Speculation about the adaptation of C S Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has existed ever since Walden Media announced that the book would be made into a movie. However, few details about the differences between the movie version and the book have been confirmed.
In a November 17, 2009 Blog entry by Mirko Grillini, who plays a “belligerent Telmarine” in the movie, role changes for the characters Rhince and Rynelf have been confirmed.
It had been speculated in the NarniaWeb.com Forum that the “mysterious little girl” that was seen on the set at Cleveland Point was the “Gael” whose mother was mentioned in casting calls, and that Rhince might be her father. (See Mysterious Addition to the Dawn Treader Cast.)
In the book, Rhince is the first mate of the ship. According to the wording of the Mirko Grillini Blog entry, the character Rynelf is apparently the first mate in the movie.
Arthur [Angel] plays Rhince in the film, joining the crew on board of the Dawn Treader to begin his voyage looking for his wife.
Narnia has now reopened the door to [Tony Nixon’s] screen performance abilities with his role of Rynelf, the right hand of Captain Drinian (played by Gary Sweet). He is effectively my boss on the boat
Fans have wondered if Gael and her mother may have been captured as salves. If so, this plot change would be used to emphasize the theme of slavery explored in the book, helping the viewer to empathize with the plight of those sold into bondage.
For more information, see NarniaWeb.com’s coverage of the story: Interesting Tidbits On Rhince and Rynelf
Walter Hooper and J I Packer were not exactly life-long friends of C S Lewis, but they did know him. Both were in their mid-thirties when the famous Narnia author passed away (46 years ago this month). Walter Hooper was Lewis’s secretary the last year of his life, and J I Packer attended Oxford while Lewis was teaching there (although Lewis was never his professor). Recently interviews with Hooper and Packer were published in which they discuss what Lewis and his works meant to them.
Walter Hooper
Walter Hooper was ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church, and converted to Catholicism in 1988. He has been a literary trustee for the Lewis estate since the famous author’s death, and edited many of his works, including a collection of his letters.
The interview with Hooper has been published on the C. S. Lewis Society of California’s website. His relationship with Lewis began in 1954 after Hopper had written Lewis to express appreciation for his books. Lewis’s hand-written response came as a pleasant surprise, and the pair exchanged letters from time to time. When they met in 1963, Lewis asked him to stay and help with his enormous correspondence load.
Hooper describes the personality of Lewis, saying there was “an underlying current of humor in everything.” It wasn’t that he told jokes, but he had a spirit of merriment that came from his view of people as eternal beings. When they first met, Hooper asked for directions to the “bathroom” not knowing English houses have separate rooms for the bathtub and the toilet. Lewis showed him to a room with only a tub, and Hooper was embarrassed to explain what he really wanted. Lewis replied, “That will cure you of those American euphemisms.”
The interview goes on about how Lewis’s conversations were always about something – never just small talk. A casual comment about the weather would probably lead to a discussion about the beautiful cloud formations. Hooper also tells about how he was introduced to the Inklings, the writers group that included JRR Tolkien, and how Lewis would ask questions to get Hooper to express his ideas.
He didn’t suppress you. Because he was a very learned man, you’d think maybe he could have made you look such a fool. He could have, and people do. But he didn’t, that wasn’t his way.
J I Packer
J I Packer is an Anglican pastor, Regent College professor, and one of the world’s best-known theologians. His local congregation in Canada recently split off from the national Anglican Church.
Packer was interviewed for the Modesto, California Bee while he was attending the Christian Book Expo in Dallas. He responded to questions on various topics, including the influence of C S Lewis on his life.
The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect affect on me. Lewis, of course, was a Catholic-Anglican rather than an evangelical, but he erected around me all the scaffolding of orthodox Christianity, in terms of which I was opened to the authentic Gospel. His writings still help me. He was certainly the 20th century’s No. 1 apologist. The older I get, the more I appreciate his real genius in Christian insight and communication. He was never my professor. He was a professor of English and the most popular lecturer at Oxford. He was, in fact, operating weekly as the anchor man in the Socratic Society. It was a club where inquirers, with an interest in Christianity, could hear the pros and the cons of the Christian faith.
Click here to read the interview with Walter Hooper.
Click here to read the interview with J I Packer.
Ernie Malik, publicist for the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie, gave an interview yesterday, November 5, on location at the studio. He was interviewed for the ABC Radio affiliate in Brisbane by Peter Scott. Here is a summary of what Malik had to say.
- The ship is 144 feet long, is modeled after illustrations in the book by Pauline Baynes, and was designed by Garry Robison, the production designer for Wolverine and Nim’s Island. The replica of Captain Cook’s Endeavour, was used for the overall size of the ship, and carousel animals were also used as inspiration. With the mechanics used to move the ship, it weighs 125 tons.
- The boat never actually has been in the water. Cleveland Point was chosen because it is a peninsula. The camera angles used show the ocean behind it, and the boat was able to be turned 360 degrees to take advantage of the angle of the sun during different parts of the day. The ship was disassembled and rebuilt inside the studio where filming is currently continuing. (Shooting should wrap up by the end of November.)
- Malik estimates that 98% of the movie will be shot on Australia’s Gold Coast, either at the studio, or locations close by. A second filming unit did do some shooting in New Zealand at White Island.
- At the end of the interview, the publicist talks about the devaluation of the dollar and how that is keeping American filmmakers from scheduling more movies in Australia. He doubts Dawn Treader would have been filmed there if the exchange rate hadn’t been so favorable when they signed on to use the Australian studios.
- December 10, 2010 will be opening day throughout most of the world. Malik believes the Australian opening will be December 26.
For more, read the report and hear the interview on ABC.net.au: Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Today I got to musing about Daylight Savings Time and the effect it would have had on Middle-earth and Narnia. I wrote up a little humorous piece (or, you may find it a piece with little humor) on Examiner.com that I thought I’d share with anyone who cares to take a look.
What if Caspian had slept another hour or Biblo and the Dwarves had missed the timing of the Secret Door on the Lonely mountain? And what does any of this have to do with me?
If you are interested, check out the article here.
A recent report on USAToday.com explores life at a military base in Adder, Iraq. Troops there are finding that the war experience this year has been a bit different than in previous years.
While some military personnel stationed in other parts of Iraq deal with combat as a daily reality, many troops in southern Iraq have found a rather peaceful existence due to the increased security there.
What to do with all the downtime?
The report includes a bit about Sgt. Neil Gussman, 56, who reenlisted a couple years ago with the National Guard. Gussman remembers serving in Germany in the early 1970’s. The Army would occasionally show a movie back then, but much of their time was spent reading.
The Sargent was surprised to find that recreational reading was not a very common practice on the base, so he decided to establish two book clubs. One, the Dead Poets Society, reads Dante and Virgil, while the other reviews essays by the famous Narnia writer, C S Lewis. Beyond Narnia has become a popular club among the chaplains on the base.
Click here to see the entire article on USAToday.com.
I reported in July that a Texas State professor had discovered a manuscript in the Oxford University Bodleian Library that he believes was an effort toward a planned collaborative work by JRR Tolkien and C S Lewis. (See Lost C S Lewis Manuscript Found.)
Dr. Steven Beebe discovered the manuscript in a notebook which also contains drafts of The Magician’s Nephew and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and other unpublished ideas. An article by Professor Beebe, “Language and Human Nature Manuscript Fragment Found: C. S. Lewis On Language and Meaning,” is scheduled to be published in the journal Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review next year. Beebe hopes to obtain permission from the Lewis estate to publish the manuscript with the article.
Recently CSLewis.com interviewed the professor about the unpublished work. Beebe has transcribed the manuscript, and “was amazed and impressed at both the clarity of his ideas as well as his depth of expression about language, meaning and communication.” He describes how he came to realize the association between the manuscript and the proposed book both Tolkien and Lewis had described in letters to third parties.
Professor Beebe is also currently working on a book about Lewis’s communication skills
To read the interview on the CSLewis.com blog, click here.
The Focus on the Family Radio Theatre Edition of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters has just been released, and is available online and in bookstores throughout the country. It will also be broadcast on the radio in limited markets this fall. Check with your local Christian radio station to see if it might be broadcast in your area.
For more information, see Andy Serkis as Uncle Screwtape!
For a review of the production, see C S Lewis Rocks … and Andy Serkis is a Diabolical Genius.
Walden President Micheal Flaherty was the guest speaker at the Asbury College’s “Engaging the Cluture” weekend in April this year. Videos of the interview responses to questions about Walden Media and the Narnia films are now online. Dr. Devin Brown, Asbury’s C S Lewis scholar, and author of the Inside Narnia series, also participated in the interview.
A video of Flaherty’s chapel message is also included in which the Walden President reviews the history and philosophy of the company.
To view the videos, follow this link: “An Interview with Micheal Flaherty”
If C S Lewis were alive today, would he have become a Catholic? In his book, C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church (Ignatius Press, 2003), Joseph Pearce stops short of giving a definitive answer, but he does say (p. 167)
We can’t know for certain what Lewis would have done had he lived to see the triumph of modernism in the Church of England and the defeat of ‘mere Christianity’. There is no doubt, however, that he would have felt strangely out of place in today’s Anglican church. There is also no doubt that today’s Anglican church sees him as a somewhat embarrassing part of their unenlightened and reactionary past. The sobering truth is that even if Lewis had not chosen to leave the Church of England, the Church of England has chosen to leave him.
In his lecture at Notre Dame last evening (based primarily on his book), Joseph Pearce repeated the assertion that Anglicans have abandoned the works of C S Lewis. Catholics and Evangelicals are reading him, but not the church of which he was a part until his death.
Like C S Lewis, Pearce was raised in a Northern Ireland Protestant family. Unlike Lewis, he became heavily involved in anti-Catholic terrorist organizations in the 1970’s and 80’s, but later converted to Catholicism.
JRR Tolkien has been quoted as saying that the reason Lewis never became a Catholic was because of “the austerior motive.” Pearce joked in his address that he believes the motive was a bit more complex than that; if he didn’t think so, there would be no need for his book. (Tolkien was also born into a Protestant Family, but his mother converted after his father died when he was a toddler.)
In his teens, Lewis became an avowed atheist. However, Catholic apologist G K Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man had a profound influence on him, and helped him understand for the first time, he would later say, the Christian view of history. Sometime afterward he would have the famous conversation with his friends JRR Tolkien and Hugo Dyson about mythology. Tolkien would explain that mankind’s creativity and imagination are part of the image of God in which we were created. In his book, Pearce quotes a letter from Lewis to Arthur Greeves which explains the concept (p 39).
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this important difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.
After Lewis became a Christian, he soon wrote the allegorical and largely biographical work Pilgrim’s Regress. Because of the ending of the book, many assumed at that time that Lewis had become a Catholic. There are also other ideas expressed in his works through the years, such as his apparent belief in purgatory, that seem to indicate he was conflicted in his beliefs and actually very close to Catholicism.
However, Lewis also expressed disapproval of certain doctrines of the Catholic Church such as the ultimate authority of the Pope and the “worship” of Mary. Pearce concludes that Lewis just didn’t “see the light” on certain issues, but that it seems certain that Lewis has become a Catholic since dying in 1963.
But of course, the conclusions of Joseph Pearce, non-Catholics would say, are a bit biased.
Sunday’s episode of Masterpiece Mystery on PBS included references to the Inklings, the Oxford writers group that included JRR Tolkien and C S Lewis.
The story involves a fictional modern-day Oxford professor who is also a fantasy writer. His book, Boxland, is a reference to the “Boxen” tales C S Lewis wrote down as a child (published by Harcourt in 1986, and in a revised version by HarperCollins in 2008).
The title of the show is “Allegory of Love,” after a non-fiction book Lewis wrote originally as a college textbook. In it Lewis explores the Romantic traditions of Medieval “Courtly Love.”
The characters in this episode take some snipes at Lewis and Tolkien, and the fantasy genre as a whole.
An online video of “Allegory of Love” is available on the PBS website through October 18, 2009. Inspector Lewis, Series II: Allegory of Love
Thanks go to “Magpie” on TheOneRing.net forum for the “heads up.”
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