A Famous Friendship: The Fellowship of the King
By N.J. Lund
Did you know that
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were once good friends?
After he became a Christian, Lewis said that it was the testimony of Tolkien
and another Christian, Hugo Dyson, which led to his conversion. Their shared faith in Jesus and their common love
for great literature led to a famous friendship. Soon
they started meeting together at least once a week, and later with other Christian
writers, both for fellowship and to discuss their writing projects. They called their group the “Inklings.”
In their meetings they would take turns reading whatever they were
working on, and ask for criticism and feedback. Two
of his earlier books which Lewis shared with Tolkien were The Pligrim's Regress, published
in 1933, and The Screwtape Letters (which he dedicated to Tolkien), first published in
1942.
Until he met Lewis, whom he called "Jack," Tolkien had considered his own
writing projects to be no more than a "private hobby." At first Jack
was the only other person who knew about Tolkien's projects. Tolkien, whom
Lewis called "Tollers," first introduced Lewis to an early draft
of The Silmarillion in the early 1930s, shortly after Jack's conversion.
He read it to him out loud. Lewis loved it, and urged him to
finish it and get it published. A little later Tolkien began reading
chapters from his next book, The Hobbit. With Jack's urging and encouragement,
Tolkien was successful in getting the Hobbit published in 1937. Tolkien later
said that he owed Lewis an "unpayable debt" for his "sheer
encouragement." Tolkien explained: "He (C. S. Lewis) 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."
One reason why the books of Tolkien and Lewis are so popular today is because they speak
to a deep hunger in the human heart, a hunger for truth and significance. We live in a materialistic age which denies the
reality of heaven and hell, of sin and moral responsibility.
Lewis and Tolkien were successful in capturing and describing those
lost realities. Both writers described life as
a cosmic battle between good and evil, in which the smallest character has a critical part
to play, with eternal consequences.
Both writers believed that fiction should not be a meaningless escape from reality. They wrote the kind of books in which the
reader identifies with the moral and spiritual struggles of the characters. The heroic decisions of humble, lovable characters,
encourages us in our struggles in our own worlds. Reading
their works involves our "hearts," as well as our minds. When Tolkien's
The stories of Lewis and Tolkien remind us of the truth that no one is an island. All of us are connected in a much bigger story of
which God is the Author. They also remind us
that this world isn’t our final home. We’re
on a quest for something which is eternal and good. As
Lewis said: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can
satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world… I must
keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after
death… I must make it the main object of my life to press on to that other country
and to help others to do the same.”