Was CS Lewis A Pedophile?

I don't think the article is implying anything about Lewis - it's just lazily name-checking him and Auden because they are the two best-known writers linked to Tolkien. Who reads Charles WIlliams these days? and most of the other Tolkien friends are obscure academics.,

Tolkien had many associates. This truncated Guardian article gives NO indication that the supposed perpetrator was Lewis. You have no business saying that it is.

The quote from the son makes it sound as if it was a close friend of Tolkien because they were at the house a lot.

I thought it was established that CD Lewis raped children.

R2 The article says the abuser was a friend/associate of Tolkien's and CS Lewis is one of only two friends mentioned.

R5 Ipso facto it must be him! Agatha Christie has nothing on you.

Actually, if anything he was a paedophile.

R4 CD Lewis may have indeed been a famed child rapist. We're talking about C.S. Lewis.

Also the source is a kiddy-diddling, self-justifying priest.

OP is probably confusing CS Lewis with Lewis Carroll. We had threads about Carroll when this all came up a few years ago.

R10 I am not confusing them.

There is such speculation among academics; I have heard it discussed many times.

I rather doubt it, because it took him a looooong time to warm up to Joy Davidman-Gresham (who had two young sons) and finally marry her. If he was a pedo looking for prey, wouldn't he have jumped at that chance? And the two kids adored him for life, so...

Okay, OP, then you're being a total dip, because there's nothing in the article to implicate CS Lewis.

This makes Prince Caspian very sad.

R14 From the article:

[quote]In a tape-recording made by one of the priest’s chief accusers and heard by the Observer, a man said to be him is heard discussing his childhood during the 1920s. At the time, JRR Tolkien was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and a fellow of Pembroke College. His friends included CS Lewis, a fellow academic and author of the Narnia novels, and among his students was the poet WH Auden.

Yes, we know - it names the two most famous writers associated with Tolkien, Lewis and Auden, just because they're famous.

It could have been any one of a dozen Oxford Dons. The Tolkien's entertained a lot, they had house guests a lot. Auden wasn't a close friend.

CS Lewis was a bit fucked up sexually from abuse at his hellish boarding school but that doesn't make him a pedophile. You could say the same for many of his generation.

(Although if it was him it might go some way to explaining his falling out with Tolkien, presuming JRR found out years later. I never bought that it was just about Lewis's marriage to Joy as a divorcee, Tolkien was tolerant of divorce even within his own family.)

CS Lewis was quite open about his sexual desire for women. He wasn't into men/boys, there's no evidence he was. Interestingly, for a fundamentalist Christian he didn't consider homosexuality a sin.

Op=asshole

CS Lewis was VERY into women and wrote about it in relation to his conversion to Christianity, albeit within the conventions of the age.

Tolkein famously had loads of friends round all the time and one of the amazing things about him was how he managed to tutor, and also wrote, while regularly entertaining a wide gamut of intellectuals and friends. He was no socialite, just someone who regularly had people round.

Before Joy, Lewis had an older girlfriend, a mother with a teenage daughter. I guess his not marrying her was a class thing; they lived together and he disguised her as his maid.

I'm reading his brother's diaries (see link). Highly recommended for incurable anglophiles such as myself.

OP - left a smoldering heap of ashes in his own thread. How sad.