On a warm September night in 1931, three men went for an after-dinner walk on the grounds of Magdalen College, part of Oxford University. They took a stroll on Addison’s Walk, a beautiful tree-shaded path along the River Cherwell, and got into an argument that lasted into the wee hours of the morning — and left a lasting mark on world literature.
At the time, only one of the men had any kind of reputation: Henry Victor Dyson, a bon vivant scholar who had shared tables and bandied words with the likes of T.E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. His two companions were little-known Oxford academics with a shared taste for Icelandic sagas, Anglo-Saxon verse and the austere cultural mystique of “the North.” Few people remember Dyson now, while millions celebrate the names of his companions: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Yet the works that made their reputations — “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” for Tolkien, “The Chronicles of Narnia” for Lewis — were profoundly shaped by that night-long argument and the bond it cemented. It’s possible that Tolkien’s Middle-earth would have remained entirely a private obsession, and quite likely that Lewis would never have found the gateway to Narnia.
“Lovers seek for privacy,” Lewis wrote in “The Four Loves” (1960). “Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not.” Lewis and Tolkien quickly found this cozy solitude after they met in 1926, during a gathering of the English faculty at Merton College. Both men had fought in World War I, and come back scarred by its industrial savagery. They had seen the worst the 20th century had to offer — up to that point, anyway — and took paradoxical comfort in studying blood-soaked Viking Age stories of ambiguous heroes and gods battling monsters and the outer darkness, tales short on the milk of human kindness but long on sardonic humor. (“Broad spears are becoming fashionable nowadays,” a character remarks in “Grettir’s Saga,” just after being pierced with one.)
In the pitiless Old Norse universe, gods and their human allies face inevitable defeat, but there is no thought of surrender or negotiation with the monsters besieging them. The brave and the cowardly all come to the same end — what then must we do? “It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination,” Tolkien explained in his famous 1936 lecture on “Beowulf,” “that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the center, gave them victory but no honor, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage.” In the struggle against evil, there is no shame in defeat — only in not fighting.
The solution seems to have made a bigger impact on Tolkien’s writing than on Lewis’. There is an unmistakable Icelandic chill in the air when Aragorn, faced with a catastrophic loss in “The Lord of the Rings,” asks what hope is left, then answers his own question: “We must do without hope. At least we may yet be avenged.”
Lewis approached “the North” from the literary side, while Tolkien was a philologist immersed in the sound and history of languages. He could be spiky and opinionated: After their initial meeting, Lewis called him “a smooth, pale fluent little chap — no harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” But by the next year, Tolkien had invited him to join a group known as the Coalbiters, who were devoted to reading the Icelandic sagas in the original Old Norse. (The name was a play on “kolbitars,” an old Icelandic term for tale-swappers who sat so close to the communal fire that they were almost literally biting the coals.)
Every Thursday evening the friends would gather by the fireplace, slippers on their feet and drinks at their elbows, to hear “The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki” or “The Saga of the Volsungs” or whatever epic was under study. The Coalbiters faded in the early 1930s, to be replaced by the Inklings, an informal group that lasted over the next three decades, with Tolkien and Lewis as its key members. (Much more about them can be found in such books as Humphrey Carpenter’s “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography”and Colin Duriez’s new “Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Story of a Friendship.”)
At the time of their meeting, both men were uneasy about their literary prospects. Tolkien’s curriculum vitae consisted of a 1925 translation of the important Middle English poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” along with a 1929 essay on “Ancrene Wisse,” a 13th century manuscript offering advice for “anchoresses,” or female monks, and “Hali Meidhad,” a medieval tract praising virginity. His mind was awash in anxiety over half-completed and languishing projects; “Leaf by Niggle,” his 1939 tale of a painter who can never find time to complete an ambitious work, is accepted by Tolkien scholars as a byproduct of these worries.
Lewis, for his part, had published two books of the type automatically described as “slim volumes of verse” — no further explanation necessary. He had yet to find his voice as a writer, let alone anything worthwhile to say with it. “From the age of 16 onwards,” he wrote in a letter to his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves, “I had one single ambition, in which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole contentment; and I recognise myself as having unmistakeably failed in it.”
When he got his first look at Tolkien’s fiction — an early run at the love story of Beren and Luthien, a cornerstone of Middle-earth’s invented mythology and and a tale with tremendous personal associations for Tolkien — Lewis recognized a man who could spend long years grinding away at a single story, but who also had his own voice and used many of the pagan source materials Lewis loved. To his lasting credit, Lewis reacted to this discovery not with envy or jealousy, but with spontaneous and generous delight.
On that fateful night in 1931, Lewis was in the midst of a fretful return to religious faith. Raised as an Irish Protestant, he had become an agnostic as a teenager. Though he came back to accepting the idea of a divine presence in 1929, he continued to resist Christianity. It remained for Dyson, a High Anglican, and Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, to push him over the threshold — though it literally took them all night. As they marched back and forth along Addison’s Walk, Tolkien argued for the literal and mythological truth of the Resurrection of Christ.
By all accounts, the key moment came when Lewis declared that myths are lies, albeit “lies breathed through silver.” Tolkien replied, “No, they are not,” and demanded to know why Lewis could accept Icelandic sagas as vehicles of truth while demanding that the Gospels meet some higher standard. Hours past midnight, Tolkien finally went home to bed, leaving Dyson to carry on the campaign. Tolkien’s argument — that the Resurrection was the truest of all stories, with God as its poet — may not sound particularly convincing to nonbelievers (nor indeed to some Christians), but to a man committed to the idea of myth as the only way to express higher truths, it was irresistible. Two weeks later, Lewis told a friend he had once again fully embraced Christianity: “My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”
The effect on Lewis was explosive. Beginning in 1933 with “The Pilgrim’s Regress,” Lewis produced a torrent of books, essays, novels and radio talks, all works of Christian apologetics or stories with obvious spiritual preoccupations. Even as he churned out these works, Lewis prodded Tolkien to pull together and complete his stories of Middle-earth — the private universe that had preoccupied him for most of his life. Thanks to that ceaseless, friendly prodding, Tolkien published “The Hobbit” to great acclaim in 1937. The prodding continued during the long, fitful gestation of its outsized sequel, “The Lord of the Rings,” which finally saw the light of print in the mid-1950s. “The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood but sheer encouragement,” Tolkien recalled. “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.”
