Northernness

Northernness is the term C. S. Lewis gives to the imaginative force that broke the long absence of Joy in his boyhood: a vision of the northern mythic world that began with a schoolroom headline and an illustration, then reshaped his reading, music, attention to nature, and understanding of desire. Its importance lies not simply in the myths it introduced, but in how it restored a longing that Lewis had thought lost—and in the later recognition that trying to possess that longing could make it recede.

The schoolroom encounter

Lewis locates the return of Northernness early in his time at Chartres, after what he describes as a long winter in which the imagination had slept. His attention fell casually on a headline and picture in a literary periodical, perhaps The Bookman or the Times Literary Supplement. The words were “Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods”; the image was an illustration by Arthur Rackham. Lewis had never heard of Wagner or Siegfried, and initially understood the title as referring to the twilight in which the gods lived. Yet he immediately felt that the scene belonged to a world unlike a Celtic, sylvan, or earthly twilight.

The response was at once imaginative recognition and loss. Northernness brought back the memory of an earlier Joy that had been absent for years, but the vision and the remembered Joy both seemed beyond reach. Lewis describes the two distances—the northern world and his own past experience—flowing together into a desire that vanished almost as soon as he recognized it. From that moment, he understood having the experience again as the supreme object of desire. The encounter therefore did not give him a lasting possession; it awakened him to what he had lost and to the longing itself.

From image to music and myth

The chance encounter acquired a practical sequel through a gramophone that Lewis’s father had given the boys. Lewis already enjoyed reading gramophone catalogues, though opera records with unfamiliar German or Italian names had seemed irrelevant to him. A week or two after seeing the Rackham illustration, he encountered a magazine called The Soundbox, which was publishing synopses of major operas and presented the whole Ring. Reading its account taught him who Siegfried was and what the title’s “twilight” meant. He began a heroic poem on the Wagnerian version of the Niblung story, working from those abstracts alone. His inexperience showed in rhymes such as Alberich with ditch and Mime with time; he used Pope’s Odyssey as a model, and the poem remained unfinished, reaching only the final scene of The Rheingold in its fourth book.

The unfinished poem nevertheless marked a change in Lewis’s sense of writing. At first, he had judged his verses by whether they rhymed, scanned, and advanced the story. At the beginning of the fourth book he tried instead to convey the excitement he felt, searching for language that could suggest rather than merely state it. The attempt failed, but Lewis identifies that failure as the point at which he began to learn what writing meant.

Lewis had still not heard Wagner’s music while the composer’s name and the printed words associated with him had already become powerful symbols. During the next holiday, in T. Edens Osborne’s dark, crowded shop, he first heard a record of the Ride of the Valkyries. He heard it not as an isolated concert piece but as part of heroic drama, and the music struck him with exceptional force. Wagnerian records, chiefly from the Ring but also from Lohengrin and Parsifal, became the principal demands on his pocket money and the presents he asked for. He did not consider this simply a larger dose of ordinary musical pleasure: Wagnerian music seemed to belong to a separate category of experience, combining excitement and astonishment with feelings he could not name.

That summer, while staying with his cousin in Dundrum on the outskirts of Dublin, Lewis found on a drawing-room table the Rackham-illustrated book that had initiated the episode. He coveted it intensely, and eventually obtained a cheaper edition costing fifteen shillings. His brother shared the purchase, contributing seven shillings and sixpence despite having little interest in Northernness and, Lewis later recognized, many better uses for the money. The book’s illustrations deepened the experience by making the mythic world visible to him in a form he associated with music.

Importance, worship, and nature

Lewis recalls that Northernness then outweighed the ordinary concerns around him. Asgard and the Valkyries seemed more important than the matron, the dancing mistress, or his prospects of winning a scholarship; more surprisingly, they seemed more important than his growing doubts about Christianity. He does not treat this imaginative attachment as a new religion: it carried no belief and imposed no duties. But he later understood that it included something like adoration, an unself-regarding response to an object valued for what it was. He speculates that this encounter with disbelieved Norse gods may have taught him a capacity for worship that he had not experienced in the same way in his earlier religious life. In that retrospective interpretation, even the religious estrangement accompanying the episode could become a source of later good.

The imaginative change also altered Lewis’s relation to external nature. At first, the landscape served as a setting in which he could picture Wagnerian scenes. Cycling in the Wicklow Mountains, he imagined places where Mime might encounter Sieglinde, where Siegfried might hear the bird, or where Fafner might emerge from a cave. In time, however, nature ceased to function merely as an illustration of literature and music and became a medium of Joy in its own right. Lewis did not describe this as the systematic study of plants or birds; the mood of a scene mattered more to him than classifying its contents, and his response involved more than visual attention.

This developing relation did not make Joy a stable possession. Lewis’s account insists that Joy remained a desire for something distant, past, or still to come. Books and natural scenes became joint reminders of what he could not fully hold. Northernness thus opened a way of experiencing the world, while preserving the distance that made the experience a longing rather than a permanent state.

Learning, recurrence, and the two lives

From Wagner, Lewis moved outward into books on Norse mythology, including Myths of the Norsemen, Myths and Legends of the Teutonic Race, and Mallet’s Northern Antiquities. He acquired detailed knowledge of the mythic system and could imagine that, with a teacher, he would have worked hard at Old Norse. Yet the intellectual satisfaction of learning the mythology was not identical to the original Joy. At first he received renewed moments of Joy from these books without noticing that they were becoming rarer; only gradually did he recognize the difference between the longing and the knowledge accumulated around it.

The return of Northernness also divided Lewis’s account of his life. He says that his inward life, as concerned with Joy, became so distinct from his outward circumstances that he seemed to have to tell two stories. The outer life could be busy or successful while the inner life felt empty; conversely, outward misery could coexist with inward ecstasy. When he later revisits his school years, he acknowledges both accounts: the months of weariness and the intense inward episodes that could make the same period seem like Paradise. The effect is not to cancel one version with the other, but to show how sharply different kinds of experience could coexist.

A further recurrence appeared in Lewis’s first friendship with Arthur. When they discovered a shared enthusiasm, they found that they liked not only the same material but the same parts of it in the same way; both recognized the stab of Joy, and for both its direction was North. The friendship made a private imaginative response intelligible as something another person could share. Lewis describes the discovery of such likeness as a wonder in its own right, since he had not even expected that a friend of this kind was possible.

Fading and the danger of pursuit

In retrospect, Lewis distinguishes the first Northernness from the scholarly interest that grew out of it. His accumulating knowledge of the Eddaic world brought him toward a condition in which he would know more and enjoy less. He eventually noticed that he no longer received the old thrill and came to think of the original experience as something that had departed. The disappointment led him to try to recover it, but he could find no reliable means of making it return.

Lewis’s later analysis identifies a mistake in that effort: he had treated the desired experience as a state of his own mind, something to be reproduced or monitored. In his account, the longing arose when attention was fixed on an object beyond the self—whether a mountain, the past, or the gods of Asgard. The inward thrill was a consequence, not the proper object of pursuit. As he read, listened to music, or went for walks, he sometimes watched his own mind for signs of the old feeling and tried to hold it when it appeared. The very effort to capture it could interrupt the self-forgetfulness through which it had come.

He also learned to distinguish Northernness from sexual desire. When works by William Morris became another medium through which Joy could be felt, Lewis found it possible to mistake the attraction of imagined forests for desire for their female inhabitants. Following that possibility to its conclusion brought pleasure, but not the kind of longing he had been seeking. The failure was not, as he explains it, a moral recoil from pleasure; it was the discovery that pleasure answered a different desire. This distinction became part of his broader account of Northernness: its force depended on an object beyond the self, and neither intellectual mastery nor the pursuit of an inward sensation could substitute for that object.