Tolkien & Lewis World
Welcome to Tolkien and Lewis World!
Since I first read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a child, followed by the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia (and later the Ransom Trilogy and all of Lewis's works, fiction and non-fiction) and then was captivated by the mere mention of the name The Lord of the Rings, I have been a devotee of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
If you've found your way here, you may be too.
I hope you will find here many things to enchant and delight you as we explore the worlds and thinking of these two authors together.
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Tolkien and 'The Kalevala'
’Do not laugh!’ Tolkien famously wrote in a letter to Milton Waldman
‘But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and the cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story -- the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing slendour from the vast backcloths -- which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country….I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.’

Tolkien and the Cats of Queen Berúthiel

The Thoughts of Charles Williams
Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 – 1945), famous as an author and member of the Inklings along with J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and others, was educated at St Albans School, Hertfordshire, and was awarded a scholarship to University College London, but couldn’t complete the degree because of a lack of financial resources. Williams became an editor at the Oxford University Press (OUP) and continued to work there until his death in 1945.

Tolkien and 'Final Participation'
According to Owen Barfield, close friend of C. S. Lewis and a member of the Inklings group, as well as being an influence upon Tolkien, the human consciousness was progressing from one based upon an external and unknowable underlying reality, which our senses and unconscious minds organised for us into the world that we perceived and knew, through a stage where these organised elements (or ‘collective representations’ as Barfield called them) were separated out from us through what we call scientific method, eventually arriving, he hoped, at a condition in which the individual human imagination would re-create the world in harmony with the underlying reality - or not, as Barfield pointed out.

Yorkshire and Middle-earth 4
If you look closely at maps of Tolkien's Middle-earth, there are plenty of places for the imagination to wander unhindered. The story takes us more or less diagonally across the landscape which Tolkien had devised, from the Shire in the middle West down to Mordor in the South East, with one or two excursions, like Boromir's journey to Rivendell, usually recalled rather than actually shown in the tale, into the regions called Enedwaith and Minhiriath.

Changing Views of the World: Lewis and Barfield
As discussed in an earlier blog entry, C. S. Lewis’s last book, The Discarded Image, introduces modern readers to the now-largely-lost medieval thought-world. It’s worth comparing a view that Lewis held of the way medievals thought with the view of Lewis’s long-time friend Owen Barfield, who was a major influence on Lewis’s thought and work.

Caging Unsuspecting Readers
Master authors use every trick in the book to capture and hold reader attention. What is known as ‘great writing’ or even ‘good writing’ is simply the use of certain subtle techniques at a word and sentence level, in the framework of larger structural arrangements, all of it aimed at ‘caging’ unsuspecting readers for the duration of a tale.

Tolkien's Wisdom
Tolkien is often quoted in terms of things his characters say in his fiction, especially the world famous and highly popular The Lord of the Rings, which basically created the whole sub-genre of fantasy fiction. However, he had some profound and insightful things to say in his own right most often through his letters, which were published as a collection in 1981.

The Creative Fertility of the Mind

What C. S. Lewis Said About Charity
Lewis’s overall conclusion about love comes in his examination of the final of the four loves, Charity, which we are calling the second ‘intellectual’ love:
The natural loves are not self-sufficient. Something else, at first vaguely described as ‘decency and common sense’ but later revealed as goodness, and finally as the whole Christian life in one particular relation, must come to the help of the mere feeling if the feeling is to be kept sweet.

What C. S. Lewis Said About Friendship
A ‘friend’, according to the dictionary, is ‘a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically one exclusive of sexual or family relations’. It comes from the Old English frēond, of Germanic origin, and is related to Dutch vriendand German Freund, from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to love’, shared by ‘free’.

'Lies breathed through silver'
Though it will probably be common knowledge to you reading this, it came as a strange shock to me when, during my early teens, I discovered that C.S. Lewis, author of one of my favourite books The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was close friends with J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, which I had recently read and fallen in love with.

C. S. Lewis's 'Voyage to Venus' Opening Chapter -A Case Study
Voyage to Venus or Perelandra as it was originally called, provides in its opening chapter a perfect example of an author progressing from an accepted and ordinary reality that might be shared with readers to an encounter with the supernatural which would undoubtedly be outside most people’s experience.

15 Things About J. R. R. Tolkien That You May or May Not Know
As you probably know if you’re visiting this blog, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) wrote The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in a version of the world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth, a world peopled by humans, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (Goblins) and Tolkien’s own creation, Hobbits.

Gandalf the Procrastinator
As with many of Tolkien’s characters and ideas, Gandalf grows backwards and larger as the stories featuring him develop. Closely examining his inner motivations, though, reveals a multi-layered personality with more going on than it might first seem. His attributes, positive and negative, mould the story of the Third Age as it comes to us.

The Story of a Sword
Most Tolkien fanatics know about Glamdring, the ancient sword wielded by Gandalf during the War of the Ring and seen by most of us in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, but only the real devotees would know that the sword originally came from the Hidden City of the Elves, Gondolin, over 6,000 years earlier in the chronicles of Middle Earth, or that its history, like most things in Tolkien’s world, is worth pursuing.

'The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature' by C.S. Lewis
On a clear, starlit night, go outside and look at the stars.
Try to imagine what it was like looking up at the night sky in Mediaeval times -the stars were eternal and unchanging, occupying a perfect sphere next to God.
See if you can see a planet (they are brighter and do not twinkle like stars, being much closer to the earth). Imagine that that object has an actual influence over you and the way in which you behave.

My Favourite Place in Middle Earth

The Quality of Faerie
In 1975, my English teacher, one Mr. Sweeting, came up with the idea of a reading list from which we (his unforgiving class of 16-year-old Australians, amongst whom I was the shy, bookish, stranded Yorshireman) were to select items from which to read. The list was long and mainly uninspiring, in that I don’t remember any of them -except for one.

How Narnia Became a Fully-Fledged World
In class at school, in 1971, I sat next to a girl I’d never spoken to and had no real intention of getting to know. During a reading period, I scarcely paid any attention to what she was reading. Glancing over her arm, I saw what looked like a ‘girl’s book’, called Prince Caspian, with a picture of a boy riding a horse on the cover. But then she turned the page and I glimpsed the sub-title: ‘or The Return to Narnia’. I almost snatched the book from her hands.
Coming soon from Clarendon House Publications:

An eclectic study of the lifetime and writings of one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors and Christian apologists.

An eclectic study of the lifetime and writings of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated and imitated authors.