Norse gods

The Norse gods occupy a pivotal place in C. S. Lewis’s memoir as figures he did not believe in, yet experienced with an intensity approaching worship. First encountered through poetry, an illustrated book, and music, they gave his imagination a world of distance, severity, and heroic drama. Later, Lewis interpreted that fascination not as a new religion, but as an education in reverence that had been missing from his earlier religious practice.

First Encounters and Northernness

Lewis’s early poetic education had already prepared him to respond to remote and legendary worlds. At Campbell, reading Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum under a teacher called Octie, he was captivated less by the poem’s central tragedy than by its distant images: the Oxus, a cypress garden, and the waste of Chorasmia. Arnold’s poetry taught him to value a kind of passionate, silent gazing at things far away. That attraction to distance would acquire a more explicitly northern form in his later encounter with Wagnerian myth.

At Chartres, in a schoolroom, Lewis’s attention fell on a periodical headline and an illustration by Arthur Rackham. The words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods and the picture were enough to produce an abrupt imaginative change, although Lewis had not previously heard of Wagner or Siegfried. He initially misunderstood the title, but recognized in the image a world distinct from Celtic, sylvan, or terrestrial twilight. He called the quality Northernness: immense spaces above the Atlantic, the remoteness of northern summer, and an atmosphere of severity. The encounter also connected with an older memory of Tegnér’s Drapa, Balder, and cranes sailing toward the sun, bringing back the experience Lewis called Joy.

That first encounter was literary and visual, not musical. During the next holidays, in T. Edens Osborne’s shop, Lewis heard a record of the Ride of the Valkyries for the first time. Because he was imagining heroic drama rather than judging the music as a concert piece, it struck him with exceptional force. Wagnerian records, chiefly from the Ring and also from Lohengrin and Parsifal, became a regular claim on his pocket money and a recurring choice for presents. The printed name Wagner had already become a kind of magical symbol before Lewis had heard a note of the music.

An Imaginative World Without Belief

Lewis later stressed the disproportionate importance the Norse world held for him. Asgard and the Valkyries seemed more important than the school figures who shaped his daily life, his prospects of winning a scholarship, and even his growing doubts about Christianity. Yet he did not regard Northernness as a replacement faith: it involved no belief and imposed no duties. Its force lay instead in an attitude of disinterested attention to an object valued for what it was.

In retrospect, Lewis compared that attitude with the religious reverence he had failed to experience while he was a Christian. He had been taught to give thanks for God’s glory, but felt nearer to that form of adoration toward the Norse gods, despite disbelieving in them, than toward the God in whom he then believed. He cautiously considered whether this imaginative experience had developed a capacity for worship that could later be directed toward the true God. He did not present that possibility as necessary or as a justification for abandoning Christianity: he allowed that the same capacity might have been learned without apostasy, and described particular good as emerging from particular evil.

The earlier erosion of Lewis’s Christian belief had several causes, and the attraction of Norse myth should not be mistaken for the whole explanation. He recalled that burdensome ideas about duties in prayer supplied an unconscious motive for wanting to leave the faith. Conscious doubts also arose from reading classical literature, particularly Virgil. In the teaching he encountered, pagan religious ideas were treated as illusion while Christianity was accepted as true, without an account of how Christianity might fulfill paganism or how pagan traditions might prefigure it. Lewis found that treatment intellectually unsatisfying. His later account therefore distinguishes the myths’ imaginative and devotional influence from the more direct arguments surrounding his loss of belief.

Myth as Literary Form and Moral Conflict

The Norse gods also became material for Lewis’s own writing. The only work he completed during the period he describes was Loki Bound, a tragedy with a Norse subject and Greek form. He gave it the formal components of classical tragedy, including a prologue, parodos, episodes, stasima, and exodos, and recalled taking great pleasure in its composition. The work joined his northern imaginative interests to his classical literary education rather than choosing between them.

Its central dispute gave the mythic figures sharply differentiated positions. Lewis’s Loki opposed Odin because Odin had created a world despite Loki’s warning that existence imposed a burden on creatures without their consent. Loki’s position was framed as sad wisdom, set against Thor’s forceful orthodoxy. Odin received a more sympathetic treatment: he could understand Loki’s argument, and he and Loki had been friends before the demands of cosmic politics separated them. Thor became the principal antagonist, pressing Odin against Loki and faulting Loki for insufficient respect toward the major gods. Loki’s reply distinguished respect for wisdom from submission to strength. The conflict thus made the gods vehicles for Lewis’s developing concern with creation, consent, authority, and the difference between wisdom and power.

This literary use of the Norse gods does not amount to evidence that Lewis believed in them. It shows how myth could sustain a serious moral and philosophical argument within a deliberately classical form. The gods could be imaginatively compelling and intellectually useful precisely while remaining objects of disbelief.

Later Reinterpretation

Lewis’s later encounters with religious and philosophical ideas broadened his understanding of myth. He recognized that the poet W. B. Yeats believed seriously in magic and in the possibility of contact between the human world and a world of other beings. This challenged Lewis to consider a form of belief distinct from treating supernatural beings as merely fictional or desired. In another direction, his classical reading had already left him dissatisfied with the assumption that religions were generally nonsense while Christianity alone was true. Together, these experiences contributed to a more respectful approach to pagan myth without making Lewis an adherent of it.

That change in approach continued through his conversations and correspondence with Dom Bede Griffiths. At a stage when both men believed in God and were willing to hear more from pagan or Christian sources, Lewis began to see the apparent multiplicity of religions as a question requiring interpretation rather than a choice among simple rivals. He credited Barfield with encouraging a more respectful attitude toward pagan myth. The Norse gods consequently belonged to a longer development: first they supplied an absorbing imaginative world; later, Lewis could understand the reverence they had elicited as one element in a changed way of approaching religious history and belief.

The memoir preserves a productive contrast rather than resolving it by turning the Norse gods into Christian doctrine. Lewis remembers that their world once eclipsed his religion, while also suggesting that this period of estrangement formed a capacity he could later understand within his return toward God. Their significance lies in that tension: disbelief did not prevent them from teaching him something about attention and adoration, and later belief did not require him to deny the imaginative power of the myths that had first awakened those responses.