Chapter 35 The Wave
‘I see your appetite is coming back’ Barfield quipped as Lewis began tucking in to his ham and eggs.
‘I have some catching up to do’ was Lewis’s reply as he lifted a laden fork to his mouth.
Tolkien and Barfield had ordered bread, cheese and pickles, along with most of Keiller’s labourers, who now filled the Red Lion to overflowing.
Mr and Mrs Penry-Evans had followed Lewis’ example, explaining they had left London at eight that morning and hadn’t stopped even for a cup of tea.
‘We were following the Great West Road had meant to stop at Stonehenge,’ Violet said, ‘even though I often think it an unwelcoming place, but we found it somewhat overrun with certain undesirable individuals and so we decided to carry on to Devizes and stop here – a rather impromptu decision, and hardly on our route, but worth, I think, the detour, don’t you, Tom?’ she added, petting the hand of her partner.
‘Undesirable?’ asked Lewis.
‘Yes; a group of fascists - they’d passed us after we had left London, they were on motorcycles, driving like devils and nearly forcing us off the road. They had armbands on, with the BUF logo on it – how dare they use the colours of our flag to create that damn abomination!’
Mr Penry-Evans continued the tale.
‘Well, there must have been nearly a dozen of them, clambering over the stones; Violet wanted to tell them to leave but I didn’t advise it. It is enough to have to deal with that sort of behaviour in London – though things have been better of late since their failed demonstration.’
Mrs Penry-Evans poured herself another strong cup of tea and returned to her ongoing conversation with Tolkien.
‘So you think the serpentine shape of the temple here is what is really meant by the discovery of the fighting dragons in Merlin’s story?’ She asked.
‘I think it has to be considered.’ Tolkien said, shrugging. ‘But I’m not as convinced as Stukeley was over the serpentine form…But what has to be fathomed is, if the pair of dragons, at least in later versions, represent the conflict between Welshman and Saxon, if we are forced to look beyond the Dark Age date when Geoffrey believed the tales to be set, and go further back in time – what might this conflict represent? Perhaps a clash between earlier cults? The Neolithic circle-makers vs the Bronze Age metalworkers on their steeds, for example?’ his mind flashed back to two days prior, seated on the barrows of the horse-lords overlooking the Kennet valley; ‘After all, who leads the attack in the medieval version but Hengist and Horsa, stallion and horse – might these pair have been attached at a later point upon an earlier prehistoric myth of the taking over of these sites by the horse-riders? And if, as your husband says, Emrys originally died, might we be seeing the death of a native priest or leader at the hands of the new arrivals? Might a prehistoric Merlin have really existed and been killed at such a site?’
'It’s an interesting idea.' she said.
'And we see such conflicts in many myths –' Tolkien continued, 'the Aesir vs. the Vanir in Norse mythology, the gods vs. the titans in Greek. It’s one set of gods taking over the role of an earlier – usually the earth and fertility gods being overcome by the new gods, the Olympians, the warriors. Now, the trouble with such an interpretation is that one might also define the struggle as a seasonal one – the gods of summer achieving victory over winter, and freeing the fertility the winter has imprisoned….’
‘But cannot it be both?’ Barfield suggested; ‘a new cult using the old myth of seasonal victory to justify its subjugation of the old?’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Yes, that is true – the question is how one might distinguish between them in such a case… it is tempting, here, where we know one cult overtook another, to read the myth in terms of history, and Merlin as the defeated priest of the circles.’
'I, too, see Merlin as a priest of a very old religion' Mrs Evans stated.
'How old is old?' Lewis asked.
She paused for a second before answering. 'Atlantean.'
'And on what evidence would you base such a wild statement?' Lewis asked, snorting, clearly incredulous of the idea.
Violet Penry-Evans smiled.
‘Oh, nothing that would satisfy an academic such as yourself, Professor Lewis,’ she said. ‘I refer to a number of occult traditions, traditionally handed down in the West rather than to any historical source.’
‘That is a given, I would say, seeing as the only historical source one could refer to is Plato’s Timaeus, and that is an allegory. His Atlantis is a myth and I suppose will remain so until some deep-sea explorer finds temple ruins in the Atlantic, beyond the Pillars of Hercules.’ Lewis answered.
‘To those adepts of the occult tradition, what we call the Western Mystery Tradition, Atlantis is a given – not something to be confirmed by finding pillars on the sea bed, but through experience.’
‘Such as?’
‘Dreams and visions,’ she looked wistful. ‘I have dreamed of the destruction of the great temple of Cerne, and of a great wave sweeping over the land. And this was not something I had read, no! The dream of the wave engulfing the land I first had when I was four years old; and it has never left me.’
Tolkien blanched. Lewis snorted. Barfield took a sip of his beer then spoke.
‘You’ll have to forgive Professor Lewis, Mrs Evans; he has a great interest in occult tradition, but cannot bring himself to examine its claims with anything like the scientific open mind he possesses for other topics; he’s a man standing on the shore of a great ocean, wishing to swim but daring not even put a toe in the water!’ he winked at Lewis. ‘Do not mistake his attitude as snide cynicism; it is a defence against temptation…’
‘Balderdash, Owen. All our discussions on occultism and your peculiar attraction to the theories of Steiner have not altered my opinion one jot,’ Lewis countered, flustered at his friend’s comments. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Steiner is a great man to consult about manure but not about metaphysics!’
Barfield chuckled. ‘Steiner’s interest in organic farming stems from his thoughts on the Atlanteans, whom he saw as possessing what you would call a magical affinity with plants and the natural world as a whole.’
Lewis swallowed his beer and shook his head. ‘Poppycock, Owen.’
Mrs Penry-Evans was regarding Barfield with interest.
‘So you’re an anthroposophist? I admit I find many of Steiner’s ideas intriguing.’
Barfield nodded. ‘I find his work challenging and stimulating; he does not, for example, seek to root Atlantis in conventional history; rather he offers an alternative view of the past; a different idea of creation altogether, with mankind eventually coalescing into solidity from a creature of mist and air, almost.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Penry-Evans said ‘he suggests we look at creation in another plane, and that gradually mankind entered the material plane from a higher spiritual one. And Atlantis belongs to that higher state, hence the futility of looking for underwater ruins…’
As Barfield and Mrs Penry-Evans delved deeper into anthroposophical metaphysics Lewis turned to Tolkien who had been listening intently to what the others had been saying.
‘Creatures of mist and air, eh? I suppose as a myth it’s as good as any, worthy of the pre-Socratics, hmm? But it certainly says nothing about the real foundations of this world.’
Tolkien looked at him sidelong.
‘Do you really think that, Jack? Myth is not some arbitrary story plucked out of thin air; there is an undercurrent in myth that is rooted in a reality far more meaningful than mere history.’
Lewis nodded. ‘Yes, I was being flippant, I suppose, Tollers; one has only to think of the myth of the dying and rising god-man, a precursor of the life of Christ, to see that. So, Atlantis, you would say, was true - in a mythical sense?’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Indeed. Is not the destruction of Atlantis also the Fall from Eden – the fall from a state of grace thanks to a deed that sought to acquire wisdom for the sake of power? The men of Atlantis were accused of hubris; of seeking to control the elements, with forging a science that upset the balance of the natural world and brought about disaster; these myths are complimentary, Atlantis and Eden.’
‘But then, as I said, not historical.’
‘Perhaps they were; how are we to know? Perhaps when one goes far enough back there is no difference – perhaps history, as we understand it, the hard world of facts, really is somehow new, coalesced out of something other…’ Tolkien’s eyes seemed to fog over. In his head he was seeing the dream he had had since childhood – a vast towering wave bearing down over green fields; destroying everything in its wake. And this lady, too, he was thinking, shares the dream. Are we dreaming the same myth, plucking the same fruit from the tree of the imagination, or are we seeing glimpses of something that really happened – and if so, how? A message sent from the past, or a memory from some past existence?
Tolkien’s eyes refocused to find his gaze met by Mrs Penry-Evans.
‘Professor Tolkien – tell me what you are thinking.’ She said.
He hesitated, but then seemed to find his voice as he filled his pipe.
‘The Atlantis myth has always…fascinated me; I have, I am embarrassed to say, have been haunted by a nightmare since childhood; a dream… your dream.’
Mrs Penry-Evans nodded. ‘I sensed it, which is why I asked. Merlin was a priest who escaped that destruction, I believe. It’s in his very name: he is Merlin, from an original myrddin – 'he of the fortress in the sea'; and his companion was Morgan: 'born of the sea'.’ Her eyes seemed to be peering over distant shores; distant in both place and time.
‘And they came here, you say?’ asked Lewis, sounding sincere, as if wanting to atone from his earlier mocking stance.
‘I think they brought their wisdom out of the drowned land and established it here; in the west; I believe they founded ancient Avalon, when it was still an island in the inland sea. We have our own Atlantis legends here in the west, you know – tales of Caer Ys and lost Lyonesse; tales of haunting beauty ’
And the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.
Violet Penry-Evans recited – the very lines of Chesterton Tolkien had intoned above the Hakpen horse two days before.
‘And you think this knowledge was placed in temples such as these?’ asked Barfield, gesturing out of the window at the stones. ‘Encoded, somehow?’
‘As Professor Tolkien said earlier – these sites were built by Merlin, they bear his name - Emrys. So perhaps written into the stones themselves is a memory of the flood, and a record of the knowledge that was lost to it.’
An image floated up in Tolkien’s imagination – that Irish myth of the flooding of the river Boyne after Boann had sought to obtain the wisdom from the well of Nechtan… that, surely, was another example of the hubristic search for knowledge that had led to disaster – a disaster taking the form of a flood. That myth had been writ large in the place names hereabouts, the name of Sulis, the goddess of the sun-eye, remembered in hill and well; but was this myth, the drowning of Boannd, myth, pure myth, or a memory of some historical fall? Was it a myth of creation or some dimly recalled history? Or might it be both? Mrs Penry-Evan’s description of Merlin bringing the knowledge of the drowned temple of Atlantis to these lands after the flood seemed on the one hand wishful thinking, an occult fiction, yet there was a connection here he couldn’t quite fathom: Why, he asked himself, do I dream of that same flood? What is it that drives me? A need to rediscover what has been lost? My goal has ever been to recreate, to retell our lost mythical past; the lost myths of England that didn’t survive the coming of Augustine or the Norman Conquest, and so I looked to see what I could uncover. And that’s how it seems: recovery – not invention; I’ve always felt as if I’m rediscovering some long forgotten truth; an archaeologist of myth Owen called me. But my search isn’t just a dry academic venture; strange though it sounds, I feel as if I’m trying to remember home; I’m trying to find a place I belong. Hiraeth, the Welsh call it, a kind of longing or homesickness; only this is a wish to return to a place I have never been – never could have been, for it was lost to the flood aeons ago, before the world was reshaped, and the straight road bent…
‘I see your appetite is coming back’ Barfield quipped as Lewis began tucking in to his ham and eggs.
‘I have some catching up to do’ was Lewis’s reply as he lifted a laden fork to his mouth.
Tolkien and Barfield had ordered bread, cheese and pickles, along with most of Keiller’s labourers, who now filled the Red Lion to overflowing.
Mr and Mrs Penry-Evans had followed Lewis’ example, explaining they had left London at eight that morning and hadn’t stopped even for a cup of tea.
‘We were following the Great West Road had meant to stop at Stonehenge,’ Violet said, ‘even though I often think it an unwelcoming place, but we found it somewhat overrun with certain undesirable individuals and so we decided to carry on to Devizes and stop here – a rather impromptu decision, and hardly on our route, but worth, I think, the detour, don’t you, Tom?’ she added, petting the hand of her partner.
‘Undesirable?’ asked Lewis.
‘Yes; a group of fascists - they’d passed us after we had left London, they were on motorcycles, driving like devils and nearly forcing us off the road. They had armbands on, with the BUF logo on it – how dare they use the colours of our flag to create that damn abomination!’
Mr Penry-Evans continued the tale.
‘Well, there must have been nearly a dozen of them, clambering over the stones; Violet wanted to tell them to leave but I didn’t advise it. It is enough to have to deal with that sort of behaviour in London – though things have been better of late since their failed demonstration.’
Mrs Penry-Evans poured herself another strong cup of tea and returned to her ongoing conversation with Tolkien.
‘So you think the serpentine shape of the temple here is what is really meant by the discovery of the fighting dragons in Merlin’s story?’ She asked.
‘I think it has to be considered.’ Tolkien said, shrugging. ‘But I’m not as convinced as Stukeley was over the serpentine form…But what has to be fathomed is, if the pair of dragons, at least in later versions, represent the conflict between Welshman and Saxon, if we are forced to look beyond the Dark Age date when Geoffrey believed the tales to be set, and go further back in time – what might this conflict represent? Perhaps a clash between earlier cults? The Neolithic circle-makers vs the Bronze Age metalworkers on their steeds, for example?’ his mind flashed back to two days prior, seated on the barrows of the horse-lords overlooking the Kennet valley; ‘After all, who leads the attack in the medieval version but Hengist and Horsa, stallion and horse – might these pair have been attached at a later point upon an earlier prehistoric myth of the taking over of these sites by the horse-riders? And if, as your husband says, Emrys originally died, might we be seeing the death of a native priest or leader at the hands of the new arrivals? Might a prehistoric Merlin have really existed and been killed at such a site?’
'It’s an interesting idea.' she said.
'And we see such conflicts in many myths –' Tolkien continued, 'the Aesir vs. the Vanir in Norse mythology, the gods vs. the titans in Greek. It’s one set of gods taking over the role of an earlier – usually the earth and fertility gods being overcome by the new gods, the Olympians, the warriors. Now, the trouble with such an interpretation is that one might also define the struggle as a seasonal one – the gods of summer achieving victory over winter, and freeing the fertility the winter has imprisoned….’
‘But cannot it be both?’ Barfield suggested; ‘a new cult using the old myth of seasonal victory to justify its subjugation of the old?’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Yes, that is true – the question is how one might distinguish between them in such a case… it is tempting, here, where we know one cult overtook another, to read the myth in terms of history, and Merlin as the defeated priest of the circles.’
'I, too, see Merlin as a priest of a very old religion' Mrs Evans stated.
'How old is old?' Lewis asked.
She paused for a second before answering. 'Atlantean.'
'And on what evidence would you base such a wild statement?' Lewis asked, snorting, clearly incredulous of the idea.
Violet Penry-Evans smiled.
‘Oh, nothing that would satisfy an academic such as yourself, Professor Lewis,’ she said. ‘I refer to a number of occult traditions, traditionally handed down in the West rather than to any historical source.’
‘That is a given, I would say, seeing as the only historical source one could refer to is Plato’s Timaeus, and that is an allegory. His Atlantis is a myth and I suppose will remain so until some deep-sea explorer finds temple ruins in the Atlantic, beyond the Pillars of Hercules.’ Lewis answered.
‘To those adepts of the occult tradition, what we call the Western Mystery Tradition, Atlantis is a given – not something to be confirmed by finding pillars on the sea bed, but through experience.’
‘Such as?’
‘Dreams and visions,’ she looked wistful. ‘I have dreamed of the destruction of the great temple of Cerne, and of a great wave sweeping over the land. And this was not something I had read, no! The dream of the wave engulfing the land I first had when I was four years old; and it has never left me.’
Tolkien blanched. Lewis snorted. Barfield took a sip of his beer then spoke.
‘You’ll have to forgive Professor Lewis, Mrs Evans; he has a great interest in occult tradition, but cannot bring himself to examine its claims with anything like the scientific open mind he possesses for other topics; he’s a man standing on the shore of a great ocean, wishing to swim but daring not even put a toe in the water!’ he winked at Lewis. ‘Do not mistake his attitude as snide cynicism; it is a defence against temptation…’
‘Balderdash, Owen. All our discussions on occultism and your peculiar attraction to the theories of Steiner have not altered my opinion one jot,’ Lewis countered, flustered at his friend’s comments. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Steiner is a great man to consult about manure but not about metaphysics!’
Barfield chuckled. ‘Steiner’s interest in organic farming stems from his thoughts on the Atlanteans, whom he saw as possessing what you would call a magical affinity with plants and the natural world as a whole.’
Lewis swallowed his beer and shook his head. ‘Poppycock, Owen.’
Mrs Penry-Evans was regarding Barfield with interest.
‘So you’re an anthroposophist? I admit I find many of Steiner’s ideas intriguing.’
Barfield nodded. ‘I find his work challenging and stimulating; he does not, for example, seek to root Atlantis in conventional history; rather he offers an alternative view of the past; a different idea of creation altogether, with mankind eventually coalescing into solidity from a creature of mist and air, almost.’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Penry-Evans said ‘he suggests we look at creation in another plane, and that gradually mankind entered the material plane from a higher spiritual one. And Atlantis belongs to that higher state, hence the futility of looking for underwater ruins…’
As Barfield and Mrs Penry-Evans delved deeper into anthroposophical metaphysics Lewis turned to Tolkien who had been listening intently to what the others had been saying.
‘Creatures of mist and air, eh? I suppose as a myth it’s as good as any, worthy of the pre-Socratics, hmm? But it certainly says nothing about the real foundations of this world.’
Tolkien looked at him sidelong.
‘Do you really think that, Jack? Myth is not some arbitrary story plucked out of thin air; there is an undercurrent in myth that is rooted in a reality far more meaningful than mere history.’
Lewis nodded. ‘Yes, I was being flippant, I suppose, Tollers; one has only to think of the myth of the dying and rising god-man, a precursor of the life of Christ, to see that. So, Atlantis, you would say, was true - in a mythical sense?’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Indeed. Is not the destruction of Atlantis also the Fall from Eden – the fall from a state of grace thanks to a deed that sought to acquire wisdom for the sake of power? The men of Atlantis were accused of hubris; of seeking to control the elements, with forging a science that upset the balance of the natural world and brought about disaster; these myths are complimentary, Atlantis and Eden.’
‘But then, as I said, not historical.’
‘Perhaps they were; how are we to know? Perhaps when one goes far enough back there is no difference – perhaps history, as we understand it, the hard world of facts, really is somehow new, coalesced out of something other…’ Tolkien’s eyes seemed to fog over. In his head he was seeing the dream he had had since childhood – a vast towering wave bearing down over green fields; destroying everything in its wake. And this lady, too, he was thinking, shares the dream. Are we dreaming the same myth, plucking the same fruit from the tree of the imagination, or are we seeing glimpses of something that really happened – and if so, how? A message sent from the past, or a memory from some past existence?
Tolkien’s eyes refocused to find his gaze met by Mrs Penry-Evans.
‘Professor Tolkien – tell me what you are thinking.’ She said.
He hesitated, but then seemed to find his voice as he filled his pipe.
‘The Atlantis myth has always…fascinated me; I have, I am embarrassed to say, have been haunted by a nightmare since childhood; a dream… your dream.’
Mrs Penry-Evans nodded. ‘I sensed it, which is why I asked. Merlin was a priest who escaped that destruction, I believe. It’s in his very name: he is Merlin, from an original myrddin – 'he of the fortress in the sea'; and his companion was Morgan: 'born of the sea'.’ Her eyes seemed to be peering over distant shores; distant in both place and time.
‘And they came here, you say?’ asked Lewis, sounding sincere, as if wanting to atone from his earlier mocking stance.
‘I think they brought their wisdom out of the drowned land and established it here; in the west; I believe they founded ancient Avalon, when it was still an island in the inland sea. We have our own Atlantis legends here in the west, you know – tales of Caer Ys and lost Lyonesse; tales of haunting beauty ’
And the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.
Violet Penry-Evans recited – the very lines of Chesterton Tolkien had intoned above the Hakpen horse two days before.
‘And you think this knowledge was placed in temples such as these?’ asked Barfield, gesturing out of the window at the stones. ‘Encoded, somehow?’
‘As Professor Tolkien said earlier – these sites were built by Merlin, they bear his name - Emrys. So perhaps written into the stones themselves is a memory of the flood, and a record of the knowledge that was lost to it.’
An image floated up in Tolkien’s imagination – that Irish myth of the flooding of the river Boyne after Boann had sought to obtain the wisdom from the well of Nechtan… that, surely, was another example of the hubristic search for knowledge that had led to disaster – a disaster taking the form of a flood. That myth had been writ large in the place names hereabouts, the name of Sulis, the goddess of the sun-eye, remembered in hill and well; but was this myth, the drowning of Boannd, myth, pure myth, or a memory of some historical fall? Was it a myth of creation or some dimly recalled history? Or might it be both? Mrs Penry-Evan’s description of Merlin bringing the knowledge of the drowned temple of Atlantis to these lands after the flood seemed on the one hand wishful thinking, an occult fiction, yet there was a connection here he couldn’t quite fathom: Why, he asked himself, do I dream of that same flood? What is it that drives me? A need to rediscover what has been lost? My goal has ever been to recreate, to retell our lost mythical past; the lost myths of England that didn’t survive the coming of Augustine or the Norman Conquest, and so I looked to see what I could uncover. And that’s how it seems: recovery – not invention; I’ve always felt as if I’m rediscovering some long forgotten truth; an archaeologist of myth Owen called me. But my search isn’t just a dry academic venture; strange though it sounds, I feel as if I’m trying to remember home; I’m trying to find a place I belong. Hiraeth, the Welsh call it, a kind of longing or homesickness; only this is a wish to return to a place I have never been – never could have been, for it was lost to the flood aeons ago, before the world was reshaped, and the straight road bent…