C. S. Lewis’s imaginative Renaissance was a sudden return of the imaginative longing he called Joy, prompted at Chartres by the words and image of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. The awakening joined a newly encountered northern mythic world to memories of earlier literary experience, making the desire to recover that sense of imaginative distance the central object of his attention. Its effects unfolded through periodicals, a self-made poem, gramophone records, and other reading, rather than through a single encounter with Wagner’s music.

The Chartres awakening

The change came early in Lewis’s time at Chartres, after what he describes as a long winter of imaginative deprivation. He could identify the moment precisely but not date it. In the schoolroom, his attention fell casually on a headline and illustration in a literary periodical, perhaps The Bookman or the Times Literary Supplement. The image was one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. Lewis had never heard of Wagner or Siegfried and initially understood the title as referring to the twilight in which the gods lived. Yet the image and words immediately opened a world he recognized as distinct from Celtic, woodland, or earthly twilight.

Lewis names the experience Northernness: a vision of spaciousness above the Atlantic under the endless twilight of a northern summer, marked by remoteness and severity. Its force came partly from recognition. He connected the new image with Tegner’s Drapa, which he had encountered earlier, and with the world of Balder and the cranes sailing toward the sun. The experience therefore did not simply introduce him to unfamiliar mythology; it disclosed a continuity between a new imaginative world and materials already present in his past.

That recognition brought back the memory of Joy, a form of desire he had lacked for years. The distant world of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of his former Joy converged into an intense awareness of loss. As Lewis looked again at the ordinary, dusty schoolroom, the experience had already disappeared. Its brief duration did not diminish its consequence: he understood that having it again had become his supreme object of desire.

From printed myth to Wagnerian music

The awakening acquired practical means through circumstances already at hand. Lewis’s father had given the boys a gramophone, and Lewis was an avid reader of gramophone catalogues. Before this moment, however, he had not imagined that the records listed under unfamiliar German or Italian names could matter to him. For a week or two after seeing Rackham’s illustration, he still did not connect the newly awakened interest with the operas.

A new route opened through The Soundbox, a magazine that published weekly synopses of great operas and then covered the whole Ring. Lewis read these accounts avidly, learned who Siegfried was and what the gods’ twilight meant, and began a heroic poem based on the Wagnerian version of the Niblung story. His only source was the magazine’s abstracts. The sequence shows how his imaginative recovery proceeded through mediation: an illustration first stirred recognition, prose summaries supplied narrative material, and the desire to make a poem followed before he had heard Wagner’s music.

He first heard a Wagner record during the next holidays, in the dark, crowded shop of T. Edens Osborne. The record was the Ride of the Valkyries. Lewis understood it not as a detached concert piece but in relation to heroic drama, which helped explain its extraordinary effect on a boy already absorbed in Northernness and whose highest previous musical experience had been Sullivan. Afterward, Wagnerian records—principally from the Ring, but also from Lohengrin and Parsifal—became the chief drain on his pocket money and the presents he regularly requested. His broader appreciation of music was not initially transformed to the same degree: the change was focused on the Wagnerian works that had become attached to his imaginative awakening.

Reading before and after the return

Lewis’s account places the Chartres moment within a longer history of literary receptiveness. At Campbell, the most important event for him had been reading Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum in class under a master the pupils called Octie. He loved the poem immediately and continued to love it. What first enchanted him was not his later understanding of its central tragedy but its atmosphere and distant particulars: the artist in Pekin, the cypress in the queen’s garden, Rustum’s remembered youth, the pedlars from Khabul, and the Chorasmian waste. Arnold gave him a lasting sense of passionate, silent attention to things far away. This earlier response helps clarify why the remoteness and calm of Northernness could feel both new and familiar.

His reading of Homer offers a different measure of how early imaginative experience could change without being discarded. He and his companions read the Iliad selectively, then the Odyssey in full, returning to it day after day and month after month. Lewis remembered the music of the poem and the clarity of its formulas becoming part of him. His boyhood response was romanticized, shaped by William Morris; he recalled calling Circe a wise-wife and every marriage a high-tide. He later judged that response to have matured, while maintaining that its limitations did not make those days worthless. The Odyssey’s wanderings retained their meaning for him, and he could enjoy the poem later in a more mature way. His account thus distinguishes the persistence of an imaginative attachment from the changing judgments through which he later understood it.

A further literary encounter followed the return to England associated with Great Bookham. On the train, Lewis chose a worn Everyman edition of George MacDonald’s Phantastes from a bookstall and began reading it that evening. The remembered setting is concrete: a frosty landscape, a weekend set aside for reading, and the porter calling the Bookham, Effingham, Horsley train. The episode extends the account of imaginative renewal beyond Wagner. It places MacDonald’s romance among the books through which Lewis’s capacity for imaginative engagement continued to develop.

Significance and limits of the Renaissance

The Renaissance is presented as a change in what Lewis desired, not merely as the acquisition of information about Wagner or northern mythology. The illustration first made a distant imaginative world present; the sudden loss of the experience then sharpened its meaning. His subsequent reading, poem, and record collecting were distinct consequences of that reversal, each giving him another way to pursue what had briefly returned.

The account also keeps the awakening’s sources plural. Wagner’s mythology mattered, but Lewis encountered it first through Rackham’s image and the printed title, then through opera synopses, and only later through a recording. Earlier reading, especially Arnold and Tegner, made the new experience resonate with remembered landscapes and forms of distance. Homer and MacDonald, meanwhile, show that his imaginative life continued through different literary encounters and through later reinterpretation. The decisive event at Chartres was therefore not an isolated conversion to one author or art form: it was the recovery of a powerful desire whose subsequent course ran through several media and whose force depended on both recognition and absence.