Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Bond...James Bond

 The Catholic links of James Bond:

A Facebook friend alerted me to the blog “Roman Christendom” which details in a post from 2009 that the author of the James Bond series, Ian Fleming, either consciously or unconsciously, associated the Bond character with the Bonds of Dorset, a recusant Catholic family. The post is really worth a read. There is another Catholic link to the Bond mythology that came to me via Facebook. Joanne McPortland who writes the always insightful and interesting “Egregious Twaddle”, told me about one of the real historical figures that inspired Fleming’s James Bond was a real life spy by the name of Sidney Reilly, who at one time courted the Catholic mystic Caryll Houselander . If you have never heard of or read Houselander’s literary corpus you are missing out on some of the best spiritual writing of the last century.

It is hard to think of Caryll Houselander as a “Bond Girl”, but truth is stranger than fiction- and at least in terms of what seems to be the Catholic connection to James Bond, somewhat more interesting.
So the name Bond comes from a (secret) Catholic family,
Fleming would have known of the family (as the blogger Tribunus argues in an unusually sober post - by his standards - here) and he even gave his fictional Bond their real-life coat of arms (as seen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service) and motto ('Orbis non sufficit The world is not enough').
hence the "priesthole" in the movie...
 and Fleming was probably was aware of  the Elizabethan Spy John Bond.

Sidney Reilly is best known for the BBC miniseries Reilly Ace of Spades. He was actually Russian and his father was Jewish...

Houselander is best known for the book Reed of God, about the virgin Mary.

Headsup from Tea at Trianon, 
who notes:
My posts on Sidney Reilly, the real James Bond, and Caryll Houselander are HERE and HERE
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addendum: no, I am not a Bond fan, but Lolo is, so I've had to watch all the films on TV.

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