Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods illustrated book

Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods illustrated book is the visual and material focus of a decisive return of Joy in Lewis’s adolescence. First encountered not as a book but as a headline and Arthur Rackham illustration in a school periodical, it opens an imagined Northern world; later, the volume itself becomes a treasured possession, acquired with his brother’s generous help. Its journey from fleeting image to coveted object links the revival of Lewis’s longing to the beginnings of his engagement with Wagner and the shaping of his literary imagination.

First encounter and the return of longing

At Chartres, after a long period in which the authentic Joy of childhood seemed to have disappeared, Lewis glanced at a literary periodical left in the schoolroom. He noticed the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods beside an illustration by Arthur Rackham. He had never heard of Wagner or Siegfried and initially misunderstood the title as referring to the twilight in which the gods lived. Yet the image and words immediately evoked what he called Northernness: vast, clear spaces above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of a northern summer, marked by remoteness and severity.

The illustration did more than introduce unfamiliar mythology. It brought back a remembered imaginative world associated with Tegner’s Drapa, Balder, and the sunward-sailing cranes, and with it the knowledge that Lewis had once experienced Joy but had lacked it for years. The distance of the imagined twilight and the distance of his lost past converged in a sudden desire. As he stared around the dusty schoolroom, the experience had already vanished; the book’s image therefore became bound to both its return and its elusiveness.

From image to Wagnerian reading

The illustrated volume was not immediately available to Lewis, but circumstances gave the first encounter a continuation. His father had given the boys a gramophone, and Lewis already enjoyed reading gramophone catalogues, although he had not imagined that the records of grand opera could concern him. A week or two after seeing the periodical, he read a magazine’s weekly synopses of operas, which covered the whole Ring. Through these summaries he learned who Siegfried was and what the gods’ twilight meant, and began an unfinished heroic poem based on Wagner’s version of the Niblung story.

The volume’s influence thus began before Lewis heard Wagner’s music. At first, the printed name itself had become a kind of magical sign, while the Rackham image supplied a visual entrance into a world he could not yet explain. When Lewis later heard a recording of the Ride of the Valkyries at T. Edens Osborne’s shop, he received it not as an isolated concert piece but as heroic drama. Wagnerian records, especially from the Ring, became a principal use of his pocket money and a recurring request for presents. The illustrated book had helped make this music and mythology feel like a world to which he already belonged.

The book acquired

That summer, while staying with his married cousin in Dundrum, Lewis found the very volume he had first seen: Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Its pictures seemed to him like music made visible and drew him deeper into his delight. He coveted the book intensely. When he learned that a cheaper edition cost fifteen shillings—a sum that seemed almost mythological to him—he knew he wanted it for himself.

He eventually obtained the edition with his brother’s contribution. His brother paid seven shillings and sixpence toward what he regarded as little more than a picture book, despite having, as Lewis later reflected, many better uses for the money. The shared purchase makes the volume more than a private emblem of fascination: it also records an act of kindness from a brother who was not himself captivated by Northernness. The object’s acquisition brought Lewis’s earlier, momentary vision into his possession without making the longing that surrounded it ordinary or easily satisfied.

Imaginative and literary significance

Lewis’s account distinguishes the book’s place in his awakening from the later development of his craft. The Wagnerian poem begun after he read the opera summaries was never completed; it reached only as far as the last scene of The Rheingold. Yet, as he tried to move beyond rhyme, metre, and plot toward language that could suggest the excitement he felt, he began to learn what writing meant. The illustrated volume belongs to this wider process: its image set desire in motion, while the reading, listening, collecting, and attempted writing that followed gave that desire successive forms.

The episode also shows how Lewis describes literary reception as a chain of encounters rather than a single act of influence. A periodical image recalled an earlier imaginative world; opera summaries supplied a story; a recording gave the mythology sound; and the illustrated volume, found at last in Dundrum, joined image and music in a tangible object. Its importance rests not simply on the mythology it depicts, but on how its title and pictures reopened a lost capacity for longing and began an enduring imaginative attachment.