Lewis and Tolkien: Scholars and Friends

If you're at a conference like this, you need to visit the Wade Center at Wheaton College. It's an amazing experience to walk into lovely buildings and to see there the world's largest collection of materials on G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, did I say C.S. Lewis? And, well, there are eight authors that are collected there. Seven, excuse me, seven authors that are. And Owen Barfield, thank you, Chris. And over this wonderful collection presides Dr. Christopher Mitchell. This gentle man and historian by trade is also a man of great hospitality. Please visit the Wade Collection and please welcome Dr. Christopher Mitchell. Well, good morning and thank you for coming. And I say that on behalf of all of us. I want to get right into this. The subject right now is Tolkien and Lewis, scholars and friends. George Sayers in his biography, Jack, describes his first meeting with Lewis. He went in to meet Lewis before the term started in order to get a jump on the reading that Lewis would have him do. And he accidentally bumped into J.R.R. Tolkien on the way. And Tolkien was actually coming up to see if he could set up a meeting with Lewis to go over some things that he was writing. And as George Sayers left, or Tolkien left, he says, as I walked away from the building, this is George Sayers from New Buildings, I found the man that Lewis had called Tollers, sitting on one of the stone steps in front of the arcade. How did you get on, he asked. I think rather well, said Sayers. I think he will be a most interesting tutor to have. Interesting, yes. He's certainly that. You will never get to the bottom of him. And that was Tolkien on Lewis. And that was about 1934. And their relationship had developed. This, as far as we know, was the first encounter of Lewis and Tolkien. And this was Lewis's first impression of Tolkien. A diary entry. May 11, 1926. Into Merton for English. T at four. Tolkien managed to get the discussion around to the proposed English prelim. I had to talk with him afterwards. He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap. Thinks the language is the real thing in the school. Thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between 30 and 40. No harm in him. Only needs a smack or so. His pet abomination is the idea of liberal studies. Technical hobbies are more in his line. What we have here are two very complex and gifted men of very different makeups, temperaments, as you will see. And what I'd like to do is I want to spend the first little part giving you a flavor for their relationship and how it developed. And then a brief look at their public personas. And I'm going to do more of Tolkien's public persona this afternoon. And then look at the so-called cooling off of their relationship. And I want to look at four things in relationship to that. And then bring this to conclusion. Now, in the beginning, it's Lewis that says more about the relationship than Tolkien. And these come out of his letters. Especially letters to Arthur Greaves. And this first meeting that I mentioned was May 11, 1926. Well, just about a month and a half later, he writes to his boyhood friend, Arthur Greaves, in Ireland. This is June 26, 1927. He says, I am realizing a number of very old dreams. And if you're not aware, his relationship with Arthur Greaves revolved around their mutual love of reading and of myth. And he was Lewis's closest and most intimate friend in terms of reading. And he says, I'm realizing, Lewis says, a number of very old dreams in the way of books. Above all, learning old Icelandic. We have a little Icelandic club in Oxford called the Colbiter. Or Colbeater. Which means literally coal biters. It's an Icelandic word for old cronies who sit around the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals. You will be able to imagine what a delight this is to me and how even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic dictionary, the mere name of God or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back 15 years into a wild dream of northern skies and vultury music. And this 15 years ago, this recovery of memory is something that he'd shared with Arthur Greaves. Only they are now even more beautiful, seen through a haze of memory. You know that awfully poignant effect there is about the impression recovered from one's past. Now this afternoon, I'm going to talk about that notion of recovery from Tolkien because it was very, very important to Tolkien's understanding of literature and particularly myth. But you see Lewis now beginning to enter into an experience at Oxford with this Icelandic club that he had as a younger boy. And the person, the driving force behind this club was of course J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis again later that year towards the end, December 3rd. I have too many irons in the fire, the Icelandic society and this and that. One week I was up until 2.30 on Monday morning 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 in Asgard for three hours and then departing in the wind and rain. Who could turn him out for the fire was bright and the talk was good. Now it was in this same period of time that Lewis converted to theism. This was December 3rd, 1929 and Lewis had made his move to a belief in a personal god, not to Christianity as yet. And then just about six months later writing to Greaves, by the way one of the results of mine having left my keys at home, he'd just come back, Lewis did from holiday in Ireland and left his his keys to his rooms back there, at home is that I can't let myself into college and therefore always have to be back by midnight 12. Which didn't matter on Monday but it did matter at the Icelandic society when I had to leave Tolkien, Bryson, Dawkins just as we were getting comfortable. Bryson you know, Tolkien is the man I spoke of when we were last together, the author of the voluminous unpublished metrical romances and of the maps companions to them showing the mountains of Dredd, Náthgrán and the city of the orcs. In fact he is in one part of him what we were in terms of their relationship. So you begin to see Lewis who said all he needs is a little smack, he'll be all right, drawing closer to Tolkien because of what they shared. And then in September 22nd, 1931, writing to Greaves he says, I couldn't write to you last Sunday because I had a weekend guest, a man called Dyson who teaches English at Reading University. I met him I suppose about four or five times a year and I'm beginning to regard him as one of my friends of the second class. That is not in the same rank as yourself or Barfield but on the level with Tolkien and Macfarlane. And so you know Lewis is now, I mean Tolkien is considered a friend but it's a friend of the second class and really Tolkien never really goes beyond that in terms of Lewis's perception of things. There is a period of time from 1927 to 1940 as you'll see that Tolkien considers Lewis his best friend. And we'll allude to this a little bit later here as to why I think Tolkien never made it into the first class as it were. But still there was a deep love and affection and loyalty to one another. Now it was also around this time that Lewis makes it all the way to his conversion to Christianity. And he makes a statement and surprised by joy, when I began teaching for the English faculty I made two other friends, both Christians. These queer people seemed now to pop up on every side who were later to give me much help in getting over the last style that is into the faith. They were Dyson then at Reading and J.R.R. Tolkien. Friendship with the latter, that is 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. And as you know, and here I will just summarize, that what Tolkien along with the help of Dyson was enabled Lewis to do was to open himself up to the myth of the Gospels like he did the other myths. Because Tolkien's view of the Gospels of Christianity is that it is the myth that has become fact. In fact Lewis builds on that and writes on that subject. But Lewis said, I was willing to open myself up and feel the power of the myth in everything but the Gospels. He had a prejudice against them. And what Tolkien enabled Lewis to understand is that Christianity is just the same sort of thing. But it's not something that happened in pre-historical past. It's something that actually happened in time and history. It was a concrete fact. It was all of these myths that participated in one way or another found their meaning and their fulfillment in the myth, which is the myth, the Christ myth. And Lewis used to think of myths as lies. Lies breathe through silver, but lies. And he came to realize, no, that all myths participate in the truth at one level or another. They all mirror or shadow the true myth, which is the Christ myth. And so what happened is as Lewis began to open himself up to such things as sacrifice and propitiation and the dying God and doing so in Christianity. And let me make just one observation in terms of Surprise by Joy and Lewis's journey to this faith. Because I think it is important and it says something about what Tolkien and Dyson were able to accomplish with Lewis. If you are familiar with the book, basically the entire book takes you up to the point where Lewis hops on the sidecar of Warnie's motorcycle and takes off for the Wipsned Zoo. And up to that point, even to his conversion to theism, a belief in God, Lewis was able to unpack it very carefully and probably in more detail than some of you would really like. But he was able to chart it right up to that point. But when he comes to taking that final step to faith that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, he unpacks it in a small little paragraph. He says, I took off for this zoo. I did not believe Jesus Christ was the Son of God. When I arrived, I did. And that was it. And there's something authentic about that. And the reason he couldn't unpack it is because now he was dealing with this incredible person called Jesus Christ. And you just do not unpack him like a bunch of theological and philosophical systems. That he finally bumped up against something that he couldn't just intellectually dissect. It was a step of faith. And how he got from one side to the other, he couldn't explain. But he could explain everything up to that point. And in terms of one's entrance into the kingdom, that's how it happens. You just don't unpack Jesus. Not in that way. And so he finds himself on the inside and that adds a new dimension to their relationship. In November 1922, 1931, just after this, Lewis is writing to Warnie. It soon became his regular custom, he was telling Warnie, for Tolkien to drop in on Mondays mornings and have a drink, a glass. And Lewis tells Warnie that this was one of the most pleasant times in his entire week. So you see from 1926 to 31, nothing really harmful about the guy just needs a little slap, a little smack. Now he becomes one of the most important things in his week. Then to Greaves, 1933, another step. Since term began, I've had a delightful time reading a children's story which Tolkien has just written. And this is The Hobbit. I've told of him before, the one man absolutely fitted. If fate had allowed to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he grew up on William Morris and George MacDonald. Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny. It is so exactly like what we would have both have longed to write back in 1916. So that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry. Whether it is really good, I think it is until the end, is of course another question. Still more whether it will succeed with modern children. And of course we know it did. And further along that same year, I was talking about this to Tolkien, who you know grew up on Morris and MacDonald and shares my taste in literature to a fault. We remarked how odd it was that the word romance should be used to cover things so different as Morris on the one hand and Dumas or Raphael Sabatini on the other. We agreed that for what we meant by romance, there must be at least the hint of another world. One must hear the horns of Elfland. My point here is just the growing relationship. And just to sort of cap it off here, note this, a diary entry by Warnie, December 4th, 1933. And what you have to realize is that Warnie is very much a part of the first class of friendship. It was Warnie, Owen Barfield, and Arthur Greaves. But Warnie says, Jack turned up about half past ten and we came out to lunch together. When we were about to start out, I found that he was engaged to go for a walk with Tolkien this afternoon. Confound Tolkien, I've seemed to see less and less of Jack every day. So there's a sense of a bit of jealousy here on Warnie's part in terms of this encounter. Now I'm going to, for time's sake, one thing just to prime for something else that'll come up towards the end, is that Out of the Silent Planet, Tolkien enjoyed very much Out of the Silent Planet and He did not appreciate as much that hideous strength. And most of Lewis's work, I mean, there isn't a whole lot that Tolkien actually said he liked. But Out of the Silent Planet is one of them. And Lewis had some difficulty getting it published. And Tolkien was one of the ones that helped with this. You can see in September, I mean in February 18th, 1938, he writes to Stanley Unwin encouraging him to write, to publish this book. He does it again on the following month in March, talking about the book. And again, giving it high praise. Now back in, by 41, C.S. Lewis is writing to Dombey Griffith, which was a student of his, pupil, and then became a friend. And he's saying, Williams Dyson of Reading, and my brother Anglicans, and Tolkien, and my doctor Havard, your church RC, are the inklings to whom my problem of pain was dedicated. We meet on Friday evenings in my rooms, theoretically to talk about literature. But in fact, nearly always to talk about something better. What I owe to them, Lewis says, all is incalculable. Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate causes of my own conversion. Is any pleasure, note this, on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire? Now this is 41, and I want to contrast this with a letter from Virginia Woolf, just to put this in context, a different context, to her sister after a meeting with T.S. Eliot, finding out that he'd become a Christian. I've had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I'm really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, note this, there is just something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. What would she have thought of a bunch of several men sitting by a fire believing in God? Lewis and Tolkien lived in a very different world than the Bloomsbury group or many others. Now, C.S. Lewis to a fellow named Charles Brady, he says, Tolkien is the most important, and he's talking to him about things to read. The Hobbit is merely the adaptation to children of a part of a huge private mythology of a most serious kind. The whole cosmic struggle as he sees it, but mediated through an imaginary world. And we'll talk about this this afternoon, because Tolkien at a little different level is doing the same thing as Lewis, that is past watchful dragons. But what Tolkien called it is putting it in unfamiliar embodiments. He says, the Hobbit successor, which will soon be finished, will reveal this more clearly. Private worlds have hitherto been mainly the work of decadence or at least mere estates. This is the private world of a Christian. He is a very great man. Now, there are also differences in temperament. We've come to a point where you see this relationship is developed. And Lewis in 1950 is writing to Sister Penelope, my book with Professor Tolkien, any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man is dated. I fear to appear in the Greek Killens. And so, which never comes about. I mean, Lewis was able to pump things out. Tolkien, it was like pulling teeth to get him to publish anything. Lewis to Charles Mormon. And here all I'm trying to do is just unpack a little bit of the flavor of their relationship. This is by 1959. And note this, this man Mormon now is writing a book on Charles Williams, Lewis, and T.S. Eliot. So by 1959, people are now giving attention to this. And Lewis is writing back and he says, I don't think your project is at all presumptuous, but I do think you may be chasing after a fox that isn't there. Charles Williams certainly influenced me and I perhaps influenced him. But after that, I think you would draw a blank. No one influenced Tolkien. You might as well try to influence a bandersnatch. We listen to his work but could affect it only by encouragement. He has only two reactions to criticism. Either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else he takes no notice at all. Now, there is an occasion where Tolkien admits that he listened to Lewis. So, there are always exceptions to these things. And Tolkien is responding to a summary statement of an interview with Tolkien concerning Lewis's influence and then he qualifies it. This is what the plumbers, Charlotte Denise Plummer, noted. They say, when he would say, this is Lewis now to Tolkien, you can do better than that. Better, Tolkien, please. I would try. I would sit down and write the section over and over. That happened with the scene I think is best in the book, the confrontation between Gandalf and his rival wizard, Saruman, in the ravaged city of Isengard. Now, Tolkien writes back and qualifies this and this is what he says. I do not think the Saruman passage the best in the book. It is much better than the first draft, that is all. I mention the passage because it is, in fact, one of the very few places where, in the event, I found Lewis's detailed criticisms useful and just. I cut out some of the passages of light-hearted Hobbit conversation, which he found tiresome, thinking that if he did, most other readers, if any, would feel the same because Lewis was his greatest fan, him and Stanley Unwin's young son at this point, Reiner Unwin. In fact, Lewis writes to Stanley Unwin right after this and says, I have met long ago to have thanked Reiner, that is his son, for reading the text, tentative chapters, and for his excellent criticism. It agrees strikingly with Mr. Lewis's, which is therefore confirmed. I must plainly bow to my two chief and most well-disposed critics. The trouble is that the Hobbit talk amuses me privately more than adventures, but I must curb this severely. Now, what's interesting here is when you think of Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings and the movies, it's all the adventures that are there. The things that Tolkien loved the most are the things that you don't get as as much in the movies. Now, in terms of their public persona, all I want to do here, because I'm going to talk more about Tolkien's this afternoon, is first to just lay out, and some of this you'll be aware of, in terms of Lewis and then Tolkien's response to it. As early as 1942, Lewis was a best-selling author, and by 1947, he was heralded, quote, one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world. And this was in the Time magazine, in which bore his picture on the cover. It goes on to say, with erudition, good humor, and skill, Lewis is writing about a religion for a generation of religion-hungry readers brought up on a diet of scientific jargon and Freudian cliches. He is one of a growing band of heretics among modern intellectuals, an intellectual who believes in God, and not a mild and vague belief, for he accepts all the articles of the Christian faith. Now, this article attributed much of Lewis's remarkable success to his talent for putting old-fashioned truths into a modern idiom, and giving a strictly unorthodox presentation of strict orthodoxy. Three years earlier, in the Times Literary Supplement, they had already suggested something similar. Mr. Lewis has a quite unique power of making theology attractive, exciting, and one might almost say an uproariously fascinating quest. Now, I don't know another person writing theology who has ever, ever been spoken of in those ways. You know, to make theology this uproariously fascinating quest, I mean, that's wonderful. I mean, I'm really historical theology, that's my area, and this is great stuff. Now, Elvin Underhill remarked in 1941, after reading Problem of Pain and Out of the Silent Planet, it is this capacity for giving imaginative body to the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith that seems to me one of the most remarkable things about your work. So, early on, Lewis has this profound public persona, and it got him into trouble. He was hated at Oxford for it, and Tolkien, responding to Walter Hooper's question, you know, why is it that Lewis was so hated? He writes back, and Tolkien says, well, you know, you're forgiven for writing two kinds of work, or you're allowed to write two kinds of work. That is, areas in your own field, your own discipline, and detective novels, because all dons get sick and have to, you know, read something while they recover. But what you're not forgiven is for writing works of popular theology, especially if they give you, you know, success. And so, there were jealousies at Oxford. Now, one of the things I want to note, too, is that Tolkien was a different sort of fellow. And you'll see towards the end of his life, especially after Lewis died and people asked him questions about Lewis, it was clear that Lewis had no problem criticizing Lewis. And he felt he had a right. He was a friend, a good friend. But he didn't like other people doing it, or taking shots at him, because they didn't know what they were talking about. And Tolkien felt he did. Now, there was a point in which the relationship begins to cool. And there are four factors involved here. There is Charles Williams. There's the breaking up of the Inklings Fellowship. There's the entrance of joy. And there is the difference in their faith, Protestant versus Catholic. This is a letter to a Christopher Brethernton. And this is in 64, a year after Lewis died. And he had written Tolkien and asked about Lewis. He says, yes, Lewis was my closest friend from about 1927 to 1940, and remained very dear to me. His death was a grievous blow. But in fact, we saw less and less of one another after he came under the dominant influence of Charles Williams, and still less after his strange marriage. So, what you see are these two things. And again, most of this is after Lewis died. And people kept writing Tolkien, and asking him about his friend Lewis. I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of CSL, whom I met in the company when, owing to the war, he spent much of his time in Oxford. We liked one another, and enjoyed talking, mostly in jest. But we had nothing to say to one another at a deeper or higher levels. I had read or heard a good deal of his work, but found it wholly alien, and sometimes distasteful, occasionally ridiculous. This is perfectly true as a general statement. But it is not intended as a criticism of Williams. Rather, it is an exhibition of my own limits of sympathy. And of course, in so large a range of work, I found lines, passages, scenes, and thoughts that I found striking. I remained entirely unmoved. Lewis was bowled over by Williams. And so, there is, again, sort of a jealousy that comes in. Even as Warnie experienced early on with Tolkien, Tolkien now is sort of feeling that in relationship to Williams coming on board. He's writing to his son Michael, right after the death of Lewis. He says, I am sorry that I have not answered your letter sooner, but Jack Lewis's death on the 22nd has preoccupied me. It is also involving me in some correspondence, as many people still regard me as one of his intimates. Alas, that ceased to be so some ten years ago. We were separated first by the sudden apparition of Charles Williams, and then by his marriage, of which he never even told me. I learned of it long after the event. He also, just about a year after the death, to an Anne Barrett, I am a man of limited sympathies, but well aware of it. And Charles Williams lies almost completely outside them. And this is not in terms of the man, but of his work. I came into fairly close contact with him from the end of 1939 to his death, and that was 1945. I was in fact a sort of assistant midwife, note this, at the birth of All Hallows Eve, one of Charles Williams' novels. He read it aloud to us as it was composed, but the very great changes made in it were, I think, mainly due to C.S. Lewis. I much enjoyed his company, but our minds remain poles apart. I actively disliked his Arthurian Byzantine mythology, and still think that it spoiled the trilogy, Lewis's trilogy, the last part, which was that hideous strength. Now what's interesting though, in all of this, and again it's a more complicated picture, because there are indications, especially in Warnie's diary, that Tolkien and Williams got on really quite well. And there were often entries in Warnie's diary where it was just Warnie, Williams, and Tolkien that went out for a pint, and Lewis was nowhere to be found, and had a great time together. Tolkien writes to his son Christopher in 44, Charles Williams, who is reading it all, says the great thing, and note this, this is, he's saying reading it all, reading all of the Lord of the Rings as it's coming out, Williams is, and he's writing to his son Christopher, and he's saying, Charles Williams, who is reading it all, says the great thing that is that its center is not in strife and war and heroism, though they understood, they are understood and depicted, but in freedom, peace, ordinary life, and good liking. Yet he agrees that these very things require the existence of a great world outside the shire, lest they should grow stale by custom and in turn into humdrum. Now Tolkien confesses earlier, as you know, that he loved Hobbit talk and all the quiet ordinary things, and Williams affirmed that and encouraged him. In fact, in this sense, they were both on the same page. And so again, you know, it's just not one thing. They were gifted, complicated individuals, and there were levels that they shared that don't necessarily come out in sometimes just responses and letters. Lewis to Greaves, 1944. In spite of his angelic quality, speaking of Williams, he is also quite an earthy person, and when Warnie, Tolkien, he and I meet for our pint in a pub in Broad Street, the fun is often so fast and furious that the company probably thinks we're talking body, when in fact we're likely talking theology. So what you see is Williams certainly comes in and kind of drives a wedge between them. And in many ways, part of it is Williams' sympathies, literary sympathies, were much broader than Tolkien's. Tolkien's were quite narrow. And even though Lewis said that he like a monkey had an angelic quality, that is Williams, that put a wedge between Tolkien and Lewis, and it was more on Tolkien's side than Lewis's side. And then also by 1949, the Inklings group, the regular meetings, dissolved. It stopped. Lewis and Tolkien continued to meet, but it was less frequent. Lewis's heavy tutorial, Tolkien was a professor, Lewis was not. All the time he was at Oxford. And the cares of the aging Mrs. Moore, this is 49 and Mrs. Moore dies in 51, along with the increased demands of Tolkien's growing family, he had four children, made it increasingly difficult for them to maintain the earlier intimacy. So you have Charles Williams, which kind of put an edge. You have the breaking up of the fellowship, and just demands that the university and domestic life that just did not allow the same sort of relationship. There was also the matter of joy. And here I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, because I think probably many of you know about it. But Tolkien did not like joy. George Sayre and his wife Moira did not like joy. Austen K. Ferrer did get on, and also Roger Lancelin Green and his wife, but most people did not accept joy. And clearly there are statements in terms of Tolkien writing about joy that this was extremely problematic. And as I've already read, the idea that Lewis never told him about this marriage really bothered him. But at the same token, Lewis knew Tolkien's views of divorce and remarriage, and he knew that it would not be a good encounter to talk to him about it. And so I think Lewis just left it alone. But that was another one that came in. But there were also faith issues. And here I'll just give a little bit of background. If you don't know about Tolkien, when he was three, the family moved from where his mother and his little brother, who was just born, Hilary, back up to the Midlands because of health reasons, Tolkien's health reasons. And while they're there, his father dies in South Africa. And so they're left in the Midlands. And she soon, his mother soon converts to Catholicism, which creates an enormous problem on both sides of the family. There was just one Tolkien uncle that actually helped them at all. They were basically ostracized from that point on. And part of it is because to become a Roman Catholic at that time, at the turn of the century, to many was almost viewed as an act of treason because of the longtime relationship between England and France and the Roman Catholic Church. But, as Tolkien himself says, that her conversion was a declaration that her Christianity and her citizenship were not to be confused, that her faith took precedent over all things, even her family and her country. And her desire to see that her boys were nurtured in the Catholic faith led her to work extremely hard at great personal cost. And opposition from the family, long hours of work, undermined her health. And she died of diabetes in 1904 when Tolkien was 12. So by 12, he's bereft of both father and mother. Now, she had made arrangements for him to be taken care of by a priest, Father Francis Morgan, who just did a yeoman's job, as it were, and caring for the boys, took him on holidays. And when he dies, it was, again, a similar blow to the death of his mother. His comment, Tolkien's comment about her when he was 21, my own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hillary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith. Tolkien had an incredible estimate of her mother and her faith, and he did, in fact, keep that faith. Ralph Wood, who's down at Baylor, did an interview with Priscilla Tolkien, who's the youngest of the Tolkien children. And this is how she described her father and her father's Catholic faith. He was a very spiky sort of Catholic, and what she meant by that is very finely defined and a bit defensive. He was pre-Vatican too, a believer who scorned the vernacular liturgy, longing still for the Latin mass, and who had no desire for ecumenical unity. Like Chesterton, Tolkien regarded the Protestant Reformation as a terrible mistake, and he looked upon the great Anglican cathedrals as stolen Catholic property. In uncharacteristically harsh language, he called Anglicanism, that is the Church of England, a pathetic and shadowy medley of half-remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs. And Tolkien could be a bit sharp at points, not always. He would deride his friend Louis for being an unrepentant, ulster Protestant. Yet, note this, what Priscilla said was that when he, though, explored his imaginative world, this short-fused defensiveness about his faith fell away, and he was free to plumb the inexhaustible depths of what Louis called mere Christianity. Now, at the same, Tolkien, let me just, one little letter from Louis to give you in terms of his view and relationship to Catholicism. He's writing, he says, the questions for me, naturally, writing about the Roman Catholic Church is not, why should I not be a Roman Catholic, but why should I? This is 1951. But I don't like discussing such matters because its emphasis, it emphasizes differences and endangers charity. By the time I had really explained my objection to certain doctrines which differentiate you from us, and also, in my opinion, from the Apostolic and even the Medieval Church, you would like me less. And so, what you see is Louis's desire not to enter into that kind of conflict, especially with his friends. And the same was with Owen Barfield, who was an anthroposophist. And Barfield continually wanted to engage Louis, and Louis would not, and it really troubled Barfield. Barfield died in 1997. I actually met with Barfield on four different occasions, and that was one of the things he told me. But Louis would just not go there. He does with Don Giovanni Calabria in the Latin letters, and that goes on for quite some time. But in terms of those closest to him, he shied away from those kinds of discussions. Now, note this too, that Tolkien's inability, inability to actually get into Louis's first level of friendship had nothing to do with his faith. That isn't, I don't believe, the thing that kept that from happening, because Barfield was a part of that first level, and he wasn't even a Christian, at least not until later in his life. He was an anthroposophist. He did join the Church of England later in his life. Louis writes him and welcomes him on board. But I think the difference is that, even as Tolkien himself says, his literary sympathies were very narrow, and Louis's were large. And as Tolkien says, he was generous, almost to a fault. And so, in terms, he could share with Tolkien at these certain levels, North mythology and that, but he couldn't go any further. And for Louis to be on the first class, first level, needed a broader spectrum of literary sympathies, I believe. And they were both big men, and therefore, neither one of them allowed the differences in faith to create any real major problems in their life. But it was there, and there were differences, and it was more troubling for Tolkien than it was for Louis. I mean, Tolkien really did want Louis to come all the way to the Catholic fold, but it never happened. Now, time is waning, and there's one other thing that needs to be said here, a qualification, and that is, by 19, in these 40s, you see 49, 50, the relationship cooling. But it only cools to a certain level. And one of the things that alerts us to this is, when Louis was offered the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, modern-day College Cambridge, when the invitation first came, he turned it down. Now, one of the things often people don't realize is that the committee that was searching for the candidate, and they really all wanted Louis in the first place, Tolkien was one of two external members on that board. When Louis turns it down, he says it's because of domestic issues, the idea that I can't move from Oxford, that sort of thing. The head of the committee writes back immediately the same day and says, you know, please reconsider. He writes back the same day, Louis does, and says, no, there's just no way. Now, there were two things that caused Louis to do this. One was, he really didn't feel that he could be responsible to his brother and certain domestic issues in Oxford and responsibly take this position. Also, when it was first advertised, and it was advertised in the paper, Louis never even showed interest in it. A colleague on campus, on the university campus, Louis encouraged him to apply for the position and told this fellow that he wasn't, and he just didn't feel like he could go back on that as well. But right in the middle of this, Tolkien visits Louis. Tolkien gets wind that Louis said no. And what happens here is Tolkien basically causes him to reconsider, and it's Tolkien's influence that gives him the ability to do this. And here, I want to read this one section. Now, why can't I find this? Yeah, this is Tolkien to Bennett. He's saying, whatever may be strictly correct in an elector, it was clear to me, Tolkien says, that without some such talk, the offer to Louis would be a mere gesture. But in spite of the loss to Oxford, I felt able to urge the case for Cambridge sincerely. He's talking, Tolkien to Bennett, since I do think that besides being the precise man for the job, Louis would probably be happy there and actually be reinvigorated by a change of air. And again, it's because in Oxford he was hated. Oxford is not, I think, treated him very well, and though he is incapable of a dungeon or of showing resentment, he has been a little dispirited, Tolkien says about him. After our talk, he said he would accept. It was as I thought. The chief obstacle is domestic. He has a house and some dependents, including his brother. He will not contemplate closing that establishment. But if he could be assured that Cambridge would provide him with the equivalent, more or less, of his rooms in Magdalen, which he will lose, in which to live during term and house a lot of his books, then I think you can have him. I suppose that depends on election to a fellowship, since chairs are not automatically attached to a college as here. But would there be much difficulty in that case? I must add that I should be relieved if this comes off. The more I reflect, the more certain I feel right in my vote to have Lewis come. Now the problem here was with this professorship, he wouldn't necessarily be connected to a college, which means he would have no access to rooms as he had in Oxford, which he would have to give up. So what Tolkien is doing, he's actually, one, he talked Lewis in. That shows you the influence that he still had in 1954 in the nature of their relationship. So there's a cooling off, but not to the degree that is often thought. At the same time, Tolkien is now pushing the university at Cambridge to make an exception, to not only have a professorship, but to attach him to a college to provide him for rooms so that he might be able to make this change. And indeed, it all comes off. Now what's interesting is, after the second denial, they offered it to the second candidate. It was a woman. And so Bennett writes back to Lewis and says, I'm sorry, because what Lewis did with his tail between his legs, you just don't do this, by the way, folks. You don't say no, and especially twice, and then come back and say, well, maybe. You know, maybe I could. So it was an embarrassing letter, which I won't read. I have it here. It's an embarrassing letter of Lewis back to Bennett. And you can tell, you can feel the tension within Lewis. But he writes back and says, we're just going to have to wait. Now we really don't know why this other candidate did not accept the position, but she doesn't. And so Lewis then is able to make the move. With Tolkien's influence, he was given rooms. But the point, all of this, is the fact that Tolkien, even though there's a cooling, there is still a very, very significant relationship that continued and was maintained. And as I begin to wrap this up, this is Tolkien, November 26, 1963, just after the funeral for Lewis. And he's writing to his younger daughter, Priscilla. Thank you so much for your letter. So far, I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age, like an old tree that is losing all its leaves, one by one. This feels like an ax blow near the roots. Very sad that we should have been so separated in the last years, but our time of close communion endured in memory for both of us. I had a mass said this morning and was there and served. And Havard and Dundas Grant were present. The funeral at Holy Trinity, the Heddington Quarry Church, which Jack attended, was quiet and attended only by intimates and some maudlin people, including the president. Austin Fair read the lesson. The grave is under a larch in the corner of the churchyard. Douglas Gresham was the only family mourner. Warnie was not present, alas. I saw Owen Barfield, George Sayer, and John Lawler, a good mark to him, among others. Chris came with us. That was his son, Christopher. There will be an official service in Maudlin on Saturday at 1215 p.m. Now, in this, as I wrap this up, Lewis is writing to Ann Barrett. Lewis, of course, had some oddities and could sometimes be irritating. This is 64. He was, after all, and remained an Irishman of Ulster. But he did nothing for effect. He was not a professional clown, but a natural one, when a clown at all. He was generous-minded, on guard against all prejudices, though a few were too deep-rooted. And here he's talking about his Ulster background. Whether Tolkien was really right on that, I'm not sure. Too deep-rooted in his native background to be observed by him. That his literary opinions were ever dictated by envy, as in the case of T.S. Eliot, is a grotesque calumny. After all, it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity, even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels himself. Well, of course, I could say more. Note this. But I must draw the line. Still, I wish it could be forbidden that after a great man is dead, little men should scribble over him, who have not, and must know, they have not sufficient knowledge of his life and character to give them any key to the truth. Lewis was not cut to the quick by his defeat in the election to the professorship of poetry. He's just giving one example of what they don't know. He knew quite well the cause. I remember that we had assembled soon after in our custom tavern and found Lewis sitting there looking, and since he was no actor at all, probably feeling as well, much at ease. Fill up, he said, and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset. And he did not really accept the chair in Cambridge. It was advertised and he did not apply. Cambridge, of course, wanted him, but it took a lot of diplomacy before they got him. And you know who now was stood in the gap. His friends thought it was, note this, it would be good for him, he was mortally tired after nearly 30 years of the Baileys of this world and even of the Duntons, and that is his students that he tutored. You know, for 30 years, you don't know the workload that that involved. He proved a good, it proved a good move and until his health began to soon to fail, it gave him a great deal of happiness in a troublous year, troublesome year, endless distractions, much weariness, ending with the blow of C.S. Lewis's death. Now note something here. I want to end with two statements to show you, even though joy was a division, but their approaches to their wives were remarkably similar. You may be familiar with this poem. Joys that sting. Oh, do not die, says Dunne, for I shall hate all women so. How false the sentence rings. Women, but in life made desolate. It is the joys once shared that have the stings. To take the old walks alone or not at all. To order one pint where I'd order two. To think of and then not to make the small time-honored joke senseless to all but you. To laugh, oh, one will laugh. To talk upon themes that we talked upon when you were there. To make some poor pretense of going on. Be kind to one's old friends and seem to care. While no one, oh God, through the years will say the simplest common word is just your way. Now he's writing now, Tolkien is, about the death of his wife and he's writing to his son Michael. But the feeling of insecurity is possibly, and I hope do, mainly to the maiming effects of the bereavement we have suffered. Him a wife and Michael his mother. I do not feel quite real or whole and in a sense there was no one to talk to. This is 72. Since I came of age and our three years separation, and here he's talking about three years of separation before he could meet again and marry his wife Edith. After that separation we had shared all joys and griefs and all opinions, in agreement or otherwise, so that I still often find myself thinking, I must tell E about this. And then suddenly I feel like a castaway left on a barren island under a heedless sky after the loss of great ship. I remember trying to tell Marjorie Ingleton, Tolkien's first cousin, this feeling. And when I was not yet 13 after the death of my mother and vainly waving a hand at the sky saying, it is so empty and cold. And again I remember after the father Francis, my second father at the age, his age of 77, and this was in 34, saying to Lewis, I feel like a lost survivor into a new alien world after the real world has passed away. And then he finishes, I met the Luthien Tunaville, this is his wife, his affectionate term for her, of my own personal romance with her long dark hair, fair face and starry eyes and beautiful voice. In 1934 she was still with me when father Francis passed away and her beautiful children, but now she is gone before Baron, that's his reference to himself, leaving him indeed one-handed. Now I remember the first time I met Owen Barfield in 1994, who was just two, two and a half weeks older than Lewis. And one of the first things he told me was, I've lived too long, all my friends died over 20 years ago. And what you see here with Tolkien is with the death of his wife, 72, and he dies in 73, he was alone. And part of that loneliness I believe was also Lewis. And so I want to end with this statement from Lewis, the four loves, in terms of their relationship. And try to picture yourself right now in a scene of heaven, because that might be very true of what's going on at the moment. Those are the golden sessions, when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows. When the whole world and something beyond the world opens itself to our minds as we talk. And no one has any claim on any or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals, as if we had met for the first time just an hour ago, while at the same time an affection mellowed by the years that unfold us. Life, natural life, has no better gift to give who could have deserved it. I can sort of picture them with their feet up against the fire, even now, discoursing in areas that they found that they loved most. Thank you. Thanks Chris. We do have maybe a couple of minutes for questions. You'll have a chance to get at Chris again this afternoon, but let's take a couple of minutes here. And let me bring the mic over here. You could shout out maybe. Well, the acoustics are pretty good. You mentioned, I never heard, this is fascinating, you mentioned that he referred to his wife as Luthien Tanufio, and perhaps himself as Barian. Yes. And that rang a chord in the Lord of the Rings, the Steward and the King, when Aragorn is crowned. The whole imagery there, I mean, he's called the Ancient of Days, and Faramir says, Behold the King. And then he marries Arwen, who seems to be like the Bride of Christ. And there is a reference to them as Luthien and Barian, as though Aragorn was Barian at one time, and Arwen, who becomes also, takes a mortal life, like Luthien did, becomes his wife. And I just wondered, now you've brought up a whole new way of looking at this relationship. I wonder how much Lewis influenced his thinking about those kinds of metaphors, since there's this connection between seeing himself as Barian and his wife as Luthien, and then seeing Aragorn, he makes Aragorn also Barian, and Arwen Luthien in the Lord of the Rings. Is there any connection there? Well, there's the connection in terms of a playing out of the same story. I mean, Barian and Luthien, that's the first age of Middle-earth. And what you have is a similar sort of love that unfolds with Aragorn and Arwen. In terms of Lewis's influence, I really doubt it, because the Barian-Luthien tale was really at least begun to be laid out before there was any kind of relationship where that would be significant at all. I'll deal with this a little bit this afternoon. One of the things too, as I said, Tolkien felt okay to criticize his friend, but he didn't want other people to criticize him. In the same way, he's willing to talk about Christian imagery in his work, he just didn't like other people doing it, often. Which is sort of interesting.