Eighty-eight years ago today, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
met.
The English Faculty meeting began at 4:00, May 11, 1926 at
Merton College, Oxford. The previous year, Tolkien had been appointed Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, and Lewis
had been elected a Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Magdalen
College.
It was heady stuff; a proposal to
co-ordinate lecture schedules with tutorials, the need for lessons in
pronunciation and beginners' outlines of literature. Lewis wrote in his journal
that "Tolkien managed to get the discussion round to the proposed English
Preliminary examination."
The two men spoke after the
meeting. "He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap – can't read Spenser
[Lewis' favourite author] because of the forms.... Thinks all literature is
written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty.... No harm in him:
only needs a smack or two."
Before long, Lewis was attending
"The Coalbiters," a weekly study group Tolkien had initiated earlier
in the year to read aloud from Icelandic sagas and myths in the original
languages – something of a precursor to the Inklings, I suppose. A year later
Lewis wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, "We have so far read the Younger
Edda and the Volsung Saga: next term we shall read the Laxdale Saga. You will
be able to imagine what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over
the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of god or giant catching my
eye will sometimes throw me back fifteen years into a wild dream of northern
skies and Valkyrie music." This experience of "northernness" was
at the centre of Lewis' spiritual longing – the "joy" in his
spiritual autobiography "Surprised By Joy" – which flowered into
faith between 1929 and 1931, Tolkien playing a critical role.
Tolkien's passion for Nordic myth
fueled a mostly secret project, the creation of complete histories, languages
and geographies of the world which eventually became the setting of his Middle
Earth stories. The summer of 1926 – within months of meeting Lewis – is the
earliest possible occasion on which Tolkien may have scrawled the words
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" on the back of a
student examination paper, though it is more likely to have been two or three
years later. By November 1929 the two men were meeting together regularly,
talking well past midnight about "the gods and giants of
Asgard." On December 6, 1929,
Lewis read Tolkien's "Lay of Leithien," the essential story of The
Silmarillion – perhaps the first Middle Earth story Tolkien shared.
In February 1933, Lewis read the
mostly complete first draft of The Hobbit, and it is likely that The Inklings
were begun in the fall of that year. By December, Lewis's brother Warnie writes
in his journal that he sees less and less of his brother every day because of
the friendship with Tolkien.
Because Tolkien's journals are not
readily available to scholars, we don't know that date of the following entry,
but likely soon after the famous Addison's Walk conversation of September
19, 1931. "Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving
constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man
at once honest, brave, intellectual - a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher -
and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord."
