300 From a letter to Walter Hooper

[With reference to C. S. Lewis's verse 'We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I / In a Berkshire bar... / This short poem, first printed in Lewis's Rehabilitations (1939), p. 122, tells how a workman in the bar claimed to have seen dragons himself.]

20 February 1968

The lines which Jack gives as examples are not unfortunately entirely accurate examples of Old English metrical devices. The occasion is entirely fictitious. I have never seen a dragon, nor ever seen a man who said that he has. I don't wish to see either. A remote source of Jack's lines may be this: I remember Jack telling me a story of Brightman, the distinguished ecclesiastical scholar, who used to sit quietly in Common Room saying nothing except on rare occasions. Jack said that there was a discussion on dragons one night and at the end Brightman's voice was heard to say, 'I have seen a dragon.' Silence. 'Where was that?' he was asked. 'On the Mount of Olives,' he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.