I discovered both Tolkien and Lewis fairly early in my love affair with books. I can remember the day at my grandmother’s house one summer (I must have been about ten) that I first opened “The Hobbit” and followed Bilbo on his journey to The Lonely Mountain and back. I can remember the quality of the light as it filtered through the big silver maple in my grandmother’s front yard (sadly cut down a few years later to build a dike to protect her house against a flood that never came), the smell of the paperback book, and the feeling of wonder and excitement as I pored over Tolkien’s maps. I remember reading “The Silver Chair” later that year, bundled in blankets in my great-aunts’ house, as Puddleglum and Jill and Eustace escaped from the giants’ house and released Caspian from his years of enchantment. Years later I wondered what these men were like who wrote these books.

My connection to Tolkien’s writings has remained strong through the years, although in college I became disaffected with fantasy literature, and uncomfortable with the racism and classism that permated his world-view. Lewis I discovered later as a writer of a little bit of interesting science fiction. And as my own faith has grown and deepened, I have grown to respect his theological writings, despite the fact that I don’t always agree with him.

Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - The Gift of Friendship There are fine biographies of both men, none of which I have read yet. But as I have learned a little bit more about these men, I was interested to discover that they were close friends, and very influential on one another. Colin Duriez’ “Tolkien and C. S. Lewis” sheds great light on the relationship between these two important authors, the depth of their friendship, as well as the struggles that they encountered as they each followed their professional and literary careers. This is a short book, and not an exhaustive study of their lives or work, and instead focuses on the connection between the two men, and how they impacted one another.

Duriez traces the early lives of Lewis and Tolkien, their first meeting, and their growing friendship. We learn that that Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity (as much an intellectual “convincing” as a spiritual awakening), and Tolkien’s strong disapproval of Lewis’ later enthusiasms for popular spirituality through his lectures and writings (he thought it unseemly for Lewis to practice “amateur theology”, and as a Roman Catholic thought that such activity should be left to priestly experts). The impact that each man had on the other was quite different — Tolkien was influential on shaping Lewis’ thinking about God and spirituality, which greatly shaped his writing, while Lewis acted on Tolkien more through encouraging him constantly, and Tolkien credits Lewis for enabling him to complete LOTR through persistent support.

I was surprised to learn that Tolkien remained largely unaware of Lewis’ relationship with Joy Davidman, as the two grew apart and Lewis and Davidman began to grow close (Tolkien disapproved of the fact that she was divorced), and did not know that they had married until well after the fact, and did not meet her both Joy and Edith Tolkien happened to be in the hospital at the same time. This explains something I had wondered about when watching the film “Shadowlands”: where is Ronald Tolkien? Lewis and Tolkien never regained their previous closeness after this period, although Tolkien was certainly supportive of Lewis during his profound grief after Joy’s death.

The book also gives some good insight into the dynamics of the Inklings, the informal literary group that formed around Lewis during his time at Oxford. The group centered around Lewis and his friends, and included Tolkien, Lewis’ brother Warnie, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield (occasionally), Robert Harvard, and other “critical Christians” who gathered to share companionship and conversation, and share their literary output with each other. I was surprised to discover that Hugo Dyson disliked Tolkien’s “elvish writing”, and the reading of LOTR at their meetings became a source some contention, to the point that Tolkien stopped reading from his writings for the last third of the book. Charles Williams’ relationship with Lewis also was a source of contention, as Tolkien distrusted the “occult interests” that Williams and Lewis shared, and the influence that Williams had on Lewis. I recommend Gareth Knight’s “The Magical World of the Inklings“, which provides good descriptions and summaries of the works of Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and Barfield, but sheds relatively little insight on the relationships between these men.

This is a satisfying (if short) book, which alternates between short narrative scenes (including a moving description of Lewis’ funeral), and discussion and description, and I have a renewed appreciation and respect for these two men. For those interested in understanding more about these two important authors, this is a good place to start.