Tuesday 17 July 2012

Tolkien vs. Lewis

I recently read that CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were both members of Inkblots, a writing group, when they were both dons in  Cambridge in the 40's.

Oh - to have been a fly on the wall!

And the goss is...Tolky was so scathing about an early draft of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, that Lewis contemplated dropping the project altogether. (And aren't we glad he didn't).

There was a lot that JRR thought sucked, but he particularly hated that Father Christmas made an appeareance in Narnia.

Seems that Lewis grew a thick skin and told Tolkien to shove it (actually, he probably thanked Tolkien for his thoughtful input).

Having read it as a kid, I did not see anything wrong with Father Christmas dropping by into Narnia once eternal winter was thawing. And as for those cool gifts he gave the kids... I think Peter got short changed with a non-magical sword and shield, but Susan and Lucy did very well with their magical horn and cordial.

Looking at it now... Tolkien had a point. I mean, a story that's essentially a Christian allegory featuring beasts from classical mythology is already an unusual mash-up (from before the time mash-ups were invented)... but chucking in a figure from contemporary Western consumer culture is just... well, I wonder what he was on.

But it worked for my eight year old self, (and every other kid, it seems), so who am I to judge now that I'm an ex-kid? I guess the lesson here is to keep the crazy stuff in your kids' stories. They tend to enjoy stuff, we adults ruin it by over analysing.

And I wonder if CS ever suggested to JRR that perhaps an occasional word-cull/ darling slaughter might have... yanno.... made his story more readable?

Lewis: 1; Tolkien: 0.

Friday 13 July 2012

Choosing a partner.



A bunch of American university students – freshies (the natural prey of the research student) – were given the chance to try a free dating service. Based on psychological profiling, the service promised to hook them up with their ideal partner.

Hey, it was the start of the year, they were new to the place, so it sounded like a great idea. Lots signed up.

They completed reams of paperwork about their views and opinions, and were duly assigned a date. So far so good. After their night out, they were asked a single question by the researchers: Did they want to see this person again?

Did I mention this was a psychological study? Well, that's code for there being a sneaky element to it. When they first signed up for it (in person, not on line, this was back in the 70’s yanno) a panel of judges hidden behind a screen rated each participant in terms of a single factor: how attractive they were.

(Hold on for a minute while I get this picture of geeky researchers surreptitiously rating younger peoples' attractiveness out of my mind. Ick.)

(And there is no way this would get ethics-panel approval these days)

And so what do you think was the most pertinent factor in determining how much a person wanted to see their date again?  Was it their wit? Their ambition? Their scintillating conversational ability? Their shared views of life?

None of the above. For both men and women, it was overwhelmingly how attractive their date was. Hotness rules.

It’s the kind of result I hoped would have been different.  But I'm kind of not surprised about. Ah, we humans are a predictable lot.

Brains: 0; Hormones: 1.

Ok, there's more to the psychology of romantic relationships than that... but not much. I'll save it for a later post.