Asgard

Asgard, the home of the Norse gods in C. S. Lewis’s imaginative life, mattered to him in adolescence more than school, social prospects, or even his growing doubts about Christianity. Its importance lay not in belief or religious duty but in the unbidden reverence it awakened: Lewis later saw his attachment to the Norse gods as a possible, paradoxical schooling in worship.

Place in Lewis’s Imagination

Lewis recalled that Asgard and the Valkyries seemed incomparably more important than the Matron, the dancing mistress, or his chances of winning a scholarship. They also outweighed his steadily increasing doubts about Christianity. He described this attachment as part of his Northernness, an imaginative response to the Norse world that could command his attention without asking him to accept its gods as real.

The distinction mattered. Northernness was not a new religion: it offered no belief to profess and imposed no duties. Yet Lewis recognized in his response something like adoration, a self-abandonment to an object valued simply for what it was. The Norse world therefore occupied an unusual middle ground in his life: he disbelieved in its gods, but felt toward them a reverence he had not experienced toward the God in whom he still believed.

A Paradox of Worship and Apostasy

Lewis measured this experience against the Prayer Book’s instruction to give thanks to God for His great glory—not only for particular benefits, but for God’s very nature. At the time, he felt closer to that kind of recognition in relation to the gods of Asgard than to the God of Christianity. In retrospect, he could almost interpret the detour through the false gods as a means of acquiring a capacity for worship before, as he put it, the true God recalled him.

That retrospective interpretation did not make the apostasy harmless or necessary. Lewis allowed that he might have learned the same lesson sooner and more safely without abandoning his faith. He nevertheless held together punishment and mercy: a particular good could emerge from a particular evil, and the blindness associated with his estrangement might prove sanative. Asgard thus became part of a complicated spiritual history, not a substitute creed but an unlikely occasion for an element of religious feeling that his Christianity had not yet formed in him.

The Norse World Among Other Mythologies

Asgard remained the foremost of several mythic worlds Lewis came to value. In the library at the Gurney he encountered Celtic mythology, which became a companion to Norse mythology rather than a rival; by then he had also begun to love Greek mythology. He sharply distinguished their imaginative qualities: Asgard possessed a stony, fiery sublimity, while the Irish mythic world of Cruachan, the Red Branch, and Tir-nan-Og seemed green, leafy, amorous, and elusive, and Olympus harder, more defiant, and sun-bright.

The contrast shows that Asgard’s primacy did not require Lewis to collapse different mythologies into one. He prized their distinct flavors and believed that enjoying more than one could be a balancing influence, encouraging catholicity. Even as other traditions widened his imaginative world, the Norse remained first: the completed work he produced in this period was Loki Bound, a tragedy with a Norse subject shaped in Greek dramatic form. In this account, Asgard’s lasting significance rests on the combination of imaginative priority and spiritual paradox: a world Lewis did not believe in could nevertheless teach him something about adoration.