C.S. Lewis by Joel Heck

Today I want to bookmark for myself and share with all of you an incredible set of resources on C.S. Lewis put together by Joel Heck, a Lewis scholar and currently the Interim President of Concordia Lutheran Seminary in Edmonton, Alberta. I’ve never met Dr. Heck, but like me, he’s from Texas. We know a lot of the same people; we’ve been published in a lot of the same places; I’ve edited scholars’ who have cited him; and we’ve commented on some of the same Facebook posts. There’s a pretty good chance we’ve attended some of the same conferences and may have sat in the same rooms at the same time.

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked whether I knew of a day-by-day chronological resource on Tolkien’s life and work — he was trying to remember the Scull and Hammond Chronology — something “Similar to Chronologically Lewis by Joel Heck”, he said. I was too preoccupied with talking Tolkien and with the specifics of my friend’s line of research to really dig into Chronologically Lewis, whatever that was.

Did I look it up at the time? I can’t remember now, but when I stumbled upon it (again?) recently, I was staggered by it. It’s a 1,300-page, year by year, day by day, in some cases hour by hour account of the life and doings of C.S. Lewis. At more than 749,000 words, it’s longer than The Lord of the Rings! In fact, it starts in 1894, four years before Lewis was born, with the marriage of his parents, and ends in 1973, ten years after his death, with the deaths of his brother, Warnie, and his friend, Tolkien. It’s a meticulously sourced project of more than 20 years (consulting more than 200 other works) — begun in 2004, last updated in October 2024, and still ongoing. The innumerable details range from the momentous to the mundane and everything in between. Letters written, works completed, walks taken, lectures delivered and attended, meetings of the Inklings — you name it.

As incredibly valuable a resource as this is, it’s not all you’ll find at Heck’s website. He also has a 25-page chronological bibliography of Lewis’s works, including those still unpublished, and a nearly 200-page literary biography of Lewis, focusing on “the intellectual history of Oxford and Cambridge during the Lewis years”. He intended this for publication at one time, but it was evidently found to be “too technical” for a mass audience.

And even that isn’t all! Heck provides downloadable photo tours of The Kilns, Oxford University, Magdalen College, Holy Trinity Church, The Eagle and Child, Addison’s Walk, and other locales of interest; more than forty PowerPoint slide shows on Lewis’s major works and related topics that you can download and reuse however you like (with proper credit); and lots of other reviews and essays.

For anyone doing research on Lewis, it’s a truly indispensable trove! Dig in and enjoy, friends. I know I will.