So, yesterday I spent hours looking through the third volume of CSL's COLLECTER ESSAYS. And, as has often proved the case, I didn't find what I was looking for but came across a number of interesting things in the search. For example, I'm not quite sure how to take the following passage from a 1959 letter to the great Arthurian scholar Eugene Vinaver. (III.1083-1084)
Have you read Tolkien's lecture on Fairy Stories in the volume Essays presented to Charles Williams? Part of my case against the Celticists wd. be his mixim that 'motifs are a product of analysis' -- not bricks out of which stories are put together but entia rationis ['mental fiction'] into which we analyse them -- rather like the metrical feet or grammatical conjunctions and declensions.
I thought I knew ON FAIRY STORIES pretty well, but this 'maxim' doesn't ring a bell. Could this be an example of what JRRT called 'Lewisification'?**
--John R
--current viewing: RINGS OF POWER
*Hooper's note explains that by Celticist Lewis meant figures like Loomis who explained everything in Arthurian legend as derived from Celtic soures.
**For Tolkien's description of being 'Lewisified', see LETTERS p.89.
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