The Arthurian Wing · Reading Path

The Matter of Britain · A reading path in Arthurian mythology

Movement VI — Afterlives and Returns · Unit 33 of 36

The Inklings' Arthuriad: Williams, Lewis, and David Jones

What did the twentieth century's theological imaginations build from the matter — and why did they need Logres?

The Argument

While Eliot's generation read the matter as diagnosis, a circle of Christian writers read it as vocation. Charles Williams — poet, editor, occultist-turned-theologian, the strangest of the Inklings — spent his life on an Arthuriad: Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), dense lyric sequences in which the poet Taliessin serves an Arthurian Britain called Logres, mapped onto a visionary geography of the human body and of Europe, with the Grail's achievement depending not on any single knight but on the web of exchanged love Williams called co-inherence. Byzantium is order; P'o-lu is the abyss; Broceliande the making-place; and the failure of Logres — Arthur's incest, Balin's stroke, the wound in everything — means the Grail withdraws and the company of the redeemed continues underground. It is difficult poetry (Lewis's posthumous commentary, published with Williams's unfinished prose Figure of Arthur as Arthurian Torso, 1948, remains the indispensable guide) and it is the most serious theological use the matter has ever been put to.

C. S. Lewis dramatized his friend's scheme in That Hideous Strength (1945), where Merlin wakes in modern England (the wild man of Unit 6, literally exhumed into the twentieth century, his knowledge "not... exactly forbidden, but... valid only in a world that no longer exists") and the hidden company of Logres — the true Britain inside fallen Britain — stands against a technocratic abyss. And David Jones, Anglo-Welsh painter-poet of the trenches, wove the matter into the century's two most demanding long poems of war and worship: In Parenthesis (1937), where the Somme is read through Y Gododdin and Malory until the dead of both armies lie inside one tradition, and The Anathemata (1952), where the matter of Britain is one stratum in a liturgical archaeology of the island — Eliot called it a work of genius. For all three, the matter supplied what secular modernism could not: a way of speaking about a sacramental order hidden inside a ruined one. That is Blaise's wager (Unit 19) restated for the age of the tank.

The Texts

  1. Taliessin through Logres / The Region of the Summer Stars — "The Calling of Taliessin," "Taliessin's Return to Logres," "The Coming of Galahad," "Taliessin at Lancelot's Mass" · Charles Williams

    Difficult, and worth it: Logres, co-inherence, and the Grail withdrawn.

  2. That Hideous Strength — the Merlin chapters · C. S. Lewis

    Merlin awake after fifteen centuries, inside a novel about a research institute. The wild man as the thing modernity cannot metabolise.

  3. In Parenthesis / The Anathemata — In Parenthesis, Part 7; The Anathemata, "The Lady of the Pool" · David Jones

    The Somme read through Y Gododdin and Malory.

The Scholarship

  1. Arthurian Torso · Charles Williams & C. S. Lewis

    Williams's own prose account of his Arthuriad, with Lewis's commentary. The key to the poems.

  2. The Inklings and King Arthur · ed. Sørina Higgins

    The collection that takes this body of work seriously as a whole.

The Practice

Lectio Read "Taliessin at Lancelot's Mass" (the cycle's close) after re-reading Malory's last chapter. Note what Williams believes survives the wreck — and in what form.

Scriptio Lewis's Logres is the true pattern hidden inside actual Britain. Write a paragraph on the equivalent claim for your own work: the ideal practice hidden inside the actual one. (This site calls its version the Scriptorium; name yours.)

In the Anatomy

The Wild Man

Doors from this unit

  • The Scriptorium — Logres inside Britain; the scriptorium inside the working day. The wager is the same.

Movement VI — Afterlives and Returns

  1. 31. Tennyson's Idylls of the King
  2. 32. Weston, Eliot, and the Waste Land
  3. 33. The Inklings' Arthuriad: Williams, Lewis, and David Jones
  4. 34. The Novelists' Arthur: White to Bradley
  5. 35. The Scholars' Arthur: A Field Studies Itself
  6. 36. The Wild Man's Return

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