The Fellowship & Fairydust blog has posted the second part of its interview with our friend Dale Nelson. This portion concentrates on his work on Inklings scholarship:
So, much that keeps me interested in the Inklings is not just academic curiosity or opportunism but a concern for the moral imagination incarnated in our lives and homes; and these books are delightful to read. At the moment I’m reading The Lord of the Rings for the 14th time.
Dale Nelson, retired professor of English at Mayville State University, North Dakota, is a good friend of mine and one of the more frequent commenters on this blog. He is also a presence in the world of Inklings and fantastic fiction scholarship.
Linked here is a recent interview he gave to the Fellowship & Fairydust web site. The interview actually comes in two parts. This is the first, and deals mainly with horror literature.
A second segment, more about the Inklings, is coming soon. I’ll post that too.
I thought, since it’s Friday, I’d post some music consistent with my overheated musings in yesterday’s post. So here’s a lovely arrangement of “This Is My Father’s World,” one of my old favorite hymns. It was originally published in 1901, with lyrics by Rev. Maltbie D. Babcock (1858-1901), a sadly short-lived Presbyterian pastor who published several popular hymns. The tune is Terra Beata, based on an English folk song. (And I’m pretty sure they cribbed the first line for the Shire theme in the Lord of the Rings movies.)
Here’s an interesting item from the latest issue of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society. It’s all the better for being written by our good friend Dale Nelson:
Pages 22 and 23 feature Dale’s article on Thomas Dewar Weldon (1896-1958), with whom Lewis had a variable relationship. They came to Oxford at the same time, and were good friends for a while. But even before he stopped being an atheist, Lewis grew weary of Weldon’s relentless, materialist cynicism. As a tutor in Moral Philosophy his teaching method (according to R. W. Johnson’s book, Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age) was to first demolish his students’ conventional beliefs, and then to demolish whatever new beliefs they constructed, until they were left “in a state of free-floating agnostic cleverness.”
Weldon declared, in a 1944 lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, near Oxford, that the carpet bombing of German cities was justified because it would shorten the war and save lives. Lewis was already on the record, along with a number of Anglican clergy, as rejecting that argument categorically.
Weldon was (according to George Sayer) that “hardest-boiled atheist” who remarked to Lewis in his rooms one day that the evidence for the Resurrection of Christ was remarkably good, saying, “Rum thing,” as Lewis recalled in Surprised By Joy.
Weldon was also the model for the Dick Devine, the cynical, flippant character who’s so annoying in Out of the Silent Planet and (promoted to the title, Lord Feverstone) in That Hideous Strength.
The other day somebody on F*cebook shared a fine article on J. R. R. Tolkien from the archives (2002) of Touchstone Magazine. It’s about love and happens to have been written by Dale Nelson, a Tolkien scholar and a close personal friend of mine:
Tolkien told one of his sons about his young love for Edith in a letter, written after her death. “I met the Lúthien Tinúviel of my own personal ‘romance’ with her long dark hair, fair face and starry eyes, and beautiful voice” in 1908, when he was 16 and she was 19. Very soon after they married, he was captivated by his wife’s dancing, for him alone, when he was an army officer on leave from the Great War, in 1917, and they slipped away to “a woodland glade filled with hemlocks” in Yorkshire. And that moment was the origin of the myth of Beren and Lúthien, Tolkien wrote to another of their sons.
Read the whole thing here.
You know what’s spooky? I’ll tell you what’s spooky. As far as I know, I’d never heard of the author M. R. James before I read the book I’ll review tonight, Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Stories, by Dale Nelson. And what does Phil do today but link to an article citing M. R. James? [Cue Twilight Zone music.]
Full disclosure: Dale Nelson, author of this story collection, is a good friend of mine and generally the first reader for my novels. He sent me a signed copy as a gift.
Dale, by his own statement in the Preface, has written many of these stories in conscious emulation of James’ “antiquarian” works. I’m not generally a reader of ghost stories, in part because nowadays the genre has gotten mixed up with horror, which I don’t like at all. But as I read this book, I was reminded of Poe’s essay on poetry, in which he says that the purpose of a poem is to leave a single, vivid impression in the mind of the reader. This sort of ghost story has much the same purpose – not necessarily to shock or terrify you, but to leave you with a feeling of unease, of invisible doors left ajar, of watching eyes behind your back in the darkness, of secrets best left buried.
The genres of the stories in fact range beyond ghost tales. There’s plain science fiction here, and fantasy explorations of folklore themes. There’s a straight Christian miracle story. All expertly written, with keen insight into human nature and an understanding of Orthodox theology (and I intended the capitalization on “Orthodox,” because a distinct preference for the eastern church is easy to discern).
Recommended. And yes, I’m prejudiced.