___
The recording of this meeting of the Inklings captured episodes of a competition to see who could read the famously bad prose of Amanda Ros for the longest without laughing. Toward the end of the evening the discussion turned to other matters.
“Charles, as a historian, you have lectured us about the tatters and fragments and competing versions of ‘truth’ that underlie what we today call the King James Bible. Despite that, is there not an essential truth to the varied tellings of the tales of Jesus?”
“I wish I could be of more comfort, but the truth is that many of the gospels, wildly variant in their accounts, were systematically tracked down and destroyed, especially, as we all know, after the Council of Nicea. The accounts fell prey, along with their followers and those who possessed the documents themselves. So what you are left with today, is not justified by its history. Only belief will carry one through …”
Part of the tape is lost here. It resumes with clanks and knockings on the table, perhaps a call for ale as the group huddled about in discussion. C.S. Lewis is talking.
“… I have a hero, modeled after Tollers here, who is in one of my books. Sort of a philologist-adventurer. A swashbuckling professor of ancient languages. He discovers things because he is not afraid to believe. What, Ian?”
“And where does this discovery occur? So often we speak of breakthroughs and journeys. Tollers speaks of hidden gates, you Jack, speak of passages through the doors of old wardrobes. Why such devices?”
“These are the stuff of tales not by literary convention, but because they mirror the way we form and test the very art of believing. Mark this: true belief arises only from a passage, after a long and perilous journey. The terrain may be of Fear, call it dragons or demons, or Despair, a desolate waste, but it must be traversed.”
“Speaking of journeys, and having duly ravaged poor Madame Ros, let us do justice to the true doers of heroic deeds, heroines.”
“Some might say we, all of us male prattlers of tales, do not do enough to acquit that justice.”
“But there is a void of the feminine heroic, is there not? In your ‘discovery’ of your myths, Tollers, you read to us little of heroines. Why so?”
“Speaking within those myths, I suspect many heroines existed, but were rooted out by censors with different agendas— none more persistent that the wizards, of all stripes and colors. And yet, there are intimations of one, a tale lost in the root and branch of many languages. A legend of which I am slowly seeing more. A saga that barely survived. A heroine that may have changed the entire course of history in a real place, a place I have seen only imperfectly from ruined foundations.”
“Well, so be it. I, for one, suspect that, if history be told straight and true, our heroes, and thus we, owe much to heroine counterparts. In fact, I would wager our fare tonight that …”
The tape grinds down to unintelligible drunken growl sounds, presumably as the battery ran down.