"Deep Lies the Sea-Longing": Inklings of Home (1)‪.‬

WHEN ELWIN RANSOM takes the name Fisher-King and the office of Pendragon, when England becomes Logres and a remote part of Venus becomes Avalon, we realize that the Arthurian myth has come to resonate more deeply in C.S. Lewis's creative work than it had before. The first two novels of the Ransom trilogy contain nothing of this sort. Some attribute the change to Lewis's closer association with Charles Williams, and they could be right. It may have been around the same time that Lewis requested from Williams, and received, the explanatory notes that are quoted so extensively in his commentary on Williams's Arthurian poems. Yet having identified the Arthurian element in That Hideous Strength, we still have only half the background. For the Avalon-Venus connection, at any rate, has roots much farther back in Lewis's imaginative life. Let me quote the opening lines of a poem he encountered early and long admired, Milton's Comus.