Letters to Malcolm and the trouble with Narnia: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their 1949 crisis

Mythlore, Fall-Winter, 2007 by Eric Seddon

IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1949, C.S. Lewis read part of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, still in manuscript, to J.R.R. Tolkien. Expecting enthusiasm from his longtime friend and colleague, he received instead what would remain Tolkien's permanent dismissal of the work. The assessment was blunt and unequivocal: Tolkien deemed the book almost worthless--a carelessly written jumble of unrelated mythologies. He simply detested it (Sayer 312, 313). Although shaken by this terse and unexpected verdict, Lewis later sought the opinion of Roger Lancelyn Green, whose encouragement lead to the ultimate decision to finish the book (Green & Hooper, 241). It went on to become one of Lewis's best sellers. The first of what eventually became The Chronicles of Narnia, it has been continuously in print ever since. Now half a century from its first publication, the place of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seems increasingly remarkable. Like The Lord of the Rings it remains embraced and even celebrated by a society steadily annexed by secular values. Its success both in book sales and, more recently, at the box office have even resulted in the somewhat bizarre spectacle of secular critics writing polemical tracts attempting to marginalize, if not deny, the Christian elements of the plot. (1) Thus Narnia's success has remained somewhat oddly stunning--the greatest testimony to its place in literature being this steady endurance in the public imagination, despite the societal shifts since its first publication.

It can therefore seem, at least superficially, that Tolkien's opinion was not simply wrong, but ridiculously wrong. If ever there was any problem with Narnia, the sales history of the work would indicate that it was entirely Tolkien's. This, in fact, has functioned as the underlying assumption of much subsequent scholarly opinion. Moreover, the crisis of 1949 (2) has been identified as a contributing factor to the waning of the two men's friendship, with Tolkien considered primarily to blame. Professional jealousy, artistic narrowness, and even personal complexity as a man are supposed to have conspired against his appreciation of Narnia. He has been portrayed as envious of Lewis's writing speed, annoyed by his popular success, and offended by Lewis's appropriation of his own ideas and mythic histories. Finally, it has been suggested that there was a disagreement regarding the nature and rigors of mythopoeic writing between the two-that Tolkien slaved over every detail of a long gestating masterwork, while Lewis churned out commercially successful books which might have been deemed less scrupulous in craft (Carpenter, Tolkien 201; Sayer 313). Yet despite some compelling aspects of these theories, they seem unconvincing when considered in the broader context of their friendship and careers.

In his 1988 analysis of the Narnia crisis, Joe R. Christopher presents a closely reasoned argument against many of the assumptions surrounding Tolkien's supposed annoyance at both Lewis's writing speed and the borrowing of his own mythopoeic ideas. Christopher pays particular attention to the intellectual provenance of the theories, tracing many of them back to Humphrey Carpenter's interpretations of Tolkien's feelings. He concludes that "four or five motives which Carpenter attributes to Tolkien probably should be taken more as Carpenter's interpretations than as Tolkien's reasons [for rejecting Narnia]." (Christopher Part I 39). The present paper offers no quarrel with this conclusion, but rather adds the following argument: If Tolkien had been truly disturbed by his friend's prodigious output, a simple chronological listing of Lewis's works begs the question as to why he would draw the line in 1949. The fact is that, in the late 1930s and '40s, Lewis produced books at what can only be described as an astonishing rate, among them Out of the Silent Planet (1938), The Problem of Pain (1940), A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), The Screwtape Letters (1942), Perelandra (1943), That Hideous Strength (1945), The Great Divorce (1946), and Miracles (1947). After all of these, it seems unreasonable to suggest that Tolkien should have gotten upset at the speed of a relatively short children's book.

Christopher's argument also established that Tolkien's dislike of Narnia had multiple stages; that his first negative reaction was against what he perceived as Lewis's 'distorted' or 'sentimentalized' mythology in the opening chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while the second stage encompassed the Narnia series in general, on the basis of it being too allegorical (Green & Hooper 240-41, Christopher Part I 42, 45). As we shall see, this allegorical difficulty is of great importance, not only in terms of genre but in terms of the meaning of Narnia--meaning which would not likely have been lost on Tolkien. These important issues granted, the present argument diverges from Christopher's ultimate opinion that it was an irreconcilable difference of mythopoeic theory that separated the two (Christopher Part II 22-23). For the theory that Narnia's eclectic mythologies somehow irrevocably offended Tolkien fails to explain the full force and endurance of his negative reaction. Even when considering, as Christopher does, the relative difference between the two men's handling of mythologies-Lewis's eclectic and classical, Tolkien's dominantly self-consistent and Nordic--the puzzle remains. For had Tolkien been so easily agitated by mythological eclecticism, Lewis's Space Trilogy would undoubtedly have provoked a similar reaction. Drawing from Plato, Arthurian legend, direct parallels to Christian theology, and a multitude of stylistic and philosophical sources (including William Morris, David Lindsay, Milton, Charles Williams and even Tolkien himself), it was every bit as much a jumble as Narnia. But one needn't stop there. From his very first book of fiction (The Pilgrim's Regress) onward, the magpie tendency is both apparent and constant in Lewis's development as a writer--so much so that it must be considered an essential aspect of his style. Narnia represents no radical departure. And, significantly, in none of Lewis's earlier books of fiction was this eclecticism objected to by Tolkien.