J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  By this time – the end of 1929 – Lewis was supporting Tolkien’s plans for changes within the English School. The two men intrigued and discussed. Lewis wrote conspiratorially to Tolkien: ‘Forgive me if I remind you that there are disguised orcs behind every tree.’ Together they waged a skilful campaign, and it was partly thanks to Lewis’s support on the Faculty Board that Tolkien managed to get his reformed syllabus accepted in 1931.

  In Surprised by Joy Lewis wrote that friendship with Tolkien ‘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’. Soon after the second prejudice had been overcome, the friendship moved into the area of the first.

  Lewis, the son of a Belfast solicitor, had been brought up as an Ulster protestant. During adolescence he had professed agnosticism; or rather he had discovered that for him the greatest delight was to be found not in Christianity but in pagan mythologies. Yet already he had receded a little from this standpoint. During the middle nineteen-twenties, after taking a First Class in the English School (and earlier a double First in Classics) and while making a precarious living as a tutor, he had arrived at what he called his ‘New Look’, the belief that the Christian ‘myth’ conveys as much truth as most men can comprehend. By 1926 he had moved further and had come to the conclusion that in effect his search for the source of what he called Joy was a search for God. Soon it became apparent to him that he must accept or reject God. At this juncture he became friends with Tolkien.

  In Tolkien he found a person of wit and intellectual verve who was nevertheless a devout Christian. During the early years of their friendship there were many hours when Tolkien would lounge in one of Lewis’s plain armchairs in the centre of the big sitting-room in Magdalen New Buildings while Lewis, his heavy fist grasping the bowl of his pipe and his eyebrows raised behind a cloud of smoke, would pace up and down, talking or listening, suddenly swinging round and exclaiming ‘Distinguo, Tollers! Distinguo!’ as the other man, similarly wreathed in pipe smoke, made too sweeping an assertion. Lewis argued, but more and more in the matter of belief he was coming to admit that Tolkien was right. By the summer of 1929 he had come to profess theism, a simple faith in God. But he was not yet a Christian.

  Usually his discussions with Tolkien took place on Monday mornings, when they would talk for an hour or two and then conclude with beer at the Eastgate, a nearby pub. But on Saturday 19 September 1931 they met in the evening. Lewis had invited Tolkien to dine at Magdalen, and he had another guest, Hugo Dyson, whom Tolkien had first known at Exeter College in 1919. Dyson was now Lecturer in English Literature at Reading University, and he paid frequent visits to Oxford. He was a Christian, and a man of feline wit. After dinner, Lewis, Tolkien, and Dyson went out for air. It was a blustery night, but they strolled along Addison’s Walk discussing the purpose of myth. Lewis, though now a believer in God, could not yet understand the function of Christ in Christianity, could not perceive the meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. He declared that he had to understand the purpose of these events – as he later expressed it in a letter to a friend, ‘how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example could help us’.

  As the night wore on, Tolkien and Dyson showed him that he was here making a totally unnecessary demand. When he encountered the idea of sacrifice in the mythology of a pagan religion he admired it and was moved by it; indeed the idea of the dying and reviving deity had always touched his imagination since he had read the story of the Norse god Balder. But from the Gospels (they said) he was requiring something more, a clear meaning beyond the myth. Could he not transfer his comparatively unquestioning appreciation of sacrifice from the myth to the true story?

  But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.1

  No, said Tolkien, they are not.

  And, indicating the great trees of Magdalen Grove as their branches bent in the wind, he struck out a different line of argument.

  You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a ‘tree’ until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

  We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

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

  Lewis listened as Dyson affirmed in his own way what Tolkien had said. You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.

  At last the wind drove them inside, and they talked in Lewis’s rooms until three a.m., when Tolkien went home. After seeing him out into the High Street, Lewis and Dyson walked up and down the cloister of New Buildings, still talking, until the sky grew light.

  Twelve days later Lewis wrote to his friend 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 great deal to do with it.’

  Meanwhile Tolkien, invigilating in the Examination Schools, was composing a long poem recording what he had said to Lewis. He called it ‘Mythopoeia’, the making of myths. And he wrote 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.’

  Lewis and Tolkien continued to see much of each other. Tolkien read aloud to Lewis from The Silmarillion, and Lewis urged him to press on and finish writing it. Tolkien later said of this: ‘The unpayable debt that I owe to him 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.’

  Lewis’s conversion to Christianity marked the beginning of a new stage in his friendship with Tolkien. From the early nineteen-thirties onwards the two men depended less exclusively on each other’s company and more on that of other men. In The Four Loves Lewis states that ‘two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best’, and he suggests that each friend added to a group brings out some special characteristic in the others. Tolkien had experienced this in the T.C.B.S.; and the knot of friends which now began to come together was the ultimate expression of the T.C.B.S. principle, the ‘clubbable’ urge which Tolkien had felt since those adolescent days. This group was known as The Inklings.

  It began to form itself at about the time (in the early nineteen-thirties) when the Coalbiters ceased to meet, having fulfilled their aim of reading all the principal Icelandic sagas and finally the Elder Edda. ‘The Inklings’ was originally the name of a literary society founded in about 1931 by a University College undergraduate named Tangye Lean. Lewis and Tolkien both attended its meetings, at which unpublished compositions were read and criticised. After Le
an left Oxford the club lived on; or rather its name was transferred half jestingly to the circle of friends who gathered at regular intervals around Lewis.

  The Inklings have now entered literary history, and a good deal has been written about them, much of it over-solemn. They were no more (and no less) than a number of friends, all of whom were male and Christian, and most of whom were interested in literature. Numbers of people have been stated to have been ‘members’ at this or that period, whereas in truth there was no system of membership. Some men attended more or less regularly at various periods, while others were only occasional visitors. Lewis was the invariable nucleus, without whom any gathering would have been inconceivable. A list of other names gives little idea of what the Inklings really were; but if names matter, besides Lewis and Tolkien (who was almost invariably present) among those who attended in the years before and during the war were Major Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis’s brother, known as ‘Warnie’), R. E. Havard (an Oxford doctor who attended the Lewis and Tolkien households), Lewis’s long-standing friend Owen Barfield (although, being a London solicitor, Barfield rarely came to meetings), and Hugo Dyson.

  It was a thoroughly casual business. One should not imagine that the same people turned up week after week, or sent apologies if they were to be absent. Nevertheless there were certain invariable elements. The group, or various members of it, would meet on a week-day morning in a pub, generally on Tuesdays in the Eagle and Child (known familiarly as ‘The Bird and Baby’); though during the war when beer was short and pubs crowded with servicemen their habits were more flexible. On Thursday nights they would meet in Lewis’s big Magdalen sitting-room, congregating some time after nine o’clock. Tea would be made and pipes lit, and then Lewis would boom out: ‘Well, has nobody got anything to read us?’ Someone would produce a manuscript and begin to read it aloud – it might be a poem, or a story, or a chapter. Then would come criticism: sometimes praise, sometimes censure, for it was no mutual admiration society. There might be more reading, but soon the proceedings would spill over into talk of all kinds, sometimes heated debate, and would terminate at a late hour.

  By the late nineteen-thirties the Inklings were an important part of Tolkien’s life, and among his own contributions to gatherings were readings from the still-unpublished manuscript of The Hobbit. When war broke out in 1939 another man was recruited to the group of friends. This was Charles Williams, who worked for the Oxford University Press at their London office and who with the rest of their staff was now transferred to Oxford. Williams was in his fifties; his thought and writings – he was a novelist, poet, theologian, and critic – were already known and respected, albeit by a small circle of readers. In particular his ‘spiritual thrillers’ (as they have been called), novels which deal with supernatural and mystical events in a mundane setting, had found a small but enthusiastic public. Lewis had known and admired Williams for some time, but Tolkien had only met him once or twice. Now he came to develop a complex attitude to him.

  Williams, with his curious face (half angel, half monkey, Lewis called it), his very un-Oxford-like blue suit, the cigarette dangling from his mouth, and a bundle of proofs wrapped in Time & Tide tucked under his arm, was a person of great natural charm. Tolkien recalled twenty years later: ‘We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest).’ But he added: ‘We had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels.’ This was partly because, while Williams enjoyed the chapters from The Lord of the Rings that were then being read to the group, Tolkien did not like Williams’s books, or those which he had read. He declared that he found them ‘wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous’. And perhaps his reservations about Williams, or Williams’s place in the Inklings, were not entirely intellectual. Lewis believed, and declared in The Four Loves, that true friends cannot be jealous when another comes to join them. But here Lewis was talking about Lewis, not about Tolkien. Clearly there was a little jealousy or resentment on Tolkien’s part, and not without cause, for now the limelight of Lewis’s enthusiasm shifted almost imperceptibly from himself to Williams. ‘Lewis was a very impressionable man,’ Tolkien wrote long afterwards, and elsewhere he talked of the ‘dominant influence’ that he believed Williams had come to exercise over Lewis, especially over his third novel, That Hideous Strength.

  So Williams’s arrival in Oxford marked the beginning of a third phase in Tolkien’s friendship with Lewis, a faint cooling on Tolkien’s part which even Lewis probably hardly noticed as yet. Something else made him cooler, something even more subtle: the matter of Lewis’s growing reputation as a Christian apologist. As Tolkien had played such an important part in his friend’s return to Christianity he had always regretted that Lewis had not become a Catholic like himself, but had begun to attend his local Anglican church, resuming the religious practices of his childhood. Tolkien had a deep resentment of the Church of England which he sometimes extended to its buildings, declaring that his appreciation of their beauty was marred by his sadness that they had been (he considered) perverted from their rightful Catholicism. When Lewis published a prose allegory telling the story of his conversion under the title The Pilgrim’s Regress, Tolkien thought the title ironical. ‘Lewis would regress,’ he said. ‘He would not re-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 again, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted in childhood and boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland protestant.’

  By the mid nineteen-forties Lewis was receiving a good deal of publicity (‘too much,’ said Tolkien, ‘for his or any of our tastes’) in connection with his Christian writings, The Problem of Pain and The Screwtape Letters. Tolkien perhaps felt, as he observed his friend’s increasing fame in this respect, rather as if a pupil had speedily overtaken his master to achieve almost unjustified fame. He once referred to Lewis, not altogether flatteringly, as ‘Everyman’s Theologian’.

  But if these thoughts were at all in Tolkien’s mind in the early nineteen-forties they were well below the surface. He still had an almost unbounded affection for Lewis – indeed perhaps still cherished the occasional hope that his friend might one day become a Catholic. And the Inklings continued to provide much delight and encouragement to him. ‘Hwœt! we Inclinga,’ he wrote in parody of the opening lines of Beowulf, ‘on œrdagum searopancolra snyttru gehierdon.’ ‘Lo! We have heard in old days of the wisdom of the cunning-minded Inklings; how those wise ones sat together in their deliberations, skilfully reciting learning and song-craft, earnestly meditating. That was true joy!’

  1 Queen’s College Taunton, which Tolkien’s grandfather John Suffield had attended as one of its earliest pupils.

  1 C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Fontana, 1963), p. 68.

  1 The account of this conversation is based on Tolkien’s poem ‘Mythopoeia’, to which he also gave the titles ‘Misomythos’ and ‘Philomyth to Misomyth’. One manuscript is marked ‘For C. S. L.’.

  CHAPTER V

  NORTHMOOR ROAD

  ‘What were the women doing meanwhile? How should I know? I am a man and never spied on the mysteries of the Bona Dea.’ So writes C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves while speculating on the history of male friendship. This is the inevitable corollary of a life that centres on the company of men, and on groups such as the Inklings: women get left out of it.

  Edith Tolkien had only been given a limited education at a girls’ boarding-school which, while good in music, was indifferent in other subjects. She had spent a few years in a Birmingham lodging-house, then a period at Cheltenham in a markedly non-intellectual middle-class household, and then a long time living with her poorly educated middle-aged cousin Jennie. There had been no chance either to continue her education or to improve her mind. More than this, she had lost a good deal of her independence. She had been set for a career as a piano teacher and just possibly as a soloist, but this prospect had simply faded away, first of all because there had been n
o immediate need for her to earn a living, and then because she had married Ronald Tolkien. In those days there was in normal circumstances no question of a middle-class wife continuing to earn her living after marriage, for to do so would have been an indication that the husband could not earn enough by himself. So piano playing was reduced to a mere hobby, although she continued to play regularly until old age, and her music delighted Ronald. He did not encourage her to pursue any intellectual activity, partly because he did not consider it to be a necessary part of her role as wife and mother, and partly because his attitude to her in courtship (exemplified by his favourite term for her, ‘little one’) was not associated with his own intellectual life; to her he showed a side of his personality quite different from that perceived by his male friends. Just as he liked to be a man’s man among his cronies, so at home he expected to live in what was primarily a woman’s world.

  Despite this, Edith might have been able to make a positive contribution to his life in the University. A number of Oxford dons’ wives managed to do this. A few lucky ones such as Joseph Wright’s wife Lizzie were themselves expert in their husband’s subjects, and could assist in their work. But a number of other wives who, like Edith, did not have university degrees could by their expert management of the household make their home into something of a social centre for their husbands’ friends, and so participate in much of their lives.