C. S. Lewis

Life

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898. As a small child he announced that his name was "Jacksie," after a dog that had died, and he was "Jack" to his friends for life. His mother died of cancer when he was nine, and he was sent to a series of English boarding schools he mostly loathed, before being tutored privately by William Kirkpatrick, a formidable logician who taught him to argue. He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, but went almost at once to war as an officer in the Somerset Light Infantry, reaching the front line on his nineteenth birthday. On 15 April 1918, during an attack on the village of Riez du Vinage in the Battle of the Lys, he was wounded when a British shell fell short.

Back at Oxford he took three firsts, and in 1925 was elected a fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, where he taught for nearly thirty years. In 1926 he met J. R. R. Tolkien. Their friendship, and a long night's talk with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson on Addison's Walk in 1931, carried Lewis from a reluctant theism to Christianity. The circle of friends who met in his rooms and at the Eagle and Child pub became The Inklings. During the Second World War his BBC radio talks, later collected as Mere Christianity, made him the best-known Christian voice in Britain. In 1954 he moved to a chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1956 he married the American writer Joy Davidman, who died of cancer in 1960. He died at his home in Oxford on 22 November 1963.

Work

Lewis wrote in almost every form: scholarship (The Allegory of Love, 1936), apologetics (The Screwtape Letters, 1942), autobiography (Surprised by Joy, 1955) and fiction. His Space Trilogy — Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945) — sent a philologist modeled partly on Tolkien to Mars and Venus.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) began with a mental picture of a faun carrying an umbrella through a snowy wood. Four children evacuated from wartime London step through a wardrobe into Narnia, a land of talking beasts frozen under the White Witch's winter, and help the great lion Aslan break it. Six more books followed by 1956, forming The Chronicles of Narnia: a creation myth, a voyage to the end of the world, a fall and an apocalypse, all in brisk, warm prose. The Last Battle won the Carnegie Medal. Tolkien disliked the books' jumble of mythologies — fauns beside Father Christmas — but readers did not care.

Legacy

Lewis's greatest service to fantasy may have been as a reader. He heard The Lord of the Rings chapter by chapter at Inklings meetings; Tolkien later said that without Lewis's encouragement he would never have finished it. Lewis championed the older fantasists too: he called George MacDonald his master, and loved William Morris and E. R. Eddison.

Narnia became the model of Portal Fantasy and a cornerstone of Children's & YA Fantasy: ordinary children crossing into a secondary world where they are kings and queens. That pattern runs through later fiction and into games whose heroes are summoned from our world into another. Lewis is not on Gygax's Appendix N, and D&D borrowed little from him directly, though the fauns, dryads, centaurs and talking beasts of Narnia belong to the same classical and folkloric stock as many of the game's monsters. Narnia's direct presence in games came late and through film: Walden Media and Disney's adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) was accompanied by a licensed action video game, and Prince Caspian (2008) had one too. His most important contribution to gaming, though, is indirect and enormous — he was the friend who made sure The Lord of the Rings was finished.