"SPLINTERED FRAGMENTS"

J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, a Legendary Friendship: A new book reveals how these two famous friends conspired to bring myth and legend -- and Truth -- to modern readers. (Chris Armstrong, 08/29/2003, Christianity Today)

Tolkien and Lewis shared the belief that through myth and legend--for centuries the mode many cultures had used to communicate their deepest truths--a taste of the Christian gospel's "True Myth" could be smuggled past the barriers and biases of secularized readers.

Christian History managing editor Chris Armstrong reached Colin [Duriez, author of Tolkein and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship] this week at his home in Leicester, England.

[Q:] You have said that if it hadn't been for the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the world would likely never have seen The Narnia Chronicles and The Lord of the Rings. What was it about "fairy stories" that led these two men to want to rehabilitate them for a modern audience--adults as well as children?

[A:] They had both personal and professional reasons for this interest. Personally, they had both read and enjoyed such stories as they were growing up, in collections by the brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, and others. Lewis had also heard Celtic myths--his nurse had told him some of the folk tales of Ireland.

Professionally, they studied and taught the literatures of medieval romance and, in Tolkien's case, the background of Norse myth. And they realized that it was only quite recently that such stories had become marginalized as "children's stories." Through much of history these were tales told and enjoyed by grown-ups. Even strong warriors enjoyed them, rejoicing in their triumphant moments, weeping at tragic turns of events. These stories told them important things about life--about who they were and what the world was like, and about the realm of the divine.

It dawned on both men that there was a need to create a readership again for these books--especially an adult readership. Lewis's space trilogy came out of this same impulse to write the sort of stories that he and Tolkien liked to read. He felt he could say things in science fiction that he couldn't say in other ways. And Tolkien had been expressing this sense already for years when the two men met--ever since World War One he had been writing hundreds of pages of a cycle of myth and legend from the early ages of Middle-earth. This, it would later turn out, would provide the "pre-history" for The Lord of the Rings, some of which was published after his death in The Silmarillion.

[Q:] You have said that Lewis and Tolkien shared three interrelated commitment--to "romanticism, reason, and Christianity." Can you elaborate?

[A:] The two friends were interested in the literature of the romantic period because many of the poems and stories attempted to convey the
supernatural, the "otherworldly"--and thus provided a window into spiritual things. Lewis explored romantic themes like joy and longing, and Tolkien emphasized the nature of people as storytelling beings who by telling stories reflect the creative powers of God. But they both rejected an "instinctive" approach to the imagination. Many romantic writers were interested in a kind of nature mysticism. They looked within themselves and at the world around them and sought flashes of insight into "the nature of things"--illuminations of truth that could not be explained, reasoned, or systematized. But Lewis and Tolkien insisted that the reason and the imagination must be integrated. In any understanding of truth, the whole person must be involved.

This is where their third shared commitment came into play--this sense of wholeness was a Christian approach, distant from the neo-pagan mysticism of some romantics, the "Pan worship" of the early twentieth century. Indeed, Tolkien worried increasingly towards the end of his life that people were missing the Christian balance of his work, and were taking it almost as the basis of a new paganism. You could argue in fact that one reason Tolkien didn't finish the Silmarillion was his concern to make his imaginative creations consonant with Christianity. Obviously not wanting to make them into allegory or preachment, he was concerned his literary insights be clearly consistent with Christianity.

One quotation from Tolkien puts the importance of the myths we tell each other especially nicely:

We have come from God and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the fall.

MORE:
-EXCERPT: Space, Time, and the 'New Hobbit': C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien discuss science fiction. (Colin Duriez, 08/29/2003, Christianity Today)
-REVIEW: of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth by Bradley J.
Birzer (Sandra Miesel, The Crisis) Posted by Orrin Judd at September 1, 2003 12:29 AM