![]() It must echo with the sound of a thousand thousand tales told using similar figures, similar symbols. In other words, it must make use of types and figures. In order to truly be myth, it must be archetypical. The fact that something is told as myth or in a mythological form does not necessitate its truth or falsity one way or the other. The form that these stories take cannot be true or false. Unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth. Myth-woven and elf-patterned and no earth, ![]() To flame like flowers beneath the ancient song, He sees no stars who does not see them first When we look at a tree or a sunset or the stars, we are seeing more than the material that they are made up of. He rejects materialism and the reductionistic tendencies of an evolutionary mindset. In Tolkien’s poem “Mythopoeia,” we find a direct answer to Lewis’s claim that myths are simply “lies breathed through silver.” Tolkien argues that everything we see or touch or experience is in fact a “myth” in the sense that it is more than the sum of its parts. He had fallen in love with things that he believed were simply untruths-utterly “mythical.” Tolkien was quick to correct him in this assumption. Even before he was close to accepting Christ as his Lord and Savior, Lewis had encountered the “dying god” motif over and over throughout his classical studies. He struggled because he loved myth-myth presented him with archetypes and models and themes that enchanted him. Lewis once told Tolkien that myths were “lies breathed through silver.” He said this prior to his conversion, when he was still struggling with many of the truths that he had encountered in his studies and in the works of literature that he so loved. We can know that they are fiction and they can also communicate truths that are greater than any we encounter elsewhere. We see a glimpse of that when we encounter great stories. That said, there is a deeper truth than merely being historically accurate. For it is often the case that the word “myth” is used to refer to legends and vice-versa. Myths are equated with legends and there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this. The first definition is simply “A usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.” Even in this first definition we see the word “ostensibly” pop up-myths are usually considered to be different than historical fact. What is myth? If we simply look the definition up in a dictionary, we can see that the idea of falsehood has been intricately intertwined with the word itself. How is this possible? Isn’t myth, by definition, untrue or false? To understand what Lewis does with all of the mythological references in Perelandra, we must first understand his view of myth itself. The world that he has entered is true, living myth. But more than that, Ransom finds that he has in fact entered a myth himself. The student who is at all familiar with Homer, Vergil, and the classical Greek and Roman myths will find that Perelandra is rich and full to the brim with allusions to these myths. What do I mean by this? It contains the highest concentration of classical mythological references. Perelandra is the most obviously classically influenced book of the Ransom Trilogy. Were all the things which appeared as mythology on earth scattered through other worlds as realities? He remembered how in the very different world called Malacandra-that cold, archaic world, as it now seemed to him-he had met the original of the Cyclops, a giant in a cave and a shepherd. By some means or other he then realised that he was awake but extreme comfort and some trance-like quality, both in the sleep which had just left him and in the experience to which he had awaked, kept him lying motionless. ![]() “This is the most vivid dream I have ever had,” he thought. He recognised the garden of the Hesperides at once. Round the base of the indigo stem was coiled a small dragon covered with scales of red gold. He opened his eyes and saw a strange heraldically coloured tree loaded with yellow fruits and silver leaves. At Ransom’s waking something happened to him which perhaps never happens to a man until he is out of his own world: he saw reality, and thought it was a dream.
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