Tea at Trianon: Tolkien & Lewis on the Blessed Virgin Mary

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Tolkien & Lewis on the Blessed Virgin Mary

From The Imaginative Conservative:

I discovered an old letter last week, hidden between the pages of an old book, the content of which has been haunting me ever since. It was addressed to me at an old address in Florida and I seem to have tucked it away for safekeeping. What I read astounded me as it contains revelations about J.R.R. Tolkien which I don’t believe have ever been published. It was a photocopy of a letter written by George Sayer, a good friend of both Lewis and Tolkien, and was addressed to Dame Felicitas Corrigan, a Benedictine nun who was a friend of George Bernard Shaw, Siegfried Sassoon, Alec Guinness and Rumer Godden. It had been sent to me from England by my late friend Stratford Caldecott who had appended to it a brief handwritten question: “Shall I write about the discovery of this letter for StAR?” Stratford Caldecott, who should be no stranger to readers of The Imaginative Conservative, was a great Catholic writer who died in 2014 at the tragically young age of sixty. The “StAR”, to which he referred, is the St. Austin Review, the Catholic cultural journal that I’ve edited since 2001. His note was dated November 22, 2006. I’ve checked the content of the St. Austin Review in the months after this date and can find no trace that Stratford ever did write on this.
As for George Sayer, with whom I had corresponded when doing research for my book, Literary Converts, he wrote an excellent biography of C. S. Lewis, which was full of his own personal memories of his friendship with him. He recalls a hike in the west of England in the company of Lewis, Tolkien and Warnie Lewis, Lewis’ older brother. The Lewis brothers were believers in walking briskly in order to get physical exercise, which made them frustrated by Tolkien’s frequent halts to admire the beauty of a flower or a tree. Exasperated by these incessant interruptions to their forward march, they asked Sayer to walk with the dawdling Tolkien so that they could stride on at the pace they desired, arranging to meet the stragglers at the pub. (Read more.)