Would it be possible, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis wondered in the 1930s, to write fiction that might combine: a love of history; a desire to debate the defenders of the modern world and point out the many foibles of modern living; and a way to promote one’s philosophical and religious beliefs without being overly blatant?
“Tollers,” C.S. Lewis declared, using one of the many names—nicked as well as given—of his good friend, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. “There is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” [1]
Though Tolkien did not record the exact date of this conversation, it almost certainly happened sometime in the mid-1930s, probably 1936. Tolkien had already written but had not published The Hobbit, and he would soon write his most famous academic essays on Beowulf and On Faerie Stories. He also held a chair at University of Oxford at Pembroke College, soon to be followed by the even more prestigious Merton Chair at Merton College. Lewis, however, held the much less prestigious position of “Fellow” at Magdalen College, Oxford, but his writing career was at nearly the same stage as Tolkien’s. By the mid 1930s, he had written his first significant piece of scholarship, “A Note on Comus,” as well as his excellent Allegory of Love, but after his conversion to Christianity in September and October of 1931, he had also begun to write Christian apologetics in a variety of forms. The first significant such book was his Pilgrim’s Regress, after which, his great friend, Owen Barfield said, Lewis “never looked back, but appeared to my dazzled eyes to go on for the rest of his life writing more and more successful books at shorter and shorter intervals.”[2]
Would it be possible, Tolkien and Lewis wondered in the 1930s, to write fiction that might combine all of these things: a love of history; a desire to debate the defenders of the modern world and point out the many foibles of modern living; and a way to promote one’s philosophical and religious beliefs without being overly blatant? That is, could a modern writer create art while avoiding the pitfalls of the ever-prevalent ideological morass and political propaganda of the era and remain artful?
After a “toss up,” the two men agreed that Lewis’s stories would deal with space travel while Tolkien’s would deal with time travel.[3] It should be remembered that the term “science fiction” did not yet exist in the 1930s—except by a few pockets of followers, here and there—and would not become the accepted term for that genre until the very early 1950s. While other writers, such as Thomas More, Mark Twain, G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley, had already employed what would be one day called and labeled science fiction, Tolkien and Lewis’s decision to write of such things was quite out of the ordinary. So much so, that the average person of the English-speaking world regarded what would be known as science-fiction as something at once conflictingly juvenile and pornographic, the stuff merely of pulp.[4] What Tolkien and Lewis were really hoping to create, and succeeded in doing so, was myth and faerie. Lewis’s books that came from this friendly competition—Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength—became immediately successful and propelled C.S. Lewis into the public eye in the U.K. and in North America and helped legitimize science fiction throughout the English-speaking world. Indeed, one could go so far as to state that C.S. Lewis and Ray Bradbury made science fiction respectable. Tolkien’s attempt at a time-travel story failed in the short term, though, and it would take two more decades for The Lord of the Rings to appear and another two decades after that for The Silmarillion to be published. In the four decades since The Silmarillion first appeared, however, at least fifteen more volumes of Tolkien’s imaginary world of Middle-earth have been edited and published by his son, the now late Christopher.
Additionally, it seems, the two decided to allow the other free reign to create what and as he would. Inspired by the fear that space travel would allow men to ignore sin and believe that technology could triumph over all in the universe, Lewis decided to write his story as a cautionary one against imperialism while also including rather traditional Christian theology and incorporating and baptizing pagan mythology.[5] By the third of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, however, Lewis had borrowed significantly from Tolkien’s invented Atlantean world of Númenor. Númenor, corrupted as “Numinor,” appears nine times in That Hideous Strength as well as in one of Lewis’s poems, “The End of the Wine” and, very likely, as the background to Atlantis in the Narnia tale, The Magician’s Nephew.[6] Not surprisingly, especially given Tolkien’s rather eccentric as well as individualistic character, plodding, he took nothing from Lewis except the inspiration to work hard and keep his fortitude as stoically as possible. Completely unrelated to anything Lewis wrote or created, Tolkien’s own time-travel story became intimately a part of his larger mythology, incorporated as the touchstone of the Second Age of the World, a world in which men rose and fell.
In almost every way, this one challenge fits the friendship as well as the personalities of Lewis and of Tolkien rather perfectly. Tolkien niggled, a perfectionist seeking nothing less than the true, the good, and the beautiful. Lewis, a bolt of lightning and a force of nature, never stopped, as though his mind and soul were incapable of true rest, hesitation, or relaxation. Whereas That Hideous Strength is one of the finest, if not the finest, dystopias of the twentieth century, it flawlessly captures the fears and the delusions of right-wing and left-wing progressivism of the 1940s. In grand contrast, The Lord of the Rings, published a decade later, reveals and explores the very essence of human existence. If That Hideous Strength, probably Lewis’s greatest work (along with the Abolition of Man), was the Christian 1984 of its time, The Lord of the Rings is the greatest tale of modernity, comparable to Virgil’s The Aeneid, the great tale of the ancient world, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, the great tale of the medieval world. Indeed, while many might very well see this following as the throwing down of the gauntlet by an unrelenting patriot and partisan, it is not too radical to believe that five hundred years from now, the world will view The Lord of the Rings and its associated mythology in the way we of the 21st century view Milton, Dante, Virgil, and Homer as representatives of their respective eras.
And, yet, whatever their own differences in personality, in religious outlook, and in artistic achievement, Tolkien cannot be separated from Lewis and Lewis cannot be separated from Tolkien. The two belong together as readily as Lewis and Clark, as surely as Holmes and Watson, as certainly as Chesterton and Belloc, and as wonderfully as Batman and Robin. Their friendship, quite real, was nothing less than one of the greatest friendships of its century. Where the two gathered, men coalesced, changed, and became something greater than they had been alone as individuals, no matter what level or type of genius each possessed. Through their friendship—and especially its most important manifestation, the Inklings—Tolkien and Lewis created what their mutual friend, Owen Barfield, would call a “commonwealth of the spirit in which there is no copyright.”[7]
Yet, whatever love and admiration Tolkien and Lewis shared for one another, and the never-ending inspiration one gave to the other, the two often found themselves out of sync with one another. Lewis, that force of nature, stated things too quickly, borrowed from others too freely, and rarely cared what another thought of him. Tolkien, that gentleman of wisdom, moved slowly and observed everything, desired originality and depth to a fault, and worried constantly about what he said and what others said. Nothing is so revelatory of their personalities as the way Oxford thought of each and they of Oxford. Most students admired Tolkien and Lewis, but they adored Tolkien as a fatherly and a grandfatherly figure, while they feared (and admired) Lewis as a bulldog, odd, and sometimes rabid in his criticisms. Almost a fop, Tolkien appeared anywhere and everywhere with handsome dignity. A bachelor throughout most of his life seemingly Lewis considered it unmanly and vain to care about one’s appearance. He reeked of various types of tobacco, and his wardrobe clothed him rather shabbily. When it came to their equals and academic peers, however, Lewis possessed the thick skin of a dragon’s hide, while Tolkien allowed every comment to become a slight, accumulating them as a type of “death by a 1,000 cuts.”
And, yet . . . what a friendship. Each loved myth, honesty, and God. Each desired to make the world a better place, and each knew the other as a vital ally in making such a thing happen. Most importantly, the two men loved one another, whatever specific troubles might hang over them, real or imagined. Certainly, each thought the other a genius and a rarity in this world of sorrows, violence, and upheavals.
The two met for the first time at a faculty meeting on May 11, 1926. Lewis famously wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that as a Protestant Ulsterman, he had been taught all of his life never to trust a papist, and, in his academic life, never to trust a philologist. Tolkien, Lewis notes rather humorously, was both![8] A year later, in 1927, Tolkien founded the Koalbiters, a group dedicated to learning Icelandic (that is, Old Norse) and reading the great sagas and eddas of the Northern middle ages, seeing these as a means to promote a very particular understanding of Anglo-Saxon language, history, and culture. On October 17, 1929, the friendship of the two men became something more than academic colleagues who admired one another. For, on this day, Tolkien and Lewis admitted to one another that they had an almost childlike love of all things northern, mythologically, the “gods and giants and Asgard.” They talked for three hours that night about such things.[9] Even more importantly, this conversation led to Tolkien admitting that he had been working on his own mythological world—his Legendarium, he called it—for well over a decade. This had been little more than a private hobby with a few poetic manifestations up to this point in Tolkien’s life, and only his closest friends and family knew anything of this. He even leant a copy of his “Lay of Leithian” to Lewis, following this meaningful conversation. Two months later, Lewis offered Tolkien the following response. “I sat up late last night and have read the Geste as far as to where Beren and his gnomish allies defeat the patrol of orcs above the sources of the Narog and disguise themselves in the reaf,” an Anglo-Saxon term for clothing and weapons taken from the dead. “I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight.”[10] As Lewis did to and for so many of his friends, he bolstered Tolkien’s creative spirit and tenacity, challenging him to do better and perfect what already seemed nearly perfect.
Tolkien also continued to talk with Lewis about religion, myth, and, in particular, Christianity, trying to ween his friend of his quasi-atheistic views. On the evening of September 18 and into the early morning of September 19, 1931, Tolkien, another friend, Hugo Dyson, and Lewis talked about the relationship of pagan mythology to Christian theology. That conversation, more than anything else in his life, convinced Lewis to become a full-blown adherent of Christianity. “We began,” Lewis noted, “on metaphor and myth–interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing.”[11] His convictions became so strongly evangelical from this moment until the end of his days that it almost completely pervaded and overwhelmed his already boisterous personality. In some way that probably only God understands, Lewis became not just Christian that night, but much more fully C.S. Lewis.[12]
Two years after Lewis converted to Christianity, in the summer of 1933, the remnants of the group that had once been known as the Koalbiters had expanded (or mutated, depending on one’s perspective) to include many of Lewis’s closest friends began to call itself “The Inklings.”[13] The group of friends would have come into existence no matter its name, Tolkien claimed, as Lewis had a profound love of all of the things the Inklings would come to do so well. Lewis, especially, “had a passion for hearing things read aloud,” Tolkien remembered, “a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.”[14] Lewis, however, did not employ the term “Inklings” in print until his first personal letter written to Charles Williams, dated March 11, 1936.[15] Four years later, Lewis dedicated his 1940 theological tract, The Problem of Pain, to the Inklings. By the fall of 1949, the Inklings—by whatever measure—had played itself out as a specific—albeit always fluid—group. When, on October 27, 1949, not a single person showed up to the meeting, the group as group effectively ended.[16]
The essay is part one in a series. The second essay may be found here.
Author’s Note: This essay was a talk given on January 30, 2022, for Hillsdale’s Center for Constructive Alternatives. I would like to thank the students of his Christian Humanism class; Nathaniel and Dedra Birzer; Matt Bell, Doug Jeffrey, and Tim Caspar of the CCA office; and Dean Mark Kalthoff, Eric Hutchinson, Nathan Schlueter, and Jason Peters of the faculty roundtable.
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[1] Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pp. 342, 347, 378. Christopher Tolkien recounts this conversation by citing the same letter at the beginning of Volume Five of the History of Middle-earth. See J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings ed. By Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 7.
[2] C.S. Lewis, “A Note on Comus,” Review of English Studies 8 (April 1932): 170-176, and C.S. Lewis, Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1936; and C.S. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress (London: Sheed and Ward, 1933). Lewis finished the manuscript for Allegory of Love on December 7, 1935. See Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis vol. 2, pg. 169. “Never looked back” comes from Owen Barfield, “Introduction,” to Jocelyn Gibb, ed., Light on C.S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965), xiii
[3] Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 347.
[4] See, for example, John Wain, “C.S. Lewis,” Encounter 22 (1964): 53.
[5] On Lewis’s fear of space travel as a way to ignore and even “overcome” sin, see The Collected Letters of C.S.L., vol. 2, pg. 262. Interestingly enough, the other founder of science fiction, Ray Bradbury, also wrote against imperialism (cultural and political) in his profoundly poetic The Martian Chronicles (1950).
[6] C.S. Lewis, “The End of the Wine,” Punch 213 (December 3, 1947): 538. Tolkien had mixed feelings about Lewis’s use of “Numinor” and borrowing other words and ideas from his own mythology. See, for example, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 33, 151, 224, 303, 361.
[7] Owen Barfield, “Effective Approach to Social Change,” The Christian News-Letter (July 24, 1940).
[8] Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), 209; and Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922-1927, ed. by Walter Hooper (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1991), 392-393.
[9] George Sayer, JACK: C.S. Lewis and His Times (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1988), 150; and The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, v. 1, pg. 838.
[10] CSL to JRRT, December 8, 1929, in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 150-151.
[11] Hooper, ed., The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 421.
[12] I am indebted to my friend and colleague, John J. Miller, for many discussions about the importance of this moment not just to Lewis and Tolkien, but to western civilization.
[13] J.R.R. Tolkien to Reverend White, September 11, 1967, reprinted in The Image of Man in C.S. Lewis (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1969), 221.
[14] Tolkien to White, The Image of Man in C.S. Lewis, 222.
[15] The Collected Letters of CSL, vol. 2, 183. Warnie, Lewis’s brother, did not record the term in his diary until the day Charles Williams passed away, May 15, 1945. See Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Brother and Friends: An Intimate Portrait of C.S. Lewis, The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis (San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1982), 182.
[16] Sayer, JACK, 152; Hooper, CSL: COMPANION, 124; and Hooper/Green CSL: A BIOGRAPHY, 177.
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