The Friendship of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

What is International Inklings Day?

I’m excited to launch my first ever Substack newsletter! This one will be solely dedicated to C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ll be revisiting some old material from my blog and creating fresh material for this new format. And of course there will be brand new material as well - y’all know I can talk about these two for days! 

And there is no other first post I could do, but one about International Inklings Day and the celebration of Lewis’ and Tolkien’s friendship. I think it makes for a great introduction about their friendship and why I adore them so much. I’m looking forward to sharing much more and I hope you’ll join the fun. 

International Inklings Day all started in August 2014. I was reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship for the then monthly Inklings Series. These two pages caught my eye:

The idea didn’t come to me right then, but here’s what I wrote in my original discussion of the book:

“First off, I think there should be an official holiday on May 11th (1926). This was the day Tolkien and Lewis first met. All I’m saying is there could be some epic Middle Earth and Narnia mashup shenanigans happening. Or maybe we can all have a pint for the boys :). If these two weren’t a part of each others lives, we wouldn’t have LOTR or Narnia. What a dark and dreary world that would be.”

This date was clearly still on my mind the next year because it was a few weeks after this Facebook post (from my since deleted personal FB page) that I had the first Inklings Week (in the middle of July because I didn’t want to wait until the following May).

Eight years later and I’m still not tired of sharing this story.

“Friendship makes prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.” Cicero

On May 11, 1926, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis both attended English tea for the Oxford English faculty at Merton College and met for the first time. This began a 40 year friendship that would inspire generations to come and also help to produce some of literature’s greatest masterpieces.

Yet, truth be told, it wasn’t friendship at first sight. After that first meeting, Lewis commented (I believe jokingly!) about Tolkien: “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” He thought him rather opinionated, but this was more due to the fact that at the time Lewis was an atheist and Tolkien was a strong Roman Catholic. As Diana Pavlac Glyer explained in Bandersnatch (which really is an excellent book and you should all read it!):

“It got worse. As Lewis and Tolkien got to know each other, it became clear that they had a number of serious disagreements. They had different interests and personalities. They came from different religious traditions. And they had different academic specialties. Lewis was an expert in literature and philosophy; Tolkien was a philologist, an expert in languages. He loved Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon. Lewis said that meeting Tolkien triggered two of his childhood prejudices. He explains, “At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a [Catholic], and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.”

Soon after this initial meeting, the faculty disagreed on required courses for English students and Lewis and Tolkien found themselves on opposite sides of the debate. So Tolkien decided that in order to win people over to his curriculum, he would gather the faculty together to bring about love for mythology and ancient languages. This turned out to be a genius move. Once again, quoting Bandersnatch:

“Lewis and Tolkien discovered they had significant common ground. They gravitated towards each other because they shared an interest in what they called “northernness,” the vast skies, icy landscapes, and heroic tempers of the ancient Vikings. As they talked together, Lewis was slowly won over to Tolkien’s view of the English curriculum. And as they worked side by side, they forged a solid friendship. E. L. Edmonds, a student at Oxford, remembers, “It was very obvious that [Lewis and Tolkien] were great friends—indeed, they were like two young bear cubs sometimes, just happily quipping with one another.”

Along with encouraging and supporting Lewis’ literary endeavors, Tolkien would go on to play a significant role in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity (especially on the night of September 19, 1931, where, along with Hugo Dyson, the three men spent hours discussing life and faith and Lewis later said this was his final push for Christianity) and Lewis would be Tolkien’s biggest supporter and encourager in finishing Lord of the Rings and other works. Their friendship was a staple in each other’s lives and, while, in later years the friendship did shift, it never lost its meaning.

In Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of a Friendship by Colin Duriez, we see that “with C.S. Lewis’ death, it was a “wound [Tolkien] knew he would not lose, as one loses a falling lead.” 

Even years after Lewis’ death Tolkien wrote about Lewis: “The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him [did I] ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby.”

And because there are so many unique facts connecting the two, here are a few enjoyable fun facts:

• Lewis’ character, Elwin Ransom, in Out of the Silent Planet, resembles Tolkien quite a bit. Elwin means “elf-friend” and the character is a Cambridge philologist who has a love for languages.

• The Professor in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was also inspired by Tolkien.

• Treebeard was inspired by C.S. Lewis.

• They each have fabulous names: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Clive Staples Lewis.

• They both lost their moms at a young age.

• Tolkien’s dad died when he was a toddler and Lewis’ Dad withdrew and sent Lewis to a boarding school after his mother’s death.

• They both fought in WWI.

• In 1961, Lewis nominated Tolkien for the Nobel Peace Prize in literature (which he totally should have won)

• Both Humphrey Carpenter (Tolkien’s official biographer) and Edith Tolkien (speaking with scholar Clyde S. Kilby) stated that C.S. Lewis actually wrote Tolkien’s obituary, which was published the day after his death (9/2/73) in The Times.

“My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends and old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs – or else sitting up till the small hours in someone’s college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer tea and pipes.” C.S. Lewis

I hope y’all enjoyed this brief look at Tolkien and Lewis’ friendship! Have you read about them before? Who has greatly encouraged and inspired you in your life?

From Diana Glyer’s Bandersnatch. 

© 2022 Jamie Lapeyrolerie