Narnia and Middle Earth: When Two Worlds Collude
Back in 1997 several major opinion polls in the United Kingdom confirmed the place of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien as the most popular book of the twentieth century. A few years later, from the release of The Fellowship of the Ring in December 2001 until the release of The Return of the King two years later, Peter Jackson's three part film version of Tolkien's epic became the movie phenomenon of the new century. Now, and no doubt inspired by the success of Jackson's blockbuster, Walt Disney Studios and Walden Media have released a movie entitled The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the hope that the children's classic by C.S. Lewis can emulate the success of Tolkien.
It is indeed singularly appropriate that Lewis should be following in the footsteps of his great friend, Tolkien, not least because, as we shall see, he was following in Tolkien's footsteps when he wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. It would in fact not be an exaggeration to describe Lewis as a follower of Tolkien, at least in the area of what might be termed their shared philosophy of myth. A look at the history of their friendship will illustrate how Lewis was greatly influenced by his friend and how Tolkien, for his part, benefited greatly from the encouragement he received from Lewis during his writing of The Lord of the Rings.
In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis described how his first meeting with Tolkien had forced him to confront his own prejudices: "At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both." Lewis's upbringing in the sectarian atmosphere of Belfast had colored the way in which he perceived "papists" and the prejudice persisted long after his Protestant faith had dissolved. Having lost the lukewarm Christian faith of his childhood, Lewis was a somewhat reluctant atheist at the time that he and Tolkien first met in Oxford in May 1926. Lewis's first impressions of Tolkien as "a smooth, pale, fluent little chap" gave no indication that he saw in Tolkien someone with whom he was destined to form a long and enduring friendship. The touchstone of their friendship, and the touchwood that ignited it, was their shared love for mythology.
Tolkien, six years Lewis's senior, soon became not merely a friend but a mentor. In December 1929, Lewis wrote to a friend that he had been up until the early hours of the morning "talking to the Anglo-Saxon professor Tolkien . . . discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours," adding that "the fire was bright and the talk was good." If Lewis had found in Tolkien a kindred spirit who shared his love for the Norse myths, it seems that Tolkien also detected in Lewis a soul with whom he could share his own creative endeavors at myth-making. Taking Lewis into his confidence he lent him his poem on Beren and Luthien, two heroic characters to whom he would allude in The Lord of the Rings, and who would finally emerge as central figures in The Silmarillion following its eventual publication almost half a century later. On December 7 of that year, Lewis wrote to Tolkien expressing his enthusiasm:
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.
Formal and Informal Allegory
The last sentence has a particular resonance with regard to the work of both writers because it touches upon aspects of the philosophy of myth that inspired their creative vision and underpinned their respective literary works. Take, for instance, Lewis's denial, in the following letter to schoolchildren written in 1954, that The Chronicles of Narnia were "allegorical" in any crudely formal or clumsily intentional way:
You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books "represents" something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim's Progress but I'm not writing in that way. I did not say to myself "Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia": I said "Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened." If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.
Clearly Lewis was at pains to distance the Narnian stories from the sort of formal or crude allegory of which The Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the most obvious exemplar (although it is noteworthy that Lewis succumbed to the genre of formal allegory himself with great success in the semi-autobiographical The Pilgrim's Regress). It is also evident from his discussion of the issue in The Allegory of Love that Lewis understood that there is a crucial distinction between formal allegory and what could be called informal allegory, the latter being the allegory of applicable significance which is almost universally present, to one degree or another, in literature and beyond.
Allegory, in some sense, belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind, in general. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms. What is good or happy has always been high like the heavens and bright like the sun.
Lewis distinguished this broad definition of allegory from formal allegory, which he defined thus:
. . . you can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia [visible things] to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira [Anger] with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia [patience]. This is allegory.
In fact, pace Lewis and in view of his earlier broader definition, this is not an instance of allegory per se but of formal allegory.
Perhaps at this juncture it might be helpful to look at the whole question of allegory, formal and informal, in more detail.
Saint Augustine wrote about the most basic level of allegory with unexcelled eloquence in De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Doctrine) in which he discussed "signs". In the case of all signs, the thing signified can only be ascertained through a process of quasi-allegorical applicability. One must know that a three letter word, dog, signifies a certain type of four-legged mammal, or that the same three letters, when arranged in reverse order, signify the supreme being and creator of the universe (if the g is in upper case) or some lesser being of supernatural power (if the g is in lower case). In each case a leap of imaginative applicability needs to be made from the "dead" letter of the literal thing or things being used as signs to the "living" meaning signified. This involves allegory, at least in the broadest and most basic sense in which the word is used.
Moving from the most basic understanding of allegory to what could be seen as the strictest and most elaborate, Saint Thomas Aquinas asserted that there were four levels of meaning in Scripture, namely the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical. It is of course arguable that this four-fold exegesis is not applicable to literature as a whole and is only applicable to, and appropriate for, a theological reading of the Bible. Such a view was not shared by the author of arguably the greatest work of literature ever written.
Dante insisted that his magnificent poem, The Divine Comedy, should be read according to Saint Thomas's four-fold method. This is interesting within the context of our understanding of Narnia and Middle Earth because Dante's magnum opus is not a formal allegory. Dante, Virgil, Beatrice, and the various individuals they meet on their travels are principally themselves. They are not mere personified abstractions. On the literal level, Dante is himself; it is only on the level of allegory that he can be seen as Everyman. Virgil is himself, or the ghost of himself; it is only on the allegorical level that he can be seen as the summit of human Reason or Wisdom unassisted by Christian Revelation. Beatrice is herself, albeit, no doubt, an idealized form of herself as purified by Dante's imagination; it is only on the allegorical level that she can be seen as signifying a Bearer of the Light of Grace. Similarly Dante does not meet seven deadly monsters named Pride, Envy, Lust, etc., representing the seven deadly sins, as he would have done had his work been a formal allegory; he meets real historical people who were guilty of these sins. In short, the story can be read purely on the literal level, and no doubt enjoyed as such, although it is greatly enriched when understood on the other levels of allegorical significance.
This discussion of the meaning and nature of allegory is essential to a true and deeper understanding of the work of both Lewis and Tolkien. Generally, though not exclusively, Lewis and Tolkien tended to use the word "allegory" in its formal sense. Thus Lewis in his letter to the schoolchildren could deny that Aslan is allegorical and Tolkien could say that he "despised" allegory and that The Lord of the Rings "is neither allegorical nor topical." On the other hand, and on other occasions, Lewis could write that the "whole Narnian story is about Christ" and Tolkien could write that "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." Since Christ is never mentioned by name in either Narnia or Middle Earth the Christian significance in both works is only discernible through leaps of imaginative applicability that is certainly allegorical in the looser and broader sense of the word. How else does one discern Christ in Narnia except through making allegorical connections? How else does one unravel the "fundamentally religious and Catholic" dimension in Middle Earth without seeking and discovering the levels of Christian allegory with which the works of Tolkien are awash?
A Shared Philosophy of Myth
In order to understand more fully these allegorical connections in the works of Lewis and Tolkien it is necessary to return to the philosophy of myth that they shared. Tolkien's philosophy of myth, destined to have such a profound influence on Lewis, was conveyed most memorably in his poem "Mythopoeia," which was written "To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silver.'" The "one" to whom this dedication referred was Lewis himself who had claimed that myths were merely beautiful lies during a conversation on mythology in Oxford in September 1931, a conversation that has now been enshrined as being pivotal to Lewis's final embrace of Christianity. "No," Tolkien had replied emphatically. "They are not." He followed this blunt rebuttal with a lucid exposition of the nature and supernature of mythology, which can be summarized as follows.
Since we are made in the image of God and since we know that God is the Creator, it follows that our creativity is the expression of the imageness of God in us. As such, all myths, as the product of human creativity, contain splintered fragments of the one true light that comes from God. Far from being lies they are a means of gaining an inkling of the deep truths of metaphysical reality. God is the Creator, the only being able to make things from nothing, whereas we are sub-creators, beings made in God's creative image who are able to partake of his creative gift by making new things from other things that already exist. Put simply, we tell our stories with words, God tells his story with history. The fact that facts serve the truth is another way of saying that Providence prevails. In essence, Tolkien believed that Christianity is the "true myth," the myth that really happened. It is the archetypal myth that makes sense of all the others. It is the Myth to which all other myths are in some way a reflection, a myth that works in the same way as all the others except that it exists in the realm of fact as well as in the realm of truth.
For Tolkien the pagan myths — far from being lies — were in fact God expressing himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their "mythopoeia" to reveal fragments of his eternal truth. Most astonishing of all, Tolkien maintained that Christianity was exactly the same except for the enormous difference that the poet who invented it was God himself, and the images he used were real men and actual history.
Tolkien's arguments had an indelible effect on Lewis. Twelve days later, Lewis wrote to his friend, Arthur Greeves, that he had "just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ," adding that his "long night talk with . . . Tolkien had a good deal to do with it." The full extent of Tolkien's influence can be gauged from another of Lewis's letters to Greeves, written only a month after the "long night talk":
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this important difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing himself through the minds of poets, using such images as he found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call "real things."
Lewis would expand upon this core thesis in his exposition of the "pictures" of the pagans during Father History's discourse on the difference between the pagans and the Jews in The Pilgrim's Regress. It is, however, clear that he owed his initial inspiration to Tolkien's philosophy of myth. It is also clear that the conception of (sub)creativity that underpins this philosophy would have a profound and pronounced effect upon the approach of Lewis and Tolkien toward their own work. It was their shared belief in the gift of creativity that led to their dislike of formal allegory. For Tolkien and Lewis formal allegory constituted an abuse of the gift. If one has faith in the powers of the gift, derived from the power of the Giver, one will allow the gift the freedom it needs to breathe life into the creative work. In allowing a story to take on a life of its own a writer allows the gift itself — or, more correctly, the Giver of the gift — to add dimensions of truth beyond the conscious designs of the story-teller. By contrast, in seeking in his pedagogy and didacticism to dominate the reader, the writer of a formal allegory dominates the gift, thereby enslaving it and depriving it of much of its power.
Applicability
Although Tolkien and Lewis were at such pains to distance their own work from the taint of formal allegory there are clearly truths to be gleaned from the works that can only be deduced allegorically or, to employ the term that Tolkien preferred, can only be ascertained through a process of "applicability" that is the process of applying the truths that emerge in the story to the "real world" beyond the story.
There are so many of these "applicable" moments in The Lord of the Rings that whole books have been written on the subject and there are many more waiting to be written. A few examples will suffice. Tolkien, in the Appendix, slips in the fact (surely a conscious Christian revision of the original "unconscious" Christianity in the story) that the Ring is destroyed or "unmade" on March 25, a fact that serves as the key to understanding the whole work. In the Christian calendar this is the traditional date of the Annunciation, the moment in which Christ becomes Man in the womb of Mary, the moment when the Word becomes flesh. Tolkien, as a Christian, believed that this was the moment when Original Sin was destroyed or "unmade", the moment when the world was saved or redeemed from the One Sin that rules us all and in the darkness binds us. The date of its destruction suggests that the Ring is a symbol of sin in general and Original Sin in particular. The One Sin and the One Ring are allegorically synonymous. As Christ bore the burden of sin on the Cross, so Frodo bears this burden of sin as he carries the ring to Mordor (Death). Frodo, as the Ring-bearer, is applicably connected to Christ as the Cross-bearer and also to every Christian soul who takes up his cross to follow Christ. Frodo is, therefore, a Christ figure and an Everyman figure, as well as remaining, on the literal level, a hobbit of the Shire.
Likewise, Gandalf's death, resurrection, and transfiguration remind us of Christ; Aragorn's taking the Paths of the Dead and his power to release the Dead from their age-long curse reminds us of Christ's descent into Hell and his release of the souls from Limbo. The elvish way-bread, lembas, translates from the elvish as "life-bread" or "bread of life," a clear allusion to the Eucharist. These examples are but the tip of the iceberg of applicability. There are countless others.
The influence of The Lord of the Rings on The Chronicles of Narnia, and on Lewis's other works, is inestimable. Tolkien read each chapter of The Lord of the Rings to Lewis at the weekly meetings of the Inklings as it was being written, and one can only wonder at the wonderful and wonder-filled hours that Tolkien spent in Lewis's company explaining the work during the catalytic process of its creation. Certainly he found in Lewis one of its greatest admirers and advocates both before and after its publication. "The unpayable debt that I owe to him," Tolkien wrote of Lewis, "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." This view of Lewis's importance as an "encourager" was reiterated by Tolkien in a letter to Professor Clyde Kilby in December 1965: "But for the encouragement of C.S.L. I do not think that I should ever have completed or offered for publication The Lord of the Rings." Lewis's own estimation of the work was expressed in a letter to Tolkien shortly after Lewis had read through the completed typescript of The Lord of the Rings in the autumn of 1949. It was, he asserted, "almost unequalled in the whole range of narrative art known to me."
An Unequal Mutual Esteem
Tolkien's "unpayable debt" to Lewis was repaid more than adequately by Tolkien's positive influence on Lewis's own intellectual, spiritual, and creative development. It is, however, a little surprising that Tolkien failed to sympathize with most of Lewis's work. If Lewis had been a great "encourager" to Tolkien he must have been greatly discouraged by Tolkien's lack of enthusiasm for his own efforts at fiction. In 1949, the same year that Lewis was enthusing about the finished typescript of The Lord of the Rings, Lewis began to read the first of his Narnia stories to the Inklings. This was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, destined to become one of the most popular children's books ever written. Tolkien was unimpressed. "It really won't do!" he exclaimed to Roger Lancelyn Green, a mutual friend who would later become Lewis's biographer. "I mean to say: 'Nymphs and their Ways, The Love Life of a Faun'!" Later, Tolkien would write that it was "sad that 'Narnia' and all that part of C.S.L.'s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy." Why, one wonders, should this be so?
Tolkien's almost obsessive perfectionism led to the expectation of very high standards and an intolerance of the efforts of those who failed to attain such heights. Tolkien must have been aware of his influence on Lewis and must have been aware also that Lewis's creation of Narnia was all too obviously a reflection, albeit a pale reflection in shallower creative waters, of his own creation of Middle Earth. The wistful gravitas of The Lord of the Rings grated with the whimsical gaiety of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; hence Tolkien's scoffing at the juxtaposition of mythical creatures worthy of respect, such as nymphs or fauns, with the descent into the vulgar vernacular, "and their Ways" and "Love Life."
Similarly, Tolkien would probably have been decidedly uncomfortable with the insertion of inconsistent and incompatible objects into a mythical world, such as lampposts and umbrellas. As a cultural Luddite who despised most manifestations of technological "progress" he would have looked upon the gate-crashing of these objects of modernity into the purity of a mythological world as pollutants of the world itself and of the imagination of the reader.
Finally, Lewis's work, based upon what he termed "supposals", lacked the subtlety of applicability for which Tolkien strived. For all Lewis's denials that The Chronicles of Narnia were not an "allegory", it is clear that Aslan is always a figure of Christ, albeit a Narnian manifestation of Christ, in all the stories and at each and every moment. Compare this with the subtlety with which Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragorn remind us of Christ while always remaining themselves and while always being distinct from Christ, even at the moments when they most remind us of him. Although, strictly speaking, Lewis is right to assert that the Narnia stories are not formal allegories, they can be seen to be closer to formal allegories than are the stories of Middle Earth. Put bluntly, one suspects that Tolkien's subtle sensibilities considered Narnia too close to "crude" or "formal" allegory for his liking. One suspects also that Lewis not only understood Tolkien's objections but agreed with them, at least in part. This was probably why Lewis considered his late work, Till We Have Faces, to be his "best book" and his "favorite of all my books." In this book, subtitled A Myth Retold, Lewis resists his natural inclination to didacticism and controls his desire to teach his readers a lesson. In consequence, he succeeds for the first time in submerging the allegory within the story with the subtlety that had hitherto eluded him.
In the final analysis, and in spite of Tolkien's criticism of Lewis's work, it would be wrong to suggest that Tolkien had not benefited as greatly as Lewis from their friendship, though in a different way. Tolkien's daughter Priscilla believed that her father owed an "enormous debt" to Lewis, and his son, Christopher, was even more emphatic in his insistence that his father's friendship with Lewis was crucial to his creative achievement. "The profound attachment and imaginative intimacy between him and Lewis were in some ways the core to it," he said, adding that their friendship was of "profound importance . . . to both of them." To put the matter in a nutshell, Lewis's debt to Tolkien is that if he had not known Tolkien he would not have written The Chronicles of Narnia; Tolkien's debt to Lewis is that if he had not known Lewis he would never have finished The Lord of the Rings. Paradoxically, we have Tolkien to thank for Narnia, and Lewis to thank for Middle Earth. Such are the benefits, the power and the glory when two worlds collude.
Joseph Pearce, Writer in Residence and Associate Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, is the author of Tolkien: Man & Myth and C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, both published by Ignatius Press. He is editor of the Saint Austin Review (www.staustinreview.com).
— Ignatius Press
This item 6856 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
