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The Ideal of Kingship in the Writings of Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien: Divine Kingship is Reflected in Middle-Earth. By CHRISTOPHER SCARF.

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jts/flu027

1477-4607

Richard Sturch,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Kings, queens, and royalty figure a great deal in the writings of the three principal Inklings. Most of Williams’s mature poetry is based on the figure of Arthur, about whom he was writing a study when he died. Kings and queens are essential to Lewis’s ‘Narnia’ books and Till We Have Faces, and appear, though less prominently, in two of the ‘Ransom’ novels. And The Lord of the Rings reaches its climax in The Return of the King (with lesser kings in Rohan and Erebor also playing important roles). A study of the way they handle the idea of kingship was certainly to be desired. And Dr Scarf, who has himself a strong sense of the grandeur, the ‘mystique’, of kingship, has read extensively both in the three authors themselves and in secondary sources. It is the more unfortunate, therefore, that the resulting book is a disappointment. It was in need of really drastic editing, and indeed proofreading: the numbering of notes to chapter 2, for example, begins in the middle of chapter 1, and the index, with entries like ‘Queen of Perelandra – passim’, is a bad joke. The text itself is marred by repetition, by sentences which change their grammar halfway through, and by digressions into subjects with only tenuous links to the topic supposedly being discussed. There are startling assertions which need, but are probably incapable of, justification—for example, that Aragorn in Tolkien is a type of Christ; and there are even misreadings of the texts themselves. Again Tolkien affords an example, for Scarf depicts the Witch–King as the arch-enemy, not of Gandalf (with whom in the original text he is often ‘paired’) but of Aragorn, whom in fact he encounters just once, and briefly. These are the sorts of errors which careful reading and ruthless editing might well have eliminated, or which a more disciplined structure might have avoided. The theme of kingship in Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien is an interesting and important one, which deserves that a book should be written on it; but not, alas, this one.