A lion in the English meadow: Charles Williams, or the invisible at the table of the Inklings

In 1936, Lewis read a novel where a lion of supernatural power appears in the English countryside. He immediately wrote to the author, Charles Williams, editor, poet, and mystic. Three years later, the war brought Williams to Oxford, where he greatly influenced the Inklings, until his sudden death in 1945.

The lion in the wild

Un lion immense et irréel apparaît dans une prairie anglaise au crépuscule

Charles Williams (1886–1945), editor at Oxford University Press.
Author of metaphysical thrillers, including The Place of the Lion (1931).
Joined the Inklings in 1939; Lewis dedicates his Preface to Paradise Lost to him.
His death in 1945 changes how Lewis thinks about death.

Aslan, a Serpent, a Butterfly

In 1936, Lewis read The Place of the Lion, a novel in which Platonic archetypes (a lion, a serpent, a butterfly) intrude upon the English countryside. Excited, he wrote to the author. At the same time, Williams, an editor at Oxford University Press in London, had just read the proofs of The Allegory of Love and wrote to Lewis. The two letters crossed in the mail: the beginning of a friendship.

A reader of Narnia cannot help but be startled by the lion who disrupts an English landscape. Lewis never claimed that Aslan came from there, and he said that Aslan had “leaped” into his story at a time when he often dreamed of lions. The connection remains a mere resonance, but it says something about the shared tastes of the two men.

Oxford, 1939

When war broke out, the London offices of Oxford University Press were evacuated to Oxford. Williams arrived, with his theatrical manner, his Cockney accent, and boundless energy. He immediately joined the Inklings, where he read his Arthurian poems. Lewis admired him unreservedly. Tolkien, more reserved, felt somewhat excluded and did not care for his mysticism.

The Uncredentialed Lecturer

Without a university degree, Williams gave lectures in Oxford on Milton that caused a sensation. Lewis obtained an honorary degree for him from the university (1943). His ideas on “coinherence” (we literally bear one another’s burdens) and on the “way of images” nourished Lewis’s own thought.

What Williams Changed in Lewis’s Novels

Williams’s influence is recognized in That Hideous Strength, with its Arthurian material, Merlin and his angels, and in The Great Divorce, where the invisible becomes more solid than the visible. The Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) is dedicated to him. One can see in it one of the sources of the blend of English everyday life and the supernatural found in Narnia’s wardrobe.

Death That Changes Death

On May 15, 1945, a week after the victory in Europe, Williams died following an operation. Lewis said that this death strengthened his faith rather than shook it: the idea of death seemed changed, as if his friend had crossed a door. In 1947, Lewis edited a volume of tributes, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, with contributions from Tolkien (including the famous essay On Fairy Stories), Barfield, and Dorothy L. Sayers; in 1994, Arthurian Torso provided commentary on Williams’s Arthurian poems.

Reading Williams Today

His novels are rarely translated into French; a few have been, often out of print. They remain fascinating curiosities for those who love religious fantasy and a key to understanding Lewis during the war years.

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