J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

Without Lewis, no Lord of the Rings; without Tolkien, perhaps no conversion of Lewis. A portrait of a decisive and complicated friendship.

Two friends

Deux professeurs sur un sentier d'Oxford

They meet on 11 May 1926.
Tolkien helps Lewis's conversion; Lewis presses Tolkien to finish The Lord of the Rings.
A friendship that cooled, but was never broken.

The meeting

Lewis and Tolkien meet on 11 May 1926, at a meeting of the English Faculty at Oxford. Lewis notes in his diary that this pale little man 'has no harm in him; he only needs a good smack'. They draw closer through the Coalbiters (Kolbítar), a club in which the Icelandic sagas were read in the original.

Two reciprocal influences

Tolkien upon Lewis: on the night of 19 September 1931, on Addison's Walk, Tolkien convinces Lewis that myths can speak the truth, and that the Gospel is a 'true myth'. He afterwards draws from this his poem Mythopoeia, dedicated 'from Philomythus to Misomythus'.
Lewis upon Tolkien: for nearly twenty years, Lewis is the first listener, and for a long time the only one, to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would say that he owed it to him that the book was finished, by dint of encouragement. In 1961, Lewis even proposes him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The wager

Around 1936, the two friends observe that there are not enough stories to their taste. They decide to write some: Lewis a journey into space, Tolkien a journey into time. Lewis keeps his word with Out of the Silent Planet. Tolkien's tale, The Lost Road, remains unfinished.

The misunderstandings

Tolkien does not like Narnia: too hasty, too disparate, too allegorical for his taste. He is also hurt by Lewis's friendship with Charles Williams, and then by his marriage to Joy Davidman. Their relations cool in the 1950s, without ever being broken off.

The farewell

At Lewis's death, Tolkien writes to his daughter that he feels the loss 'like an axe-blow near the roots'.

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