Did CS Lewis influence tolkiens writings in any way??

[River Jordan]

Did Lewis influence Tolkien's writings in anyway? An interesting question, and some good replies so far. Here's another one!

September, 1931
It was a dark and stormy night. Well, windy, at any rate. On the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, two tweed-jacketed, pipe-puffing professors go crunching down the gravel path known as Addison's Walk, under the deeper shadows of a grove of trees.


"Look!" says one of them, a tall, long-faced fellow with the furrowed brow and twinkling eyes of a sage . . . or wizard. He points to a large oak. "There it stands," he says, "its feet in the earth, its head among the stars. A majestic miracle of creation! And what do we call it? A tree." He laughs. "The word falls absurdly short of expressing the thing itself."

"Of course it does," responds the other, a round-faced, slightly balding, bespectacled man in his mid-30s. "Like any word, it's just a verbal invention—a symbol of our own poor devising."

"Exactly," says the first man. "And here's my point: Just as a word is an invention about an object or an idea, so a story can be an invention about Truth."

The other rubs his chin. "I've loved stories since I was a boy," he muses. "You know that, Tollers! Especially stories about heroism and sacrifice, death and resurrection—like the Norse myth of Balder. But when it comes to Christianity . . . well, that's another matter. I simply don't understand how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever He was) 2,000 years ago can help me here and now."

"But don't you see, Jack?" persists his friend. "The Christian story is the greatest story of them all. Because it's the Real Story. The historical event that fulfills the tales and shows us what they mean. The tree itself—not just a verbal invention."

Jack stops and turns. "Are you trying to tell me that in the story of Christ . . . all the other stories have somehow come true?"

A week and a half later, Jack—better known to most of us as C.S. Lewis, teacher, author, defender of the Christian faith, and creator of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia—writes to his friend Arthur Greeves: "I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. My long night talk with Tolkien had a great deal to do with it."

"Tollers" (a nickname used by some of his closest friends) was, of course, J. R. R. Tolkien himself: creator of Middle-earth and author of The Lord of the Rings, the fantasy trilogy hailed by some as "the book of the 20th century." And yes: It was Tolkien who helped Lewis take that final decisive step toward faith in Christ.

Their long night talk about symbols and verbal inventions was just the beginning. Through the years, Lewis and Tolkien were to spend long hours refining their ideas and incorporating them into their literary art. In part, they did this with the help of a group of like-minded Christian friends: The Inklings.

Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child (an Oxford pub); Thursday evenings in Lewis' rooms at Magdalen; year in and year out, the Inklings met, talked, sipped tea, and critiqued one another's manuscripts-in-progress: books like Lewis' That Hideous Strength, Williams' The Place of the Lion, and, of course, The Lord of the Rings. Their goal? To find ways of pouring the steaming, bubbling, heady stuff of the Real Story into the molds of their own invented stories.

Intentions
Just how serious were these writers about the Christian purpose of their "verbal inventions"? Let's ask them.

Lewis made no secret of his intentions. "Supposing," he once asked himself, reflecting on the nature of God, the sufferings of Christ, and other fundamental Christian truths, "that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency. . . ." This, he said, is exactly what he was trying to do in The Chronicles of Narnia.1

As for Tolkien, he would have been shocked and angered to hear Tom refer to his work as pagan.

"The Lord of the Rings," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "is of course a fundamentally religious and Christian work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision."

Humphrey Carpenter, author of Tolkien's authorized biography, takes this claim seriously. Tolkien's writings, he says, are "the work of a profoundly religious man." According to Carpenter, God is essential to everything that happens in The Lord of the Rings. Without Him, Middle-earth couldn't exist.

But be forewarned: Evidences of God's presence are not as obvious in Tolkien's work as in Lewis' more allegorical style of writing. They are there, however—firmly embedded in the tales he insisted on calling "inventions about Truth." In fact, if you know what to look for, you may find them popping up everywhere. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you set out on the quest.

"The Story"
First, stay alert to the importance of story. The Lord of the Rings is actually a story of stories—a vast web of histories, legends, tales, and songs in which every character has a crucial role to play.
"What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven't we?" reflects Sam after a harrowing encounter with their enemies. As a Christian, Tolkien understood that we've been in a tale, too. Like the adventure of his hobbits, he saw the adventure of our lives as part of a story that begins "once upon a time" and moves toward its eventual "ever after"—a tale full of meaning and purpose, composed by the grandest Author of all.
The Power of Sin
You'll also want to keep an eye on Gollum, the pitiful, wretched creature who discovered the great Ring—his "Precious"—and kept it for many years in dark places under the earth. So long did he possess and cherish the sinister talisman that he has become the possessed. That's because Tolkien's Ring is an image of the unwholesome, perverting power of evil and self-serving sin—a progressive, growing, encroaching power that starts small and ends big. The apostle James described it like this: "Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death" (James 1:14-15).
Good out of Evil
Notice, too, that Middle-earth is full of battles and conflicts—images of the spiritual war in which we are engaged as Christians: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world" (Ephesians 6:12). We're not talking generic good vs. evil here. The evil in Tolkien's universe is personal. It takes shape as an Enemy who relentlessly hounds and pursues his prey with ill intent:

Small Hands
Finally, take a close look at the members of the Fellowship of the Ring as they go trekking across the movie screen. Ask yourself which one looks the most like an epic hero. Is it the handsome, mysterious, swashbuckling Aragorn? Keen-sighted, swift-footed Legolas? Hard-fisted Gimli? Strong, dauntless Boromir? Wise and aged Gandalf?

Each is a hero in his own way, of course. And yet not one of them is chosen to carry the perilous Ring into the heart of Mordor. Instead, it's a hobbit—a boyish-looking halfling—who bears the burden of the world to its final destination.

This idea—that God uses small hands to accomplish great deeds—could almost be called the heart and soul of The Lord of the Rings. It's Moses and Pharaoh, David and Goliath, Gideon and the Midianites all over again. But the mission of Frodo and Sam isn't just your typical underdog story. It's something much more. In a way, it's a desperately needed reminder that God's ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8)—that when the power of evil confronts us with overwhelming odds on its side, the answer is not to fight fire with fire, but to look for deliverance in unexpected places. Hope and salvation, Tolkien seems to say, often arise in small, unnoticed corners. Like a hobbit-hole in the Shire.

Or a manger in a Palestinian stable.
Looking . . .
A late night in the spring of the year. Lewis' sitting room is strewn with papers, books, and empty teacups. The other Inklings have gone. Jack yawns and stretches.

"Tollers," he says as Tolkien gets up to leave, "there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves."

And so they did.

But with what results? When we drink from the cup of their "verbal inventions" is it really the Living Water we imbibe? Or did my friend Tom get it right—are their tales merely exercises in "pagan" imaginative art?

You've seen what they had to say. Now you'll have to decide for yourself . . . when you go looking for God in The Lord of the Rings at a theater—or bookstore—near you.

Jim Ware is crazy about Celtic music. In fact, he plays the guitar and the hammered dulcimer, and he's likely to show up wherever there's an opportunity to play a few jigs and reels! But writing is his real passion. Jim is the author of three novels for children, as well as the co-author (with Kurt Bruner) of Finding God in the Lord of the Rings. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, Joni, and their six kids.

From "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's To Be Said," in Of Other Worlds; ed. Walter Hooper, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1966.
Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1977; p. 98.
Quote from: http://www.fotf.org/pplace/pi/lotr/A0018586.cfm

As you can see, Tolkien and Lewis greatly influenced each other in their lives as well as their writings!

Your friendly neighbourhood youth pastor,
Chris Jordan http://www.angelfire.com/bc/YMF