Glome On The Map: The Real-Life Location of Till We Have Faces
Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis’ classic retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche is wonderful for a strange and beautiful quality that renders it entirely unique. “Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood,” we are told, and where Lewis’ other writings glimmer like forest streams, this book takes deep root in the holy dark.
The setting of this novel is critical to this unique quality: we are far from allegorical Narnia, where all is transformed through the breath of Aslan. We are in a fully pagan world, in the stage of salvation history before the incarnation, B.C. on the timeline and Before Christ for humanity. Lewis commits fully to the bit.
He sets his Cupid and Psyche tale in the Kingdom of Glome, which feels utterly convincing — Lewis was a great student of the classics and wrote many times of his enchantment with the pagan world, so it is no surprise that his pre-Christian kingdom feels so authentic. And yet it is striking as an authentic unknown, as a loving portrait of a mysterious somewhere whose memory is lost to time.
I was always fascinated with the location of Glome — were we in Russia, among the Scythians? Scandinavia before the Norsemen or any familiar place in Europe made unfamiliar through the turning of time? Perhaps even the land that…
