The Discarded Image and the Key to Narnia

00:05 - Julia Golding (Host)
Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding and today I am joined by Jacob Rennaker, who many of you who listen to this podcast will know is a frequent conversation partner for me as we discuss all things fantasy. And today we thought we would actually take a bit of a dig back into the history of CS Lewis. In particular, we would look at the connected topic of his work the Discarded Image, planet Narnia and the Narnia series. So bear with us. If that doesn't mean anything to you, then hold on, because it's going to be a revelation and for those of you who already have an inkling about this topic, you hopefully will enjoy the conversation that we're about to have. So, Jacob, welcome. Do you want to kick off by saying what this is? The discarded image? What do we mean when I say CS Lewis and the discarded image?

01:11 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
Right. So the discarded image is essentially a reification of his set of lectures that he provided, that he gave at the university about the medieval cosmos, the model of the medieval cosmos, and so when he says the discarded image, it's the kind of mental picture, the imaginative framework that the medieval authors that he was a specialist in had in mind when they were discussing everything the world around them, nature, sciences, everything is kind of undergirded by this kind of imaginative image and it's this image that in modernity that he said that we have discarded, set aside, uh. And so his attempt here, uh, is to kind of rehabilitate this image, to help to introduce it to, to show modern, uh, modern readers what this would have looked like and felt like to experience for a medieval and the value that it still holds to people today.

02:16 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah. So you have to imagine that CS Lewis gave this first as a series of lectures. As Jacob said, he was faced with rows upon rows of students who were pitching up at Oxford and then Cambridge, who had come with a modern mindset of science. Things had been set out into space. They knew how big the universe was or had an inkling of it anyway I think it's got bigger since and he felt there was a need to give them a guide to how people before the modern times thought, because so much was being missed when students were reading medieval literature. And right towards the end of his life he compiled these lectures into a book called the Discarded Image.

03:04
Rather poignantly, the prologue is written in 1962 and the book is published in 1964. And 1963, the intervening year, is the year in which he dies, so it's very much something that comes out right at the end of his career. Okay, so that was the purpose of this book, just so you can sort of feel what it's like to read. It is a scholarly book and there are large chapters on things like the Latin writers that the medievals were reading, who aren't on any present day bestseller list, people like Plotinus Boethius, who I think is probably. I certainly knew a bit more about him.

03:53
And then there was sort of the old faves, like Aristotle and others' description of the Greek writers, like Plato and so on. So he does the Greeks, he does the Latins and tries to show the continuity between those writers and the medievals, who then pick them up in the period which he was teaching in. So if you skip those chapters, the nub of the argument comes in the beginning material and the epilogue at the end. So that's what we're going to be concentrating on. So, jacob, do you want to have a stab at describing what the medieval universe was like?

04:35 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
Yeah, this is fascinating. It took Lewis a number of different lectures so I don't think I can do it in any shorter of a time than he did, but I'll try. So, just kind of, the 20 000 to 30 000 uh foot view is uh a kind of intricately woven, uh carefully planned, interconnecting uh set of heavenly bodies, earthly bodies, um, all governed uh by, you know, by god, essentially uh, but with layers, um levels, uh, that all relate to each other in different ways but that are all firmly interconnected and, like I said, interwoven um, and it's organized. You can, you can label everything. Everything has its proper place uh, everything makes sense. There's, it's a given that things are going to make sense, there's, there's a reason and rationale for it all uh, and the medieval mind, as Lewis says, enjoyed this sort of categorization and this sort of complexity.

05:52
And just contemplating this model was something that authors that really kind of sparked them and drove them, so that they didn't see repetition of the model, trying to re-explain it as being something that would be dull to them.

06:10
Rather, it was something that they thought, that they looked upon with a sense of joy and delight and that if they could recapitulate this model, they could explore it. They could kind of detail the interconnection between these different parts, that that was something that delighted them and presumably delighted their audience. That the reason why lewis says that they spoke about this model so much was because they enjoyed it so much, uh, and that that might be a difference. It wasn't a sense for a drive for novelty, um, uh, rather, it was a sense of kind of like comfort not just comfort, but like really deep appreciation for, uh, respect for, and kind of an enlivening by these, these sort of principles that stood as as fundamental. So you can see everything, everything is explainable and, uh, you can enjoy it again and again, and there's always more to kind of see and understand. But it's all there, it's all laid out, um, you just have to remember it I think one of the it.

07:12 - Julia Golding (Host)
It's a kind of instinctive version of the universe. So if you imagine us standing outside looking up at the skies, um, this model of the universe, which goes back to the Greeks and probably before that, starts with the idea of the earth, is not exactly at the center, but it's at the bottom, and then above that are the spheres, and the spheres are all the seven planets, and the moon is counted as a planet in their separate spheres. So you've got the moon, mercury, venus, sun, jupiter not the very outer layer, planets like Uranus, because they weren't yet discovered. So you've got seven of them sort of stacked up, and then, beyond that you've got the fixed stars, and beyond that you've got the sort of prime mover, because they understood that in order for the spheres to be revolving, there had to be something to set them in motion. The other thing was that it was felt that this, this, was like an eternal universe. They didn't have a sense of it being created. That was the Greek version of it. Of course, by the time you get to the medieval version, they've got the idea of the Christian worldview of there being a creation moment. So there were some dissonance between what Christianity had entered into the model and what the Greek scientists had, anyway.

08:51
So we don't need to go into the minute detail, but there are some absolutely brilliant descriptions. This is why I was so excited to talk to Jacob about it, because he'd also been reading it, and there's some fantastic descriptions of what it's like to be a medieval man person looking up at the universe. I've just got a couple here I want to read to you. So, hence, to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest trees forever and no horizon. To look up the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building.

09:37
The space of modern astronomy may arouse terror or bewilderment or vague reverie. The spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic and theirs was classical. So that goes back to what you were saying, jacob, that they had this model which they celebrated and found. They wanted to illustrate and add to and explore, because it was like being in a vast, wonderful medieval cathedral understandable place in a sense, as opposed to us now, with the proportions of the universe being so vast that we feel lost in a trackless forest, as CS Lewis says here. When you were reading this, did it help you do the adjustment which he's aiming for, which is to sort of feel a bit medieval as you were reading it?

10:44 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
Yeah, one of the things, yeah, these perspective shifts that he provides, and he does it three different times in Discarded Image he asks the audience reader to. He says the best way to get a sense for this is to actually go out in the night sky to spend half an hour just looking up at the stars, like you were mentioning, julia. That it's really kind of hour just looking up at the stars, like you were mentioning, julia. That it's really kind of this intuitive looking up and really getting a feel for what what it's like. So then then you can start playing imaginatively like what are these? Is it? You know, in the ancient near eastern, uh, you know, mediterranean view, you have the sky as a dome and, uh, light as being, either, you know, gems, jewels or, uh, you know pinpricks that are kind of showing through to something else beyond, and so if you sit with that once, you kind of enter into that model and try to look at what that's like, it can be disorienting in a way, and that's what I think what Lewis is trying to encourage disorientation or for him and that's what I think what Lewis is trying to encourage, disorientation or for him it would be kind of a reorientation that the world needed to understand that. Yes, it's. He used the term vertiginous, right, he says the medieval model is vertiginous If you look at it the right way. You're not actually looking up, you're actually looking down, you're looking out into this, know, the more real world, and so to try to shift that perspective, that's yeah, that that's interesting and yeah, and there's, I've actually had there was a point actually to it, to your, to your question, right, have I have I tried this, if I experienced that there was.

12:21
I remember I had read, uh, out of the silent planet, where you have kind of a description, and we'll move into this a little bit later but he describes the, you know the space versus the heavens, you know talking, and he talks about this, uh, here, in the discarded image, that space is what we call what's outside of the world, and that is the opposite of what the medieval mind would have described space as, instead of empty, you know, vacuous, cold, dark. The medieval mind looks at this as bright, full of song, light, warmth, and he illustrates this in Out of the Silent Planet at one point, and I remember I just read that I was at, um, I was at the Griffith observatory in Los Angeles, uh, and was there and they had a great, great view, um of of the city, but it was a near, it must've been nearly full moon, it was. It was enormous, uh, and as I was, was standing there kind of just looking out at that. There's lots of people around, but I was just just captivated by the moon and it just seemed like.

13:26
After having read this, you know lewis's description of what it felt like to be or experience space, or imagine space, uh, it was for me. So there's a there's kind of a switch that that flipped and the moon seemed to be like something that was living or at least worthy of love, and that wasn't at a distance, but it was close, as a hunk of rock that's orbiting, however, many miles away from Earth. And this is what its rotation it is a thing rather than it is an object. It is something to be reflected upon and contemplated's.

14:23
Really, what lewis is trying to do here is to, to, to shift our, our view from just seeing things as things, seeing, you know, a star, and this is something again, most we're going into how he illustrates this, but in in his uh fiction, um, which tolkien does in his, in his poem mythopoeia as well, and you see some kind of interplay between what lewis is doing here and what tolkien is seeing, kind of interplay between what Lewis is doing here and what Tolkien is seeing, kind of the conversations that they were having. He's trying to broaden our view from the kind of modern view of examining and applying taxonomy to different items and saying, okay, I know what this is, because these are the parts that make it up and this is kind of how it functions within the laws of physics, moving from that to a world that is moved ultimately by love. Um, and that's something that's, yeah, that I found incredibly moving and even kind of like personally meaningful, as I was kind of playing with those sort of experiments experiments myself.

15:24 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, and I think what I really appreciate about the discarded image is he's trying to say look, these weren't ignorant people, the medievals. They were very sophisticated in the way they used this model. So he takes you through the thought experiment. After having put us in a sense at the bottom or in the center of this, with the spheres going around us, he says they also understood that, um, we were outside the city wall, that god, the the first mover, um, the ultimate, we are the furthest away. So he suddenly flips the model and he said this is what the medievals did. They were able to hold this uh, sophisticated image of being both in the center and on the outside at the same time. So this gets away from the rather tired, uh cliche that there wasn't really science in medieval period and they spent all their time debating whether or not angels danced on pinheads. You know that stuff. And so it's actually no, they knew it was a model, they knew it was the best guess that they had at the time. But they were also able to do these interesting things with it to explore their beliefs and the way they understood their beliefs, by incorporating it into this classical model that they'd inherited from uh well, the greeks, really.

16:51
So let's move to the epilogue of the discarded image, because that gets really interesting, because there he really confronts our modern age. He's obviously writing a few, you know, a few decades before us now, but he was in a time when we have the beginning of, you know, einstein and special relativity and general relativity and the quantum world, and so he is in a sort of, in a sense, in a world of modern science. And he goes on to point out some really fascinating things about our current scientific models, that is, non-mathematical conceptions, far from being a further truth to which mathematics was the avenue, is a mere analogy, a concession to our weakness. So he's saying that science has reached a point now where when mathematicians, who are the ones who speak the language of science, try and explain it, they give us an analogy, but it's nowhere it's. The distance from what they're trying to describe is vast.

18:10
So take for something like the string theory, which you and I may have a vague idea. Well, it's about strings of things, but that's not at all. It's just a sort of something to stand between us and the science. It's not actually access to what the scientists themselves are discussing. We have to acknowledge that our understanding of science by analogy. We use models that are flawed. We're not truer, we're just using flaws a flawed model, which is a kind of explanation. And so he sums this up by saying no model is a catalogue of ultimate realities and none is mere fantasy. So there's some truth in all of them. Each reflects a prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age's knowledge.

19:04
Nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her. And then he has a final image which I find really helpful. He says that our questions are like a stencil it determines how much of the total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest. So if we go to science or go to nature asking certain questions, we get back certain answers. Um, I found this really really thought provoking, actually, because I'm very interested in science and I do try and understand science which is above my pay grade mathematically, and I do sort of rest on these analogies, thinking I'm understanding. But he's warning me that I'm kind of not, you know. So I mustn't look down on the medievals because they were doing a you know damn fine job, in their own terms, with their model.

19:56 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
Now, this is great and what he says, yeah, I like how he begins the epilogue that you mentioned there. He says I've made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to have combined splendor, sobriety and coherence in the same degree, so there's appreciation for it. It is possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it had a serious defect. It was not true, right. So this is a great way, with traditional, you know, lewisian kind of wit and humor, no-transcript. You know in our knowledge, in our morals, in our understanding, that we are far superior today than anyone that existed before. Can't try to say that that's not the appropriate way to look at this. I'm trying to say that that's not the appropriate way to look at this.

22:09 - Julia Golding (Host)
Each person, each age, has its own kind of way of engaging with the world that deserves to be taken seriously and held kind of in conversation intention not just intention with, but I think he would say like in conversation with these other models and that it's in that conversation of these different models that you're arriving closer to what is ultimately real and what is actually meaningful. So, fortunately, we're not about to set off in a rocket ship, so we don't need to have the right. We're using this imaginatively and as an inspiration. But if you're wanting to understand, really, hundreds and hundreds of years of literature, it's a very good book. Just to give you a sort of you know, primer on that. And also it links to the idea of the humours which was the main kind of medical knowledge until very recently really, um, until we got germ theory and other things, the and you've probably heard of the sort of the, the you know, choleric, temper and melancholy and all these things sanguine. This all comes from the planets, their influence and how that affects our bodies, because the medics were trying to explain why we get ill, why people were different from other people, why people went into depression, all these things. They look for explanations and they connect it to this model. So if you want to understand how people understood character, it's a great book to read, just to put that in your head. So when you read your Shakespeare plays, you know what's going on, for example.

23:29
Anyway, so let's move on from the discarded image to briefly look at how Lewis played with this himself. He says right at the beginning he hopes to persuade the reader not only that this model of the universe is a supreme medieval work of art which I think you mentioned, jacob but that it is in a sense the central work, that which most particular works were embedded, to which they constantly referred, from which they drew a great deal of their strength. So everything goes back to this all the time, and recently, or in the last 10 years or so, scholarship about cs lewis has suggested that this is really true of his own fiction and his own writing, and it's very much front and centre in his poem the Planets, which in itself is like a little primer to understand the seven heavens of the medieval imagination. But it also goes into his Ransom trilogy, the science fiction trilogy set in space, and also the Narnian. What's the word for a seven-part book?

24:54 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
Well, ward calls it the Narniad like the Iliad which. I kind of like the Narniad.

25:05 - Julia Golding (Host)
Narniad, like the Iliad, which I kind of like the Narniad, okay, so, um. So I would just recommend reading the short poem I mean not that short, but the poem the planets, um, which is in the collected poems of CS Lewis, because it's going to be very key to the next place we're going with this, which is Michael Ward. Now, michael Ward is an academic who lives and works in Oxford. I had dinner with him last week, so he's very much around on the scene. He's a delightful man, but he also happens to be the person who I'd say has revolutionized the way we think about cs lewis in our generation. And this was all because he was sitting reading the planets, the poem the planets. So do you want to pick up the story there, uh, jacob, and say what revelation came to Michael?

25:59 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
Yeah. So he's, he's reading that, he's, he's doing work on Lewis and it, and in reading there there's a passage from uh, the, this, this poem about Jupiter, that mentions uh, in, in talking about the, the sense, the essence of of Jupiter, um, that it's of um, that it's of the sense of winters ended and sins forgiven. And so those two lines together winter ended, sins forgiven or wrongs forgiven then that kind of immediately sparks his mind to make a connection between the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where you have right, you're always winter, never Christmas. And then Edmund and his betrayal, and then Aslan's making restitution for that and ultimately forgiving him. So that seems to be the impetus, the spark that reframes things for him. And so him, and so he starts looking, rereads again the poem itself, uh, and that then goes to to look at the different volumes, uh, within the narniad, uh, to see if there, if there were, it was a correspondence. So, first within lines, which, in the wardrobe, how much jupiter imagery do we see there? Um? And then he, he finds, uh, he demonstrates quite a bit, uh, that finds there, and says well, if that is the case for language and wardrobe, is it also true for these other planets. And there are seven planets, in essence, here and seven heavenly bodies, I should say. And then there's seven Narnia novels. I should say, and then there's seven Narnia novels, and there's been.

27:44
Traditionally, scholars have had a difficult time trying to provide some sort of overarching schema for understanding. How do these fit together? What is the organizing principle of these books? Is it just flap dash, as Tolkien had described it right? Is this just Lewis, just kind of in the dark, firing off shots, grabbing pieces of mythology from here and there that Tolkien found to be inconsistent mythological systems? What is Lewis doing? And scholars have tried a number of different ways mapping them onto the seven Catholic sacraments, mapping them onto different plays. Ward even says that he tried making connections between different Shakespearean plays, which he finds allusions to, but there wasn't any satisfying overarching model for understanding why seven books? How do they actually fit together? And so, yeah, so this poem and this, this reading through specifically of jupiter, is what kind of sends him off into this deep, deep, deep dive into lewis's planetary imagination or heavenly body, medieval imagination, and then looking at how those uh ideas might have been embodied in the different uh books of the Narnia series.

29:00 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, so probably I mean Michael is putting it out there for us to challenge him, and I guess the one challenge would be the stencil image that CS Lewis provides. If we put the stencil of the planets on the books, then we get the answers back we're looking for. Okay, but still I find it very enriching. So that's an argument for going along with this argument. So, jove, jupiter, jovial, happy rejoicing, the the greatest of the planets is the narnia. Uh, the lion, the witch in the wardrobe, um, but it is quite convincing, particularly um the association with the silver chair and luna, the moon, madness, water, wateriness, enchantment. There's silver, there's all sorts of um imagery there that works well with the medieval understanding of Luna. You've got Mercury messenger, fleet-footed messenger for the horse and his boy, because the whole point of that story is to get the message to Narnia that the Calamans are coming across the desert.

30:17
But there are many other aspects to this languages, all sorts of things, cross-cultural aspects, um, oh, mars, prince caspian, all about war, battles, single combat, fighting. It's, it's, you can see once you start looking for it. Yes, absolutely that. That that is the book about war. Um, we've. So who have we got left?

30:42 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
we got venus magician's nephew is venus.

30:45 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, yeah, now that one I find less of a close fit. Yeah, um, okay, I'm happy to go with it. I'm still convinced, michael. And then of course, the. The last one is um, uh, saturn, which is the last battle. Oh no, I've missed out the sun.

31:09
So the sun one is the voyage of the dawn treader, the sun imagery in that um is, and gold, which everyone remembers, the bit in the water where people turn into gold statues. I mean, there is lots of, yeah, I find that convincing, the imagery on board the ship, it sort of picks up the solar theme. And then going back to saturn, the old man, the end of times, of closing up the shop on narnia, you know, it's the sort of the aged one, everything is in its last days in that story. So, yeah, I do find the theme convincing and enriching. And I read. So I'd read the books as a child, read them as an adult, read Michael's book, planet Narnia, and then reread or listened again to the stories and found new depths, new possibilities of imagery coming through. So for me, that's the point of reading a critic like this is you can suddenly see a richer theme by thinking, hmm, that's possible. So are you totally sold on the theory or do you have reservations?

32:25 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
yeah, it's, I mean it's, it's not like to, like you said, going back to to lewis, that this it's, it's a, it's a model for understanding, uh, the narnia books. Um, I think you're absolutely agree that that Word has produced enough evidence and ideas there to make a convincing argument that this was something that that could have been in Lewis's mind and, more importantly than whether or not this was actually what motivated it, it is a valuable lens through which you can see these books and that you can draw deeper appreciation for what Lewis is doing. So, at the very least, if it wasn't the governing principle of the Narnia books, it certainly seems to be something that was part of. As we discussed with the discarded image, this was something that was kind of fundamental to Lewis's thought and way of kind of toying with what the world is, how do things work together. He loved the medieval model, and so it makes sense that he would that, even if it wasn't intentional, that that love for and engagement with that model would inevitably kind of bleed into what he's doing with, with his, with his fiction, and it seems to be doing it, he seems to be doing it.

33:45
He seems to be doing it. He's kind of explicitly doing that in the ransom. Yeah, the cosmic trilogy. You definitely have the names of the planets. It's it's much more explicit, so you can see him doing it there. And so we know that he's capable of treating those sort of themes and wanted to engage with those ideas of heavenly bodies, translating them into fiction, entering into a fictional world in which these planetary ideas and ideals were a reality and you were able to experience them, or the characters in the story were able to experience them. So I think that that's a good argument for saying yes, lewis is capable of doing this. Is he doing that in some way here in the Narnia books? And it seems like it would be difficult to say that it wasn't in his mind or he was able to shut off that part of his mind while he was writing these books. But it does certainly add some unique and, I think, enriching perspective on the Narnia stories.

34:42 - Julia Golding (Host)
And of course there is that material at the end of the Dawn Treader, where they meet a retired star, ramandu, and dear old Eustace, one of my fave characters all the time, basically says oh, you can't be a star, you know, stars are a big ball of burning gas. You can't be a star, stars are a big ball of burning gas. And his answer, romandu's answer, is well, that's what a star is in your world, in this world, this is what stars are like. I'm a star. So what CS Lewis is doing is you're in a world of fantasy. So this can be the model of the universe. Stars can be different. It can be the medieval version of some sort of wonderful angelic being, a sort of demon of the skies. Demon spelled, not demonic, but the sort of presence in the skies. Who can be a retired star living on an island? Why not? You're in the world of presence in the skies. Who can be a retired star living on an island? Why not? You're in the world of fantasy and it's real within that world of fantasy. So I think, yes, there's plenty of evidence in there.

35:52
The biggest problem is the one which Michael Ward does tackle, which is why didn't he tell us so once he'd finished writing the Narnia series. Why didn't he tell us so once he'd finished writing the nine-year series? Why didn't he leave a letter saying hey, everybody, I've been super clever, look how clever I've been. This isn't the answer to all those critics who told me I was being random Tolkien. You should have paid more attention. You know why didn't he do that? What do you think about Michael's answer, which is basically that CS Lewis liked to set the puzzles and he liked to have it sort of the surprise of unfolding it?

36:29 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
Yeah. So I think if we're writing a novel about CS Lewis writing his stories, then I think that's compelling, right, that's like the Da Vinci code. This is the Narnia, and actually one of the popular versions that Ward did was called this the Narnia code, right? So it's this thrilling discovery that there's a secret key to re-examine these things that have been in plain sight all along, and really is teaching about X, y or Z. So there's something that for us, kind of like narratively, as humans, we find that compelling, uh, and this is a mystery to to solve. But you're right, that's it. It isn't, it's an argument from silence and that's the hardest argument to make, right, that he yeah, that was the part that was kind of least convincing to me was that lewis could be a secretive person. He kind of kept his, his Mary, his marriage, um, uh to, uh, to joy a secret for a year or so from a lot of his closest friends, and that there were other things in his life that he didn't document in a surprised by joy in his autobiography, that some who knew him felt were kind of glaring omissions. Um. So, yes, he, he was secretive, maybe just private about certain things. But again, you have to say the argument I think that I find most compelling that Ward makes for Lewis's silence about his model, own kind of impetus for uh, writing these, these uh works of fiction, is that again going back to how lewis was studying medieval literature, and so he uses, you know, draws the comparison of the knight's tale in in chaucer, that um, mars imagery kind of pervades it, and then it's explicitly stated that it happens, you know, things resolve on a tuesday, which is the day of mars, uh, in the calendar. And so so lewis is, you know, pointing out, recognizing and discarded image that medievals are infusing their works, even imaginative works, with this imagery, um. And so if he is trying, you know, trying to emulate, trying to get into the mode and model of uh, of the medieval mind, then to have this happening himself, that he would just presume that the medievals didn't say's taking the same approach, and he calls it and Ward, ward, if you're in the air, you don't, I don't recognize that I'm breathing air because I'm breathing it so much, and then to do so is to kind of ruin it, to kind of take you out of that um mode of suspension of belief, or to to draw attention to the fact that you are in a particular model, that it is something that needs to be just kind of breathed and experienced. So that's, I think that's probably the most compelling argument that Word makes.

39:49
It's not entirely like you said, julia, it's not entirely convincing, it's not ironclad. You can't say yes, he did this and that he was a secret person and that he meant for this and he's just giggling somewhere on the other side that finally somebody has discovered this. Um, it's, it's hard to say it's, it's, it's hard to say that why he wouldn't have mentioned it. He does have a word, brings up a couple of different references that lewis may have been alluding to this, but again it's allusions and a lack of uh explicit calling out this, this imagery. So it's, it's difficult, but it doesn't invalidate the idea. I think the core uh thesis that the medieval model of the heavens and the sphere is played a part in Lewis's construction of the Narnia books.

40:43 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, and also I wonder if we're looking at it a bit around the wrong way, in that he's not setting a puzzle for academics, he's writing books for children. And just as when he thought about the Ransom trilogy, he was thinking what fun can I have for adult readers of science fiction to familiarize themselves with the medieval model in certain aspects? He's thinking what fun can I have for children in bathing them in the atmosphere of a sort of a medieval concept of the heavens? I mean, there is another organising principle which is more obvious, which is the creation to revelation structure of the Narnia series. So you go from, not in order they were written, but when you put them all together you've got the sort of foundation stories of the creation of Narnia. Then you've got the Golden Age period, which is Lion, witch and the Wardrobe and a bit of Prince Caspian and Dawn Treader, and then you've got the sort of undoing and the Silver Age and the end of Narnia. So there is another kind of more obvious organising principle, and I think he was drawing on what he loved.

42:05
We also are used to Easter eggs now, aren't we in films and what have you? I put them in my own books that I will connect characters which I'm not expecting anybody else to recognize, but I'm just doing it for my own pleasure, because I see connections between characters. I might import them into another book, or there'll be these webs which I'm creating, and I feel that you don't need to expose the workings in order to have the effect, the enjoyable effect, of what that adds up to. So yeah, so should we move briefly to the Ransom trilogy and its application of the discarded image? Do you want to explain a little bit about Out of Silent Planet, when this is most obvious that he's using the medieval model?

42:54 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
um, for me, yeah, it was. Uh, it is a space travel book and this is just to provide a greater context. This is a book that he wrote, uh, as a result of a conversation that he had with uh jr tolkien right, that they were kind of lamenting the state of science fiction. They thought that books, the science fiction books, weren't as good as they should be or could be, and so they decided one of them would tackle time travel, the other one would tackle space travel. Um, tolkien started working out some ideas, never finished anything because it ended up kind of getting subsumed into his larger project and it was too difficult for him to kind of work into his larger legendarium Whereas Lewis went out and he was able to do. I think it was much easier for Lewis to do kind of one-off project that didn't have to be all part and connected to a larger whole. So Lewis is looking at space travel as a trope for science fiction. And so in the actual space travel portion of the book, when Ransom, the main character, is kidnapped and then taken in space to the planet Mars the silent planet is Earth, mars has every planet, has a different name and he's providing. It is truly interesting how he's taking medieval model and kind of recasting it as a science fiction premise of different worlds under different governing systems, kind of an interplanetary council. So for me, where I see it really, where it kind of initiates you into the medieval mode, is during the, when ransom is taken from earth, uh, to mars, to malacondra, the, the, the planet that that is mars essentially, but in in this world, uh, it's called malacondra, but as he's as, as ransom is kind of sitting looking out into space, he had this, you know, an extended, beautiful, kind of revelatory moment for the character, um and uh, he said I can I read just a little portion of that here to give that um. So he says, uh, a nightmare long, engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off of him. So this is kind of like shedding this view that modern science has put on him. Um, so it continues.

45:36
It says he had read of, quote space. At the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold, vacuity, the utter deadness which was supposed to separate the world. He had not known how much of it affected him until now, now that the very name space seemed a blasphemous libel for this Empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it dead. He felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He thought it barren. He saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly, even upon earth with so many eyes, and here, with how many more. No, space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser. And so this is his again, allusion to medieval thinkers. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens, the heavens which declared the glory.

46:34
So this is another reference of Psalm 19. The happy climbs that he says, where day never shuts his eye up in the broad fields of the sky. He quoted Milton's words to himself lovingly at this time and often so you have him making a few different cross-references to other works. That he does. Of course, lewis writing his preface to Paradise Lost as a Milton scholar, to Psalm 19 there, as a kind of a biblical scholar, as well as the medieval model there.

47:09
So this kind of changing of view of space isn't quote space.

47:14
That's the wrong way to look at this. There's another way of experiencing it, and I just love the language that he uses there seeing the sky, the heavens, as the womb of worlds, this nurturing, creating creative environment. So that's kind of what, what gets you to kind of shift your way of thinking. And then once you get actually get to the planet, um, he's, he's exploring different races of of of creatures, um, uh, but ultimately there's there's conflict there and there's conflict that the people from Earth are bringing to that planet.

47:51
And so I didn't find it that much with Out of the Silent Planet, that this kind of Martian imagery, this Mars, that wasn't necessarily permeating this whole book. But ultimately you have Ransom interacting with the kind of intelligence or governing creature, or I'd say kind of an angel-like creature that kind of governs this planet. That's where you kind of get a sense for what the embodiment of Mars is. But for the rest of the book it's largely kind of exploring ideas that he explores elsewhere in his, you know, uh, christian apologetic work, um, uh, in more imaginative terms. But more than that.

48:40 - Julia Golding (Host)
Again, these medieval ideas are kind of at play in the background, providing a kind of soundtrack for some of this as it as it continues yeah, so the three thread for the trilogy is the idea that Earth is the silent planet the fallen planet is another way of putting it and each planet is sort of governed by a spirit, an angel, a genius of place, it's that sort of sense. And the one on Earth is devilish and bad and corrupt, and so we are an object of pity in the solar system. Um, so when we move to perilandra, which is actually a book with not that much plot but amazing world building, um, perilandra is venus. So unsurprisingly, the uh, the presiding genius of the place is female, beautiful sort of presence. And again you've got the idea of Ransom comes as an emissary because he's learnt lessons from Outer Silent Planet. He's there, he discovers, to prevent a fall. He's been sent to stop the corruption from his experience on earth, reaching this planet as it sort of takes its first steps. So that's the sort of broad outline of that. It's amazing the, the creation of a on the evocation of a world where land masses are balanced on water, is amazing. Just reading it for that it's very, very striking.

50:17
And then, finally, the last book, that Hideous Strength, is based on Earth and I've just reread it recently. It's a strange book, but if you've got a sort of masculine world of the first book and a feminine world of the second book, michael Ward was saying to me when I was talking to him about this book and the struggles I had with it. He said well, actually it's the reconciliation of the male and female, so less reliant on the discarded image, except it's importing this imagery of there being spiritual beings at war in our universe who are fighting over the future. So let's leave the space trilogy there, because I think it might be worth returning to that hideous strength in particular at a later date, because it's such a bizarre story. Shall we think, finally, about the implications of what CS Lewis is up to. Can you think of any other writers who have used scientific models, discarded ones or not, to underwrite their fantasy?

51:38 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
Yeah, there's one particular book, an author, ted Chiang, who he wrote the short story that the film Arrival was based on, kind of first contact between an alien species and having to kind of figure out what their language system is and how that works. I enjoyed it as a film. The short story is incredible as well. What he does, what Chang does in his short stories collection called Stories of your life and others, uh, he explores a few different models, one of which is the babylonian uh model. So in the, the short story uh tower of babylon, he kind of takes seriously the babylonian construction of the world and somebody kind of walking up the Tower of Babel. But you have him taking the physics of what a model like scientific understanding or conceptualization of that particular time period. That's one author that I've seen play with some of these different models, kind of cosmological models in fiction, in short story, not in like long form but in short story, and I think they're perfect for short story kind of thought experiments. It's really a great medium for that.

53:29 - Julia Golding (Host)
In longer form. I can think of some the three body problem so I apologize to those of you who can speak Chinese, but the three-body problem by Liu Qizhen sorry, please educate me on the right pronunciation. That is fascinating. Exploration of how to describe a digital universe like computing, some of the sort of dreamlike sequences in this other culture they're interacting with, is incredibly memorable with the sort of periods of time they go through. Anyway, if you've seen the Netflix series, you'll know what I'm talking about, but the book is also brilliant. And then, of course, frankenstein. Anyway, if you've seen the Netflix series, you'll know what I'm talking about, but the book is also brilliant. And then, of course, frankenstein.

54:20
Frankenstein is Mary Shelley's thinking about the new science of electricity, plus pondering the claims of alchemists. So it's a combination of what was the cutting-edge science of her day with this older alchemy. That was an exploded science by the time she was thinking about it. A discarded image, in that case. And then the final one I thought of was, of course is Philip Pullman, who he in the Northern Lights series is thinking about dark matter, and I actually heard him talk about this in a panel in Oxford and he was sort of actually there was a physicist on the panel talking about the real science and I remember poor old Philip Pullman saying, well, of course I am just turning it into fantasy, I'm not trying to be a scientist when he was challenged on some of the bits that't quite right for science.

55:14
So we must always say when an author like cs lewis or philip pullman or mary shelley puts these things into fantasy, what. What they're doing is having fun and and applying the model, but they're not actually held to, you know, rigorous scientific standards, because that's a different profession. Yes, perhaps we should put some links in our show notes to the books we've mentioned so people can look it up. So let's finish. Um, jacob, we've we've gone around the medieval universe. Um, so where in all the fantasy world is the best place, do you think, to live in a medieval universe?

55:56 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest)
I, I think I will say, just because I just finished reading it, um, and I don't want to take more time deliberating uh in my own mind. Uh, I just finished reading uh dc comics. They have a kind of a mini series, a 12 issue mini series called dark knights, of a miniseries, a 12-issue miniseries called Dark Knights of Steel, and it's a medieval reworking, essentially, of the kind of DC mythology or core characters in a medieval world. So it kind of takes us to the starting point. Is what if Superman had crash landed in medieval Europe somewhere, without saying where exactly? But it wasn't just Superman landing there, his parents also accompanied him. So you have these characters kind of being set up as kind of god kings and their people, their relationship to society. You have your Batman character who ends up related to this in some way, and part of the fun is kind of if you're familiar with DC characters and mythology, kind of seeing the clever ways that these characters kind of manifest themselves in a medieval setting.

57:11
And yeah, it's's a fun great art. So it's tom taylor's the author, uh, yasmin putri, uh the primary illustrator for those. But yeah, it was. It was a fun uh kind of, yeah, reimagining of uh, of uh ideas, these characters in a medieval, uniquely medieval setting. That was, yeah, it was a fun, fun, fun story. Some twists, turns, uh, mysteries, uh gorgeous artwork, um, and so it made me want to to see more of that sort of thing, kind of re-imagining, uh, you know, characters from one era contemporary era, or some other era into, uh, the past.

57:46 - Julia Golding (Host)
It was it was a lot of fun. Oh, I love that. I love that. That appeals to me a lot. My brain is now whirling through all the other potential comic book universes that you could shift. So for me I was thinking it'd be really fun just to flip a switch and all the people in Star Trek find themselves actually in a real version of this medieval universe. So when you set off on the Starship Enterprise, you go through the different spheres and you've got to hear the music of the spheres and dodge all these planets and deal with the Prime Mover and the fixed stars. It would just be wonderful just to see them having to reimagine themselves in that way. It could almost be one of those holodeck episodes in the next generation, but that would be great fun. Thank you so much for talking to me about the discarded image, and so I hope as a result, people don't discard it so much anymore and we'll go back and re-examine it and find in it new, fresh sources of inspiration.

58:54 - Speaker 3 (Host)
You very much, Jacob thanks for listening to myth makers podcast brought to you by the oxford centre for fantasy. Visit oxfordcentreforfantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.