The Irish Soul of C.S. Lewis

When most readers think of C.S. Lewis, they picture the Oxford scholar, the Christian apologist, or the creator of The Chronicles of Narnia. Yet before he was ever a don at Magdalen College, he was Clive Staples Lewis of Belfast — a boy formed by the landscapes, folklore, and spiritual warmth of Ireland. His Irishness is not just a footnote to his life; it is the quiet current that runs through his imagination, his love of nature, and his understanding of God.

Lewis was born in 1898 at Dundela Villas, East Belfast, into a Protestant middle-class family. Though Northern Ireland was then a land of political tension, the Belfast of his youth was filled with the sights and sounds of a vivid countryside. His family home, “Little Lea,” looked out toward the rolling Castlereagh Hills — hills that became symbols of wonder and longing.

He later wrote,

“They were not very far off but they were to children quite unattainable. They taught me longing—Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the blue flower.”

To be a "votary of the blue flower" means to be a devoted seeker of transcendent beauty, truth, or divine love — someone who yearns for a reality beyond this one. It is a theme echoed in the profound Irish song, "Bright Blue Rose", by Jimmy MacCarthy. The bright blue rose itself is an impossible flower — blue roses do not exist in nature. That impossibility makes it a metaphor for the divine: something real yet beyond nature, beauty that transcends the material world. The bright blue rose symbolizes the incarnation of the infinite in the finite — God’s love appearing in the world.

This longing — a homesick ache for beauty and eternity — became central to Lewis’s spiritual imagination. He never forgot the Irish hills that first stirred it. Even in old age, he would confess:

“I have seen landscapes, notably in the Mourne Mountains and southwards, which under a particular light made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.”

To Lewis, Ireland’s hills were not mere geography but thresholds — places where the seen world met the unseen.

Lewis’s imagination carried the unmistakable cadence of Ireland. Like Yeats, he felt that myth and reality intertwined. As a child, he devoured tales of the Tuatha Dé Danann and the warriors of Ulster. Their enchantment never left him; it resurfaced years later in Narnia’s talking beasts, ancient magic, and sacramental landscapes.

His Irishness gave his imagination its wildness, melancholy, and warmth. He once observed that English friends often failed to grasp his love for Irish poets:

“I am often surprised to find how utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met: perhaps his appeal is purely Irish — if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish.”

Through this lens, it’s easy to see that Lewis’s love of myth was not escapism but inheritance — the Irish gift of seeing spiritual truth hidden in story.

Though he became one of Christianity’s great modern voices, Lewis’s faith was profoundly shaped by Irish spirituality — earthy, poetic, and incarnational. Irish Christianity had long blended the mystical and the natural: God found in starlight, in song, in story. Lewis’s Aslan embodies that same vision — the divine not as a doctrine, but as a living presence of love and awe.

Even his sense of “Joy,” that unnameable longing for heaven, was deeply Irish. It echoed the cianalas — the soul-deep homesickness often found in Irish poetry. Lewis described it as a desire “which no natural happiness will satisfy.” For him, faith was a return — not just to God, but to the homeland of the soul.

Lewis spent most of his adult life in England, yet he never quite felt at home there. His accent, humor, and directness marked him as different in Oxford’s academic world. “The strange English accents with which I was surrounded,” he once recalled, “seemed like the voices of demons.”

He missed Ireland deeply, admitting,

“I have no patriotic feeling for anything in England… but as to Ireland, no one loves the Hills of Down (or Donegal) more than I.”

That sense of exile sharpened both his faith and his imagination. He was an Irishman in spirit — independent, lyrical, and loyal to the landscape that had first taught him wonder.

If you look closely, Ireland breathes through every page of The Chronicles of Narnia. The emerald glades, the distant mountains, the changing light that glows like mist after rain — all bear the fingerprints of his homeland. The children’s longing to return to Narnia mirrors Lewis’s own yearning to return to the Ireland of his youth — “to break into a world where such things were true.”

“I yearn to see County Down in the snow,” he once wrote. “One almost expects to see a march of dwarfs dashing past. How I long to break into a world where such things were true.”

For Lewis, imagination was not fantasy but homesickness — the heart’s attempt to find its way back to Eden, by way of Ireland.

C.S. Lewis’s Irishness was quiet but profound. It shaped his longing, his storytelling, and his vision of grace. Beneath the Oxford robes and reasoned prose beat the heart of a Belfast dreamer — one who never lost sight of the green hills that first awakened his soul.

In the end, Lewis remained what he had always been: an Irish storyteller who spoke of heaven as if it lay just beyond the next green hill. And perhaps, for him, it did.