Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

A RING OF FELLOWSHIP:

  TOLKIEN, LEWIS AND THE INKLINGS

  We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water.1

  Tolkien’s long discussion with Lewis inspired him to distill his own ideas about the nature of myth. He composed a poem, ‘Mythopoeia’, in which he elaborated his philosophy more eloquently and powerfully than in almost anything else he ever wrote. Stratford Caldecott, director of the Centre for Faith and Culture at Westminster College, Oxford, discussed Tolkien’s philosophy in his essay, ‘Tolkien, Lewis, and Christian Myth’:

  Tolkien once wrote that ‘legends and myths are largely made of “truth”, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode’ (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. H. Carpenter, London, 1981, no. 131). In one popular meaning of the word, as we all know, a ‘myth’ is simply a story that is not true. Like Tolkien, however, I will be using the word in almost an opposite sense, to designate the kind of symbolic story that is intended to express truth. The truth that myths are designed to express concerns not only the world around us, but the world within us; not so much its surface appearance, but its inner form. For a myth is a way of describing the rules by which the world is made—‘deep magic from before the dawn of time’.2

  Although Tolkien’s philosophy of myth was pivotal to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, its cardinal importance should not obscure the role that other people played. The importance of Chesterton’s writing has been noted already, but Lewis’s steady progress towards Christian faith had as much to do with discussions with friends as with anything he read.

  Long before Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man had made an impression, Lewis had fallen under the benign influence of Owen Barfield, later described by Lewis as the wisest and best of his unofficial teachers. Barfield’s theories on myth, poetic language and the nature of knowledge influenced Tolkien as profoundly as they had Lewis and, through them, he has exerted a major influence on the direction of twentieth-century literature. ‘Lewis was very much influenced by Chesterton,’ Barfield remembered, ‘especially The Everlasting Man, but he didn’t mention anybody else really. We didn’t always talk about philosophy. We used to read together. We read the whole of the Iliad, the whole of the Odyssey and the whole of the Divine Comedy. We considered the Divine Comedy great poetry and we appreciated the total outlook but we never argued from a doctrinal point of view.’3

  It was a discussion between Barfield, Lewis and Alan Griffiths, one of Lewis’s pupils, which was to prove instrumental in edging Lewis closer to conversion. Barfield and Griffiths were lunching in Lewis’s room when Lewis happened to refer to philosophy as ‘a subject’. ‘It wasn’t a subject to Plato,’ Barfield retorted, ‘it was a way.’

  The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity. Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.4

  Even though they unwittingly played such a crucial role in the coup de grace of Lewis’s conversion, neither Barfield nor Griffiths were Christians at the time of this providential conversation. Griffiths, however, was destined to play a key role in Lewis’s progress. In Surprised by Joy Lewis described Griffiths as his ‘chief companion’ during his final approach to Christianity.5 By a strange coincidence they both received their respective first Communions within a day of each other at Christmas 1931, Griffiths as a Catholic on Christmas Eve and Lewis as an Anglican on Christmas Day.

  A few months after his reception Griffiths decided to try his vocation as a monk at Prinknash, the Benedictine priory at Winchcombe, and on 20 December 1932 he was clothed as a novice. It was at this point that he changed his name to Bede, after which he was known as Dom Bede Griffiths. He made his solemn vows on 21 December 1936 and wrote of his own conversion in his autobiography, The Golden String, published in 1954.

  From the time of their conversions Griffiths began trying to discuss with Lewis the merits of their respective positions. Lewis, however, was reticent, refusing to discuss the doctrinal differences between Catholicism and Anglicanism. ‘The result,’ wrote Griffiths, ‘was that we agreed not to discuss our differences any more, and this was perfectly satisfactory to Lewis; for me it was a great embarrassment. It meant that I could never really touch on much that meant more to me than anything else, and there was always a certain reserve therefore afterward in our friendship.’6

  Though reserved, their friendship remained, as did their respective friendships with Owen Barfield, the only one of the original trio who was still resisting conversion. Sixty years later, Barfield remembered their friendship with nostalgic affection:

  Lewis, Griffiths and I went for long walks together. We talked a good deal about theology. I was at the time an agnostic, I suppose, and when three people go off to walk together times come when two go off to talk to each other. I was with Griffiths and I told him I was an agnostic and we got talking about being damned and some remark he made elicited the reply from me that ‘in that case I suppose that I am damned’. And I’ll never forget the calm, collected way he turned round and said ‘but of course you are’. This amused Lewis very much of course when I told him afterwards.7

  Griffiths’ vocation as a monk effectively excluded him from the intellectual rough and tumble of Oxford life, although he and Lewis continued to correspond regularly. Barfield, on the other hand, played an important part in the intellectual circle surrounding Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford. This group of essentially like-minded people became known as the Inklings.

  In The Four Loves Lewis had stated that ‘two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best’,8 and he suggested that each friend added to a group brought out some special characteristic in the others. For Lewis, and for Tolkien, the Inklings soon came to embody this ideal of Friendship.

  The Inklings began to form itself in the early 1930s, at about the time the Coalbiters ceased to meet. The latter came to a natural end after its reason for existence, the reading of all the principal Icelandic sagas culminating in the Elder Edda, had been achieved. The Inklings therefore filled a vacuum as well as fulfilling a need. Whereas the Coalbiters had been formed by Tolkien with a specific purpose, however, the Inklings centred on Lewis and had no specific agenda beyond a vague shared interest in literature amongst its members. Lewis was the invariable nucleus, without whom any gathering would have been inconceivable, but Tolkien was also almost always present. Barfield was considered a key member of the group even though his job as a London solicitor kept him from attending regularly. Other members included Major Warren ‘Warnie’ Lewis, C.S. Lewis’s brother, who had returned to the practice of his Anglican faith at the same time as his brother on Christmas Day 1931; R.E. Havard, a Catholic convert and Oxford doctor who attended the Lewis and Tolkien households; and Hugo Dyson, Lecturer in English at Reading University, who along with Tolkien had been so instrumental in Lewis’s conversion.

  Typically, the Inklings met twice a week. On a weekday morning they would meet in a pub, normally on a Tuesday at the Eagle and Child, known familiarly by members as the ‘Bird and Baby’. On Thursday nights they would meet in the spacious surroundings of Lewis’s large sitting room in Magdalen College. The group would congregate soon after nine o’clock and one of its members would produce a manuscript—a poem, a story or a chapter—and begin to read it aloud. This would be followed by criticism by the other members. After this there might be more reading before the proceedings drifted into general discussion and often heated debate on almost any subject that happened to arise.

  It was at the early meetings of the Inklings that Tolkien had read his manuscript of The Hobbit, a book he had written principally for the amusement of his own children. He had shown an early typescript of it to C.S. Lewis in 1932 and, as ever, he found in Lewis
a ready and vociferous admirer. Following its publication in 1937 Lewis was one of The Hobbit’s most vocal champions:

  It must be understood that this is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown-ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funniest to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.9

  Lewis did not modify this view as time went on. A decade later, in his essay ‘On Stories’, he wrote: ‘The Hobbit escapes the danger of degenerating into mere plot and excitement by a very curious shift of tone. As the humour and homeliness of the early chapters, the sheer ‘Hobbitry’, dies away we pass insensibly into the world of epic.’10

  At around the time that Tolkien had first shown Lewis an early draft of The Hobbit, Lewis was busy working on his first book. The Pilgrim’s Regiess, which was subtitled ‘An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism’, signalled Lewis’s entry into the literary fray as a forthrightly outspoken Christian apologist. Published in 1933, the book caused anger and controversy because of its broadsides against both the High Anglicans and the Broad Churchmen within the Church of England. To many of those in both camps, Lewis became a new and unwelcome ‘enemy within’. His attacks on the Broad Church were based on orthodox theological objections to modernism. The Broad Church, Lewis believed, suffered from a ‘confusion between mere natural goodness and Grace which is non-Christian’ and is ‘what I most hate and fear in the world’.11 Meanwhile, the High Anglicans he singled out for scorn were ‘a set of people who seem to me. . . to be trying to make of Christianity itself one more high-brow, Chelsea, bourgeois-baiting fad.’12

  This increasingly awkward positioning of himself on a self-styled ‘centre ground’ of ‘mere Christianity’ was to remain the hallmark of Lewis’s writing and was probably the result of a personal psychological compromise, emanating from his roots. At least this was the view of Tolkien: ‘It was not for some time that I realized that there was more in the title Pilgrim’s Regress than I had understood (or the author either, maybe). Lewis would regress. He would not enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one; at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also take up, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted in boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland Protestant.’13 Perhaps one is tempted to see elements of Tolkien’s own boyhood prejudices in this bitter assessment of Lewis’s Christianity. None the less, Tolkien does seem justified in his complaints about Lewis’s anti-Catholic prejudice and the duplicity it caused. If a Lutheran is put in jail, Tolkien observed, Lewis ‘is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered—he disbelieves it, and I daresay really thinks they asked for it. There is a good deal of Ulster still left in C.S.L., if hidden from himself.’14 The matter was put poignantly and humorously by Christopher Derrick, a friend and pupil of Lewis and author of C.S. Lewis and the Church of Rome: ‘It a man is brought up in Belfast in a full Orange Order Sash My Father Wore paranoia, and then has his first formation in the great school at Oxford, divine grace has a hell of a nut to crack!’15

  Certainly Lewis would have denied vehemently that he suffered from any Orange paranoia, but there is little doubt that he retained more than a trace of Belfast Protestant bigotry. In unguarded moments he and his brother Warnie would refer to Irish Catholics as ‘bog-trotters’ or ‘bog-rats’ and the fact that these negative stereotypes, deeply ingrained, derived from their earliest youth can be gauged from an entry Lewis made in his diary as a ten-year-old schoolboy:

  We were obliged to go to St John’s (Watford), a church which wanted to be Roman Catholic, but was afraid to say so. A kind of church abhorred by respectful [sic] Irish Protestants. In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars, the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s Table (which they have the vanity to call an altar), and pray to the Virgin.16

  Walter Hooper, Lewis’s biographer, concedes that Lewis’s Ulster background was ‘probably important’ as a factor in his attitude to Catholicism, but believes other factors also played a part: ‘After Lewis started broadcasting for the BBC he became trapped by his own success. . . He suddenly became everyman’s Christian apologist. Thereafter Mere Christianity became a ring fence and he preferred to stay out of theological dogfights.’17 This desire to avoid controversy in order to please most of the people most of the time did not please Tolkien, who referred to Lewis disparagingly as ‘Everyman’s Theologian’.18

  Although the ingrained prejudices of a Belfast upbringing may have given Lewis a jaundiced view of the Catholic Church, one suspects that Tolkien may have overstated the case. Lewis’s practice of going to weekly confession, which he commenced at the end of 1940, was hardly the sort of behaviour one would expect from an Ulster Protestant. He also had a deeply sacramental approach to Christianity, and even Tolkien admitted that Lewis ‘reveres the Blessed Sacrament, and admires nuns!’19 Furthermore, if Lewis is to be judged by the fruit of his labour, there can be little doubt that he brought in a more bountiful harvest of converts to Christianity, both during and after the war, than any other writer of his generation.

  If Tolkien was wrong to overstate the extent of Lewis’s antagonism towards the Catholic Church, it would be wrong also to overstate the extent of the antagonism which Tolkien felt towards Lewis. Most of Tolkien’s adverse references to Lewis date from much later, from after their partial estrangement in the 1950s, and there is no doubt that the first twenty years of their friendship were a great joy to both men. By the late 1930s the meetings of the Inklings were an important and integral part of their lives, a source of enjoyment and inspiration, as well as being a catalyst that assisted the fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas.

  When war broke out in 1939 the Inklings welcomed a new member. This was Charles Williams, who worked for the Oxford University Press at their London office but who had been transferred to Oxford with the rest of the publishers’ staff after war was declared. Williams was in his fifties, older than Tolkien and Lewis, and was known as a novelist, poet, theologian, and critic. Like Lewis he was an Anglican and his ‘spiritual thrillers’ commanded a small but enthusiastic following. Lewis had known and admired Williams for some time before he joined the Inklings, but Tolkien had only met him once or twice and he failed to share Lewis’s enthusiasm for his work. ‘We liked one another,’ Tolkien recalled twenty years later, ‘and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest).’ Yet, significantly, he added: ‘We had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels.’20

  Although Williams enjoyed and admired the chapters from The Lord of the Rings that were being read to the Inklings during the war years, Tolkien neither enjoyed nor admired Williams’s books, declaring that he found them ‘wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous’.21 Perhaps it was not surprising, therefore, that Tolkien objected to the ‘dominant influence’ that he believed Williams was beginning to exercise over Lewis, and especially over Lewis’s third novel, That Hideous Strength.

  Williams was not, however, the only person exercising an influence on Lewis’s novels. That Hideous Strength was the final part of a trilogy of science fiction novels featuring the character of Ransom as the philologist hero. Ransom was certainly modelled in part on Tolkien, and Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher in 1944 of his unwittingly benign influence on Lewis’s characterization of Ransom: ‘As a philologist I may have some part in him, and recognize some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified in him.’22 Lewis, in turn, would influence Tolkien’s characterization of Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien was writing throughout the war years. Tolkien told Nevill Coghill, a fellow Inkling and Fellow of Exeter College, that he had modelled Treebeard’s way of speaking,
‘Hrum, Hroom’, on the booming voice of C.S. Lewis.23 Tolkien also told Walter Hooper that ‘I wrote The Lord of the Rings to make Lewis a story out of The Silmarillion.’ Hooper admits that Tolkien was ‘probably exaggerating light-heartedly’, knowing that Lewis ‘had a huge appetite for stories’, but he did consider Lewis ‘a great encourager’.24

  During the war years Tolkien, Lewis and the other Inklings continued to meet, their gatherings representing a network of minds energizing each other into creativity. Towards the end of the war, in November 1944, Tolkien wrote of a meeting with Lewis and Williams, stating that he could ‘recollect little of the feast of reason and flow of soul, partly because we all agree so’.25 Later in the same month, in a letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien wrote of ‘a great event: an evening Inklings’. On this occasion Tolkien had been joined by Charles Williams and R.E. Havard in the Mitre public house, where they enjoyed a pint before joining Lewis and Owen Barfield in Magdalen College. Lewis ‘was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle’. Barfield, Tolkien wrote, was

  the only man who can tackle C.S.L. making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form. On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on and define ‘Chance’, Jack said: ‘Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have.’ Warnie: ‘That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.’ But there was some quite interesting stuff. A short play on Jason and Medea by Barfield, two excellent sonnets sent by a young poet to C.S.L.; and some illuminating discussion of ‘ghosts’, and of the special nature of Hymns (CSL has been on the Committee revising Ancient and Modern). I did not leave till 12.30, and reached my bed about 1 a.m. this morn. . .26