Clive Staples Lewis was a celebrated Anglo-Irish novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, lay theologian and Christian apologist whose impact and influence lives on.

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New C S Lewis Manuscript?

July 9th, 2009 | Skip to comments

When J.R.R. met C.S.
By Jeff Salamon, Austin American-Statesman Books Editor

There probably isn’t a movie in it, but even so this is pretty cool: Texas State University communications professor Steven Beebe discovered an unpublished manuscript fragment by C. S. Lewis, best known as the author of ‘The Narnia Chronicles.’ Better still, the fragment was apparently intended to be part of a larger work written in collaboration with Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien.

According to a TSU press release, Tolkien wrote a letter to his son Christopher in 1944 revealing that he and Lewis planned to write a nonfiction book titled ‘Language and Human Nature.” And though the book was scheduled for publication in 1950, it never came out – and was presumed to have never been written. Beebe, said the press release, ‘discovered the opening pages of the unpublished manuscript in the Oxford University Bodleian Library and has recently documented that the manuscript was the beginning of the previously believed to be unwritten Lewis and Tolkien book… .

‘The partial book manuscript Beebe found was in a small notebook on which Lewis had written the word “Scraps.” Included in the tattered notebook are early fragments of two “Narnia Chronicles,” “The Magician’s Nephew” and “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” along with unpublished ideas about a variety of topics. Beebe discovered the book fragment by turning the little notebook upside down and reading from back to front.’

There is no indication that Tolkien contributed to the planned project. An article Beebe has written about the fragment, ‘Language and Human Nature Manuscript Fragment Found: C. S. Lewis On Language and Meaning,’ is set to be published in 2010 in the journal Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review.


I will be commenting on this, this weekend. Stay tuned. —Bruce E.


1 Comment

  1. […] “New C.S. Lewis Manuscript?” – Bruce L. Edwards’ C.S. Lewis & Inklings Resource Blog […]

    Pingback by New C.S. Lewis Manuscript Found at Oxford « The Unicorn Triumphant — 17 July 2009 @ 9:04 PM

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