C.S. Lewis's Oxford

[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans

[0:05] and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. And today I am joined by a friend and but very distinguished academic, Professor Simon Horobin.

[0:21] Now, Simon is the Professor of English Language and Literature at Magdalen College. Simon, are you talking to us from Magdalen College? Because your background does look very, you know, worthy of Magdalen. Yeah, no, well spotted. Yeah, I'm sitting in, I mean, if you've seen pictures of Lewis in his rooms.

[0:38] I'm in that same building, but just two staircases along from him in a room that's sort of um identical to the to the main sitting room that he had but it's kind of mirror image of it so yeah that's the background you can see so if you're listening to this rather than watching it um there's a beautifully decorated panelled room behind without the smoke stains which i imagine would have been in and um yeah a big oxford it's called the new building which means it's extremely old and one way you look out on the rest of the college and the other you look out on the deer Park. But perhaps we might touch on that a bit later. The reason why Simon is joining us today is because he has just published with the Bodleian Library Publishing Service, a wonderful book called C.S. Lewis's Oxford. And it's very much a title that says what it does in the book, because it's all about C.S. Lewis's long history of living in Oxford. But let's start with you, Simon because you are actually holding the same position in the college as CS Lewis held so yeah big shoes to fill how did you come to be interested in CS Lewis I was wondering about this having sort of known you for a few years now I was wondering if it's because you're.

[1:57] In the same role? Or was it through your academic career because you teach in a very similar area, the students coming to Oxford now? Or maybe as a child, you read Narnia and went through the wardrobe. Which is it? It's actually all of those things. But I suppose it starts with reading the Narnia books as a child. I still have the copies that I read, back when I was, I guess, 10 years old.

[2:27] So that was my introduction to C.S. Lewis. But then in a slightly more unusual way of getting into him, I suppose the next things I read were The Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, which is still one of my favorite Lewis books today because it's such a great introduction to medieval and renaissance literature. I read those when I was a student. I already knew Lewis quite well by the time I came to work here at Magdalen. But of course, you can't sit in the new building and walk around the college without getting more interested in Lewis and being acutely conscious of his legacy.

[3:09] Also, when I arrived, people like the C.S. Lewis Society would write and ask me to come and give a talk. I remember the first time they did, I wrote back and said, I didn't really know very much about C.S. Lewis. So I thought I'd better find out. And so that is then the sort of next stage. And then I then started looking more into his biography and to his life specifically at Magdalen. And I guess that's how the book kind of grew out of that experience.

[3:39] So it is absolutely the perfect book to have on hand if you come to Oxford to visit. You know if you're a Lewis fan you've got to get this book but I don't think you need to be in Oxford to enjoy it I think it's very enjoyable as a virtual visit through the pages of this book and it also gives a great insight into Lewis himself got a wonderful picture of him on the back in a room very much like the one Simon is currently occupying so do you want to tell us a little bit about how you decided to structure the book because I should also mention it doesn't only deal with Oxford. Yeah, somewhat controversially, it has a chap called Cambridge.

[4:23] But then, you know, we can't pretend that he didn't actually go there. But yeah, and partly the structure. So it is structured around, I mean, you could do it as a kind of walking tour of Oxford, as you've suggested. And that's partly because during the pandemic, when we could only meet outside in groups, I started doing C.S. Lewis tours for student groups and for others. And so that partly is the origin of the book, is sort of walking people around Magdalen and pointing things out and then working our way down the high street. And you go past the Eastgate Hotel, which is where Lewis and Tolkien would meet on a Monday morning to read bits of Lord of the Rings or The Great Divorce to each other. And then you go past University College where Lewis began his academic studies. You know, we always think of him as being at Magdalen, but he started out at what's called UNIV as a student of classics. So it's a bit different to, you know, now we think of him as an English tutor. Then he was a classicist, a philosopher.

[5:28] And also you go past Merton College where Tolkien himself was when they were meeting with each other. And so that kind of, that's sort of the origin of it and why I thought I would structure it around these places. And it's partly because places is so central to Lewis because, you know, I mean, actually, of course, he spent most of his adult life in Oxford. And even when he went to Cambridge, he didn't really leave Oxford in the sense that, you know, he commuted and spent term times and weekdays living in college in Cambridge, but he came back to Oxford weekends. And the places that, particularly the pubs, I suppose, are really important.

[6:06] The Eagle and Child has a chapter to itself because of the Inklings being so associated with it. Those kinds of institutions, places, and of course the people that he encounters and meets there, just seem to me so central to what makes Lewis Lewis, to his writing and his thinking. Um just so if you've not been to oxford people might not realize just how close those places are so when simon's talking about going past eastgate hotel and then univ we are talking about a minute walk up one it's really really close a very densely um densely important set of locations um for for oxford uh and for our northern ireland listeners we should mention that Northern Ireland does get a mention too because we shouldn't forget that.

[6:57] You never really took the Northern Irish out of C.S. Lewis either even being in Oxford he retained a strong connection with his place of birth so yeah.

[7:10] When I was reading this, having lived in Oxford for decades and knowing the places, so I was able to follow it very, very closely. But the one thing which was new to me and new to all the biographies I've read of C.S. Lewis was the college details of Magdalen. Now, I was actually a Magdalen postgrad for a few years when I was doing my doctorate, but I didn't get to know it in the same way as you as a professor do. And I felt reading this section it could only be written by an insider so do you want to mention some of the odd little things about the Magdalen experience and perhaps you might want to go on to talk about whether or not what's the same and what's changed in Magdalen since um C.S. Lewis's time bearing in mind someone listening to this might be thinking to apply in future we don't want to put them off no I think that's right and and I think that's partly what spurred me to write the book is that you know there are many excellent biographies of C.S. Lewis and so it only makes sense to write something where I feel that there's something I could add to that and I think you're right that having that college angle sitting in a room just like his, and you know sort of, teaching in the way that he taught, the course that he taught, more or less.

[8:36] Going around the various parts of the college did give me an insider's view of what that was like.

[8:45] Some of the weird kinds of traditions that actually still go on today. He talks in Surprised by Joy about the moment that he became a fellow here in 1925 and how strange it was. He found it when he was lining up in the president's lodgings and then he had the Latin admission ceremony and then went round and shook the hands of all of the fellows at the time who all said, I wish you joy, to which he made no reply.

[9:18] And of course that was very significant for him because the word joy already had an importance for him which it then took on even greater significance and for a number of reasons surprised by joy is obviously one joy davidman another but that strangeness of that ceremony well that's exactly the ceremony that I went through when I came here as a fellow 18 years ago so there are all these connections And there are some nice kind of objects that are still around in the archives,

[9:53] which I talk about in the book. So, for instance, we still use the college weighing scales on special dinners where guests who come to dinner are given the option. Not so many people take it up these days. are being weighed i don't know if that was active in in your day julia but well i'm i was um having a child at the time having my daughter lucy so i i was having enough weighing at the right yeah yeah yeah because it is something that happens at graduate dinners but um, But yeah, so he appears in the College Waits book.

[10:35] Somewhat unfortunately for Lewis, he appears sort of early on in his time here at Magdalen and then just before he left for Cambridge in 1954. So you can exactly work out how much weight he put on during the period he was here.

[10:49] So there's that kind of thing. There's also the College Betting book, which again is still active in the SCR where fellows might fall out over some sort of abstruse fact and decide that because they can't decide who's right, they're going to stake a bottle of port on the outcome of it. And there's an entry by Lewis in the college betting book where he's had a wager with C.E. Stevens, the ancient history tutor, about whether the word eros appears in Homer's Odyssey and they stake a bottle of port on the outcome. And of course, Lewis turns out to be the correct and wins the bottle. But these kind of quaint traditions, they're still active today, but we can sort of trace them back to Lewis's day and see him taking part in them. I think the thing to emphasize really, it emphasizes how masculine the environment was in his day compared to now.

[11:45] I mean, obviously, I was there years ago. It would change dramatically. I don't know, when it went mixed, in the 80s, maybe? In the 70s. But yeah, exactly what I was going to say is that the big change between Lewis's day and today is, I think, the admission of women. This was a very exclusively male world in Lewis's time. Although one of the things that I found which had surprised me, really, was how many female students he taught.

[12:15] And that's partly because going through the archives of a number of the women's colleges I found references to him being paid for tuition or writing reports on students and that was particularly during the Second World War where lots of the male students of course were not here but also before that as well so although it was particularly a male dominated, there were women students in the ladies colleges and they did come in pairs rather than singly because of course Lewis, they needed to be chaperoned.

[12:54] But he did actually teach women as well You have a chapter on Somerville College and you mentioned Dorothy L. Sayers so I think one of the things that strikes me about C.S. Lewis compared to Tolkien who often people say is a lack of women in Tolkien's well the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings I think rather than the Silmarillion um you don't see the same thing so much in the Narnia stories where you've got girls as heroes as well and I think with the what you're saying about the contact with female students but also his home life I don't know if you want to say a little bit about Headington which um is now a suburb of Oxford so people would refer to it in the same breath as Oxford but back in the day would feel like more of a countryside destination where he had his house, the kilns. But he lived in a house of women. Yeah, that's right.

[13:48] I mean, again, also, when we think of it as a suburb and quite a well-to-do suburb of Oxford, and when Lewis began living in Headington with Mrs. Moore, before they bought the kilns, it was striking to me what a kind of transient life they led. You know, sort of subletting individual rooms with Lewis sleeping on the sofa. And, you know, it was really quite a primitive existence to begin with. And then, of course, in 1930, they bought the house that Lewis then lived in for the rest of his life, which was, you know, as you say, really quite a sort of rural kind of countryside location with a huge grounds, which is now what's called the C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve. So you don't really get quite the sense of how big the surrounding area was, a huge lake which Lewis used to skate on when it iced over.

[14:46] And a big wood where Joy Davidman would go shooting pigeons and things. So it was like living in the countryside. Actually, he was a great lover of animals.

[14:56] They had a real menagerie of various kinds when they lived there. But you're right, he lived there with Mrs. Moore, the mother of Paddy Moore that he served with during the First World War, but who was killed, and her daughter Maureen. So, yeah, it was quite a female household.

[15:19] But, you know, it's interesting to me as well, the extent to which he was living at the kilns, but also living in college. You know, he was obviously splitting his time in a way that nowadays you either would live in or live out. In those days, I think you could kind of move between the two worlds so that, you know, he spent so many evenings in college doing various kinds of societies. He's, you know, we know about the Inklings meeting on a Thursday night in his rooms here in Magdalen, but, you know, every night he was doing something similar. It was incredible. So he would quite often sleep over during the week in term time, go back at weekends and then probably spend most of the vacations living in the canes. That's one of the elements I hadn't really clocked because it's a short distance, but if you miss the bus, it's a long way. And so if you're late chatting into, you know, midnight with the Inklings, you aren't going to get home. Tolkien could always cycle back home because his house was in the central Oxford itself. But Lewis, of course, he would have to stay over. One of the things that you reminded me of when I was reading it is how when Lewis starts his academic career in the 20s, well, coming out of the war, actually, he's considering himself, his ambition is to be a poet. Yeah. And that's really what he wanted to excel at. And you have a beautiful poem about Oxford. I don't know if you want to read a little bit, if you've got it to hand.

[16:48] Sure, yeah. I've got it here in my copy because I printed it at the beginning of the book. And it's, yeah, it's a poem that he wrote during the war when he was actually, you know, on the front line in the trenches.

[17:04] I find it very poignant because he, of course, started his Oxford career in April 1917, so during the war, but he didn't really ever get properly started. it. He mostly was just doing some training with the Oxford Cadet Corps. Then he goes off to Keeble College and starts training properly with the Somerset Light Infantry. Then by November of that year, his 19th birthday, he finds himself in France on the front line. He has had, at that point, a glimpse of what Oxford could offer, but it's already been taken away from him. He's obviously looking at what he hopes is lying ahead of him in the future. So how much of this would you like me to read?

[17:57] I think if you read the first verse and then the last verse, that would give a sense of his relationship to Oxford. Okay. It is well that there are palaces of peace and discipline and dreaming and desire. Lest we forget our heritage and cease the spirit's work to hunger and aspire she was not builded out of common stone but out of all men's yearning and all prayer that she might live eternally our own the spirit's stronghold barred against despair so in a way oxford is everything the wall isn't you know so it's a very important, place to him this is before he obviously had his conversion it's a spiritual experience for him being in Oxford.

[18:52] In a non-Christian sense but obviously that then got even more special when he became a Christian in was it 1931 1930, 1931 as a result of meeting people here so.

[19:06] When you were doing your research, it sounds like you've been snooping around all the archives of all the colleges. Is there anything that really surprised you? An odd little thing that you found out that you had no idea had gone on at the time? For me, the fact that I sort of took away is the image of C.S. Lewis sitting on the bus, going up the hill, Headington Hill, leaving Oxford for the countryside. I sort of knew that, but reading this again, And I reckon that transition from one place to another was very important to him in his understanding of his own life and his creativity and relationship to Oxford. So that's my takeaway is the bus journey, quite nice and practical.

[19:50] Well, and of course, there's a moment in Surprised by Joy where he talks about that exact bus journey, isn't there? I mean, when you think of it, it's such a kind of quotidian, sort of ordinary kind of experience. But for Lewis, quite often those are the moments where he has these great spiritual insights when he talks about, you know, suddenly I found myself having to confront the reality of, you know, whether to, well, and again, interestingly, in quite Narnian terms, he says, I needed to decide whether to open the door or leave it closed. It's a moment of sudden crisis in his deciding whether to accept the Christian faith or not. It happens on that bus going up Headington Hill. So I think that is a significant feature of his life. I think one of the things that I was really struck by was the sheer workload. Because we think about how much he was so productive.

[20:43] And it's tempting to imagine quite leisurely days as an Oxford academic. And now, obviously, we have lots of committees and we have to do kinds of different sort of paperwork and reporting and so on. But the amount of tutorial teaching he was doing, you know, I've already mentioned that the women's colleges, but, you know, he left UNIV when he came here in 1925. He was the college's Maudlin's first English tutor, because it's a relatively new subject. And he carried on teaching the English students at UNIF for the next kind of at least 15 years alongside all of the students here at Maudlin. And also he was teaching at New College as well as at the ladies' colleges. And he said that he comes here as an English tutor, but his training was in classics and particularly in philosophy. And as a result, he was asked to teach the philosophers at Magdalene, which he did. And I also found he was teaching the historians as well.

[21:49] So he had an immense teaching load. And we have to remember in those days, this is one-on-one tutorial teaching. So there's no sense in which you're sort of doubling them up or having classes. So that was something that struck me was that just how did he fit everything in? And the other sort of nice discovery, say I'm snooping around the archives, one thing that I was really struck by was that when he arrived at Maudlin, there was a ban on any student clubs and societies. You know, the very thing that we associate him with, because the president felt that they were interfering with more important pursuits like rowing. That's not a club. Yeah, yeah. And so Lewis felt that this was somehow the wrong way around. And he and one of the history tutors, K.B. McFarlane, set up a thing called the Micklemas Club. And it was a sort of literary philosophical discussion group which is obviously in keeping with lots of things that Lewis was actively engaged in at the time and in fact he gave papers at it himself.

[22:57] And then other students spoke at events and then they decided after a few years to have some invited speakers from outside the college and one of them, again this is not surprising but one of them was Tolkien and came and gave a paper on constructed languages And there's a lovely little account in the minute book of this event. And it says that Professor Tolkien came and spoke to us. He talked about the origins of constructed languages. He traces it back to Animallic and some of these early languages that he was involved in as a child. He then gave some polished philologies of his own and read poems in those languages. It was only after I read that account that I realized, looking at the date of it, that what this is is an early version of what becomes the secret vice. Early in the sense that we think of secret vice being the first time that Tolkien ever talked about his construction of his own languages and shared some of the poetry that he'd written in them. But actually, this event at Magdalen, which happened in June 1930, predates that by about a year and a half. And so that was a really surprising find. Not surprising, I suppose, in some ways, because you might think that the first time that he talked about all of these things would be with C.S. Lewis.

[24:22] And so in that sense, it was in keeping. But it just amazed me that this document was sitting there in the college archives and nobody had ever really put those two connections together. And very frustratingly, though, the student who wrote the account of it, you'd like to have heard a lot more about this, but he says, unfortunately, because I had an exam the next morning, I had to leave early. And so I couldn't stay for the rest of the discussion. So we never quite find out what exactly was said afterwards. Oh, that is a shame, isn't it?

[24:54] You did mention earlier on that, in some ways, Lewis's career reached a blockade in Oxford, and so he actually got his chair over, a professorship chair, over in the other Magdalen in Cambridge. When you were thinking about this, what did you come across, having got your Magdalen Oxford experience and then looking at Magdalen Cambridge, what do you think of the two experiences as far as Lewis is concerned?

[25:27] To the outsider, they seem very similar cities, but insiders might think actually they're quite different, certainly as colleges.

[25:35] Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, Lewis says himself that Magdalen Cambridge was much smaller than Magdalen Oxford.

[25:43] And he found it quite a congenial change in that sense. It was smaller, it was friendlier, I think. By the time that he'd spent nearly 30 years at Maudlin Oxford, he had a lot of longstanding friends, but he also had some enemies. And by the time he'd become a very successful sort of public apologist for the Christian faith, I think he had his admirers, but he had his detractors. And I think moving to Maudlin Cambridge, where it just seemed homelier, friendlier, and also he says they were much less hostile to the Christian faith. He talks about Magdalene the impenitent from Magdalene Oxford. And so I think he felt that it wasn't an entirely congenial environment for him by that stage. But also switching jobs, they may sound to outsiders like very similar things, and you might wonder why you'd move from one to the other. But the distinction was much clearer in those days, and that's to say that he was always Mr. Lewis in Oxford. And it wasn't just about getting the title. They are different jobs in the sense that a tutorial fellow is responsible for doing all of these tutorials, these one-on-one meetings with students going through their essays.

[27:09] And it's very time consuming. And as I've said, he did a lot of tutorial teaching, whereas a professor gave a number of lectures. And that was all of their duties. Otherwise, it's mostly research and graduate teaching. Well, Lewis wasn't a big fan of graduate teaching. That's fair to say. He didn't think that research degrees were a worthwhile thing. You should just carry on reading more.

[27:35] But you know the idea of just lecturing and not having to do tutorials was obviously appealing to him and in fact he says after he's made the move that you know i've never had so much free time since i was at school it's like getting twice the money for half the work and so i think you know it made a big difference to him in that way and and i think he he also talks about cambridge as being like a sort of county town you know you can walk out from cambridge and find yourself in the countryside very quickly. And he certainly got a bit fed up with the way that Headington, you know, we've talked about it as being in the countryside. But by the time he moved to Cambridge, it was becoming much more suburban. And it was a big Cowley car factory and all of the workers' houses that were being built all around where he is. I mean, now, of course, there's a huge ring road that goes right past his front door. And I think in that sense, He felt that the Oxfordshire countryside was being spoiled and that Cambridge had still preserved it. So he seems to have very much enjoyed elements of that switch. But as I say, he never actually moved to Cambridge. It was just a kind of place that he lived during term time. I'll save this pleasure for people when they get to read it, but you're very funny about C.S. Lewis's experience of being a college administrator.

[28:57] What's the name of the role that he took on at the goodness of his heart and was hopeless at? Yeah, the vice president. There we go. I found that very funny. He was completely in above his head. But being very sort of responsible, he felt he had to do it when his admin wasn't his skill. No, and I love the fact that when he goes to Cambridge and they suggest, because one of the duties of a professor is that you are required to take on the duties of head of department if you're asked to do it. And so immediately they ask him to do it. He says, no, no, no, this has been tried before. It was a disaster.

[29:36] Oh, yes. Anyway, we all can think that his time might have been better spent rather than doing that. Yeah, exactly. Many people listening to this will be trying their hand at writing fantasy. What in your research did you learn about Oxford? It's coming back to Oxford from Cambridge. What did you learn about Oxford infiltrating into his fantasy imagination? Because you and I both know, walking around Oxford, you'll hear the tour guide saying, ah, yes, and this little carving here definitely inspired the fawn and this one inspired Aslan and so on. Was there something else that you found in Oxford that was feeding into his fiction?

[30:18] Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because actually, having just been talking about Cambridge, I mean, Oxford's full of fantasy writers in the past and present, but is Cambridge? I don't know. You probably know better than me. It's got quite a few poets and the current generation, there's a lot of nature writers there. Robert McFarlane, I think, is based there, isn't he? Yeah. It doesn't have quite this, and scientists, you know, with Newton and Cavendish labs and things. So, but they don't have the hotspots of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Dinah Wynn-Jones, Philip Pullman, and so on. So, one thing Cambridge will have to cede to Oxford, I think. Exactly. And it does make one wonder, you know, what is it about Oxford that's so conducive to fantasy writing? And there's that lovely essay by Philip Pullman where he sort of suggests that maybe it's something to do with the fog coming off the rivers that have this kind of solvent effect on reality. And, you know, or the gargoyles coming down at night from New College Tower and having a fight with the gargoyles from Magdalen and all of this. And it is tempting to think that, you know, the buildings, the place, you know...

[31:31] Inspire much of this kind of fantastical imagining. And I walked past that little doorway the other day in St. Mary's Passage where you always see a group of tourists. And so I sort of listened to see what they were saying. And it is that standard story always that, you know, Lewis is coming out of the church and he sees the doorway and there's the fawn and there's the lion's head and so on. But the reality is, of course, that the actual images that lie behind the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis tells us, go back to when he was a schoolchild. He had the image of a fawn in a wood surrounded by snow holding some brown paper parcels. So I don't think we can actually sort of – there are lampposts all over Oxford that we want to claim as being the original for lantern waste and so on. But I think we're probably going about it the wrong way, looking to find a specific landmark or something that's influenced Lewis.

[32:31] Although, of course, walking around Magdalen and seeing all the stone statues of these strange mythological beasts, you can't help but think of the white witch that's turned them to stone and the white stag that we currently have in the Deer Park and so on. There are so many Narnian touchpoints in Oxford. But I suppose the conclusion I came to, having thought about all these things, is that actually what really links Oxford with Lewis's fantastical worlds is the literature that he was reading as part of his studies and teaching as part of his academic job. Because, of course, Narnia in particular is so influenced by such a huge variety of literary works, especially classical medieval ones, in which he was completely immersed. And so that seems to me to be key to it. And also the fact that he came into contact with people like Tolkien, who were also interested in the same thing, And that they had the libraries that furnished them with these books, but also places like colleges where they could meet in the SCRs and high table dinners, or the pubs like the Eagle and Child and the Eastgate where they could sit and talk.

[33:57] That's really what I think Oxford is doing. It's providing the people and the place within which they can come together and feed from each other's shared interests and respond to each other's criticisms and provocations and inspirations and so on. It may be something to do with the historic construction of the English syllabus as well, The Oxford one sort of gave priority to the early stuff, you know, the Anglo-Saxon and medieval, which if you think about it is largely fantasy stories.

[34:35] Whereas Cambridge certainly towards the end of his life is all caught up in the debates about literary criticism and how you read texts, much more a sort of philosophy of criticism interest there, which is antithesis of interest in story.

[34:51] And so I sometimes wonder if it's that that's also going on. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I mean, I think Lewis found that when he moved to Cambridge. And of course, Anglo-Saxon isn't part of English studies at all in Cambridge.

[35:04] It's part of a different department, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. And I think that Lewis found odd. And also, yeah, the study of what he calls literary criticism with the biggest possible capitals for both words, which you know i think he you know he didn't have a lot of time for that kind of theory um but and that was very much at the forefront in cambridge so i i would agree with that and you know the sort of the submersion in i mean story is exactly what lewis is all about isn't it like that that's it if he is interested in in theory it's in what makes a good story, um so yeah i agree so if you're thinking of a good christmas gift for a uh c.s lewis fan in your life or to put on your own list c.s lewis's oxford is definitely well worth a look it's got it's beautifully produced lots of pictures which i always love uh really beautiful ones so i highly recommend it um and we'll put a link in our show notes so that you can click your way through to finding it so simon thank you for your time but just before we send you back into teaching your.

[36:10] Undergraduates um we always end with where in all the fantasy world is the best place for something we've gone to the best pub we've gone to um and we've been different kinds of people like best assassin that kind of thing um but i thought in honor of c.s lewis we should have where is the best place to go through a wardrobe which is slightly different because our wardrobe doesn't just go to narnia it can go to any fantasy world whatsoever so imagine there's a wardrobe in your office that you can walk through into any fantasy world we'll allow it to always go to nanya as well occasionally but if it's going somewhere else where would you like to go in terms of a fantasy world to visit as as a professor of um english language and literature, It's going to sound a bit predictable, but I would want to go to Middle Earth, specifically for the reason you've just given. Because, of course, so much of that is, again, like Narnia, built out of medieval, but particularly sort of philological things that I'm interested in. And so, you know, I mean, the sort of, you know, the fact that Orthanc comes out of Orthanc into your way, Ork, you know, the cunning work of giants from an old English poem makes me just want to go and see it. And so it's those specific connections and also the fact that, you know, the writers of Rohan actually speak old English.

[37:33] You'd do well there, wouldn't you? Wesley, Theoden Haal, you know, I could converse with them. That would be fun. But I feel like it might be a bit controversial because of course you know Narnia you can kind of dip in and out of through these portals like wardrobes but of course Middle Earth isn't really like that you know it's not a place that you kind of portal in and out of so I don't know how they would take me special dispensation.

[38:01] In answer to my own question I think I'm going to stick with C.S. Lewis actually but I'd switch to his space trilogy I'd quite like to visit temporarily really, and not for a long period of time, his version of Perilandra, Venus, because the descriptions of that are so amazing. I would just love to go and see it the way he imagines this place that almost has no solid solidity to it. Not the real one, because if I went to the real one, I would just die. But his one, as he imagined it, I think would be really fascinating. But I would be coming quickly back through the wardrobe because I think it's only for a short term visit, that one. Thank you so much, Simon. And thank you very much for writing this book, which I'm certainly going to treasure. Thank you very much. Thanks very much for having me.

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