50 Fun Facts About C. S. Lewis

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

Belfast. He said the nearby Mourne Mountains, seen in a certain light, made him feel a giant might raise his head over the next ridge, and they helped shape the landscape of Narnia.

By his stepson's account, why was Lewis known as 'Jack'?

He renamed himself after his dog. When Jacksie was killed in an accident, the small boy said he would answer to no other name; no document confirms the dog, and one biographer calls the choice obscure.

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

Boxen. It began as Jack's own Animal-Land, peopled by 'dressed animals' and knights, and took its name when the brothers joined it to Warnie's imaginary India.

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

Cancer. She died on her husband's birthday, and the Shakespeare line on that day's calendar, 'Men must endure their going hence', is now carved on her sons' shared gravestone.

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

Cherbourg House. He was happy there and made his first real friends, yet wrote that he dropped his faith 'with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief'.

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

The Great Knock. He met the boy's first polite remark about 'wild' Surrey scenery by demanding what he meant by wildness, and went on to drill him in ruthless logic.

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

Northernness. It engulfed him at about thirteen when he saw an illustration for Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, and Wagner records soon swallowed his pocket money.

How did Lewis describe the accents he met on first arriving in England?

'Like the voices of demons'. Worse still, he wrote, was the landscape seen from the train, and he conceived 'a hatred for England which took many years to heal'.

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

W. B. Yeats. Finding his English friends indifferent to the poet, Lewis wrote 'thank the gods that I am Irish' and thought of sending his own verse to a Dublin publisher.

In which Oxford pub did Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings meet to drink and talk?

The Eagle and Child. Regulars called it the Bird and Baby; the group also met in Lewis's college rooms, where chapters of The Lord of the Rings were first read aloud.

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

The Somerset Light Infantry. He reached the trenches on his nineteenth birthday, and later joked that he 'took' some sixty prisoners who simply walked up with their hands raised.

How was Lewis wounded in April 1918?

By a British shell falling short. He believed the same shell killed the sergeant beside him, yet his memoir shrugs the wound off as 'a sound Blighty from an English shell'.

What distinction did Lewis earn at Oxford between 1920 and 1923?

A triple first. After top honours in classics and in philosophy he added English in one year instead of the usual three, because classicists were struggling to find posts.

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

Her son Paddy. The two cadets shared a room in training and are said to have promised to look after each other's family; Paddy was killed in 1918 and Lewis kept his word.

How did Lewis usually introduce Janie Moore?

As his mother. He had lost his own as a boy, and he shared a home with Mrs Moore for nearly thirty years and cared for her as her health failed; whether the bond was ever more than filial is disputed.

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

The Kilns. Built beside an old brickworks, it took in evacuee children during the war, and their arrival gave Lewis the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Which Scottish writer's fantasy Phantastes began to turn the teenage Lewis away from atheism?

George MacDonald. Lewis said his imagination was 'baptised' the night he bought the book at a station bookstall, and he later made MacDonald his guide to Heaven in The Great Divorce.

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

The Everlasting Man. Reading it, Lewis wrote, he 'for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense'.

Lewis became 'the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England' kneeling in his rooms at which Oxford college?

Magdalen College. 'You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night,' he wrote; yet that surrender, he stressed, was only to belief in God, not yet to Christianity.

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

Addison's Walk. Tolkien argued there far into the night that the old myths had prepared the ground for a story that really happened, and within days Lewis accepted it.

Where was Lewis heading, riding with his brother by motorcycle, when he came to believe in Christ?

The zoo. 'When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did,' he wrote, yet the ride passed in neither thought nor great emotion, like waking after long sleep.

Which Narnia book won Lewis the Carnegie Medal, Britain's leading prize for children's books?

The Last Battle. The prize went to the seventh and final chronicle, and Lewis wrote to his illustrator asking whether it was not really 'our' medal.

Lewis's wartime BBC radio talks were later collected as which book?

Mere Christianity. He gave the first fifteen-minute talks live in August 1941, and so many listeners wrote in that he went back on air to answer their questions.

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

The Oxford Socratic Club. Stella Aldwinckle founded it so that believers and sceptics could argue about religion in the open, and she needed a senior don to sponsor it.

Which honour did Lewis turn down in December 1951?

A CBE. He declined so that critics who saw politics in his religious writing could not point to his name on a government honours list.

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

Cambridge. He gave his inaugural lecture on his 56th birthday but never really moved: he slept in college during the week and went home to Oxford every weekend and vacation.

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

So she could continue to live in Britain. Her permit had run out, and the two friends kept the ceremony quiet; it became a marriage in earnest only after she was found to be dying.

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

The Communist Party USA. She joined in 1938 and reviewed films and edited poetry for its magazine New Masses, before Lewis's books helped turn her towards Christianity.

What made a Church of England wedding difficult for Lewis and Joy Davidman in 1957?

She was divorced. A priest friend, Peter Bide, married them anyway at her hospital bedside and prayed for her recovery, and her illness then went into a remission that gave them three more years.

Lewis disliked travel, but in 1960 he and Joy took a last holiday together in which country?

Greece. Knowing her illness had returned, they toured Athens, Mycenae, Rhodes and Crete with friends that April, and Joy died three months later.

Under what pseudonym did Lewis first publish A Grief Observed?

N. W. Clerk. The disguise worked so well that friends pressed the book on Lewis himself, hoping it would help him through his own bereavement.

Which of Lewis's stepsons left Christianity for Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his mother's ancestors?

David Gresham. He made the change while still a boy in Lewis's house, and Lewis went out of his way to find him kosher food; his brother Douglas remained a Christian.

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

Aldous Huxley. News of both writers' deaths was buried under the assassination coverage, and Peter Kreeft later imagined the three men debating in the afterlife.

Lewis died of what, aged 64?

Kidney failure. He collapsed at home a week before his 65th birthday; a heart attack that summer had already left him briefly in a coma and made him give up his chair.

Where is Lewis buried?

Holy Trinity churchyard, Headington, Oxford. His brother Warnie chose the epitaph and was laid in the same grave ten years later; Westminster Abbey added a memorial only in 2013.

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

Wormwood. The letters first ran weekly in a church newspaper in 1941, and Lewis gave away the two pounds he was paid for each one.

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

That Hideous Strength. The trilogy grew from a bargain with Tolkien: Lewis would write a space-travel story and Tolkien a time-travel one, which he never finished.

Perelandra depicts a new Garden of Eden on which planet?

Venus. Lewis pictures it as an ocean world of floating islands, where his hero must stop the planet's first woman from being talked into a second Fall.

Lewis's first novel after his conversion, an allegory published in 1933, was called what?

The Pilgrim's Regress. He called it 'a kind of Bunyan up to date' and wrote the whole book in a single fortnight in August 1932, while staying with his oldest friend, Arthur Greeves.

Lewis's last novel, which he considered his best, retold which classical myth through the eyes of the heroine's sister?

Cupid and Psyche. Till We Have Faces hands the story to Psyche's elder sister Orual, who writes it as a charge against the gods and ends by seeing her own part in it.

Who illustrated The Chronicles of Narnia?

Pauline Baynes. Her pictures for Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham won her the commission, yet Lewis told his biographer more than once that she could not draw lions.

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

Lord, liar or lunatic. Lewis reused the logic in Narnia, where the Professor reasons that Lucy must be lying, mad or telling the truth about the wardrobe.

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

Elizabeth Anscombe. A Catholic herself, she recalled only a sober discussion of one argument in his book Miracles, and Lewis rewrote that chapter for the 1960 edition.

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

Durham. He actually spoke at its college in Newcastle, and he later set a novel in a small university town which, he insisted, resembled Durham only in its size.

Which of Lewis's Oxford pupils, later a much-loved poet, came to detest his tutor?

John Betjeman. Lewis thought him an 'idle prig', Betjeman left Oxford without a degree, and he was never reconciled with the tutor whose verdict still rankled decades later.

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

The Kolbítar. Lewis told a friend the Icelandic name meant 'coal-biters', old cronies who sit so close to the fire that they seem to bite the coals, and the dons read the sagas aloud.

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

A philologist. As a child, he added, he had been warned never to trust a Papist, and Tolkien, who became one of his closest friends, 'was both'.

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

The Allegory of Love. His study of courtly love won the Gollancz Memorial Prize the following year and made his name as a scholar long before Narnia.

Who played Lewis in the 1993 film Shadowlands?

Anthony Hopkins. Richard Attenborough's film gives Joy a single son, although two boys really came to live with Lewis, and it draws on his own account in A Grief Observed.

A centenary bronze in Lewis's home city shows which Narnia boy, later the Professor who owned the wardrobe?

Digory Kirke. In The Magician's Nephew he plants the core of a Narnian apple, and when the tree it grows into blows down he has its wood made into the wardrobe the statue shows him opening.