Buy the audiobook: www.amazon.com/C-S-Lewis-Coll... Schizo-posters will be tolerated Aggressive ath*ists will be kept on a short leash Blessed posters are welcomed
I can't help but chuckle at the "I would rather paint my face bright blue with woad" comment since it gives me the mental image of CS Lewis dressed up like Mel Gibson in "Braveheart"
I believe that this excellent essay of Lewis’s is based on something of a howler, surprising in a critic of mediæval literature. Lewis references the Germans’ selection of Hagen over Siegfried as a hero, and supposes they have missed the entire point of Wagner’s „Der Ring des Nibelungen“ by elevating a minor villain over the shining hero, Siegfried. I, however, have no doubt that the Germans were not thinking of Wagner’s dramas at all, but of the German national epic, the „Nibelungenlied“, which has only a nominal connection to Wagner’s monumental work, the composer having based it rather on Scandinavian reconstructions of the original Teutonic legend rather than on the 13th century Middle High German poem. The Germans of the 1940s, however, would have been far more familiar with the German poem than with Wagner’s adaptation, not least because of Fritz Lang’s silent film duology of 1924, „Die Nibelungen: Siegfried“ and „Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache“. Lang follows the epic poem much more closely, particularly in the second film, in which Siegfried’s widow, Kriemhild, takes revenge on her brothers and their vassal, Hagen, for murdering her husband, whom they believe to have raped her eldest brother’s wife and dishonored the royal family. In Wagner, Hagen is indeed a minor villain, but in the „Nibelungenlied“, he is stalwart defender of his masters against the fratricidal rage of their sister (a magnificent character in her own right, who appears in Wagner only in the attenuated, pathetic form of Siegfried’s bigamous wife Gutrune). It was and is a critical common-place that the grim, implacable Hagen cuts a far more impressive figure than the conventionalized courtly figure of Siegfried in the „Nibelungenlied“. German propaganda, even before the Nazis, had played up Hagen as the faithful defender of „Blut und Sippe“ - a concept of fanatical loyalty unto death described as „Nibelungentreue“. Siegfried, on the other hand, suffers in the „Lied“ from being too perfect a knightly pattern (despite some of the odd actions his rôle in the ancient legend forces him to perform) and comes across, frankly, as a bit boring. The German people, with a good critical if not a good moral sense, naturally preferred Hagen, as most people today prefer Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker or Maleficent to Princess Aurora-especially since, with all his faults, Hagen Tronje (unlike Wagner’s Hagen, who actually murders his lord Gunther) dies trying to defend his masters. It is, as I say, surprising that a mediævalist like Lewis could have made so obvious a bloomer. It indicates, perhaps, a certain insularism, not entirely uncommon with Britons of his time and class, and perhaps even intensified by Lewis’s not being himself an Englishman. Still, one must be grateful for the error, inasmuch as it gave rise to a truly insightful and inspirational essay. “I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper.”
Interestingly enough, the ordinal second is also a verb. If second things second not, they loose their own end wich is always a mean to first things. This essay is a nice commentary on Plato´s philosophical notion of the Sumum Bonum, the goodest of goods from wich every else good derives its goodness and is hierarchly ordained. Ordo est anima rerum.
@@FlyingAxblade_D20 I´d like to know what´s your criteria of sorting out and linking those individuals as partaking in a tradition. I did not get it and I´m just curious. I´ve heard of Tolstoy as a great novelist but I don´t know a thing about Schaefer. Lewis I know most for his apologetic work.
@@klausehrhardt4481 oh dude, I love you. Tolstoy in the 90's became a Christian after being not just the best author in the world, but having been a duelist! Which is more important to me. I've been bow & knife fighting for 42 years...he's impressive. LOL, might be hard to comprehend living in physical violence your whole life. I dunno. It's not for me =) Covered in scars, grew up in Sonora. Lewis did WW1, with injuries. Dr. Francis Schaeffer...mmm...he's a good bois. Had a retreat. Met older people that went there, his son dissed him. Each one was about 50 years apart. Well we're due, from the 70's, a new hyper intelligent person. And RIGHT NOW, I'm too old to be the next one. So I seek the next prophet. Those 3 seem to be in an order, that can be traced further back.
Lewis never fails to amaze with just words. He cleverly uncovers truth, and seems to have an unlimited way of saying the same thing over and over again. Those blind to it will feel a need to criticize but are only bolstering his argument by doing so.
