‘The Music of the Spheres’ in the Works of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien: A Lecture
In the beginning God played with the planets,
Set them a-spinning in time and in space,
Stars in the night sky, while sun lit the daytime,
Blue was the globe that was formed for our race.
(Andrew Pratt)
Since the mid-20th century, the names CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien have been synonymous with the ‘high fantasy’ genre of literature. Their collective works have been read by millions, translated into dozens of languages, and have reached new audiences through the various media of radio, television and film; not least, in the 21st century, through big budget Hollywood productions of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and several of the Chronicles of Narnia, including The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
This year, 2023, marks the 60th anniversary of the death of Lewis, on November 22nd 1963: the very same day, incidentally, as that of another renowned writer, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley; and also, most infamously, the 35th American president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Tolkien, on September 2nd 1973. My wedding anniversary also happens to fall on September 2nd: but my wife is probably delighted that I have, thus far, resisted any temptation to dress up as a hobbit or a wizard in homage to the late Professor Tolkien on our special anniversary.
So, a strange conjunction of dates: and that very word - conjunction - gives a further clue as to the subject matter for my lecture tonight. We perhaps most commonly use the term ‘conjunction’ when referencing the meeting together, or close proximity (at least apparently) of heavenly bodies, most particularly planets, on their journeying through the night skies above.
I say apparent - that’s the key term, of course. When these points of light, millions of miles away, appear to come together, it’s merely an optical illusion from our point of view; we’re actually viewing objects which are at vastly different distances from one another, that just so happen to be on the same line of sight from our perspective. A conjunction is, actually, a piece of fiction. It is a fantasy (albeit a powerful and inspiring one).
Fantasies and Heavenly Bodies, taken together, brings us to consider The Music of the Spheres: the title of my lecture this evening. ‘The Music of the Spheres’ refers to the mediaeval philosophical belief that there was a mathematical order in the arrangement of the planets, that harmonised with the mathematical ordering of musical notes. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras was perhaps the first to suggest a connection between maths and music. By the time we get to the 17th century, we find that the astronomer Johannes Kepler believes passionately that the cosmic movement of the celestial bodies produces a form of music that, whilst inaudible to the physical ear, is nevertheless capable of being perceived by the soul. This is ‘The Music of the Spheres’. And as I hope to show this evening, it’s a profoundly powerful and imaginative philosophical idea about the nature of harmony within a divinely-ordered cosmos; one that resonated for centuries beyond the Renaissance, ultimately influencing the thinking of modern fantasy writers such as CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.
So before we go further, a little bit of Cosmography 101…
The word ‘planet’ derives from the Greek word πλάνητες meaning ‘wanderer’. They were so-called because they were bright bodies that appeared to wander in their journeying through the heavens, unlike the fixed courses of the stars. The ancients observed that there were seven such objects in the night skies. They named them in honour of their gods. The Roman names for them are the ones that we, by and large, retain today: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, to which we would add the Sun and the Moon (names we tend to use in preference to their Latin equivalents, Sol and Luna).
Now, you may already be noting, and wondering, two things. First, you may well be thinking: Hang on - that list of planets is rather inaccurate, isn’t it? Why are the Sun and Moon included as planets? And why are Neptune and Uranus excluded?
(We could also, of course, note the exclusion of Pluto, which since its discovery in 1930 most of us have grown up with as the ninth planet - that is, until the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to the status of ‘dwarf planet’ in 2006.)
Secondly, you may also be thinking: What does this list of heavenly bodies have to do with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, anyway? Well, as it happens, heavenly bodies, stars and planets, and their place within the grand cosmological scheme of things, turns out to have been of immense interest to both Lewis and Tolkien. And the answer to both of these questions lies in us understanding that Lewis and Tolkien, though writing their works of fantasy in the 20th century, are very much drawing upon far older mythological and philosophical traditions.
Let’s deal with that first question: Why those seven planets? Why are they different from the eight - or until recently nine - that astronomers generally refer to as the planets of the solar system today?
A profound change in our understanding of the universe took place in the 16th century, coinciding with the scientific and artistic revolution that we commonly refer to as the Renaissance. Before the Renaissance, it was generally assumed that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, and that all the stars and planets revolved around it. Because the Sun and the Moon had variable orbits through the heavens, they were included in the select list with the other ‘wanderers’: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
Now, as long ago as the third century Before Christ, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus had suggested that the Sun was at the centre of the universe, and that the Earth, and other planets, moved around it: this was the so-called heliocentric model of the universe (from the Greek ἥλιος meaning ‘sun’). However, Aristotle and Ptolemy were proponents of the rival geocentric model, placing Earth at the centre of the universe (from the Greek Γαῖα, the personification of the Earth).
It was this model that was to remain ascendant; until the great trio of 16th and 17th century astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler made a series of scientific discoveries that were to dethrone the Earth from its place at the centre of the universe. The new model, the so-called Copernican model, was, essentially, a revival and refinement of Aristarchus’ observations almost two thousand years earlier.
Later, of course, even Copernicus was shown to be wrong: the Sun isn’t at the centre of the universe either, but is merely a fairly unremarkable middle-aged star rotating slowly through the outer arm of an equally unremarkable spiral galaxy of stars, the Milky Way Galaxy. But at least the Sun still remains supreme within the solar system itself, orbited by those planets that are visible with the naked eye, alongside two others that were only discovered with the development of telescopes: Uranus, discovered in 1781, and Neptune, in 1846. These, then, are the eight planets of the modern solar system: and that is why we distinguish them from the seven planets of classical and mediaeval times.
On then to the second question: What does this list of heavenly bodies have to do with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien? Before we can answer this, we have perhaps to look a little at the related background of these two remarkable individuals.
Lewis and Tolkien were both born in the final decade of the long reign of Queen Victoria (in 1898 and 1892 respectively). Both fought in the trenches of the Western Front during the First World War. Later they both became members of the English Faculty at Oxford University, which was where they first met one another. Initially somewhat wary of each other, they soon developed a strong friendship that was to last through much of their adult lives (though sadly there was a definite cooling off in their friendship in their final years). Nevertheless, both encouraged and influenced one another in their writings throughout the late 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s: the twenty-year period that saw them produce their greatest literary endeavours.
Lewis and Tolkien were leading lights within The Inklings, a literary circle that regularly met in Lewis’ college rooms, and also in an Oxford pub, The Eagle and Child (which The Inkings rechristened The Bird and Baby). As well as being fantasy writers, and members of the English Faculty, Lewis and Tolkien shared a third attribute: they were both Christians. However, whereas Tolkien had been a devout Roman Catholic since childhood, Lewis’s spiritual journey had followed a more tortuous path. As a teenager, Lewis had rejected his childhood upbringing within the Anglican Church of Ireland, and embraced atheism. Lewis later returned to Christianity at Oxford (partly due to Tolkien’s influence). For his part, Tolkien somewhat regretted that Lewis didn’t convert to Catholicism, but instead returned to the Anglican Church. Tolkien was also, privately, somewhat resentful of the fact that it was Lewis, the recent convert, who now became famous in the 1940s, thanks to his wartime radio broadcasts as an eloquent and effective apologist of the Christian faith.
In many ways, Lewis was also, at least initially, the more successful writer of the two. His many notable works included the apologetical Mere Christianity (based on his earlier radio talks); The Screwtape Letters, a blisteringly funny work of satire, purporting to be the correspondence from a senior devil to his apprentice; and The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, two remarkable works that give markedly contrasting viewpoints on the issue of suffering, separated from one another because they were written before and after Lewis’ encounter with a woman whom he came to love profoundly, his eventual wife Joy Gresham.
But Lewis’ greatest legacy is undoubtedly the seven children’s novels that together make up the Chronicles of Narnia, published in successive years from 1950 to 1956. These seven tales recount the adventures of a group of children from our world, who by various means, travel into the fantasy land of Narnia: a land that is inhabited by talking beasts, and protected by a Christlike figure - Aslan, the Great Lion.
Compared to Lewis’ prodigious output across the 1940s and 1950s, Tolkien was wrestling during that same period with one great endeavour: the sequel of sorts to his one significant publication thus far, the children’s story The Hobbit, which had been published in 1937. This sequel was far longer and darker in tone, and was eventually published in three parts, from 1954 to 1955. Its title?
This, of course, was The Lord of Rings: the epic tale of the struggle between the Dark Lord Sauron, the eponymous ‘Lord of the Rings’, and the various Free Folk of Middle-earth - Men, Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits. Together the Free Folk must unite to oppose the Dark Lord’s tyrannical rule, which threatens to plunge all of Middle-earth into unending darkness; unless, that is, the One Ring that Sauron himself made, but which he has now lost, can be destroyed. And ultimately only one small Hobbit stands against the overwhelming might of the Dark Lord…
Thanks to Lewis’ constant, patient encouragement, Tolkien eventually managed to complete his magnus opus. Following his death, a third work, The Silmarillion, was published posthumously by his son Christopher, in 1977. Although it was the last of his major works to see print, some forty years after The Hobbit, The Silmarillion was actually the first of his works in terms of its slow literary genesis. He had begun working on individual tales that would eventually make up The Silmarillion whilst still a young man, recovering from injury in the trenches of the Western Front. These stories would give us much of the mythological backstory to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; and between them, these three great works have succeeded in making Tolkien’s Middle-earth the most richly detailed and convincingly realised fantasy realm ever devised.
But once again we ask the question: What do the planets have to do with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien? Well, let’s turn to some quotations from their works, to find out.
Let’s turn first to a passage from Prince Caspian - the second of Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series, published in 1951. The following passage describes a night-time observation of the heavens made by the young prince, the rightful ruler of Narnia, whose throne has been usurped by his wicked uncle (shades of Hamlet) and the prince’s tutor Dr Cornelius, one of his few allies at court as the scene unfolds.
There was no difficulty in picking out the two stars they had come to see. They hung rather low in the southern sky, almost as bright as two little moons and very close together.
‘Are they going to have a collision?’ [Caspian] asked in an awestruck voice.
‘Nay, dear Prince,’ said the doctor (and he too spoke in a whisper). ‘The great lords of the upper sky know the steps of their dance too well for that. Look well upon them. Their meeting is fortunate and means some great good for the sad realm of Narnia. Tarva, the Lord of Victory, salutes Alambil, the Lady of Peace. They are just coming to their nearest.’
The idea that the celestial dance of the planets in the heavens above should be indicative of the fortune (good or otherwise) of peoples and realms on the world beneath, might sound decidedly eccentric today. It doesn’t sit very well with scientific scepticism about astrology; nor with traditional Christian warnings about the perils of dabling in such arts. And yet, according to the pre-Copernican mediaeval worldview, the sharp modern day chasm between astronomy and astrology had not, as yet, opened up. The two disciplines were, essentially, one and the same. And this is precisely the Narnian viewpoint too. Doctor Cornelius had earlier specifically told his young charge:
’
Tonight I am going to give you a lesson in Astronomy. At the dead of night two noble planets, Tarva and Alambil, will pass within one degree of each other. Such a conjunction has not occurred for two hundred years, and your Highness will not live to see it again.’
‘A lesson in Astronomy’. Yet what actually follows reads more like a lesson in Astrology, from our standpoint. But not from the Narnian standpoint. Nor from the mediaeval European one either.
In the mediaeval world, heavenly conjunctions were just as often seen as presaging ill-fortune. Perhaps one of the most famous instances of this was the appearance of Halley’s comet - a comet that passes through the inner solar system once every 76 years - in the heavens in 1066 (the one date in English history almost everyone remembers). Its appearance was noted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, and bewailed by a contemporary English monk with these words: ‘You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers… for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country.’ And so, of course, it came to pass: William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings, and night fell on Anglo-Saxon England.
CS Lewis similarly speaks of disaster being foretold in the heavens above for Narnia, in the seventh and final Chronicle of Narnia, The Last Battle, published in 1956. Roonwit, the wise Centaur, is reporting to King Tirian the results of his observations of the night sky. The auguries are not favourable.
‘Sire,’ [Roonwit] said. ’You know how long I have lived and studied the stars; for we Centaurs live longer than you Men… Never in all my days have I seen such terrible things written in the skies as there have been nightly since this year began. The stars say nothing of the coming of Aslan, nor of peace, nor of joy. I know by my art that there have not been such disastrous conjunctions of the planets for five hundred years…
‘Last night the rumour reached me that Aslan is abroad in Narnia. Sire, do not believe this tale. It cannot be. The stars never lie, but Men and Beasts do. If Aslan were really coming to Narnia the sky would have foretold it. If he were really come, all the most gracious stars would be assembled in his honour. It is all a lie.’
As we all know, the coming of Jesus Christ was accompanied by signs in the heavens. We’re all familiar with this passage from Matthew’s Gospel: After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, ‘Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.’ (Matthew 2.1, 2)
Perhaps less familiar, though, is the following passage from the Book of Revelation: A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who ‘will rule all the nations with an iron sceptre.’ And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. (Revelation 12.1-5)
The language of apocalyptic literature bears more than a few resemblances to that of high fantasy works such as those of Lewis and Tolkien. Who then are these mysterious figures in this passage from the Book of Revelation? It seems like a strange mix of the first advent of Christ and the second. Is the woman ‘clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head’ a representation of Mary, the Mother of Our Lord; or is it instead a metaphor for the Church? And does the crown of twelve stars represent the twelve apostles? Or perhaps the twelve tribes of Israel?
The dragon is, of course, as we’re told explicitly a few verses later, that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray (Revelation 12.9). The dragon stands ready to devour the woman’s child the moment he is born, sounding more like King Herod than Satan: is this a flashback to the first coming of Christ, then? But we’re also told that this child ‘will rule all the nations with an iron sceptre’ - which points us forward, surely, to Our Lord’s second coming.
This jumble of images, with the cosmic order being further disturbed by the dragon’s tail sweeping a third of the stars out the sky and flinging them to the earth, is all very colourful, and poetic; but any attempts to find an entirely satisfactory historical narrative or a wholly meaningful prophetic outline are surely doomed. That’s not, really, the author’s intent. I believe the Book of Revelation, above all else, is a sublime piece of poetry. In places, it intersects with the same kind of thinking that we find underpinning the philosophy of ‘The Music of the Spheres’.
And ‘The Music of the Spheres’ is suffused with the language of poetry. John Donne, the 16th century metaphysical poet, wrote these words:
The spheres have music, but they have no tongue,
Their harmony is rather danced than sung…
(Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, His Sister)
Whilst the great Bard himself, William Shakespeare, placed these words on the lips of cunning Ulysses in his play Troilus & Cressida:
…But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture.
(Troilus & Cressida, Act 1, Scene 3)
By the day of Shakespeare and Donne, this mediaeval world-view is already beginning to give way to a new understanding of the cosmos, the adoption of which will soon accelerate further thanks to the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus; but within the vivid imaginings of these poets, ‘The Music of the Spheres’ still has a strong hold. Lewis and Tolkien, as scholars of Old, Middle and Early Modern English, were deeply steeped in a knowledge and appreciation of this world-view; and it is entirely natural that this world-view coloured their own literary endeavours, as they developed their own mythologies of Narnia and Middle-earth.
I’ve given a couple of examples from CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (and I’ll come back to them later): but I want to turn now to the second of my authors, JRR Tolkien, and specifically, to The Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is actually a compendium of various works, the first of which is called the Ainulindalë. In Tolkien’s invented Elvish language of Quenya, this means ‘The Music of the Ainur’. The Ainur are the highest order of angelic beings that Tolkien conceives to be members of the heavenly power, the first beings to be created by Eru Ilúvatar (‘The One’ or ‘Allfather’): in other words, God. It is these Ainur who assist Eru in the creation of the universe through a holy chanting, or music, i.e. the Ainulindalë itself.
This is how the Song is described by Tolkien:
…It came to pass that Ilúvatar called together all the Ainur and declared to them a mighty theme, unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful than he had yet revealed; and the glory of its beginning and the splendour of its end amazed the Ainur, so that they bowed before Ilúvatar and were silent.
Then said Ilúvatar: ‘Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will… But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been wakened into song.’
Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.
…Ilúvatar sat and hearkened, and for a great while it seemed good to him, for in the music there were no flaws.
This is Tolkien’s own particular version of the ‘musica universalis’, the great universal music, otherwise known as ‘The Music of the Spheres’.
Unfortunately, a discordant note is now introduced to this universal music, when one of the Ainur, the most powerful of the angelic beings, named Melkor, gets ideas above his station.
But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself…and he had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame. For desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own, and it seemed to him that Ilúvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness. Yet he found not the Fire, for it is with Ilúvatar. But being alone he had begun to conceive thoughts of his own unlike those of his brethren.
Melkor is, of course, Middle-earth’s equivalent of Lucifer. Like Lucifer, the greatest of the angels, he becomes fallen because of the original sin of pride and rebellion. Yet Melkor’s attempts to bring disorder into the great music of creation are ultimately futile, as Eru Ilúvatar is able to take even Melkor’s most discordant notes, and gradually incorporates them into the themes of his music.
Then Ilúvatar spoke, and he said: 'Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but…thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'
Eru Ilúvatar leads the Ainur into the Void: and, behold, they receive a vision of their music made manifest. There, floating in the Void, is the Earth, the world itself, in all its created glory. And even the evil of Melkor has been subsumed into a greater good.
The Ainulindalë was written early in Tolkien's literary career, and it demonstrates the importance of music in his legendarium. According to the literary critic John Gardner, ‘Music is the central symbol and the total myth of The Silmarillion, a symbol that becomes interchangeable with light (music’s projection).’ And it’s very likely, as suggested by Tolkien and Lewis scholar Colin Duriez, that Tolkien’s Music of the Angels directly influenced Lewis, when he came to write his own account of the creation of Narnia.
This is a part of how that creation, as witnessed by some of the children from our world, is described in the sixth novel - The Magician’s Nephew (published in 1955):
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful that he could hardly bear it…
…Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by the other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment, a thousand, thousand points of light leapt out - single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.
The Voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter.
The narrative continues with the rising of the sun, and Narnia’s first dawn; and in that first Narnian sunlight, Digory and his companions at last discover for themselves the identity of that mysterious First Voice. It is, of course, Aslan: the talking Lion who is Narnia’s creator, and later, Narnia’s saviour.
Here, then, is Lewis’ equivalent of Tolkien’s ‘Song of Creation’; here is Lewis’ equivalent of ‘The Music of the Spheres’.
All rather fanciful, and all rather fantastic, you might think. But there’s more. In 2008, the scholar Michael Ward published a book entitled Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of CS Lewis.
Lewis himself hinted on several occasions that there was a very specific reason for there being seven novels in his Chronicles of Narnia series. What could that reason be? Why seven - no more, no less? Lewis refused to say more. In the decades since his death, several critics, suspecting there to be some secret theme to the series, have made comparisons between the novels and, for example, the seven sacraments, or the seven deadly sins. None of these suggestions for a hidden meaning have proved terribly convincing.
However, Michael Ward has - in my view - convincingly argued for a link between the sevenfold structure of the novels, and what Jonne Donne - no stranger to the philosophy of ‘The Music of the Spheres’ as we’ve already noted - referred to as: ‘The Heptarchy, the seven kingdoms of the seven planets.’ Ward further suggests that each of the seven Chronicles of Narnia embodies the spirit or nature assigned to a particular planet, and that this shapes the plot and tone of the book.
Let me give you just one example of his thesis. The final book in the series, The Last Battle, is, in many ways, the Narnia Chronicles equivalent of the Book of Revelation. There’s no need for a spoiler alert, for the first six words of chapter one of The Last Battle read as follows: ‘In the last days of Narnia.’ And if the book’s title and opening words weren’t enough, we then read these words at the beginning of chapter two: About three weeks later the last of the Kings of Narnia… No ambiguity, then.
Michael Ward suggests, in Planet Narnia, that the planet Saturn is thematically linked to The Last Battle. The Roman god Saturn - the equivalent of the Greek god Chronos - is associated with Time. So there’s no surprise, really, when an enormous giant named Father Time, who has been sleeping whilst awaiting the End of Narnia, awakens towards the end of the novel, and brings down a final darkness upon the Lewis’ fantasy realm by reaching up into the sky, and extinguishing the Sun. Saturn is especially associated with death and decay; and these are the final, decaying days of Narnia, afflicted by apostasy and false religion. Saturn, the outermost of the seven known planets (according to the ancient heliocentric model of the universe) was also, therefore, the coldest.
Entropy, the end of time, the final heat death of the universe - the second Law of Thermodynamics, with perfect sublime synchronicity, ties together what scientists tell us about the fate of our universe with what The Last Battle, the Book of Revelation and the classical associations surrounding ‘Saturn: The Bringer of Old Age’ tell us. This is how Lewis puts it, in The Last Battle:
Then Aslan said, ‘Now make an end.’
The giant threw his horn into the sea. Then he stretched out one arm - very black it looked, and thousands of miles long - across the sky till his hand reached the sun. He took the sun and squeezed it in his hand as you would squeeze an orange. And instantly there was total darkness.
Everyone except Aslan jumped back from the ice-cold air which now blew through the Doorway. Its edges were already covered with icicles.
‘Peter, High King of Narnia,’ said Aslan. ‘Shut the Door.’
Peter, shivering with cold, leapt out into the darkness and pulled the Door to. It scraped over ice as he pulled it. Then, rather clumsily (for even in that moment his hands had gone numb and blue) he took out a golden key and locked it.
Night falls on Narnia. Saturn has sounded his horn.
That’s just a few examples, from one of the books, and one of the planets, that Michael Ward considers. And he does so, convincingly, with the other Narnia books. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader? The Sun, of course. The Silver Chair? The Moon. And so on…
So, in summary, we’ve seen that the mediaeval and Renaissance concept of ‘The Music of Spheres’ underpins the Ainulindalë, the foundational text of Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium. And ‘The Music of the Spheres’ runs organical right through the very structure of Lewis’ Narnia saga, as assuredly as ‘Brighton’ through a stick of rock.
It’s all fantasy. It’s all a piece of fiction. Isn’t it?
Well, perhaps not. In 1965, radio astronomers discovered that if you listen out into the universe, in every direction, you will find what is referred to as Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, or CMB Radiation for short. This is the microwave radiation that fills all space, a landmark remnant of the Big Bang that ushered in the Dawn of Creation 13.8 billion years ago.
That background noise resonates through the universe at 160.4 GHz - that’s 160,400,000,000 (one hundred and sixty billion, four hundred million cycles per second). It’s far beyond the feeble limitations of human hearing, of course. But go onto YouTube, search for ‘Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation’, and you will find numerous audio videos that will allow you to ‘listen’ to an approximation of what that CMB radiation might sound like, if we had truly had ears to listen. Just as Kepler noted: ‘The Music of the Spheres’ produces a form of music that, whilst inaudible to the physical ear, is nevertheless capable of being perceived by the soul.
Alternatively, you could just listen to Holst’s Planet Suite.
But seriously, my friends: CMB Radiation is the very ‘Song of Creation’ itself. Perhaps Lewis and Tolkien, and Donne, and Kepler and Pythagoras, truly knew that of which they spoke. Music and light. ‘The Big Bang’. ‘Let there be Light’.
The Music of the Spheres.