Myth Makers

The Inklings: according to religion scholars Philip and Carol Zaleski, “a small circle of intellectuals” who “from the end of the Great Depression through World War II and into the 1950s .  .  . gathered on a weekly basis in and around Oxford University to drink, smoke, quip, cavil.”

Were the Inklings a BOGSAT? Yes. Were their meetings worthless? Hardly. The Inklings took their name, wrote J. R. R. Tolkien, as a “pun .  .  . suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.” Tolkien was at the heart of the group, along with his fellow Oxford don C. S. Lewis, in whose large, shabby rooms at Magdalen College the Inklings met on Thursday evenings.  

Tolkien was a philologist with the soul of a myth creator. His day job included lecturing, sometimes to an audience of one, on his great but generally unshared academic passions: Middle English, Anglo Saxon, and Old Icelandic. (His favorite book as an undergraduate was A Finnish Grammar.) In stolen hours, Tolkien labored to produce what eventually became The Hobbit (1937) and the three-volume The Lord of the Rings (1954), arguably the greatest and certainly the most popular novels of fantasy of all time. Vocation and avocation were as one for Tolkien. He believed that myth was the fruit of a people’s history, geography, and, especially, language, all of which he felt he had to create from scratch before venturing into the writing of his Hobbit cycle. That’s why it took so long and rings so true.

The Inklings’ main activity, according to the Zaleskis, was “to read aloud their works in progress, and endure or enjoy with as much grace as they could muster the sometimes blistering critiques that followed.” Tolkien, reticent by nature, became gun-shy when fellow Inkling H.V. D. Dyson greeted an installment of the trilogy with a caustic, “Oh God, not another fucking elf!”—and then bullied Tolkien into never reading from it in his presence again. It was Lewis, Tolkien said, who gave him the courage to persevere. “Only by his support and friendship did I ever struggle to the end of the labor,” he wrote. And what support: “The steady upward slope of grandeur and terror,” Lewis told Tolkien, “is almost unequalled in the whole range of narrative art.” Tolkien repaid the favor when Lewis was criticized as an escapist for writing three science-fiction novels. The only people who rightly condemn escape, Tolkien said, are jailers.

Unlike Tolkien, who was a devout Roman Catholic, Lewis spent his first 30 years as an atheist, often to the point of belligerency. But like Tolkien, he was enchanted by mythology. As such, Lewis later recorded, he led a double life: “to care for almost nothing but the gods and heroes .  .  . and to believe in nothing but atoms and evolution.” Lewis’s conversion to Christianity is an oft-told tale, but one with Tolkien at its heart. 

Myths are stories that convey deep truth, Tolkien told his friend. What made matchless the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection was that it lay at the intersection of myth and history. The Zaleskis summarize Tolkien’s argument thus: “Here God tells—indeed, enacts—a tale with all the beauty and wonder and symbolic power of myth, and yet a tale that is actually true.” Lewis was persuaded, and, true to his temperament, he became as fierce an advocate of Christianity as he had been an enemy.

Who is the more enduringly important of the two? Tolkien wrote the greatest work, as evidenced by Germaine Greer’s backhanded compliment: “It has been my nightmare,” she snarled, “that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century. The bad dream has materialized.” Lewis’s claims are broader. A half-century after his death, does any other writer turn up on so many shelves of good bookstores and libraries? 

In the literary criticism section, one is likely to find, at a minimum, The Allegory of Love (1936) and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), two books that, according to Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages (1991), “rocked the transatlantic Anglophone world of medieval studies.” In literature, we find Till We Have Faces (1956), a superb novel that reimagines the Cupid and Psyche myth. The religion shelves will be chock full, of course: Books like Mere Christianity (1952) and The Screwtape Letters (1942) continue to sell well. But then so will the science fiction shelves, with Lewis’s trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1943; and That Hideous Strength, 1945), and the children’s section, with his seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, the most famous of which is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). 

And don’t stop there: Look in poetry for one of several collections of his verse, in biography for his spirit-ual autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), and in the section on death and dying for A Grief Observed (1961), the powerful memoir of Lewis’s tormented reaction to the death of his wife that provided the basis for the movie and play Shadowlands.

In The Chronicles of Narnia and the science fiction novels, as in The Lord of the Rings, Christian themes are implicit, not overt. Lewis’s Narnia, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, is largely devoid of temples and gods. But Lewis’s Aslan, the terrible but gentle lion who dies to save one of his young protagonists and then rises to save all Narnia, is a Christ more thrilling to children than the stained-glass version they usually encounter in church. Tolkien described the Hobbit novels as “fundamentally religious and Catholic” because of their themes, which the Zaleskis rightly identify as “pity and mercy, faith and trust, humility, self-sacrifice, the powers of the weak .  .  . and grace when all seems lost.”  

The Zaleskis have written a fine book, fair-minded and appreciative without succumbing to the adoration bordering on hagiography that accompanies so many works about C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. (They dismiss Lewis’s much-celebrated Screwtape, for example, as “a one-joke affair” that, “if it were half as long, and half as clever, might have been twice as good.”) But their decision to add fellow Inklings Charles Williams and Owen Barfield to their title and then cram in a bunch of material about (for example) Barfield’s obsession with anthroposophy greatly overstates the importance of those writers. Six hundred and fifty-seven pages is a long slog for even the most interesting of BOGSATs.

Michael Nelson, Fulmer professor of political science at Rhodes College, is the author of Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government, which won the American Political Science Association’s Richard E. Neustadt Award for best book on the presidency and executive politics published in 2014.