By Fr Dwight Longenecker
In Surprised by Joy C.S.Lewis recounted a moment in his childhood which struck like a sword of beauty to his heart
“. . . I had become fond of Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf but then, and quite different from such pleasures, and like a voice from far more distant regions there came a moment when I idly turned the pages of the book and found the unrhymed translation of Tegner’s Drapa, and heard the voice that cried, “Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead.” I knew nothing about Balder but instantly was uplifted to huge regions of Northern sky. I desired with almost sickening intensity something ever to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote.)”
In another passage Lewis describes his second schoolboy encounter with Northernness.
“Someone must have left in the schoolroom a literary periodical. My eye fell on a headline and a picture, carelessly expecting nothing. A moment later as the poet says, ‘the sky turned round.’ What I had read was the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrarions to that volume. I had never heard of Wagner nor or Siegfried. I thought the twilight of the gods meant the twilight in which the gods lived…How was I to know that this was no Celtic or silvan or terrestrial…