Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  One of Tolkien’s most interesting and illuminating accounts of an Inklings gathering was given in another letter to his son six weeks earlier. Tolkien had called in at the Eagle and Child with Charles Williams on 3 October and was surprised to find Lewis and his brother ‘already ensconced’. The conversation was ‘pretty lively’ and Tolkien noticed ‘a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose sitting in the corner. The others had their back to him, but I could see in his eye that he was taking an interest in the conversation quite unlike the ordinary pained astonishment of the British (and American) public at the presence of the Lewises (and myself) in a pub.’27 The stranger reminded Tolkien of Strider in The Lord of the Rings, the mysterious Ranger who eavesdropped on the conversation of the hobbits at the Prancing Pony at Bree. All of a sudden the stranger ‘butted in, in a strange unplaceable accent, taking up some point about Wordsworth’. He was revealed as Roy Campbell, and Tolkien was gratified to learn that ‘this powerful poet and soldier desired in Oxford chiefly to see Lewis (and myself)’ and had been told where to find them by the Jesuit, Father Martin D’Arcy. After the stranger’s identity became known, the conversation became ‘fast and furious’, not least because Lewis had violently lampooned Campbell in a recent issue of the Oxford Magazine. Lewis and Tolkien invited Campbell to a meeting of the Inklings two days later, on the evening of 5 October. This time the venue was Lewis’s room at Magdalen. Tolkien reported that Lewis ‘had taken a fair deal of port and was a little belligerent’ and insisted on reading out his lampoon while Campbell laughed at him.

  If Lewis was belligerent towards Campbell, Tolkien was transfixed by him, listening intently as the assembled company ‘were mostly obliged to listen to the guest’. Paradoxically, he felt that Campbell was ‘gentle, modest, and compassionate’, even though he spent most of the evening listening to Campbell’s embellished and highly romanticized account of his own life:

  What he has done. . . beggars description. Here is a scion of an Ulster prot. family resident in S. Africa, most of whom fought in both wars, who became a Catholic after sheltering the Carmelite fathers in Barcelona—in vain, they are caught &. butchered, and R.C nearly lost his life. But he got the Carmelite archives from the burning library and took them through the Red country. He speaks Spanish fluently (he has been a professional bullfighter). As you know he then fought through the war on Franco’s side, and among other things was in the van of the company that chased the Reds out of Malaga. . . But he is a patriotic man, and has fought for the B. Army since. . . However, it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left—the ‘corduroy panzers’ who fled to America.28

  As well as displaying a somewhat reactionary side to his character, Tolkien’s meeting with Roy Campbell highlighted further differences with Lewis. Tolkien was puzzled by his friend’s hostility to Campbell, describing his reactions as ‘odd’. ‘Nothing is a greater tribute to red propaganda than the fact that he (who knows they are in all other subjects liars and traducers) believes all that is said against Franco, and nothing that is said for him.’ In fact, following the meeting with Campbell, Lewis had stated that ‘I loathed and loathe Roy Campbell’s particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism, and told him so.’29

  Lewis’s judgement was unfair. Campbell never considered himself a Fascist, and his decision to fight for Franco’s Nationalists when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936 was based on a desire to defend traditional Catholic culture from the destructive atheism of the communists. He was living in Spain at the outbreak of hostilities, having become a Catholic along with his wife the previous year, and was sucked into the vortex. Believing that his duty was to fight for the culture and traditions he had recently discovered and embraced, Campbell saw his part in the conflict as a straightforward defence of hearth and home.

  Back in England the choice had not seemed so cut and dried. In 1936 Nazism was considered a far greater threat than communism and even those who had no time for the communists were worried about Hitler’s support for Franco. The Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria, had taken place in March of that year and the Nazis were demanding territory in Czechoslovakia. War, it seemed, could engulf far more than Spain and, if it did, Hitler and not Stalin would be Britain’s enemy. Yet Catholics throughout the world were horrified by news of atrocities carried out against priests and nuns by the communists and anarchists in Spain. Before the war was over twelve bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks and about 300 nuns were killed. Churches were burned and George Orwell recorded of Barcelona that ‘almost every church had been gutted and its images burned’. Priests had their ears cut off, monks had their eardrums perforated by rosary beads being forced into them and the mother of two Jesuit priests had a rosary forced down her throat. For all Franco’s faults, many considered anything preferable to the brutal anti-Catholic atheism of his opponents. Evelyn Waugh had spoken for many Catholics when, in 1937, he replied to a questionnaire sent to writers in the British Isles asking them to state their attitude towards the war in Spain: ‘If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils.’30 Similar sentiments were expressed at the time by other members of the Catholic literati, including Arnold Lunn, Alfred Noyes, Ronald Knox, Christopher Hollis and Christopher Dawson, and their views were reflected by Tolkien. None of these men, by any stretch of the imagination, could be described as ‘Fascists’. Neither was Campbell. The only difference between his position and those of his literary peers was that he happened to be living in Spain and so had become embroiled in the grim reality. His friend, the Carmelite prior of Toledo, had been murdered along with many of the other monks under his charge in spite of Campbell’s efforts to hide them in his house. Having witnessed the horrors at first hand, it is scarcely surprising that Campbell was somewhat vociferous in his attacks on communism.

  He was, however, equally opposed to Nazism. Before the Spanish war had started he had made the acquaintance of fellow foreigners in the neighbourhood of Altea. These included two Norwegians, Helge Krog and Erling Winsness: ‘Helge was a Communist and Erling was a Nazi,’ Campbell observed, ‘but they were both staunchly united in their hate of Christ and Christianity.’31 One can imagine the heated discussions which ensued when Campbell met up with these two Scandinavians. Their religious and political arguments must have been a foretaste in microcosm of the struggles about to explode into violence on a worldwide scale. ‘From the very beginning my wife and I understood the real issues in Spain,’ Campbell had written,’. . . now was the time to decide whether. . . to remain half-apathetic to the great fight which was obviously approaching—or whether we should step into the front ranks of the Regular Army of Christ. Hitler himself had said, even by then, how much more easy the Protestants were to enslave and bamboozle than the Catholics.’32

  Tolkien suspected that the real root of Lewis’s antagonism towards Campbell was not his alleged Fascism but his outspoken Catholicism. It was in the context of the angry exchange between Lewis and Campbell that Tolkien had made his complaint of duplicity on Lewis’s part: ‘If a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered—he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it).’ These are strong and even bitter words, signifying perhaps that Tolkien had over-reacted to Lewis’s alleged anti-Catholicism, as Lewis had over-reacted to Campbell’s alleged Fascism.

  Campbell made one or two more appearances at the Eagle and Child, and came to the Inklings once more in 1946, but the enmity with Lewis ensured that he was never really admitted to the group’s inner sanctum.

  If Tolkien’s siding with Campbell during the altercation with Lewis hinted at a growing estrangement of interests between Lewis and Tolkien, it did not affect their friendship unduly at this stage and Lewis continued to act as a great encourager of Tolkien as the latt
er struggled to finish The Lord of the Rings. ‘I do not seem to have any mental energy or invention,’ Tolkien had written at the beginning of 1944, his work on The Lord of the Rings having lain untouched for many months. Lewis, noticing his friend’s lack of progress, urged him to resume work. ‘I needed some pressure,’ said Tolkien, ‘and shall probably respond.’33 By April he was writing again, and reading the newly completed chapters to the Lewis brothers and Charles Williams. He reported in a letter to his son that the ‘recent chapter’ had ‘received approbation’ from his fellow Inklings.34

  On 15 May 1945, only six days after the end of the war in Europe, the group of friends was shaken by the sudden and unexpected death of Charles Williams. As soon as he heard the news Tolkien wrote to Williams’s widow: ‘My heart goes out to you in sympathy, and I can say no more. I share a little in your loss, for in the (far too brief) years since I first met him I had grown to admire and love your husband deeply, and I am more grieved than I can express. . . Fr. Gervase Mathew is saying Mass at Blackfriars on Saturday at 8 a.m., and I shall serve him; but of course I shall have you all in my prayers immediately and continually.’35 The genuine warmth of this letter should be borne in mind when considering the nature of Tolkien’s relationship with Williams. It is true that he was never a great admirer of Williams’s novels, and that he complained of the ‘dominant influence’ that Williams came to exert on C.S. Lewis, but Williams was still one of his closest friends throughout the war years and he felt the loss immensely. Along with both Lewis brothers, Dorothy L. Sayers, Owen Barfield and Father Gervase Mathew, Tolkien contributed to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, which was published in 1947 as a posthumous tribute to Williams by some of his friends and admirers.

  Meanwhile, Tolkien’s friendship with C.S. Lewis continued, but on a somewhat cooler level than in the early years of their relationship. Indeed, it is significant that Tolkien would write later that Lewis ‘was my closest friend from about 1927 to 1940, and remained very dear to me’.36 Yet the cooling of their relationship in the years after 1940 was very gradual and, to Lewis at least, probably imperceptible. Outwardly, the friendship seemed the same as ever. Both attended the regular Inklings meetings and both could be seen together in the Eagle and Child or the White Horse, drinking and discussing as they had done for the previous twenty years. In 1949 Lewis began to read the first of his ‘Narnia’ stories to the Inklings. This was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, destined to become one of the most popular children’s books ever written. Tolkien, however, was unimpressed. ‘It really won’t do!’ he exclaimed to Roger Lancelyn Green, a mutual friend who would later become Lewis’s biographer. ‘I mean to say: “Nymphs and their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun”!’37 Fifteen years later, Tolkien would write that it was ‘sad that “Narnia” and all that part of C.S.L.’s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy’.38 Yet if Tolkien was unable to enjoy Lewis’s work, Lewis continued to be full of praise for The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien had finally finished it in the autumn of 1949, lending the completed typescript to Lewis, who reported back in laudatory tones:

  My dear Tollers,

  Uton herian holbytlas indeed. I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst. Once it really gets under weigh the steady upward slope of grandeur and terror (not unrelieved by green dells, without which it would indeed be intolerable) is almost unequalled in the whole range of narrative art known to me. In two virtues I think it excels: sheer sub-creation—Bombadil, Barrow Wights, Elves, Ents—as if from inexhaustible resources, and construction. Also in gravitas. No romance can repel the charge of ‘escapism’ with such confidence. If it errs, it errs in precisely the opposite direction: all victories of hope deferred and the merciless piling up of odds against the hero are near to being too painful. And the long coda after the eucatastrophe, whether you intended it or no, has the effect of reminding us that victory is as transitory as conflict, that (as Byron says) ‘there’s no sterner moralist than pleasure’, and so leaving a final impression of profound melancholy. . .

  I congratulate you. All the long years you have spent on it are justified.39

  Lewis’s enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings spilled over into letters to his friends. ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful,’ he wrote to Katherine Farrer on 4 December 1953, ‘if it really succeeded (in selling I mean)? It would inaugurate a new age. Dare we hope?’40

  This private praise became public knowledge when Lewis reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, after its publication in 1954:

  This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as unpredictable in our age as Songs of Innocence were in theirs. To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate. To us, who live in that odd period, the return—and the sheer relief of it—is doubtless the important thing. But in the history of Romance itself—a history which stretches back to the Odyssey and beyond—it makes not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory.41

  If Lewis’s immense admiration for Tolkien is evident, so is the influence of Tolkien’s work on Lewis’s own literary efforts. Lewis’s creation of Narnia was all too obviously a reflection, albeit a pale reflection in shallower creative waters, of Tolkien’s Middle Earth and at least one critic has suggested that the germ of Lewis’s The Great Divorce was provided by the purgatorial peripatetics of Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle.42 Yet, in spite of Tolkien’s criticism of Lewis’s work, it would be woefully wrong and unjust to suggest that the influence only flowed in one direction. Tolkien gained a great deal from his friendship with Lewis, benefiting from Lewis’s enthusiasm, his encouragement and his comradeship. Tolkien’s daughter Priscilla believed that her father owed an ‘enormous debt’ to Lewis,43 and his son, Christopher, was even more emphatic in his insistence that his father’s relationship with Lewis was crucial to his creative vision. ‘The profound attachment and imaginative intimacy between him and Lewis were in some ways the core of it,’ he said, adding that their friendship was of ‘profound importance. . . to both of them’.44

  Their friendship with the other m+embers of the Inklings was also of profound importance and they derived more than mere pleasure from the twice-weekly meetings. Over the years, the network of minds and cross-fertilization of ideas that the Inklings facilitated allowed both men to develop their creativity in a critically sympathetic and intellectually stimulating atmosphere. The appearance of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in the top thirty ‘greatest books of the century’ was a vindication of the Inklings as much as it was of the authors themselves. This was admitted by Nigel Reynolds, an arts correspondent with the Daily Telegraph, who wrote that the results of the Waterstone’s poll ‘suggests that The Inklings, a 1930s Oxford drinking club, has been a more powerful force than the Bloomsbury Group, the Algonquin set in New York, Hemingway’s Paris set or the W.H. Auden / Christopher Isherwood group of writers in the 1930s’.45

  Other writers have also stressed the importance of the Inklings. Chad Walsh wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Tolkien, Lewis and Charles Williams had ‘renewed the sense of magic and enchantment and assimilated it into the contemporary Christian sensibility’.46 Meanwhile, Sister Mary Anthony Weinig wrote from a specifically Christian viewpoint in the University of Portland Review:

  Bedrock reality of human values and spiritual truth comes to light under the probing of rays beyond the ordinary spectrum of the naturalistic novel, and a vision emerges whose depth and wholeness stagger an imagination fed on fragments [in] the symbolic situation of Charles Williams, the allegorical narrative of C.S. Lewis, and the mythic rendering of J.R.R. Tolkien.47

  Perhaps the final word on the enduring influence of Tolkien, Lewis and the Inklings should be left to Stephen R. Lawhead, the bestselling fantasy writer:

  I discovered the Inklings—quit
e by accident, as it happens. While researching an article about Tolkien for Campus Life, I picked up a copy of Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of the professor. The author described the importance in Tolkien’s life of his literary friends, a fairly informal group of Oxford academics of one sort or another who went by the name of the Inklings.

  Having enjoyed Tolkien’s books, I tracked down and read some of the work of some of the other Inklings—C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams especially. I enjoyed the books, but in the end it wasn’t the Inklings’ work that moved me. It was the informing spirit of their work, a spirit which I began to sense they all shared.

  . . . the lessons I learned from Lewis and Tolkien penetrated deep into my psyche—deeper than emulation, deeper than imitation. In short, it was not Tolkien’s style or subject matter that influenced me; it was the integrity of the work itself.

  I found this same integrity in Lewis’s space tales. Taken together, these books possessed an inner worth that far exceeded the narrative skills of their authors. Perelandra and The Lord of the Rings seemed to me more in total than the simple sum of their parts. These books, I concluded, derived their value chiefly from this inner worth, this integrity that lay behind the stories themselves. But what was it?

  It was, of course, the Christian faith of the authors shining through the fabric of their work. I saw that faith informed the story, and infused it with value and meaning, lifting the tale above the ordinary expressions of the genre. Even though the stories of Lewis, Tolkien, or other Inklings like Charles Williams, were not explicitly promoting Christianity, nevertheless the books were ripe with it.