Valhalla is the mythic focus of Lewis’s early experience of Joy and, later, a test of whether he can distinguish the experience from the mythology that first awakened it. His movement from wonder to scholarship, and then to the remembered hill walk that he had mistaken for a mere recollection, makes Valhalla both a setting of imaginative desire and an example of how desire can be misdirected toward its object.

First Encounter and Shared Joy

Lewis recalls discovering a first friend through a shared response to a book. The two readers bent their heads together, pointed, quoted, and talked until they were nearly shouting. Their questions revealed that they liked not only the same work but the same parts of it, in the same way. Each recognized in the other the same “stab of Joy,” and both felt that its arrow had come from the North. The encounter makes Valhalla part of a larger recognition: the discovery that another person can be extraordinarily like oneself.

The force of that recognition depended on more than matching tastes. Lewis had not expected such a friend to exist and had never longed for one; its discovery therefore astonished him as much as an exact replica of his imagined Boxonian world would have done. The northern mythic world is not described as a physical place he visited. It is the shared imaginative territory through which two people recognized a likeness they had not known to seek.

From Mythic Wonder to Scholarship

Lewis’s delight in Valhalla and the Valkyries gradually became scholarly interest. Though he knew no ancient Germanic language, he learned as much as a boy in that position could: he could have faced a difficult examination, distinguish later mythological sagas from the classical sagas, separate the Prose Edda from the Verse Edda, and identify the roots of the Ash and the beings who moved up and down it. The growth of knowledge was real, but so was its cost. Only gradually did he understand that this accumulation of detail was different from the original Joy.

Lewis describes the change as a movement toward knowing more while enjoying less. In retrospect, he pictures himself building a temple to the mythic world, only to wake and find that its god had flown. At the time he would have put the loss more simply: the old thrill had gone. His distinction is not between accurate and inaccurate knowledge, but between learning about Valhalla and undergoing the desire that had first made it matter.

The Hill Walk and Joy’s Return

When efforts to recover the old thrill failed, Lewis remembered a particular hill walk on a morning of white mist. His father had given him the other volumes of the Ring, The Rheingold and The Valkyrie, as a Christmas present. The prospect of reading them accompanied the cold, lonely hillside, moisture on every branch, and the distant murmur of a town hidden from view. Together these circumstances produced a longing that seemed to flow beyond the mind and involve the whole body. Lewis later understood the moment as an experience of heaven.

He initially treated the walk as a lost experience that might somehow be recovered. Yet remembering it was itself a new experience of the same kind. The original moment had not been possession in the ordinary sense: it was desire, and its fullness lay precisely in that desire. Lewis’s account therefore unsettles the division between wanting and having. Joy returns not as a repeatable sensation summoned at will, but as a renewed longing that the act of recollection can itself contain.

The Mythic Object and Its Limits

The remembered Joy had once alighted on Valhalla, but Lewis could not recognize its return when it settled on a particular moment of his own past. He had become an idolater and a formalist, insisting that the experience should appear in the temple he had built for it. The error was to treat the mythic object as the source he could command, rather than as the place on which a desire had once alighted. In Lewis’s image, the Desirable cares about temples being built, not temples already built.

Lewis compares this small imaginative mistake with the biblical rebuke against seeking the living among the dead, while explicitly distinguishing the infinite importance of the religious event from the limited importance of his own experience. For him, imagination can reflect heavenly truth, but it is not itself faith or an ethical beginning of spiritual life. Valhalla thus remains significant without being equated with Christian belief: it is an imaginative image capable of reflecting something beyond itself, not the destination or source that Lewis had mistakenly tried to make permanent.

Place in Lewis’s Imaginative Life

Lewis’s later account of Valhalla clarifies why his detailed mythological knowledge could coexist with a worldview in which he believed only in atoms, evolution, and military service. He cared intensely for gods and heroes while withholding belief from them. The tension was severe, but he considered it wholesome; the intermittent wavering in his materialist convictions late in the Bookham period, he says, arose from another source rather than simply from his wishes.

Valhalla’s importance consequently changes across the recollection. It first belongs to a shared northern imaginative response; then it becomes the subject of disciplined study, whose details cannot restore the first delight; finally, it serves as the example through which Lewis identifies his mistake in pursuing Joy as though it were bound to a fixed mythic object. The experience does not make Valhalla unreal or irrelevant. It shows instead how an image can carry desire while remaining distinct from the desire it awakens.