The real fellowship of the ring

If many of Lewis' books remain in print, it is largely as a byproduct of the continued success of "The Chronicles of Narnia," the seven-volume cycle that began in 1950 with "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and continued at more or less yearly intervals until "The Last Battle" appeared in 1956. Though the Christian themes are out in the open, the sheer charm of the books seems to disarm all readers -- all except Tolkien, who saw them as heavy-handed and inconsistent.

Some of Tolkien's attitude may have been grounded in chagrin. The Narnia books marched out of Lewis' brain and into bookstores with assembly-line efficiency; "The Lord of the Rings," meanwhile, wallowed for over a decade in dithering and endless rewrites. Lewis was unswervingly supportive of Tolkien during the long gestation, but the other Inklings could be brutal: Dyson, for one, was known to snarl, "Oh fuck, not another elf!" as Tolkien read another section of the epic in his usual rapid-fire mumble.

Tolkien's chief objections, however, were those of a craftsman. He considered "The Lord of the Rings" a Christian work, but its religious themes were carefully buried in the story. (Even die-hard Lewis fans may be tempted to groan when, in the first Narnia book, Aslan sacrifices himself to redeem the human children.) Tolkien presented Middle-earth as a sort of prehistoric Europe, employing elements from the Icelandic sagas, "Beowulf" and the Finnish "Kalevala" as though they were half-understood memories of the events described in "The Lord of the Rings." But Tolkien's systematic approach used folklore from northern Europe. The Narnia book, in which the Germanic figure of Santa Claus rubbed elbows with Greco-Roman divinities, struck him as simply lazy and undisciplined.

This drove something of a wedge into Tolkien and Lewis' friendship, and they were not nearly as close in their later years. But when "The Lord of the Rings" was finally ready for publication in three hefty volumes, Lewis understood that it was a major work. He put any sense of personal injury aside and placed his considerable reputation on the line to sing its praises. The mutual support that began with that argument on Addison's Walk was still going strong (at least on one side of the equation).

It was only natural that literary gamesmanship would crop up in each man's work. Lewis made the first move by using Tolkien as the model for John Ransom, the philologist hero of the Space Trilogy. Tolkien steadfastly denied any connection with Ransom beyond choice of profession and "some of my opinions and ideas Lewisified." In this he has backup from Lewis biographer A.N. Wilson, who calls the hero "fairly unlike" Tolkien. Readers may want to take these denials with a few grains of salt.

In "Out of the Silent Planet," Ransom finds himself confronted by terrifying monsters on the red planet Malacandra (aka Mars), but immediately lays plans for a grammar as soon as he discovers the creatures use language. "If you are not yourself a philologist," Lewis explains, "I'm afraid you must take on trust the prodigious emotional consequences of this realization on Ransom's mind ... The love of knowledge is a kind of madness." In "That Hideous Strength," the final book of the Space Trilogy, Lewis gives Ransom a speech that might have been lifted whole from one of Tolkien's letters:

"However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren books: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and returned to Britain across the great ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all."

Tolkien repaid the favor in "The Lord of the Rings" by giving some of Lewis' mannerisms to Treebeard, the ligneous leader of the tree-like Ents -- chiefly his booming voice and constant throat-clearing. And it's not too far a stretch to find a faint dig at Lewis' nonstop literary productivity when Tolkien has Treebeard describe Entish as "a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it unless it is worth taking a long time to say."

Shortly after Lewis died, in November 1963, Tolkien wrote to his daughter: "So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man my age -- like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots." By then, both men had definitively answered any self-doubts about their ability to succeed as writers. Tolkien, in fact, was about to become an international celebrity as the paperback edition of "The Lord of the Rings" caught on with college students. When he died in 1973, the Oxford don was a campus favorite alongside Hermann Hesse and Carlos Castaneda. It hardly needs to be pointed out that his epic has only grown in popularity over the decades, withstanding the sneers of critics, the songwriting of Led Zeppelin, the kitsch-sodden calendar art of the Brothers Hildebrandt, the rise of legions of subpar imitators, and animated films from Ralph Bakshi and Rankin-Bass that can still astonish viewers with their sheer awfulness.

The long-overdue arrival of a proper film adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings," courtesy of Peter Jackson, gives this story a fitting coda. A film version of the first of the Narnia books, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," will soon go into production in New Zealand. The enterprise was finally able to go forward because of the huge success of Jackson's "Lord of the Rings," and will use some of the same production and design people, including the Weta special-effects shop that helped bring Middle-earth to earth.

The repercussions of that 1931 conversation along the River Cherwell are still being felt. Even now, it seems, Tolkien and Lewis are helping each other out.

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