Tea at Trianon: The Jovial Father and Tom Bombadil

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

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

The Jovial Father and Tom Bombadil

From The Imaginative Conservative:

Joviality is an attribute of kingship; we can discern that if we look into the origin of the word. Jove is another name for Jupiter. I’m not thinking of the planet here—not the planet as it is contemporarily understood, anyway. The Jupiter I’m thinking of lived in the old cosmos as it was understood by astronomers before the invention of the telescope. He was the King, and his name literally means, “Sky Father”. That old cosmos, with all if its relevance for creatures living on the earth, was beautifully brought back to life by C. S. Lewis in his Narnia Chronicles. In those books the planets exercise a subtle, but pervasive influence in each one of the stories. We can see the influence of Mars in Prince Caspian, and Mercury in The Horse and His Boy, and even the Sun (yes, it was considered a planet, too), in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But we see Jupiter, in all his kingly splendor, in the first book (at least in the order in which they were written): The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Michael Ward in his marvelous book, Planet Narnia, makes an irrefutable case for what I describe. His thesis might be written off as eisegesis if it wasn’t for the consistent interest Lewis shows in the planets in so much of his scholarship. For example, The Discarded Image, the last book Lewis published, documents the contents of his Oxford lectures entitled, “A Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry.” (In other words, it is his introduction to the subject of medieval poetry, containing important information a reader must know if he is to understand the poetry of the period.) And in that introduction Lewis zeroes in on Jupiter, the King, and the influence he has on the world that lies beneath him. (Read more.)