Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  This letter contains much of crucial importance to anyone wishing to understand Tolkien. It illuminates his own marriage, and his attitude towards it, and illustrates many of the virtues and much of the philosophy which underpins his creation of Middle Earth. The influence of Tolkien’s marriage upon his work was discussed perceptively by Brian Rosebury:

  Their marriage, though at times troubled, was to last fifty-five years, from 1916 until her death in 1971. If its difficulties are dimly discernible in his work, in a recurring theme of estrangement of interests between husband and wife (the Ents and Entwives in The Lord of the Rings-, the late, bleak, unfinished tale ‘Aldarion and Erendis’), the romance in which it was founded is also commemorated, in the tale of Beren and Luthien (whose names appear on the Tolkiens’ tombstone), and in a number of shorter works, from early poems such as ‘You &. Me’ to the last story, Smith of Wootton Major. It undoubtedly surfaces also in The Lord of the Rings, where Elrond (in the Father Francis role) forbids Aragorn to marry Arwen unless and until he achieves the kingship: Sam Gamgee’s delayed marriage to Rosie Cotton duplicates the theme at a homely level.9

  For Tolkien, drawing on a profound understanding of orthodox theology and the depth of his own Christian mysticism, the rose of Christian marriage was inextricably linked with the thorns of mortification. The joys and sorrows of life, as in the Joyful and Sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary, were not to be seen in isolation but were light and dark threads interwoven in a richer fabric. ‘Christian joy,’ Tolkien wrote in a letter to one of his sons, ‘produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.’10 For his wife, who never attained these theological or mystical depths, the sorrows of married life could not be accepted with such philosophical resignation. Rather, they were the occasion of frustration and resentment.

  In the first years of their marriage, and particularly during the four years that they lived in Leeds, Edith was fairly happy and settled. It was following their return to Oxford in 1925, after Tolkien had succeeded Sir William Craigie as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, that Edith’s loneliness and sense of isolation began. She never felt comfortable in academic circles and initially made few friends among the families of other dons. Her husband, on the other hand, was entirely at home in Oxford and relished its heightened intellectual atmosphere. Edith began to feel that she was being ignored, even though Tolkien was in the house for much of the time and did much of his teaching from home. He was not often out for more than one or two evenings a week, and was always ‘very loving and considerate to her, greatly concerned about her health (as she was about his) and solicitous about domestic matters’.11 None the less, she still felt that his affections were elsewhere and that there were needs in his life that she was unable to satisfy. Sadly she began to realize that there was one side of her husband’s character that only came alive when he was in the company of men of his own kind. She became resentful of the time he spent with male friends. Her view has been echoed and supported by some later critics of Tolkien such as, for example, Valentine Cunningham who claimed that Tolkien ‘openly neglected’ his wife by attending twice-weekly meetings with friends—or ‘chums’ as Cunningham preferred to call them.12

  In particular, Edith resented her husband’s friendship with a young don named C.S. Lewis, a Fellow of Magdalen College. Lewis was popular with the Tolkien children, never talking condescendingly to them and giving them books by E. Nesbit which they enjoyed, but he was shy and ill at ease with Edith. His awkwardness with her added to her incomprehension of the evident delight that her husband took in Lewis’s company and this, in turn, added to the jealousy she felt towards their friendship. Tolkien was aware of, and regretted, his wife’s resentment but insisted on the legitimacy of male companionship. Years later, when one of his sons was contemplating marriage, he endeavoured to explain the difficulties:

  There are many things that a man feels are legitimate even though they cause a fuss. Let him not lie about them to his wife or lover! Cut them out—or if worth a fight: just insist. Such matters may arise frequently—the glass of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc., etc. If the other side’s claims really are unreasonable (as they are at times between the dearest lovers and most loving married folk) they are much better met by above board refusal and ‘fuss’ than subterfuge.13

  Years later C.S. Lewis tried to explain the differences between married love and friendship in his book, The Four Loves. Whereas the ‘importance and beauty’ of sexual love had been ‘stressed and almost exaggerated again and again’, he wrote, ‘very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.’

  To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man needs a few ‘friends’. But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as ‘friendships’, show clearly that what they are talking about has very little to do with that Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book.14

  Predictably perhaps, considering the spirit of the age—or rather its lack of spirit—at least one critic has suggested that the friendship between Lewis and Tolkien was sexual. Brenda Partridge, in her feminist critique, ‘The Construction of Female Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings’,15 implies, in a woeful and wishful flight of fancy, that Lewis and Tolkien carried on a homosexual relationship. The best riposte to such a viewpoint was given by Lewis himself in his essay on ‘Friendship’ in The Four Loves:

  It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.

  The dangerous word really is here important. To say that every Friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too obviously false,—the wiseacres take refuge in the less palpable charge that it is really—unconsciously, cryptically, in some Pickwickian sense—homosexual. And this, though it cannot be proved, can never of course be refuted. The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behaviour of two Friends does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: ‘That,’ they say gravely, ‘is just what we should expect.’ The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden. Yes—if it exists at all. But we must first prove its existence. Otherwise we are arguing like a man who should say ‘If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.’16

  Tolkien had first come to Lewis’s attention on 11 May 1926 during a discussion of faculty business at an ‘English Tea’ at Merton College. ‘I had a talk with him afterwards,’ Lewis recorded in his diary. ‘He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap. . . No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’17 From these indifferent and inauspicious beginnings, a friendship soon developed which would become increasingly important to both men.

  Shortly before Tolkien and Lewis had first met, Tolkien had formed the Coalbiters, a club among the dons dedicated to the reading of Icelandic sagas and myths. Its name derived from the Icelandic Kolbitar, a lighthearted term for those who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal. Initially its members were confined primarily to those with a reasonable knowledge of Icelandic, but soon the club’s numbers were augmented by enthusiastic beginners, one of whom was C.S. Lewis. By January 1927 Lewis was attending the Kolbitar regularly and finding it invigorating. The influential friendship between Lewis and Tolkien had begun.

  Like Tolkien, Lewis had been excited by Norse mythology and ‘Northernness’ since his childhood. He had always been enthralled by what Tolkien referred to mystically as ‘the nameless North’ and now, in the pers
on of the Professor of Anglo-Saxon, he had found not only a kindred spirit but a mentor. On 3 December 1929 Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves: ‘I was up till 2.30 on Monday, talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien, who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind and rain—who could turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk was good.’18

  A few days after this late-night conversation, Tolkien decided to show his Beren and Luthien poem to Lewis. On 7 December Lewis wrote to Tolkien, expressing his enthusiasm:

  I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it—I should have enjoyed it just as well if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author. The two things that come out clearly are the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of a myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader.19

  At last, Tolkien had found an appreciative and sympathetic audience and he began to read more of The Silmarillion aloud to Lewis in the weeks and months ahead. ‘The unpayable debt that I owe to him,’ Tolkien wrote of Lewis years later, ‘was not “influence” as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby.’20

  If Tolkien’s debt to Lewis was due to the latter’s encouragement and enthusiasm, Lewis’s debt to Tolkien was to be much more profound. Friendship with Tolkien, wrote Lewis in Surprised by Joy, ‘marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.’21

  It did not take Tolkien long to win Lewis over to philology, and it was partly due to Lewis’s support that Tolkien succeeded in getting his reformed syllabus accepted in 1931, yet Lewis’s prejudice against Catholicism was deeply ingrained, rooted in his sectarian upbringing in Ulster.

  When they had first met, Lewis was beginning to perceive the inadequacy of the agnosticism into which he had lapsed, having previously discarded any remaining remnants of childhood Christianity. By the summer of 1929 he had renounced agnosticism and professed himself a theist, believing in the existence of God but renouncing the claims of Christianity. According to Walter Hooper, Lewis’s friend and biographer, ‘a realisation of the truth in mythologies triggered Lewis’s conversion’ to Christianity:

  This came about after a long discussion in 1931 with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson which continued until four o’clock in the morning. At the end of this marathon discussion Lewis believed that myths were real and that facts took the shine off truth, emptying truth of its glory. Thereafter he became an excellent Christian apologist.22

  This meeting, which was to have such a revolutionary impact on Lewis’s life, took place on 19 September 1931 after Lewis had invited Tolkien and Dyson to dine at Magdalen. Dyson, who was Lecturer in English Literature at Reading University, was a good friend of Lewis, visiting Oxford frequently, and was also known by Tolkien who had first met him at Exeter College in 1919. After dinner the three men went for a walk beside the river and discussed the nature and purpose of myth. Lewis explained that he felt the power of myths but that they were ultimately untrue. As he expressed it to Tolkien, myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver’.

  ‘No,’ said Tolkien. ‘They are not lies.’

  At that moment, Lewis later recalled, there was ‘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 held our breath.’

  Tolkien resumed, arguing that myths, far from being lies, were the best way of conveying truths which would otherwise be inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, whereas materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to the abyss and to the power of evil.

  ‘In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology,’ wrote Humphrey Carpenter, ‘Tolkien had laid bare the centre of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion.’23

  Lewis listened as Dyson reiterated in his own way what Tolkien had said.

  Building on this philosophy of myth, Tolkien and Dyson went on to express their belief that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened. This revelation changed Lewis’s whole conception of Christianity.

  In fact, such a line of reasoning struck a particular note of poignancy with Lewis because he had examined the historicity of the Gospels and had come to the almost reluctant conclusion that he was ‘nearly certain that it really happened’.24 Indeed the discussion with Tolkien and Dyson had been foreshadowed by a previous conversation five years earlier. At the time, Lewis had just read Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, ‘and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense’, a revelation that had shaken his agnosticism to its foundations.

  I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. ‘Rum thing,’ he went on. ‘All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.’25

  ‘To understand the shattering impact’ of the atheist’s admission, Lewis wrote, ‘you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since shown any interest in Christianity).’ He was ‘the cynic of cynics, the toughest of toughs’.

  Now, five years later, it seemed that Tolkien was making sense of it all. He had shown that pagan myths were, in fact, God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their ‘mythopoeia’ to reveal fragments of His eternal truth. Yet, most astonishing of all, Tolkien maintained that Christianity was exactly the same except for the enormous difference that the poet who invented it was God Himself, and the images He used were real men and actual history. The death and resurrection of Christ was the old ‘dying god’ myth except that Christ was the real Dying God, with a precise and verifiable location in history and definite historical consequences. The old myth had become a fact while still retaining the character of a myth.

  Tolkien’s arguments had an indelible effect on Lewis. The edifice of his unbelief crumbled and the foundations of his Christianity were laid. Twelve days later Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.’26

  The full extent of Tolkien’s influence can be gauged from Lewis’s letter to Greeves on 18 October:

  Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ide
as of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.27

  Now that Lewis and Tolkien had found agreement and shared the same philosophy, their friendship flourished as never before. In October 1933 Tolkien recorded the following entry in his diary: ‘Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual—a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher—and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord.’28

  CHAPTER 5