The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Their Friends

The suggestion that Lewis be invited to join may have come from John Bryson, a fellow Ulsterman, or from George Gordon, who had taught Lewis as an undergraduate and had been influential in getting him the Magdalen fellowship (Gordon was a great intriguer and campaigner: he had also had a hand in Tolkien’s election as Professor of Anglo-Saxon). Or maybe it was Tolkien himself who discovered that Lewis was keen to join the club. At all events by January 1927 Lewis was attending the Kolbítar, and was finding it invigorating.

Like Coghill and several of the others he could not, when he first joined, read more than a few words of Icelandic without a dictionary. But this did not matter. During the evening, those present would take turns to translate from the text they were reading. Tolkien, who was of course expert in the language and knew the text well, would improvise a perfect translation of perhaps a dozen pages. Then Dawkins and others who had a working knowledge of Icelandic would translate perhaps a page each. Then the beginners – Lewis, Coghill, Bryson and the others – would work their way through no more than a paragraph or two, and might have to call on Tolkien for help in a difficult passage. The learners certainly found it hard going; as John Bryson remarked, ‘When we were enrolled we never realised that it was going to be such a business.’ He recalled that on one occasion ‘a certain scholar, who must remain nameless, was actually caught using a printed “crib” under the table as he translated his passage apparently impromptu. He was not invited back again!’ But most of them took it seriously, especially Lewis.

For someone who had been devoted to Norse myths and legends since adolescence it was exhilarating to be reading them in the original language. ‘Spent the morning partly on the Edda,’ Lewis wrote in his diary in February 1927: the Coalbiters were working their way through the Younger Edda, which contains a version of the great Norse myths. ‘Hammered my way through a couple of pages in about an hour, but I am making some headway. It is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse under the initiation of Longfellow. It seemed impossible then that I should ever come to read these things in the original. The old authentic thrill came back to me once or twice this morning: the mere names of god and giant catching my eye as I turned the pages of Zoega’s dictionary were enough.’

The Coalbiters met once every few weeks in term-time, progressing through the sagas towards their eventual goal of the Elder Edda. But not until three years had passed did Lewis begin to realise that the thrill he received from Norse mythology was shared by Tolkien.

On 3 December 1929 Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘One week 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 good.’

It was the beginning of a friendship: the moment, as Lewis once remarked, when someone who has till then believed his feelings to be unique cries out, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

*

Tolkien entirely shared Lewis’s love for ‘Northernness’. He too had first discovered the taste in childhood

when he found in a book of fairy stories the tale of Sigurd the Völsung who slew the dragon Fafnir. Reading it, the young Tolkien fell under the spell of what he called ‘the nameless North’. He ‘desired dragons with a profound desire’. At school in Birmingham he taught himself the Norse language and began to read the myths and sagas in their original words. Like Lewis, he fell under the spell of William Morris. And, just as Lewis during adolescence had begun to write his own Norse-style poetry and drama, Tolkien at about the age of eighteen conceived the idea of recreating the ‘Northernness’ that delighted him by writing a cycle of myth and legend. But it was a far more ambitious task than anything Lewis attempted, for whereas Lewis had merely written a pastiche of existing Norse stories, Tolkien began to create a whole new mythology out of his imagination. And while Lewis soon passed on from his adolescent ‘Northern’ writings to other kinds of poetry, Tolkien continued to work at his cycle year after year. It remained the centre of his imaginative life.

During the First World War he began to write in prose form the tales which were the principal elements of his cycle, and by the time he moved from Leeds to Oxford in 1925 these tales had long since been sketched out. But he did not organise them into an entirely continuous or consistent narrative, partly because his attention was taken up with a series of invented languages which were closely related to the mythology, being spoken by ‘elvish’ peoples; in fact these languages and the need to provide a ‘history’ for them had been a major motive for beginning the whole project. Tolkien also delayed drawing up a finished version of The Silmarillion, as he came to call his cycle, because he wanted to recast two of the principal stories into verse. Like Lewis he regarded himself chiefly as a poet. During his time at Leeds he began to write two long narrative poems, one telling the story of Túrin Túram-bar the dragon-slayer and the other recounting the romantic tale of Beren and Lúthien, the mortal man and the elven maid whom he loves, and for whose sake he goes on a terrible quest.

Tolkien kept this occupation a very private matter, rarely mentioning it to anyone. In 1925 he did send parts of the two poems to a retired schoolmaster who had once taught him, and he was disappointed when they were criticised rather severely. For a long time afterwards he consulted nobody.

It was early in December 1929, a few days after their late-night conversation about the Norse gods and giants, that he decided to show the Beren and Lúthien poem to Lewis. It was very long and still unfinished; its title was ‘The Gest of Beren and Lúthien’, and it was in rhyming couplets. Here is part of the description, in the version Tolkien showed to Lewis, of the ‘elder days’ of the elven kingdom of Doriath:

There once, and long and long ago,

before the sun and moon we know

were lit to sail above the world,

when first the shaggy woods unfurled,

and shadowy shapes did stare and roam

beneath the dark and starry dome

that hung above the dawn of Earth,

the silences with silver mirth

were shaken, and the rocks were ringing –

the birds of Melian were singing,

the first to sing in mortal lands.

On 7 December 1929 Lewis wrote to Tolkien:

My dear Tolkien,

Just a line to say that I sat up late last night and have read the geste as far as to where Beren and his gnomish allies defeat the patrol of the ores above the sources of the Narog and disguise themselves in the reaf. 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. So much at the first flush. Detailed criticisms (including grumbles at individual lines) will follow.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis.

When Lewis’s ‘detailed criticisms’ of the poem arrived, Tolkien found that Lewis had, in jest, annotated its text as if it were a celebrated piece of ancient literature, already heavily studied by scholars with such names as ‘Pumpernickel’, ‘Peabody’, ‘Bentley’, and ‘Schick’; he alleged that any weaknesses in Tolkien’s verses were the result of scribal errors or corruptions in the manuscript. Sometimes Lewis actually suggested entirely new passages to replace lines he thought poor, and here too he ascribed his own versions to supposedly historical sources. For example, he suggested that the lines about the ‘elder days’ quoted above could be replaced by the following stanza of his own, which he described as ‘the so called Poema Historiale, probably contemporary with the earliest MSS of the geste’:

There was a time before the ancient sun

And swinging wheels of heaven had learned to run

More certainly than dreams; for dreams themselves

Had bodies then and filled the world with elves.

The starveling lusts whose walk is now confined

To darkness and the cellarage of the mind,

And shudderings and despairs and shapes of sin

Then walked at large and were not cooped within.

Thought cast a shadow: brutes could speak: and men

Get children on a star. For spirit then

Threaded a fluid world and dreamed it new

Each moment. Nothing was false or new.

Lines like these showed how greatly Lewis’s poetic imagination differed from Tolkien’s. Tolkien wrote unaffectedly and simply, sometimes lapsing into slack diction or banality but often producing lines that were terse and dramatic; his unadorned style showed no particular ‘influence’. Lewis’s lines – and indeed all his poems – were more complex philosophically and stylistically, and more sure in diction and metre, but they often hovered on the borders of pastiche. Perhaps it was Lewis’s enormous knowledge of English poetry through the centuries that encouraged him to copy earlier models rather than to find a style of his own; at all events this fondness for pastiche was arguably the major reason why his poetry was in the end a failure.

Tolkien did not agree with all Lewis’s emendations of his poem. When Lewis suggested that Tolkien’s couplet ‘Hateful thou art, O Land of Trees!/My flute shall fingers no more seize’ would be better as ‘Oh hateful land of trees, be mute!/My fingers, now forget the flute’, Tolkien scribbled in the margin, ‘Frightful 18th century!!!’ Worse still, where Tolkien’s lines describing the three great and sacred elvish jewels had read ‘The peerless Silmarils; and three/alone he made’, Lewis suggested that this would be better as ‘The Silmarils, the shiners three’. Tolkien, upon reading this, contemptuously underlined the last three words and scribbled a large exclamation mark beside them. But he was greatly encouraged by Lewis’s enthusiasm, and took considerable notice of his criticisms, marking for revision almost all the lines that Lewis thought were inadequate, and in a few cases actually adopting Lewis’s proposed emendations, including several whole lines. Eventually, indeed, he came to rewrite the whole poem, renaming it ‘The Lay of Leithian’; though this was chiefly because of a wish to harmonise it with later developments in The Silmarillion.

Tolkien now began to read more of The Silmarillion aloud to Lewis, having noticed that he had a fondness for being read to. So Lewis was permitted to explore the vast imaginary terrain of ‘Middle-earth’, aided by the maps Tolkien had drawn to accompany the stories. Lewis was delighted, for Tolkien’s poems and prose tales reminded him in many ways of the romantic writings of Malory and William Morris in which he and Arthur Greeves had revelled during adolescence. At the end of January 1930 he wrote to Greeves: ‘Tolkien is the man I spoke of when we were last together – the author of the voluminous metrical romances and of the maps, companions to them, showing the mountains of Dread and Nargothrond the City of the Orcs. In fact he is, in one part of him, what we were.’

It was not a very accurate description of Tolkien’s work. The stories were by no means all ‘romances’, and the majority were in prose and not ‘metrical’, while Nargothrond was a city not of orcs but of elves. Yet if Lewis was not precise in these details he was as enthusiastic as Tolkien could ever have hoped. And this enthusiasm proved to be crucial. ‘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.’ His growing friendship with Lewis was also deeply important to him for reasons quite apart from his literary work. His marriage, never easy, had begun to go through a long period of extreme difficulty caused largely by his wife’s resentment of his Roman Catholicism, and by other factors that went back to the broken childhoods they had both endured in Birmingham. By 1929 the Tolkiens were bringing up four children at their north Oxford house, but this if anything increased rather than lessened the strains of their marriage. It was thus with much feeling that Tolkien wrote in his diary, ‘Friendship with Lewis compensates for much.’

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Mythopoeia (#ulink_67f076c1-b30a-53ec-9877-e3704e62eab2)

The friendship was not quite so important to Lewis as it was to Tolkien. Late in 1931 Lewis, writing to Arthur Greeves, described Tolkien as ‘one of my friends of the second class’. In the first class, as he explained in the same letter, were Greeves himself and Owen Barfield.

To anyone studying Lewis’s life, Arthur Greeves is constantly present in the background: a shadowy figure who actually played no part in the action but was the constant recipient of confidences and reflections from Lewis. There is in fact little to be said about him. His family were neighbours of the Lewises in Belfast. Arthur himself was slightly older than Jack Lewis but distinctly less mature: rather childlike, in fact, brought up in perpetual anxiety about his health and, because of his poor constitution and plentiful family funds, soon abandoning any attempt to earn his living. He was so different from Lewis that the friendship seems rather surprising, yet they corresponded regularly, Lewis using Greeves as a mixture of father-confessor and spiritual pupil. With Arthur Greeves he discussed, in adolescent days, questions relating to sex – Greeves later scored out these passages in the letters – and to Greeves he was also something like frank on the topic of Mrs Moore. In fact Greeves burnt several pages which may have contained a full account of Lewis’s relationship with her. On the other hand he often lectured Greeves on weak spelling or poor morale, taking a condescending line with his friend. It was altogether an odd and distinctly schoolboyish correspondence.

Lewis’s friendship with Owen Barfield was of a very different nature, for he regarded Barfield as in every way an intellectual equal and in some respects superior to himself. Of smaller and lighter build than Lewis, Barfield was lithe and nimble – he thought at one time of earning his living as a dancer – and though almost equally adept at logical argument he had none of Lewis’s rather heavy-handed dogmatism.