Inside a remarkable friendship

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, December 3rd.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: recovering moral and spiritual truths.

EICHER: In the years leading up to World War II, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis sensed the threat from the dangerous ideologies gaining influence over the world. The friends and colleagues set about fighting against it through writing fiction.

MAST: Joseph Loconte’s new book explores their friendship and the way it influenced what they wrote, and in turn, the world. He is the author of The War for Middle Earth and he joins us to talk about it.

Joseph, good morning.

LOCONTE: Lindsay, it's great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

MAST: Tolkien and Lewis are often lumped together, but in one sentence, what would you say about how they were profoundly different from one another?

LOCONTE: That's a fabulous question. I would say that Tolkien was much more concerned in his imaginative life. He wanted to create these worlds with a very deep, rich history, a real antiquity, as he said in one of his lectures in Beowulf, “a deep antiquity of sorrow” is so much of the backdrop of the worlds that he's creating. And C.S. Lewis is not as interested in that. And I think part of the reason is he does want to get to his main message—his deeply Christian evangelistic message—much quicker, I think, in his works. And Tolkien is more restrained, you might say, more modest about that. I think that's one of the significant differences in that way, how they approach their imaginative works.

MAST: What do you find that each man admired most in the other that readers today maybe tend to overlook or don't know about?

LOCONTE: Yeah, that's another great question, which I have not been asked before, what they admired about each other because they encouraged one another in their writings, as you know. And Lewis really saw the potential in Tolkien to take these stories that he was working with, these short stories—The Fall of Gondolin, The Hobbit itself when he had the draft in 1933—and he really encourages Tolkien that he is on to something. He is recreating or redesigning or reimagining the heroic ideal and reinventing it for the modern mind. And I think Lewis saw the potential in Tolkien to do that. And that was just remarkable. I think for Tolkien, he really encouraged Lewis, when he first started thinking about his own imaginative fiction, to introduce people to the Christian story. And that was Out of the Silent Planet. Tolkien helps Lewis to find a publisher. And I think what Tolkien sees in Lewis is: this man understands the Christian faith at a profound level, a deep level, and he's going to use the genre of fiction, science fiction, epic, to communicate that message. And Tolkien was a huge supporter of that effort.

MAST: I'm curious about if there's anything, maybe something you uncovered in your research that maybe most changed your view of either man, something you didn't know or weren't expecting.

LOCONTE: I think that the thing that has one of the most profound effects of working on this book on me personally was to see how these men pursued their callings as Christian authors and scholars at a moment of civilizational crisis. From 1939 really to 1945, the survival of Great Britain, the survival of Western civilization is an open question because of Nazism, Communism, scientism, totalitarianism, and these men are getting on with their callings in the midst of that. They are just determined to push back, to create this beach head of resistance against the ideological madness that they are awash in. And to me, that's an example of cultural leadership at a moment of cultural crisis that we rarely see nowadays, but we certainly saw it there at Oxford with these two men.

MAST: I'm curious what's a question about either their friendship or their work that scholars still debate? So much is written about them, so what is out there that is still being debated, and where would you land on whatever that is?

LOCONTE: I guess one of the debates is: how much did Lewis affect Tolkien? How much did Tolkien affect Lewis? That's an ongoing debate because you have these letters between them, or letters that they're writing to others, which will suggest sometimes that, well, Lewis didn't have any effect on Tolkien, or Tolkien didn't have any effect on Lewis. But you know when you really unpack their lives, their correspondence, their relationship, their meeting together in the Inklings—this group of fellow Christian authors every week right through World War Two—the meetings that Tolkien and Lewis had, regular lunches there at Oxford, I think we have to really conclude that neither man would have produced the works that they did without the other. At the end of the day, I think you have to come to that conclusion. And Tolkien says explicitly, he never would have finished The Lord of the Rings without Lewis's encouragement. He read virtually every chapter of The Lord of the Rings out loud to C.S. Lewis, who would respond with encouragement or suggested critique. That's a pretty amazing thing to say without that profound encouragement from Lewis. “Give me more, Tollers,” he would say, “Give me more.” And of course, Tolkien's influence on Lewis is profound. We know the relationship they had together, the famous conversation on Addison's walk in 1931 that leads to Lewis's Christian conversion, the capacity for Tolkien to speak into Lewis's mind at that moment of spiritual crisis for him was also profound. So these men had an incredible impact on one another. If you think about it, it's probably one of the most consequential friendships of the 20th century given the impact of their work.

MAST: The book was heavy and difficult at times to read, but I'm glad that I read it. If readers take away maybe only one idea from this book, what would it be? What should keep them going through reading about some of these really dark times in history?

LOCONTE: Yeah, I think the theme of friendship and the importance of friendship between these two men, particularly in this moment of crisis, civilizational crisis, as they're pursuing their callings in that crisis is really crucial. There is a line from Tolkien, he's writing to one of his sons during the Second World War, and I think he's going through a rough patch. And he says, “Friendship with Lewis compensates for much.” And I love when I read that line for the first time, I thought, wouldn't you love to be the kind of person of whom people say friendship with Loconte compensates for much? So that is a really important part of the storyline here, how their friendship together during those moments of crisis, it really helped them not only to just get through or to endure the Second World War, but to thrive and to offer this amazing vision of life as it could be.

MAST: Well, Joseph Loconte is a New York Times best selling author. His newest book The War for Middle Earth is out now. Joseph, thank you so much for being with us.

LOCONTE: Thanks so much for having me great to be with you.

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