50 Fun Facts About C. S. Lewis

In which city was C. S. Lewis born in 1898?

His father was a solicitor and his mother the first female mathematics graduate at Queen's College Belfast.

How did Lewis come to be known as 'Jack' all his life?

At first he answered to nothing but Jacksie; later he accepted Jack.

What was the name of the animal-run fantasy world Lewis invented as a boy with his brother Warnie?

He had fallen in love with Beatrix Potter's stories and wrote and illustrated his own animal tales.

Lewis's mother Flora died in 1908 of what, when he was nine?

His father then sent him to Wynyard School in Watford, which soon closed for lack of pupils.

At which Malvern prep school, 'Chartres' in his autobiography, did Lewis abandon Christianity?

He also developed a fascination with European mythology and the occult there.

What nickname did Lewis give his private tutor William T. Kirkpatrick?

Kirkpatrick instilled a love of Greek literature and sharpened the debating skills that made him a formidable apologist.

What did the teenage Lewis call the Norse legends that awakened the longing he later named 'joy'?

He wrote epic poetry and even opera to capture his passion for Norse mythology.

How did Lewis describe English accents on first arriving in England as a boy?

He conceived 'a hatred for England which took many years to heal' and stayed proudly Irish all his life.

Which Irish poet did Lewis call 'an author exactly after my own heart', meeting him in Oxford in 1921?

He was surprised his English peers ignored Yeats and the Celtic Revival: 'thank the gods that I am Irish'.

Lewis spent his 1958 honeymoon at the Old Inn in which Northern Irish village?

He visited Northern Ireland regularly and sought out Irish company in England.

Into which regiment was Lewis commissioned in the First World War?

He reached the front line in the Somme valley on his 19th birthday.

How was Lewis wounded in April 1918?

Two colleagues were killed in the same blast during the assault on Riez du Vinage.

What did Lewis win at Oxford in 1920, 1922 and 1923?

Honour Moderations, Greats and English; he became a Fellow of Magdalen in 1925 and stayed 29 years.

Lewis lived with and cared for Janie Moore for decades because of a pact made with whom?

The two cadets promised to look after each other's families; Lewis called her 'mother' and visited her nursing home daily until she died in 1951.

How old was Janie Moore when the 18-year-old Lewis met her?

Whether they were lovers is disputed; biographer George Sayer changed his mind and decided they were.

What was the house near Oxford Lewis moved into in 1930 with Warnie and Mrs Moore called?

It stood in Headington Quarry; the nature reserve behind it now bears his name.

Which Scottish writer's book Phantastes helped turn the 16-year-old Lewis from atheism?

In The Great Divorce Lewis meets MacDonald in Heaven and calls it his Beatrice moment: 'Here begins the new life'.

Which G. K. Chesterton book helped bring Lewis back to Christianity?

Arguments with Tolkien, whom he first met on 11 May 1926, did the rest.

How did Lewis describe himself on the night in 1929 when he 'gave in, and admitted that God was God'?

He was 'kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape'.

Lewis's 1931 conversion followed a late-night stroll with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson along what?

Tolkien was disappointed he became an Anglican rather than a Catholic.

Where was Lewis on his way to when he made his specific commitment to Christian belief?

He joined the Church of England, somewhat to Tolkien's disappointment.

Why did Lewis refuse to produce press columns for the Ministry of Information during WWII?

He did serve in the Oxford Home Guard, and The Kilns took in child evacuees.

Lewis's wartime BBC broadcasts of 1941-43 were later collected as which book?

Air Chief Marshal Sir Donald Hardman said Lewis provided 'a key to the meaning of the universe'; Alistair Cooke sneered at 'the alarming vogue of Mr. C.S. Lewis'.

Lewis was the first president of which university society, from 1942 to 1954?

He resigned on leaving Oxford for a new chair.

Which honour did Lewis decline in December 1951 to avoid political associations?

It was on George VI's last honours list.

In 1954 Lewis took up a newly founded chair in Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at which university?

He kept his Oxford home and returned every weekend; he argued there was no such thing as an English Renaissance.

Why did Lewis first marry Joy Davidman, in a register office in April 1956?

He regarded her at first as an intellectual companion; a bedside Christian wedding followed after her terminal diagnosis in 1957.

Joy Davidman had been a member of which organisation before her conversion?

An American writer of Jewish background, she was separated from the alcoholic novelist William L. Gresham.

Who performed the Christian marriage of Lewis and Joy at her hospital bedside in March 1957?

Because Joy was divorced, an ordinary Church of England wedding was not straightforward.

Lewis's 1960 holiday with Joy in Greece marked what?

He loved walking but disliked travel; Joy died that July after her illness returned.

Under what pseudonym did Lewis first publish A Grief Observed?

Friends recommended the book to him as a way of dealing with his own grief, not knowing he had written it.

Which of Joy Davidman's sons, adopted by Lewis, became Orthodox Jewish and a ritual slaughterer?

He wanted to present the shohet in a better light than his mother's writings had; Douglas remained a Christian.

Lewis died on 22 November 1963, the same day as John F. Kennedy and which other writer?

Peter Kreeft imagined the three meeting in Between Heaven and Hell; the news of Lewis's death was largely eclipsed.

Lewis died of what, aged 64?

He had suffered a heart attack and coma in July 1963 and resigned his professorship in August.

Where is Lewis buried?

Warnie joined him in the same grave in 1973; the Westminster Abbey memorial came in 2013.

In The Screwtape Letters, the senior demon writes advice to his nephew, a junior tempter named what?

Lewis dedicated the book to Tolkien; the letters explain how to secure a particular human's damnation.

Which third Space Trilogy novel pits nihilistic science against Arthurian legend?

Elwin Ransom, the trilogy's hero, is based in part on Tolkien; Lewis had agreed to write a space-travel story while Tolkien attempted a time-travel one.

Perelandra depicts a new Garden of Eden on which planet?

A new Adam and Eve face a new serpent, and Ransom intervenes to 'ransom' them.

Lewis's first novel after his conversion, an allegory in the manner of Bunyan, was called what?

Critics disliked it; asked when he would write another book, he said 'When I understand the meaning of prayer'.

Lewis's last novel, which he thought his most mature work but which never sold well, retold which myth?

Till We Have Faces appeared in 1956.

Who illustrated The Chronicles of Narnia?

The seven books, written between 1949 and 1954, have sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages.

Lewis's much-cited 'trilemma' about Jesus argues he must be one of which three?

The Professor in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe uses the same logic about Lucy: lies, madness or truth.

Per George Sayer, losing a 1948 debate with which philosopher pushed Lewis away from apologetics?

Anscombe remembered it differently; Lewis revised the disputed chapter of Miracles in 1960.

The Abolition of Man grew out of lectures Lewis gave in 1943 at which university?

The trilogy's third novel is set at a small English university much like it, though Lewis denied any further resemblance.

Which of Lewis's Oxford pupils, a future poet laureate, detested him?

The anti-establishment critic Kenneth Tynan, by contrast, admired him for life.

Lewis's friendship with Tolkien grew in which Old Norse reading group that Tolkien founded?

It wound up around the time the Inklings began, in December 1929 by Glyer's reckoning.

Lewis wrote that his first coming into the English Faculty had warned him never to trust what?

He had earlier been warned never to trust a Papist; Tolkien, he noted, was both.

What was Lewis's 1936 scholarly work that revived study of medieval narratives called?

His last academic book, The Discarded Image, summarised the medieval world view.

Who played Lewis in the 1993 film Shadowlands?

Debra Winger played Joy; Nigel Hawthorne had taken the role on stage in 1989, and Matthew Goode played Lewis in Freud's Last Session (2023).

Which Narnia character has a bronze statue at the Holywood Arches in Lewis's home city?

It stands in front of the Holywood Road Library, near the Strandtown of his childhood.