Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

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This is an odd essay, ignoring a couple of huge elephants in the pub room where the Inklings hung out.

Tolkien and Lewis were both deeply conservative (not Conservative), and represented a last, textual, gasp of the pre-Raphaëlite movement (for which they had both been born just a little too late).

And though they were friends, collaborators, and, as friends can be, competitors, there was one huge gulf between them: christianity. Tolkien loved and was a scholar of the pre-christian Sagas, which he felt were a deeply influential part of the English cultural underpinning. Middle Earth was a complex experiment in creating the Ursprung of that culture, but perhaps also a more English one.

While Lewis, upon seeing the success of The Hobbit, wanted to emphasize christianity as the core of the English culture. His novels, despite their settings (swords, no machinery, etc) and his conservatism, were very much 20th century in structure, sparseness, and the speed with which the plots developed: more Dorothy Parker than Thomas Mallory. But they were also unabashedly christian; deliberately not using christian vocabulary in an attempt to cast it as a universal truth.* In a way they were opposites.

* he was so convinced of the universalism of christianity that he simply presumed his readers would get it. Though I have spoken English all my life I had had no exposure at all to christianity when I read “The Lion, The Witch..” and so the whole scene where Aslan is killed, the stone table breaks and then aslan maybe returns just seemed strange and incomprehensible to me. I thought some pages must have been lost in a misprint of the book!

Wasn't Tolkien a lifelong, devout Catholic, who himself inspired Lewis's conversion to Christianity? I don't think it was a gulf between them.

Tolkien famously rejected the Vatican II reformations, and continued to respond to the priest in mass in Latin, rather than the vernacular.

Thanks, yes: Tolkein was quite a catholic (a bit oddly, given his upbringing -- perhaps due to his deep conservatism?). I had not known he had converted Lewis! That might explain Lewis' desire to write his explicitly catholic books.

That being said, apart from one letter in which he talked about christian influence, Tolkein was enamored, and his philological work concentrated on, Northern European pre-christian languages and cultures. Remember the Inklings recited the Sagas in old Icelandic at his encouragement. There are no popes, even by metaphor, in Middle Earth; no transubstantiation nor rebirth. In fact the destruction of the ring restores nothing.

It was in the intent and structure of their work that there was a gulf. I certainly didn't intend to imply that they were in any way personally estranged (though Carpenter wrote that T was a miffed at Lewis' success with his much less complex books).

Lewis's fiction (the Narnia books, Hideous strength etc) may not have risen to the level of "propaganda" in its modern sense, but they were explicitly intended to be at least "persuasive writing". I don't see Tolkein's as that at all.

Tolkien's work shows influences of both the sagas and his own Catholicism. Often, they began with the North European influences and reconceived them in his own world-view. Most prominently, the story of Turin Turambar is inspired by the Finnish Kalevala, but became very different over decades of rewrites. Due to his son's lifetime of effort, we have an extraordinary wealth of information on the evolution of his work.

The universe containing Arda is very different from ours, but Tolkien used it to work out his philosophy of what humans mean in the universe. The Elves are bound to the world, but Men have the "gift of death" and get to go beyond it. The analogy to Heaven is too facile; what's really being explored is the problem of evil, suffering, and the fear of death. It's all an explicitly pre-Christian world, before the sacrifice of Christ and salvation, which allows him to dispense with the trappings of Christianity to look at the real nature of humans (as viewed through the eyes of a people who don't have that gift of death).

All of that is much, much more subtle than Lewis's simple allegories. (Tolkien famously wrote that he "cordially detested" allegories, though he indulged in them once in a while as well.) Reading Tolkien's influences deeply requires a Middle Ages mind-set, both medieval Catholic and pagan views.

None of that is necessary to enjoy, appreciate, and even study his books. But we have the luxury of being able to read the works as they developed, and that gives us an almost unique insight into the multiple worlds that influenced them.

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