In recent decades, Tolkien and Lewis have attracted a formidable cohort of scholars and critics. To review two additions to their bibliographies is to notice how far things have come since the days when fashionable criticasters could airily dismiss them as embarrassments to the profession. The two books are Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway and C. S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin. These authors differ considerably in their outlooks and their aims. What unites them is the high quality of their scholarship.
Ordway examines Tolkien’s life as a Roman Catholic, so zealously that at times the book feels like an account of Roman Catholicism for which Tolkien is the vehicle. Yet Catholicism played a central part in Tolkien’s life, and Ordway enriches the great man’s story with a wealth of valuable detail. Many know that Tolkien triumphed over a mind-boggling amount of suffering. The chapters of his life ring out like an epic catalog: the sad arc from South Africa to Birmingham, with his father’s death defining Tolkien’s early childhood; his mother’s conversion to the Church of Rome; her diabetic martyrdom in isolation from her Protestant family; the saving intervention of the Orations and the charismatic stamp left on them by two saints, Philip Neri and John Henry Newman; the Oxford degree in English Language and Literature; the delayed marriage to Edith Bratt; the Front Line and trench fever; the academic rise; the growing family; C. S. Lewis and the Inklings; the creation of Middle-earth: here we find the facts and circumstances laid out in a fresh light, bound together by a sympathetic narrative, and enhanced by a sumptuous photo gallery.
With two major monographs, Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages (2021), and Tolkien’s Faith (2023), Ordway has taken the field by storm. What these works share is their superb scholarship, denseness combined with clarity, and an unusual emphasis on demarcation. The title of Tolkien’s Modern Reading is carefully parsed: “By ‘Tolkien’s modern reading,’ I mean works of fiction, poetry, and drama published after 1850, in English that we know for certain Tolkien read, considering only their possible role as sources for and influences upon his Middle-earth writings, not their bearing upon his other publications.” In Tolkien’s Faith, Ordway is likewise prescriptive:
This book is a spiritual biography: it focuses, necessarily, on his faith. Other events come into my account only insofar as they are relevant to the consideration of his religious life. The relative lack of detail given to matters such as his teaching, his scholarship, and his linguistic work is not a reflection of their importance but simply a necessary feature of this study’s parameters. … It is also a spiritual biography: it does not include an extended treatment or analysis of his writings, not even from the spiritual point of view.
It is consequential, this resolute framing of things. In Tolkien’s Modern Reading, Ordway assigns the arbitrary date of 1850 to the keyword modern. Change the date and you get a very different study. Further, she omits literary criticism altogether. After the year 1850, for example, one encounters the literary lectures of John Henry Newman, not to mention Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and T. S. Eliot: the critical heralds and literary conduits of modernity. The opening page of Arnold’s 1853 Preface changed everything: “The dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced.” It is a drop so pungent as to tincture an ocean. Did Tolkien know it? Rather, let us ask, how could Tolkien not have known it?
In the case of Tolkien’s Faith, Ordway states that extended literary analysis lies outside her scope. And yet, she proves skillful at the game of literary interpretation. Even her passing comments have weight and substance, as when she juxtaposes the Inklings against the Bloomsbury group. Even so, her deeper purpose may not dawn on us until we have scrutinized how she uses her boundaries. For when all is said and done, Ordway, through the revered figure of Tolkien, seeks to recast the work of literary criticism, per se, as a religious matter. Her words are not to be taken lightly: “Once we have a secure grasp of his spiritual identity, we will be able to gain a richer, deeper, more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of his writings—and their fundamental but implicit religious dimension.”
Tolkien reaches far back in time to escape modernist maladies, and to outflank Arnold’s “ignorant armies that clash by night.”
Ordway’s book is more than a bold intervention in the field. It is an act of revisionism that affirms the church’s place as the nurse of the literary arts. This project has its merits and its dangers. Its merits include the fresh light it casts on Tolkien’s life and work, the invaluable corrective offered by its religious literacy, and the modeling of scholarly standards. It is no accident that the author’s meticulous labors cohere with the scholarly exhortation of Pope Pius XII: “to make better known the mentality of the ancient writers, as well as their manner and art of reasoning, narrating, and writing.” As Ordway notes, Pius’s words would have appealed to Tolkien, England’s greatest Beowulf scholar. But Pius’s guidelines apply to modern writers as well. Certainly, they support and justify Ordway’s biography.
Given that Ordway thinks of Tolkien as “the grandson Newman never had,” it is ironic that The Idea of a University and its attendant lectures can help us grasp the dangers of her approach. Newman’s defense of literature has lost none of its unsettling power to push back equally against encroachments by church and state. Newman saw the work of culture and university education as holding the middle ground. Through this via media or “radical middle,” as I have called it, he affirmed the bond between church and culture, while granting the relatively autonomous nature of literature and art. As a scholar and critic, Newman practiced an organic Eurocentrism and did not seek to contain the history of literature and art within artificial boundaries, whether imposed by atheists or by theocrats. In effect, then, Newman spurned a narrow perspective, and resisted self-imposed Christian exile from culture.
So while I admire Ordway’s work, it invites criticism from a more literary standpoint. On the literary level, Ordway agrees with Tom Shippey that Tolkien was not a “one-off,” an isolated genius ignoring contemporary events with the indifference of a diamond cutting through steel. Shippey placed Tolkien in a group of “‘traumatized authors,’” whom he characterized as “writing fantasy, but voicing in that fantasy the most pressing … issues of the whole monstrous twentieth century—questions of industrialized warfare, the origin of evil, the nature of humanity.” He listed Tolkien’s congeners accordingly: “Orwell and William Golding, Vonnegut, T. H. White, C. S. Lewis, and even Ursula Le Guin.”
This judgment has the virtue of being a literary judgment, not a judgment prejudiced by religion, but it fails in the end to do Tolkien justice as an author. For the other writers under consideration, the trauma of modernity is unshakable, the exception being Lewis’s best novel, Till We Have Faces, which is indebted to Tolkien’s mythopoeia. (Le Guin wrote young adult fiction, and Narnia is best approached as children’s literature.) To be sure, “industrialized warfare, the origin of evil, the nature of humanity” cast their gloomy shadows on Middle-earth. But they do not define our primary experience as readers. Billy Pilgrim is permanently “unstuck in time.” Frodo Baggins is not. Something else is going on, something that has to do with Tolkien’s Christian understanding of fantasy, and with the linguistic power or vision behind that understanding.
One thing Tolkien does share with the others is a sense of the mutual relations among great authors. This sense of the literary past is both intensive and extensive. It cannot be contained without maiming the mystical body of literature—what Eliot called “the sacred wood.” To suggest that Tolkien lacked this sense of the past would be incredible. The question is, what did it mean to him? For now, let me say that I find a characteristic link between Tolkien’s deeply rooted stubbornness and his Catholicism.
Ordway recounts a number of related stories. Tolkien, like a successful Gatsby, won Edith back after she became engaged to another. He defied intense social pressure to enlist in order to complete his Oxford degree, before “bolting” into the army. He succeeded as a Catholic at overwhelmingly Protestant Oxford. He delayed the publication of The Lord of the Rings by several years, by “insisting that his epic be issued alongside another huge and unusual work (still incomplete), The Silmarillion.” He gave the responses “loudly in Latin” after the liturgy changed to English. If we turn to his astonishing lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” we find him standing up to Shakespeare, who gets mentioned by name, and to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who does not. He reaches far back in time to escape modernist maladies, and to outflank Arnold’s “ignorant armies that clash by night.” His work is too abundantly creative, and his emotional power too healthy, to be closely identified with trauma. For most of his life, he was a devout Catholic who gave courageous witness to his faith. But he was not a Christian apologist on the scale of Lewis or Chesterton. He remains the most singular of major English authors. The closest parallels are Milton and G. M. Hopkins.
Like Ordway, Simon Horobin makes exemplary use of primary sources: letters, diaries, interviews, memoirs, and original literature. C. S. Lewis’s Oxford is not quite the major contribution that Ordway’s is, but its atmosphere is more urbane, and it features some fine sallies of dry humor. The author comments about Jack and his wife, Joy: “In [the 1993 film Shadowlands] they set out in search of the Golden Valley in Herefordshire, the subject of a painting on the wall of Lewis’s study. In reality, we have seen that Lewis’s walls were adorned with Renaissance allegories, which would have made a more challenging basis for a honeymoon trip.” The excellent joke is that the erotic prints on Lewis’s wall were Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way, and Bronzino’s An Allegory of Venus and Cupid.
Like Tolkien, Lewis mastered the English language to get the upper hand.
Where Tolkien’s faith is the vehicle of Ordway’s work, the “fabled dreaming spires” of Oxford serve Horobin’s purposes. This method carries the obvious risk of mimicking the ubiquitous Oxford tour guide. True, the story of Lewis’s conversion stroll on Addison’s Walk, in September 1931, in the company of Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, has been told many times. But there is plenty of Oxford and plenty of Lewis to go around. Narnia figures prominently among the local landscapes, buildings, halls, rooms, and byways, but Horobin is a loremaster who ranges widely through Lewis’s walks and works. Imagine if you will the following scene at University College, as the young Lewis rose to his feet for “Collections,” “walking the length of the hall to the high table, where the master sat, accompanied by senior college officers. … The master then pronounced upon [his] performance and future prospects.” Lewis naturally had something to say on the subject of Collections, telling his brother it was “the “worst relict of barbarism which yet hangs about the University.” Relict, not relic. Like Tolkien, or James Joyce, for that matter, Lewis mastered the English language to get the upper hand.
C. S. Lewis’s Oxford comprises nine chapters sprinkled with lively images and supplemented by yet another sumptuous photo gallery. The chapter titles capture the book’s trajectory: “University College,” “Magdalene College,” “Headington,” “Eagle and Child,” “Eastgate Hotel,” “Somerville College,” “St Mary’s Passage,” “Cambridge,” “Global Lewis.” I have space to comment on only a few. “Magdalene College” initiates us into Lewis’s life as a rising academic. We learn about the tutoring system and its rituals, and about Lewis’s “commitment to the ideal of an Oxford don, for whom the social and pastoral aspects of the tutor-pupil relationship were of vital importance.” In regards to intellectual culture, we are ushered into the rounds of lecturing and “clubbing,” a form of scholarly fraternization that enabled Lewis and Tolkien to get to know each other. Their first meeting dates from a 1926 English faculty meeting that addressed syllabus reform, but it was the clubbing calendar that joined them in the company of kindred spirits.
The “Headington” chapter introduces the tricky matter of Lewis and Mrs. Moore. Horobin leaves little doubt that “the two were in a relationship.” The official story was that Mrs. Moore’s son, Paddy, having died in the war, left his friend Lewis to honor their pact by looking after his maternal parent, not unlike the Beloved Disciple. Certainly, Lewis’s undergraduate housing arrangements were highly irregular, as he shepherded Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen from house to house in the suburbs of Headington and Risinghurst. The migrations ended in 1930, when Lewis purchased the Kilns with money from his father’s estate. One of the more interesting sets of facts to emerge from the book is that Moore died in January 1951, and that Joy Davidman first stayed at the Kilns in December 1952. As Horobin coolly observes, “Lewis’s relationship with Joy clearly stimulated his creativity.” Tolkien scowled at Lewis’s “very strange marriage.” But we should bear in mind another remark by Tolkien, as quoted by Ordway: “Only one’s guardian Angel, or indeed God himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and an author’s works.” Sincere and complex, Lewis turns out to be a mere Christian genius, not a saint.
In his chapters “Eagle and Child” and “Eastgate Hotel,” Horobin pursues the footsteps of the Inklings. He distills their atmosphere to its essence, the rough give-and-take, the drama of character interaction, the affection, and the antagonisms. He charts the extended history of the group and identifies its shuffling cast of major and minor characters. In regards to the eventual weakening of ties between Tolkien and Lewis, I disagree with him, and with Ordway as well, since on this point Horobin follows her lead. Against their drive to smooth things over, I argue that we should squarely face up to the unhappy rift that developed between the two men. Tolkien disliked the Narnia stories because their “mixing of mythologies” jarred against his law that fantasy should express “the inner consistency of reality.” Lewis achieved this consistency in Till We Have Faces. In the world of Narnia, he did not. It is relevant that Tolkien’s demand for “inner consistency” harkens back to the pre-Socratic problem of the Many and the One. It is yet more relevant that this problem stands behind the long literary tradition to which Lewis and Tolkien belong, and by which they shall ultimately be judged as writers.
