Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

have been very different, and the writing of it very difficult, if Tolkien hadn‟t been a Christian. He thought
it a profoundly Christian book‟” (Tolkien Encyclopedia, 101).
No less profoundly Christian, but certainly more glaring are the religious connotations found in
Lewis‟s Space Trilogy. Lewis does not create a myth even slightly apart from his new Christian faith: he
instead “uses his silent planet myth in the first two novels of the trilogy as a metaphor by which he presents
to his skeptical public in an altered and hence vitalized form the great truths of the Christian doctrine, the
separation of Man and God in Out of the Silent Planet, and the nature of the Fall in Perelandra” (Moorman,
405). When his character Ransom is first transported to the planet Mars (known as Malacandra to the rest
of the universe), in the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, he is told right away that those who seem to be in
all-authority are not. The hrossa (One of the three sentient races inhabiting the planet) laugh at Ransom
when they find him and he quickly learns their language and discovers his own ignorance. He asks if their
Oyarsa made their world and they say “[do] people in Thulcandra not know that Maleldil the Young had
made and still rule[s] the world? Even a child knew that. Where did Maleldil live, Ransom asked. „With the
Old One.‟ And who was the Old One? Ransom did not understand the answer. He tried again. „Where was
the old One?‟ „He is not that sort,‟ said Hnohra, „that he has to live anywhere‟” (Out of the Silent Plane, 68t).
On the newly-formed planet Perelandra, Ransom experiences two more Christian myths: both the reenactment
of the Fall and an „outsider‟s‟ explanation of the redemption available through the Messiahfigure.
The Green Lady, the Eve of Perelandra, faces a similar decision and destruction. She has been
granted freedom to walk with her Creator in harmony on her planet of shifting, moving islands, but denied
permission to live on the stationary landscape. Ransom questions her about it: “‟Is there a law in your world
not to sleep in a Fixed Land?‟ „Yes,‟ said the Lady. „He does not wish us to dwell there. We may land on
them and walk on them, for the world is ours. But to stay there—to sleep and awake there…‟ she ended
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