How the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis created modern fantasy

The friendship between two literary geniuses changed the face of modern fantasy forever, even if their relationship was far from idyllic.

It has been 100 years and a few weeks since two giants, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, first met. It is hard to say what that meeting did to the world at the time, or if it shifted the earth or caused other natural anomalies. Regardless, Lewis had no idea back then that he would write a cycle of 7 books, The Chronicles of Narnia. And Tolkien was only just building the vast mythology of Middle-earth, from which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings would emerge many years later.

How one Tuesday afternoon sparked a literary revolution

Their long-standing friendship had its ups and downs. To be specific, it began in Oxford on a Tuesday afternoon, let's assume a rainy one, on May 11, 1926. At that time, Tolkien was working at Oxford University as a professor of medieval languages and literature, while Clive Staples Lewis, whom his friends simply called Jack, was working at the neighboring Magdalen College. They met at a faculty meeting, and Lewis noted in his diary: "He is a good man at heart, he just needs a bit of a slap."

However, after getting to know each other better, they both discovered they were incredibly similar in some ways. They both hated the modern age, didn't follow politics, refused to drive a car, and above all, loved old Norse sagas. Lewis once told Tolkien: "If they won't write the kind of books we want to read, we'll have to write them ourselves." And so they did. Together with other friends, they founded the Inklings club. Every Tuesday morning, they met at the Eagle and Child pub, which they affectionately called the Bird and Baby, and in a lounge full of pipe smoke, they read their drafts aloud.

Uncompromising support pulled Middle-earth out of the drawer

Tolkien was an insecure author who endlessly rewrote everything and hid it in a drawer. He later wrote that his debt to Lewis did not lie in stylistic influence, but in pure and uncompromising support. For many years, Lewis was his only reader and constantly encouraged him to write. When The Hobbit was published in 1937, Lewis immediately wrote an enthusiastic review for the prestigious The Times. He reacted the same way to the publication of The Lord of the Rings. They even left their mark on each other's stories. Tolkien created the Ent Treebeard based on Lewis's booming voice, and Lewis based his character, the philologist Dr. Ransom, on Tolkien.

However, they sometimes didn't understand each other at all when it came to literary taste. Tolkien made no secret of the fact that Narnia was completely outside his sphere of interest, and added that many of his own things meant nothing to Lewis. He sometimes considered Lewis's writing too clunky and criticized him for recycling names from Middle-earth for his books. Lewis, in turn, was amused by Tolkien's eternal indecisiveness. He described him as a terrible detail-oriented person who couldn't accept advice and rewrote things over and over again because of his perfectionism.

Quiet rivalry and an invisible wall between friends

These authorial disagreements were nothing compared to how much they differed on the question of faith in God. Lewis, although raised in a Christian family, turned away from faith in his youth. In contrast, Tolkien was a deeply religious Catholic. This topic led to many heated debates. One of them dragged on until 3 a.m., and that was the one that caused Lewis to reconsider his position. But to Tolkien's great disappointment, he returned to his roots and joined the Anglican Church.

Their friendship was shaken by two main events, which Tolkien himself later mentioned in a letter to his daughter. The first was the arrival of Charles Williams in Oxford in 1939, where the London publisher Oxford University Press had evacuated due to the war. This immensely charismatic, eccentric editor and writer immediately fit into the Inklings club and quickly took the place of Jack's closest confidant. Lewis was absolutely thrilled with Williams. Tolkien, however, took it hard. Williams wrote strange occult thrillers full of tarot and magic, which Tolkien, as a proponent of pure Norse mythology, absolutely hated and felt that Williams's influence began to spoil Lewis's own work.

The final breakup of the fellowship

Williams died suddenly in May 1945, but Tolkien and Lewis never returned to their original close friendship. They were soon divided by a second event. Lewis married the American writer Joy Gresham. For Tolkien, this was a problem for two reasons. As a strict Catholic, he did not recognize marriage to a divorced woman, and at the same time, he felt hurt that Lewis had kept the whole thing a secret from him for a long time. After this moment, they became more like university colleagues, and their paths parted completely in 1954 when Lewis accepted a professorship in Cambridge. C. S. Lewis died in 1963, and even after such a long separation, the news hit Tolkien deeply. In a letter, he confided that it felt like an axe blow to his own roots.

A friendship that carried over into the pages of famous novels

It is actually strange that we know so many details about an ordinary human friendship. On the other hand, the motif of friendship has a huge space in the works of both authors. And their relationship ultimately changed world literature. In the Oxford circles of the time, Tolkien's colleagues mocked fantasy, and his academic reputation suffered because of his lifelong love for myths. Without Jack's stubborn support, these stories would likely never have left the desk drawer, and modern fantasy would not exist in its current form at all.

So, when we add it all up, thanks to their friendship, the One Ring was destroyed, Narnia was saved from eternal winter, and future generations of literary bores were prevented from mocking fantasy literature. Because myths and stories have much more weight in human life than the critics of that time could ever have imagined.