Perelandra: Chapter 12

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. If you don't want me ruining the experience for you, put this post down and go read Perelandra now. I promise I won't be offended.

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Elwin Ransom, Cambridge philologist, has been brought to the planet Perelandra (Venus) by Maleldil, the supreme spiritual ruler of the solar system. Here, he met the Venusian "Eve," a green lady, and his enemy, the physicist Weston. Weston became possessed by a demonic entity, and although his own personality apparently ceased to be, the entity inhabiting his body persistently tried to tempt the Green Lady to break Maleldil's one law, which forbade dwelling on Perelandra's lone fixed island.

Ransom soon determined that his own reason for being on Perelandra was to cofront the Un-Man, the thing inside Weston, and prevent Perelandra's Fall. However, he had neither the persuasive power nor the sheer persistence of the Un-Man, who did not require sleep. Maleldil revealed to him that his only recourse is to kill Weston's body. It was no accident that he was called Ransom: he was the one responsible to stop sin from entering Perelandra.

When Ransom awakens, after bathing and eating, he searches for the Un-Man. He finds him in the act of maiming a bird, and starts the fight by punching Weston's body in the jaw. Though they are evenly matched, man to man, their fighting styles are different: Ransom is a superior boxer, while the Un-Man claws and tears. In his mind, the fight's outcome boils down to whether he could pummel Weston's body to death before losing too much blood.

As the fight goes on, Weston escapes to the sea, riding away on one of the large fish. Ransom does likewise. Fortunately, the creatures follow one another, so despite the Un-Man's head start, he hasn't lost him. Given a reprieve from the violence, he takes stock of himself and realizes he's in worse shape than he thought.

Unlike the previous two chapters, chapter 12 is long on action and short on dialogue, so I think I'll have a bit less to say this week. Two men trying to bludgeon each other to death don't lend themselves to too much in-depth analysis. Ernest Hemingway could pull it off, but I'm not him.

There are some clever details in this story. Lewis accurately notes that punching someone in the jaw, without boxing gloves, hurts.¹ Ransom also assumes that Weston, possessed by a devil, would have superhuman strength, but it turns out the demon within him has no more physical might than the overweight, middle-aged Weston had. Ransom realizes that he can actually win this. Ransom's boxing is a more tactical and intellectual approach to combat, but the Un-Man's style of fighting is brutal and feral, tearing at Ransom with his claws. Weston no longer possesses a human soul, and accordingly his fighting style is bestial, consistent with the howling and the other animalistic behaviour he's displayed since his possession.

Not only the Green Lady, but all the animals on the floating islands have been put into a supernatural sleep. Presumably this is so they won't have to witness the bloody conflict between Ransom and the Un-Man. When they escape to the ocean, however, the large fish and seabirds are still awake. It makes sense if they can't see the bloodshed. When Ransom first confronts the possessed Weston in this chapter, he catches him in the act of torturing a bird. Weston has demonstrated this cruelty before against the harmless fauna of Perelandra. But this time, he could have just picked the bird up while it was sleeping: it was not only harmless, but helpless.

After so many days (weeks? months?) on Perelandra, Ransom realizes he's actually become pretty physically fit, and that he's got nothin to be ashamed of in his own middle-aged body. In the opening paragraph, he quotes Psalm 17:15: "When I wake up after Thy image, I shall be satisfied." The allusion is, perhaps, intended as humour. But Psalm 15 is apropos to the present situation, as it is a prayer of David to be delivered from wicked people and vindicated in the face of his enemies. Ransom realizes he may not leave Perelandra undamaged, or even alive, but middle-aged body or not, he will not be ashamed to meet his Maker in the end.

The Un-Man can quote the Psalms, too: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthanai." This is the first line of Psalm 22 in Aramaic, as spoken by Jesus Christ on the cross. The Un-Man mocks Christ, and he mocks Ransom for thinking he can beat him: Maleldil did not come to save his Son from crucifixion; he did not deliver the martyrs from their sufferings. But he thinks that the Cross was a victory for his side, and he is mistaken.

In the thick of the fight, Ransom finds himself quoting literature as a battle cry: "Once he was actually astride the enemy’s chest, squeezing its throat with both hands and—he found to his surprise—shouting a line out of The Battle of Maldon. This is an Old English poem celebrating the real Battle of Maldon in AD 991, in which the Anglo-Saxons failed to stop a Viking invasion. Only 325 lines of the poem survived to the modern era, and its only extant manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1731. Near the end of the surviving portion, an aged warrior, Byrhtwold, rallies the troops with this cry:

Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað.²

which is, being interpreted, "Resolution must be the tougher, hearts the keener, courage must be the more as our strength grows less."³ It's a fitting battle cry for Ransom, whose own strength is limited, but he is standing his ground.

It seems that in real life, too, Lewis's mind was drawn to literature during times of danger or crisis: as he writes in Surprised by Joy about his experience in the trenches during World War I:

It was the first bullet I heard—so far from me that it "whined" like a journalist's or a peace-time poet's bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, "This is War. This is what Homer wrote about."⁴

There's another literary allusion Ransom uses as a battle cry in this chapter, as Ransom pursues the Weston-thing across the ocean on the giant fish: "My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, so flew’d so sanded." This is a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream.⁵ In the play, Theseus's speech signals the end of the chaos in the forest and the return of order. On Perelandra, Maleldil is restoring order through Ransom's pursuit of Weston. Ransom has become Theseus, the school of fish are his hounds, and the Un-Man his fleeing prey.

The Enemy is fleeing, but not yet defeated.

Footnotes

1. Though, as Malcolm Reynolds might tell you, it is, on occasion, hilarious.

2. The Battle of Maldon, The Labyrinth: Medieval Studies Web site, Georgetown University, archived December 15, 2013 at https://web.archive.org/web/20131215114421/http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a9.html, lines 312–13.

3. The Battle of Maldon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. S. A. J. Bradley (London: Everyman, 1995), 527. I'd like to have included my own translation—I loved studying Old English in university—but my Anglo-Saxon is rusty and my copy of Sweet isn't close at hand.

4. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Distributed Proofreaders Canada, updated December 21, 2025, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20150220/html.php.

5. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Folger Shakespeare Library, accessed August 1, 2026, act 4, scene 1, lines 123–24, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/a-midsummer-nights-dream/read/.