The image of a medieval man in the fairy tale for adults “That hideous strength” by C.S. Lewis

A fairy tale for adults “That Hideous Strength”, first published in 1945, is the third part of C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy”. The first two parts of the trilogy are novels about space travels of Elvin Ransom, the protagonist, to Mars and Venus. In the preface to “That Hideous Strength”, the author answers the reader’s most expected question about the reason for choosing the genre of a fairy tale for adults. The main reason for this important choice according to Lewis was the presence of magic and a character of a fairy-tale sort in his text. Merlin, the medieval wizard, is definitely a character of this sort, which largely constitutes the genre of the fairy tale for “That Hideous Strength”. In the article, the image of Merlin is considered as a private representative of the Middle Ages, the study of which (in Literature) Lewis was engaged in for more than forty years. The outlook of the medieval hero of “That Hideous Strength” is compared with the worldview of medieval men in Lewis’s philological work, namely “The Discarded Image”. The comparative method of research makes it possible to identify common features in the artistic and scholarly-anthropological thought of the author, as well as to compare the artistic image of a medieval man with the academic information about him, analyzing the historical and literary material that served as theoretical and conceptual basis for creating a special type of hero - a guest from the Middle Ages. Comparative analysis of the image of the Medieval man in Lewis’s academic work and fiction enables the researcher to add to the study of this author’s literary anthropology. The genesis of the image of Merlin is traced in the Middle English literature (from Geoffrey of Monmouth to T. Malory), the literary features of this image are analyzed Lewis’s novel and the conclusion is made about the role of the medieval hero in the imagery of “That Hideous Strength”.