Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: Was Tolkien friends with C. S. Lewis?
"Properly speaking," wrote Warren Lewis, "the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections."[3] As was typical for university literary groups in their time and place, the Inklings were all male. Readings and discussions of the members' unfinished works were the principal purposes of meetings. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings,[4] Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, and Williams's All Hallows' Eve were among the novels first read to the Inklings. Tolkien's fictional Notion Club (see "Sauron Defeated") was based on the Inklings. Meetings were not all serious; the Inklings amused themselves by having competitions to see who could read the notoriously bad prose of Amanda McKittrick Ros for the longest without laughing.[5]
Tolkien's opinion was adopted by another Christian writer, C. S. Lewis, in their conversations: "Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality." C. S. Lewis freely called the Christ story a "true myth", and he believed that even pagan myths express spiritual truths. In his opinion, the difference between the Christ story and pagan myths is that the Christ story is historically as well as spiritually true. Lewis writes,
The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i. e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call real things.
In 2009, a partial draft was discovered of "Language and Human Nature", which Lewis had begun co-writing with J. R. R. Tolkien, but which was never completed.
Lewis was commissioned to write the volume "English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)" for the Oxford History of English Literature, His book "A Preface to "Paradise Lost"" is still cited as a criticism of that work. His last academic work, "The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature" (1964), is a summary of the medieval world view, a reference to the "discarded image" of the cosmos.
Lewis was a prolific writer, and his circle of literary friends became an informal discussion society known as the "Inklings", including J. R. R. Tolkien, Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and his brother Warren Lewis. Glyer points to December 1929 as the Inklings' beginning date. Lewis's friendship with Coghill and Tolkien grew during their time as members of the Kolbítar, an Old Norse reading group that Tolkien founded and which ended around the time of the inception of the Inklings. At Oxford, he was the tutor of poet John Betjeman, critic Kenneth Tynan, mystic Bede Griffiths, novelist Roger Lancelyn Green and Sufi scholar Martin Lings, among many other undergraduates. Curiously, the religious and conservative Betjeman detested Lewis, whereas the anti-establishment Tynan retained a lifelong admiration for him.
In addition to his medical research papers, Havard authored an appendix for C. S. Lewis's "The Problem of Pain" as well as a description of Lewis included in "Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him" and one of J. R. R. Tolkien included in "Mythlore."
The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (2007) is a non-fiction book written by Diana Pavlac Glyer, an Inklings scholar and English professor at Azusa Pacific University. "The Company They Keep" challenges the commonly held belief that the Inklings did not influence each other through a detailed and engaging examination of both published and unpublished works, papers, and letters written by J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Warren Lewis and the lesser-known writers who comprised the Inklings.
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are among the authors that have frequented Malvern. Legend states that, after drinking in a Malvern pub one winter evening, they were walking home when it started to snow. They saw a lamp post shining out through the snow and Lewis turned to his friends and said "that would make a very nice opening line to a book". The novel "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" by Lewis later used that image as the characters enter the realm of Narnia.
J.R.R. Tolkien found inspiration in the Malvern landscape which he had viewed from his childhood home in Birmingham and his brother Hilary's home near Evesham. He was introduced to the area by C. S. Lewis, who had brought him here to meet George Sayer, the Head of English at Malvern College. Sayer had been a student of Lewis, and became his biographer, and together with them Tolkien would walk the Malvern Hills. Recordings of Tolkien reading excerpts from "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" were made in Malvern in 1952, at the home of George Sayer. The recordings were later issued on long-playing gramophone records. In the liner notes for "J.R.R Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Fellowship of the Rings", George Sayer wrote that Tolkien would relive the book as they walked and compared parts of the Malvern Hills to the White Mountains of Gondor.
Elwin Ransom may be based on C. S. Lewis' friend J. R. R. Tolkien ("Elwin" means "Elf friend" in Anglo-Saxon), though he seems to have autobiographical elements. In "That Hideous Strength" Ransom, with his royal charisma and matter-of-fact breezy acceptance of the supernatural, appears less like Tolkien than like Charles Williams (or some of the heroes in Williams' books).
Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. They both served on the English faculty at Oxford University, and were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. According to Lewis's memoir "Surprised by Joy", he was baptised in the Church of Ireland, but fell away from his faith during adolescence. Lewis returned to Anglicanism at the age of 32, owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, and he became an "ordinary layman of the Church of England". Lewis's faith profoundly affected his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.
One of his closer friends was C. S. Lewis who dedicated his book "Reflections on the Psalms" to him. Farrer took the last sacraments to Lewis before his death. Others included J. R. R. Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Farrer has been more studied and more admired since his death in the United States than in his own country.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a friend and sometime mentor to Lewis. In "That Hideous Strength", Lewis alludes several times to Tolkien's Atlantean civilization Numinor (spelt Númenor by Tolkien), saying in the foreword “Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.” Villains in both Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" cycle and here are very hostile toward the natural world (specifically in the wanton destruction of trees in Tolkien's and the manipulation of life in Lewis's).
After his conversion to theism in 1929, Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931, following a long discussion and late-night walk with his close friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. He records making a specific commitment to Christian belief while on his way to the zoo with his brother. He became a member of the Church of England – somewhat to the disappointment of Tolkien, who had hoped that he would join the Catholic Church.
George MacDonald from Huntly used Doric in his novels. A friend of Mark Twain, he is commonly considered one of the fathers of the fantasy genre and an influence on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
Bree's shortened name is the same as the town in C. S. Lewis's lifetime friend J. R. R. Tolkien's book The Fellowship of the Ring, where there is an inn called The Prancing Pony.
Tolkien's devout Roman Catholic faith was a significant factor in the conversion of C. S. Lewis from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England.
C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were planning on writing a book on language together in the 1940s, but the book was never published. Beebe discovered the opening pages of the manuscript in the Oxford University Bodleian Library. However, there was no proof that Tolkien worked on the project. Originally, the connection of the notes and draft style manuscript to what is now known as Language and Human Nature was not evident to Beebe. It was some time later that he realized what the notes in the book were indicators of the beginnings of the planned project between Lewis and Tolkien. Beebe relied on the help of other prominent C. S. Lewis scholars who are familiar with Lewis' handwriting to carefully transcribe all of the written words in the manuscript. Beebe teaches a reoccurring summer abroad course at Oxford titled "C.S. Lewis: Chronicles of a Master Communicator" about C. S. Lewis and communication sponsored by the Communication Studies Department at Texas State. In 2016 Beebe discovered an unpublished poem by C.S. Lewis in the Oxford University Bodleian library.
In 2009, a partial draft of "Language and Human Nature", which Tolkien had begun co-writing with C. S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.
Barfield has been known as "the first and last Inkling." He had a profound influence on C. S. Lewis, and through his books "The Silver Trumpet" and "Poetic Diction" (dedicated to C.S. Lewis), an appreciable effect on J. R. R. Tolkien. Their contribution, and their conversations, persuaded both Tolkien and Lewis that myth and metaphor have always had a central place in language and literature. "The Inklings work… taken as a whole, has a significance that far outweighs any measure of popularity, amounting to a revitalisation of Christian intellectual and imaginative life."
Sayers was a good friend of C. S. Lewis and several of the other Inklings. On some occasions, Sayers joined Lewis at meetings of the Socratic Club. Lewis said he read "The Man Born to Be King" every Easter, but he claimed to be unable to appreciate detective stories. J. R. R. Tolkien read some of the Wimsey novels but scorned the later ones, such as "Gaudy Night".
Duriez won the Clyde S. Kilby Award in 1994 for his research on the Inklings. He has published many articles, books and other written works, and he has spoken to a variety of literary, academic and professional groups. His best-known books include "The C. S. Lewis Handbook" (Monarch Publications/Baker Book House, 1990), the "Tolkien and Middle-earth Handbook" (Monarch Publications/Baker Book House/Angus & Robertson, 1992), "The C. S. Lewis Encyclopedia" (Crossway, 2000/SPCK, 2002), "The Inklings Handbook" (co-authored with David Porter, Azure/Chalice Books, 2001) and "Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings" (Azure/Hidden Spring, 2001).
The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic novel "The Lord of the Rings" (originally published in three volumes 1954–1955). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for "The Lord of the Rings", during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of "The Chronicles of Narnia". Both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" are set against the background of "The Silmarillion", but in a time long after it.
Addison's Walk was a favourite walk of the author C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), who for much of his life was another Fellow of Magdalen College. He regularly frequented Addison's Walk with friends who included Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien. He wrote a poem about the walk which features it by name.
Meskys later wrote, "I started a separate mailing-comments zine for the APA, and changed its name to "Niekas" and started the numbering over again with the June 1962 issue... Since there was no Tolkien fanzine being published I decided to devote "Niekas" to Tolkien and try to run at least one Tolkien related piece in each issue." The fanzine played a prominent role in the early development of Tolkien fandom in the United States. Issue #7 included a letter from C. S. Lewis to Meskys that mentions "The Lord of the Rings".
On first publication in October 1937, "The Hobbit" was met with almost unanimously favourable reviews from publications both in the UK and the US, including "The Times", "Catholic World" and "New York Post". C. S. Lewis, friend of Tolkien (and later author of "The Chronicles of Narnia" between 1949 and 1954), writing in "The Times" reports:
Of Tolkien, Lewis writes in "Surprised by Joy":