Comments on: Texas State Professor finds Lost Lewis Manuscript

By: Steven Beebe

Steven Beebe — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:11:39 +0000

Walter Hooper has written extensively about the Narnia fragments that appear in the notebook that I read in his excellent book Past Watchful Dragons. What has not been written about is the fragment of the Lewis manuscript that I inadvertently discovered while spending time exploring Lewis manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The existing drafts of the Narnia Chronicles that appear in Lewis’s handwriting in the same notebook in which I found the Lewis manuscript are different from the final drafts that are published. Lewis’s ideas about the Narnia story provide evidence of his creativity, as does the newly discovered manuscript that Lewis planned to eventually publish with Tolkien. He was a master communicator, I believe, who not only practiced effective communication in his written and oral communication, but had keen theoretical insights about human communication.

Steven Beebe, Texas State University-San Marcos

By: Paul Martin

Paul Martin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:03:04 +0000

Dr. (?) Beebe: Thank you for commenting on this! I am very excited about the prospect of eventually reading this work, however incomplete it may be. I’m sure that it’ll probably be something that absorbs you, and then leaves lingering thoughts without suitable conclusions.

I am also curious about the contents of the Narnia portions that you located, and how they relate to the final versions of the books as published. Will you be providing insight into that as well?

By: Steven Beebe

Steven Beebe — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:42:30 +0000

It was very exciting discovering this manuscript. It took several years before I figured out precisely what I had found. I knew that it was a Lewis manuscript about language and communication, but it took some time for me to figure out that Lewis had planned to write this book with J. R. R. T. The manuscript provides what I believe to be important new insights about C. S. Lewis’s ideas about communication, language and meaning.
Steven Beebe, Texas State University-San Marcos

By: Mark Sommer

Mark Sommer — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:36:27 +0000

My take on it, Paul, is that Professor Beebe came across Lewis’s thoughts for an Introduction to the book which Lewis wrote down very early after the authors’ first conversation about it in 1944. The articles talk about this draft being written up-side-down in the notebook, presumably in between the other writing in the book. Lewis was very concerned about conserving paper during the war, so an early date for this is logical. He would have assumed Tolkien would eventually be the co-author, but that does not mean that Tolkien actually had written anything yet.
I must repeat that during this time that Tolkien was very focused on finishing The Lord of the Rings and trying to get it published. There were also demands from his publisher for anything else he had written, and his time was also taken up with editing Farmer Giles of Ham. It would not surprise me at all if Tolkien never got around to putting anything on paper at all.

By: Paul Martin

Paul Martin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:29:30 +0000

Awesome. That’s a great find. Very interesting, the language that he was using. Perhaps Tolkien did have some input into it.

By: Mark Sommer

Mark Sommer — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:23:44 +0000

I just discovered the original source for this story. The official Press Release is on the Texas State website: http://www.txstate.edu/news/news_releases/news_archive/2009/07/CSLewis070809.html
A quote not found in the San Marcos Mercury report:
“It was several years after finding the manuscript after doing additional research about Lewis and Tolkien that Beebe concluded that the manuscript was the beginning of the lost book.

In Lewis’s own distinctive handwriting the opening sentence clearly indicates that Lewis was writing a book about the nature and origins of language—the topic of the planned Lewis and Tolkien book. Further evidence that the manuscript is the beginning of the coauthored book project is the fact that Lewis wrote about “our statements” and used the phrase “authors consider,” rather than writing in the first person singular as Lewis often did.”

By: Mark Sommer

Mark Sommer — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:01:14 +0000

Jonathon,

Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Tolkien ever started working on this project. I don’t think he ever did. The letter from JRR to Christopher Tolkien mentioned in the article only mentions that Tolkien and Lewis had talked about it. The compilation by Humphrey Carpenter, The Letters of JRR Tolkien, contains many letters to Christopher during the 1940’s, and the proposed book is never mentioned again by JRRT, either to Christopher or any other recipient.

While it would indeed be very exciting if any notes by Tolkien for such a book surfaced, it seems very unlikely. However, as late as 1948, Lewis mentioned the book to Chad Walsh, saying that it would be published in 1949, so perhaps Tolkien had written something by then. However, at this point, Tolkien was absorbed in finishing The Lord of the Rings and trying to get it published, so I doubt he got much, if anything done. Disagreements between the two authors about the subject was likely another hindrance.

By: FlyMeToGBU (G comme GBU)

FlyMeToGBU (G comme GBU) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:59:08 +0000

On aurait trouvé un manuscrit non-publié de C.S Lewis. Un projet de livre “Language and Human Nature” : http://tinyurl.com/mxxe9k

By: Jonathon

Jonathon — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:02:54 +0000

Hmm, perhaps with the efforts of Christopher Tolkien he could unearth his father’s work for Language and Human Nature and we can finally have a Lewis/Tolkien collaboration!

By: Genna

Genna — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:56:09 +0000

Oh wow! That is soooooooo cool; I hope it’ll be published soon!