If you’ve been following this blog for the last few days, you probably noticed the considerable interest raised by my post on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, just a few inches below this on your screen. I wrote the post in response to reading Prof. Bruce Charlton’s e-book about Tolkien and The Notion Club Papers.
Today Prof. Charlton posted a piece responding directly to my suggestions. What surprises me most is that he places most of the blame for the rift between Lewis and Tolkien on Tolkien.
The critical rift in JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis’s friendship can probably be dated to early 1949, when Tolkien heard Lewis read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.
This fact was forcefully brought home to me by Lars Walker’s blog posting at Brandywine Books.
Lewis later remarked that Tolkien disliked the book intensely, and Roger Lancelyn Green confirmed this from a meeting with Tolkien about the end of March 1949.
But if early 1949 was the critical incident, then we need to understand the background to the incident (and why it caused a rift) and also understand why the rift was not repaired.
That author is certainly providing a very different picture of what happened than Tolkien does in his letters and his other biographers have. In them, there is no speculation about psychology, and the break, which was neither complete nor forever, was due to Lewis entering into an adulterous “marriage” with Joy Davidman, and then, after, for many years, demanded that the other Inklings, including Tolkien, NOT be allowed to bring their wives, insisted on Joy (unlike the other wives) being admitted. Further, there was deep concern about the occult influence of Charles Williams. Then also, Lewis was at Cambridge and Tolkien (and the Bird and Babe) in Oxford. Yes, Tolkien was thin-skinned, comparatively, and Lewis was given to anti-Catholic statements that hurt him deeply, though Lewis probably thought nothing of it – as indeed Tolkien wrote in his letters.
Someone needs to write a loosely factual story called Jack and Tollers.