THE MYTHMAKERS: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien, by John Hendrix
I go back and forth as to whether it’s a gob-smacking coincidence or incredibly overdetermined that two of the principal architects of the modern fantasy tradition, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, not only taught at Oxford together, but also were close friends for two decades. Lewis himself seems to have found this fact startling. “Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life,” he wrote, “than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.” The complex and not untroubled creative friendship between Jack (as Lewis was known to friends) and Tollers (as Lewis tweedily called Tolkien) is the subject of a fascinating new graphic novel by John Hendrix called “The Mythmakers.” It’s a biographical study, but it’s less about the men in question than it is about the creative spark that flickered between them, flared brightly and finally went out.
Tolkien was the elder by six years. He was born in South Africa and grew up in England, near Birmingham. Lewis spent his childhood in Belfast. Both lost their mothers when they were still boys. Both had an early passion for Northern European stories and mythology (Norse, Finnish, Germanic). Tolkien was raised with a powerful Christian faith that never deserted him. Lewis lost his belief in God during a stint at a boarding school that was ghastly even by British standards. “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary,” he later wrote. “Nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” He hadn’t seen anything yet.
Both Lewis and Tolkien served in World War I and endured some of the worst fighting on the Western Front. Each consoled himself in his own characteristic way: Lewis wrote poems cursing God; Tolkien wrote a poem about angels in a language he invented. Both had the relative good luck to be invalided out of the action and wind up back at Oxford.
Lewis’s first impression of Tolkien was famously underwhelming: “a smooth, pale, fluent little chap,” he wrote in his diary. “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” Lewis himself was not smooth — he was rumpled, red-faced and loud — but the two men bonded over their love of all things mythological and medieval. Tolkien was already assembling the vast home-brewed mythology out of which his best-known works would grow, but he was such a perfectionist, and so personally guarded, that he hadn’t shown it to anybody yet. Lewis was struggling with disenchantment and disillusion, searching for some kind of joy and meaning that would feel like more than childish fancy. “The fellowship of Tolkien and Lewis had brought them to the cusp of the most fruitful period of their lives,” Hendrix writes. “Each had the right key. The door was cracked open. It was time to pass through — together.”
At that time fantastical fiction was generally considered to be for children, but Lewis and Tolkien shared a belief that the pleasure of myths and fairy tales was more than escapism; it was a glimpse of some profound, transcendent truth. In Tolkien’s case — it may surprise some fans to know — truth was the truth of Jesus Christ. “Writing stories, to Tolkien, was a holy act,” according to Hendrix. “In fact, he felt humanity’s desire to take the created order and rearrange it into new worlds was ordained by God.” Under Tolkien’s guidance, Lewis shed his atheism and rediscovered his faith. In complementary fashion, Lewis gave Tolkien the support and encouragement he needed to finally finish and publish his work.
Hendrix (author of “The Faithful Spy”) lays all this out in eloquent prose and charming, expressive drawings, colored in moody blues and purples and warm, appropriately dragonish gold. He also adds a framing narrative featuring a jaunty lion and a genteel wizard, our Virgils on this journey, who supply us with exposition and critical commentary as needed.
“The Mythmakers” takes us through 20 years of deep intellectual friendship between Lewis and Tolkien — which widened to include the social circle around them, known as the Inklings — but it’s just as interesting when documenting the slow, regrettable shipwreck of that friendship. Jack and Tollers turned out to be not so very, very like each other after all. After his conversion, Lewis, loud as ever, became famous as a radio lecturer on Christianity; this irked the quiet, rigorous Tolkien, because Lewis had never formally studied theology, and Tolkien would never have lectured on anything without earning six advanced degrees in it first.
Their creative practices were different, too. Tolkien spent 17 arduous years revising “The Lord of the Rings,” whereas Lewis wrote the seven books of the “Chronicles of Narnia” in seven years flat. “Lewis’s unearned confidence and knack for writing quickly felt slapdash to such a perfectionist,” Hendrix notes. Lewis never stopped praising and promoting Tolkien’s work, but when he read Tolkien the beginning of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” Tolkien utterly rejected it. “About as bad as can be.” “It really won’t do.” “Almost worthless.” He had become a Bad Art Friend. They never truly reconciled.
Yet “The Mythmakers” makes a powerful case that if Tolkien and Lewis had never met, they would never have written their greatest works, the world would be a significantly less elfish place and 20th-century popular culture might have taken an entirely different course. They were mythmakers, but they also dispelled a myth: “If there is one thing to take away from this story,” Hendrix concludes, “it is a radical notion of fellowship that runs counter to the cultural stereotypes about ‘loner artists.’” Separately Lewis and Tolkien were men of great intellect and feeling — but only together did they become geniuses.
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