,
compiled from folk poetry in the years 1835–1849 by the Finnish philologist
Elias Lönnrot.
The Hunting of the Snark [199]
a long nonsense poem (1876) by
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland.
a rhyme about Germanic
sound-laws [199]
C. S. Lewis himself wrote such
a rhyme early in his career as a tutor in Oxford, as a playful protest against
an unreadable textbook that was in use at the time. Its opening lines are
printed in Walter Hooper’s preface to Lewis’s Selected Literary Essays
(Cambridge University Press 1969), page xv.
CHAPTER
15 [first ed. pp. 210–223]
a wound in his heel [215]
Cf.
Gen. 3:15, “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy
seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt
bruise his heel.” Compare also chapter 14, p. 209: “the face smashed out of all
recognition.”
Tellus [216]
See
note to chapter 1, p. 10, Tellurian.
CHAPTER
16 [first ed. pp. 223–235]
Elwin, the friend of the eldila [224]
In
fact, the name (and variants like Alwin, Alvin and
Elvin) derives from Anglo-Saxon Aelf-wine, “friend of the elves”.
one of Maleldil’s sayers
[225]
The apostle Paul, in Galatians
4:1–7. One of C. S. Lewis’s favourite comments on
that Bible passage no doubt was in George Macdonald’s sermon “Abba, Father!”
(in Unspoken Sermons, second series, 1885).
concentric wheels [227]
cf. Ezekiel 1:16, “Their appearance
and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.” In a letter of
4 March 1953, Lewis acknowledged, in a general way, his “heavy debt to Ezekiel”
for the way he described his eldils (Collected
Letters III, p. 302).
archaic statues from Ægina [229]
Ægina is an island in the Saronic
Gulf, south of Athens. Fifteen statues found on this island have since the 19th
century been considered as supreme examples of archaic sculpture.
like a quantitative ... like
an accentual metre [230]
In poetry,“quantitative”
metres produce their rhythmic effects chiefly by the
varied lengths of the syllables, i.e. the time it takes to pronounce them;
“accentual” metres produce their effects chiefly by
the varied tonic stress (loudness) of the syllables. Most poetry in the modern
European languages is “accentual”, as the speech rhythms of these languages
(with the exception of French) naturally lend themselves to this form.
Classical Greek and Latin poetry is “quantitative”.
A faint breath, as Virgil says,
reaches even the late generations [231]
Aeneid VII, 646.
Mars and Venus ... the follies
that have been talked of them on Earth [232]
Viz. the idea that Aphrodite
(Venus) was married to Hephaestus, the smith, and committed adultery with Ares
(Mars). One of many allusions to this in European literature is in
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (I.5), where the eunuch Mardian says, “Yet have I fierce affections, and think
/ What Venus did with Mars.”
CHAPTER
17 [first ed. pp. 235–256]
Tor and Tinidril,
Baru and Baru’ah, Ask and Embla, Yatsur and Yatsura [237]
A hetergeneous
series of names for the first pair of humans.
– Tor and Tinidril, according to Tolkien, “are clearly Tor and
his elf-wife Idril blended with Tinuviel
(the second name of Luthien)”, i.e. the names are
derived from those of characters in Tolkien’s work; see his letter of 1971,
already quoted in the note on eldila in chapter 1.
– A baru,
in ancient Assyro-Babylonian religion, was a
soothsayer acting as prophet and intermediary of Shamash, the god of
divination. Baru’ah is probably an invented
female form. If Lewis was indeed referring to this baru,
it is curious that he shouldn't have rather chosen the god Shamash and his
sister Ishtar, since the latter goddess represented the planet Venus.
– Ask and Embla
are the first two human beings according to one old Norse creation myth. Three
gods walking along the seashore find two trees and make them into the first man
and a woman. Ask or Askr is sometimes thought to have
denoted an ash tree; Embla an elm. One place where
the story appears is the Poetic Edda, “Völuspá”, stanza 17.
– Yatsur
is Hebrew for being kneaded or moulded into the right
form; it is the passive participle of the verb yatsar.
Its use, along with a female variant, as a name for the first human pair may be
Lewis’s idea.
Animal rationale [238]
A well-known definition of
“human being” in some ancient and medieval philosophers including Seneca and St
Thomas Aquinas.
“The Great Dance does not wait
to be perfect...” [246]
The whole of the following hymnic episode was rewritten as a poem – “done into irregular Spenserian stanzas” – by Ruth Pitter (1897– 1992), a friend of Lewis from 1946 onwards. This version was first
published in Don W. King, C. S. Lewis, Poet: The legacy of his poetic
impulse (Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 2001), Appendix I/5. It is also included in the same
author’s essay, published on the internet, “The Poetry of Prose: C. S. Lewis, Ruth Pitter,
and Perelandra”. “Spenserian stanzas” are stanzas in the form
invented by Edmund Spenser for his long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene (1596). They consist of eight jambic pentameters followed by one jambic
alexandrine, with the rhyme scheme a b a b b c b c c.
Pitter’s choice for this model is
highly appropriate in light of what Lewis had written about Spenser at the end
of The Allegory of Love, pp. 357–359.
the sin whereby it came is
called Fortunate [248]
See note to chapter 9 [p.
138], Felix peccatum Adae.
This is the Morning Star
[248]
Revelation 2:28.
Glund, Lurga,
Neruval [248]
The planets Jupiter, Saturn and
(presumably) Uranus.
Updates:
13 April 2008
4 September 2008 (reference to
Chesterton in note to ch. 9, “It is for this that I
came here”).
8 March 2009 (added note on
George MacDonald about hatred in ch. 12)