Clyde S. Kilby - A Well of Wonder: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and The Inklings

ESSAYS ON C. S. LEWIS,

J. R. R. TOLKIEN,

AND THE INKLINGS

Clyde S. Kilby

Edited by Loren Wilkinson and Keith Call

For Clyde S. Kilby, with gratitude

2016 First Printing

A Well of Wonder: Essays on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and The Inklings

Copyright 2016 by Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois

ISBN 978-1-61261-862-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Names: Kilby, Clyde S., author. | Wilkinson, Loren, editor.

Title: A well of wonder : essays on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Inklings / Clyde S. Kilby ; edited by Loren Wilkinson and Keith Call.

Description: Brewster MA : Paraclete Press Inc., 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016035753 | ISBN 9781612618623 (volume 1 : hard cover)

Subjects: LCSH: Christianity. | Theology. | Christian literature. | Christianity and literature. | Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963. | Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892-1973. | Inklings (Group of writers)

Classification: LCC BR96 .K43 2016 | DDC 230.092/241dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035753

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Published by Paraclete Press

Brewster, Massachusetts, and Barga, Italy

www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America

It is a time when apples ripen,

friendships thicken,

maples kindle a fall fire

west of Blanchard. Through the halls

scholars and students quicken

at a familiar voice,

and on the corner of Washington and Jefferson

squirrels and sparrows rejoice

because youre home. Like a hobbit

come back to the Shire

youre home again, our friend,

bringing Martha with you, and sunflower

seeds, a sackful of nuts, three score

years and ten worth of wisdom, under

your armletters and Lewis-lore

your mind a well of wonder.

It was your mind, your inner eye, that

saw it long before it happened

the hierarchy of shelves

dusted obliquely by the late sun

behind old glass in the narrow room once occupied

by a minority of one

and now inhabited by Inklings and Elves.

Like a gardener raking grass,

piling the bright and varied leaves,

from far you gathered treasure, sheaves

of manuscripts, papers ornamented

with the rich, crabbed, English script,

searched out the volumes

burnished and precious with

scholarship and age

fact shrunk to truth speaking

from every page.

Then you swung open for us all

the wardrobe door,

pushed us farther up and farther in

(accompanied by some favorite talking beast)

to Middle-earth, Narnia, and the Utter East.

In there, for us to re-explore,

is perfect Perelandra.

Treebeard is growing up the cornered wall.

In the Deep Space behind the rows of books

eldila elude us; Curdie

encounters Mr. Bultitude the bear.

There in that room

we smell the past, untainted by decay or death

but fragrant, for in there

the mallorns bloom

and all the blessed air

is warm with Aslans breath.

Luci Shaw

LOREN WILKINSON

In the poem to Clyde Kilby that stands as an epigraph to this collection of his writings, Luci Shawone of many writers and scholars who received early encouragement from Dr. Kilbyuses two metaphors to describe the kind of experience this remarkable scholar and teacher provided for many of his students. The first is of a doorkeeper, an allusion to the imaginative entrance to the world C. S. Lewis created in The Chronicles of Narnia.

Then you swung open for us all

the wardrobe door,

pushed us farther up and farther in.

The second picture is of the man as a deep well, returning with his wife, Martha, after a summer in England, bringing

three score

years and ten worth of wisdom, under

your armletters and Lewis-lore

your mind a well of wonder.

As we prepared this book and its companion volume, The Arts and the Christian Imagination: Essays on Art, Literature, and Aesthetics, which includes Kilbys writings on these topics, we invited many of his former students to write of his influence on them. Many of them responded with similar language. Mark Noll also sees Kilby as a doorkeeper. For a whole generation of American evangelicals, says Noll, Kilby opened a wardrobe onto a land of wonder where the Lion stalked. Tom Howard continues the metaphor in describing the effect of taking Kilbys class in Romantic poetry: He threw open the shutters.... He pointed to the things that troubled the very marrow in ones bones, but for which one never had the vocabulary to summon into visibility.

In the dedication of his first book, Christ the Tiger, Howard uses the language of seeing: For Dr. Kilby, who took my arm and said, Look. Leanne Payne continues the metaphor. Speaking of the blindness resulting from a common kind of reductive modern analysis, Payne says, He came against this blindness in all of his courses, and his bright students, heavy into analysis and sorely introspective, dropped their blinders, looked up, and began to see. The poet Jeanne Murray Walker uses a different picture: I praise him for being a liberator. Dick Taylor, a historian with the Illinois State Historical Society, sums up Kilbys effect on him in a seminar in life writing: I cant remember a thing he taught me about writing biography, but my experience in that class changed my life forever.

As this small sampling of comments makes plain, Clyde S. Kilby was, for many students, an extraordinary teacher. It is with that fact, rather than with his early, long, and effective championing of writers like Lewis and Tolkien, that I must begin in introducing this collection of his writings on those makers of modern mythology (as he called it). Kilbys greatness was not simply the result of his influence from, or defense of, Lewis, Tolkien, and friends; rather he turned to them (and turned many others to them) because they expressed a truth about God and creation that he had already come to know.

That truthwhich kept filling and refilling that well of wonder which was Dr. Kilbys lifewas the fact that the whole of created reality is the miraculous gift of a loving, personal, and ever-present Creator. And this was not just a propositional truth intellectually known: it was lived, experienced, and shared. Often it was experiencedand expressedthrough the apparently trivial or insignificant. Several of his former students, for example, mention Dr. Kilbys love for the dandelion, and Marilee Melvin recalls his bringing a drooping dandelion to class and asking, in a voice filled with awe, how many of you believe that the Lord God made