Dublin enters Lewis’s account as the setting for a holiday that deepened his emerging fascination with Wagner and Norse mythology. At his cousin’s home in nearby Dundrum, an illustrated book brought the imagined world of the northern myths vividly before him; cycling in the Wicklow Mountains, he began to recognize nature not merely as scenery but as a source of the same elusive joy. The Dublin stay thus marks a passage from artistic enchantment toward a wider imaginative renewal.

The Dundrum Holiday

That summer, Lewis and his brother were invited by their married cousin H. to spend several weeks on the outskirts of Dublin, in Dundrum. On her drawing-room table Lewis found Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, illustrated by Arthur Rackham—the book that had started his interest in Wagner and that he had never dared hope to see. Rackham’s pictures seemed to him like music made visible, carrying him further into a delight already kindled by Wagnerian records.

Lewis coveted the book intensely. When he learned of a less expensive edition priced at fifteen shillings, he felt he could not rest until he owned it, although the sum seemed almost mythological to him. He eventually obtained a copy because his brother agreed to share the cost. His brother was not himself captivated by Northernness and spent seven shillings and sixpence on what could have seemed to him merely a picture book, despite having many better uses for the money. Lewis later understood this contribution as an act of kindness, and recalled that even at the time he was more than half aware of its generosity.

From Mythic Scenery to Nature

During the holiday, Lewis cycled among the Wicklow Mountains while looking for landscapes that might belong to Wagner’s dramatic world. A steep, fir-covered hillside suggested the place where Mime might meet Sieglinde; a sunny glade seemed suited to Siegfried listening to the bird; and a dry, rocky valley called to mind the emergence of Fafner from his cave. The mountains first mattered through these imagined correspondences: the landscape appeared as a setting for scenes he had encountered in music and myth.

That dependence gradually changed. Nature ceased to be only a reminder of books and became, in its own right, a medium of joy. Lewis did not claim that the literary associations disappeared; rather, nature and books became joint reminders of something beyond either. His response was to the mood of a scene, not to the systematic study of plants or birds, and he described that response as involving not only sight but also skin and nose. The holiday therefore joins a specific landscape to a shift in how he experienced the natural world.

Place in the Imaginative Renewal

Lewis situates the Dundrum stay within what he calls his imaginative Renaissance. Wagner had opened a new kind of experience for him, distinct from his previous appreciation of music; the illustrated volume and the mountain landscape extended that experience across visual art and nature. He also moved on from Wagner to books about Norse mythology, including Myths of the Norsemen, Myths and Legends of the Teutonic Race, and Mallet’s Northern Antiquities. These books repeatedly gave him the stab of Joy, even as he did not yet notice that the experience was becoming rarer or distinguish it from the intellectual satisfaction of learning about the Eddaic universe.

In retrospect, Lewis says he cannot continue his story without acknowledging the consequences of this episode. Dublin and its outskirts matter not as a developed portrait of the city but as the setting for an encounter among a coveted book, a brother’s generosity, Wagnerian imagination, and the Wicklow landscape. The episode made nature and literature parallel sources of longing: both could awaken Joy, but neither could turn it into a possession.