Envy is a sin, but it may be hard to not feel a twinge just looking across the Atlantic, contemplating the nice tradition of English storytelling. Even in childhood, I wondered why so a lot of my favorite books involved tuppence candy, seaside holidays and faculty children racing home for tea. My girlhood shelves were filled with volumes from Roald Dahl, Beatrix Potter, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll. With my very own children, I actually have also discovered the works of Arthur Ransome, J. K. Rowling and Hillaire Belloc. There are some effective American children’s authors too, but one way or the other the old country seems to have the sting.
At the middle of this great pantheon, we discover the Inklings. For generations now, these great Oxford storytellers have drawn the entire world to their crackling hearth. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narniahave sold greater than 100 million copies worldwide. J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels, by some estimates, have sold an astonishing 600 million copies. Each authors have been translated into greater than 40 languages. They proceed to supply wealthy content for film and tv, as we see in the brand new Amazon series based on The Lord of the Rings.
As modern-day evangelists, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are simply unrivaled.
They led an immense variety of souls to Jesus Christ. Passionate fans will sometimes insist that Tolkien’s work is “not Christian allegory,” which is true enough so far as it goes. Unlike, say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it was not meant to be explicitly allegorical. Nevertheless, Tolkien’s work is deeply suffused together with his deeply Catholic sensibilities, and readers do absorb those, whether or not they recognize the implications. As an adult convert to the religion, I find it remarkable how often I hear each Lewis and Tolkien mentioned by fellow converts as critical influences. Neither has been canonized (and Lewis was a member of the Church of England), but as modern-day evangelists they’re simply unrivaled.
How did they do it? Who were the Inklings? The second query may help us to reply the primary. The Inklings is the name of a casual literary club that met at Oxford within the mid-Twentieth century. From roughly 1933 through 1949, they gathered each Thursday night in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen Hall to listen to and critique each other’s work. Compositions were read aloud by their authors. Discussion and critique would then follow. As intimate friends, the Inklings shared many other favorite pastimes: taking long walks, giving or attending lectures, eating and drinking together on the local pub. Like hobbits and Narnians, they loved their easy pleasures. The actual work got done on the Thursday night meetings, nevertheless. In those hours, their dynamic friendship flowed over into something transformative.
Beyond essentially the most famous two members, just a few others are worthy of mention. Charles Williams, an editor at Oxford University Press, had a sanguine temperament and a luminous mind. His death in 1945 was a very sore blow to the group. Warren Lewis, the elder brother of Clive Staples, was a dedicated member who played a very invaluable role by keeping careful notes on the Thursday meetings across the years. Owen Barfield, an old friend of C. S. Lewis, resided in London but dropped in on the club each time he was able. Each Catholics and Protestants participated, but all were united in a quest to defend and revitalize Christian culture in a world that appeared to be abandoning it.
For generations now, these great Oxford storytellers have drawn the entire world to their crackling hearth.
They weren’t especially well-traveled or urbane. They got here from abnormal middle-class families. Except perhaps for Williams, none was particularly known for private charisma. On some level, the Inklings were only a clique of fusty old English intellectuals, possessed of not one of the savvy instincts that we associate today with “influencers.” But when the club itself was not diverse, the readership actually has been. In some way these men transcended their very own times and circumstances, translating Christian ideas right into a language that everybody desired to hear. There are lessons here for writers and artistic artists, and indeed for all Christians who would place their gifts and skills in God’s hands, for use for constructing the dominion. The Inklings had a talent for friendship, but in addition a selected genius for making old things recent. We’d like to relearn this art.
From the beginning that they had a powerful attraction to old things, not only inside the Christian tradition but in addition outside of it. The friendship between Tolkien and Lewis first blossomed when, as Oxford colleagues, they found their shared love of the Norse language and mythology. Lewis was not yet a Christian at the moment. A number of the Inklings, notably Barfield and Williams, had serious interests in non-Christian spiritualism and the occult. All of them were deeply thinking about history, mythology and the intricacies of language. Undoubtedly, Christian faith was essential to those writers, but worshipwas not the first glue that held them together. They were humanists. Their love of old things was not fundamentally reactionary, though a lot of their contemporaries surely viewed them that way. For the Inklings, examining different myths, cultures and languages was worthwhile because each might yield unique insights into the human condition. All people, of their various ways, are trying to find beauty and truth.
We love the Inklings partly because they will present evil so persuasively, without losing their enduring sense of supernatural hope.
Unfortunately, evil continues to be very real, and the Inklings actually understood this. Their stories have an epic quality partly because evil is personified in such compelling ways, within the White Witch, the hosts of Mordor or the devilishly genial Uncle Screwtape. Evil is a serious thing; it crushes souls, defaces beautiful things and sometimes destroys worlds. At the identical time, evil is immensely personal in these stories. This is particularly clear in a few of Lewis’s works, similar to The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce or That Hideous Strength, all of which delve deeply into the psychology of temptation. These works are concurrently arresting and chilling, because readers recognize themselves within the characters which are damned (or at the very least in evident spiritual danger). Tolkien, too, had a keen understanding of the psychology of sin. Hobbits can play a heroic role in these stories partly because they’re aware of their smallness and weakness within the face of immense evil. Because they’re willing to acknowledge their limitations and sometimes ask for help and forgiveness, they ultimately withstand certain types of corruption that overwhelm the nice and good.
We love the Inklings partly because they will present evil so persuasively, without losing their enduring sense of supernatural hope. Tolkien’s hobbits eat lembas and invoke Elbereth through the darkest hours of night; Aslan reliably appears each time Narnia is in great need. The Inklings knew the way to juxtapose darkness and hope partly because they were deeply acquainted with grief, terror and despair. As children, each Tolkien and Lewis lost their moms to diabetes and cancer respectively. As soldiers, they experienced the horrors of the trenches on the Somme. The Inklings’ best period as a club was the early Forties, when Williams was capable of join them precisely because German bombing had driven him out of London. Warren Lewis was himself evacuated from Dunkirk; Tolkien, who had a son within the Royal Air Force, viewed that war within the bleakest of terms, as an indication that humanity was being utterly effaced by malevolent machines. He was particularly bleak within the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he viewed as resounding confirmation of his dark diagnosis. Shortly after those events, he submitted his first manuscript for Fellowship of the Ring.
“A star shines on the hour of our meeting,” says Frodo to the elf, Gildor Inglorion, within the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The phrase readily involves mind when one considers the meeting of Tolkien and Lewis, as fellow faculty members in an Oxford that was growing increasingly hostile to scholars with their convictions and sensibilities. Lewis, as a Christian-friendly unbeliever, was still in need of a like-minded friend to assist him take the ultimate steps to conversion. Tolkien, for his part, needed encouragement to hunt larger audiences for his epic fantasy. A scholarly mentor had warned him that his colleagues would laugh him off the campus if he presented his invented languages, elves and dragons as anything greater than bedtime stories for his own 4 children. None of that sounded implausible in an era that, very like our own, seemed increasingly skeptical of miracle and myth. Had Tolkien never met Lewis, the world might never have known The Lord of The Rings.
Friendship was the magic ingredient that enabled these men to convert a non-public sense of alienation right into a shared sense of mission.
Friendship was the magic ingredient that enabled these men to convert a non-public sense of alienation right into a shared sense of mission. Their work was cut out for them because inter-war Britain was thoroughly demoralized. Pews were emptying. Traditional religion was widely scorned, especially by the mental classes. As in our own day, religious believers of this era had a way that they were living within the crumbling edifices of a once-great Christian culture. They fretted in regards to the “disenchantment” of contemporary life and the collapse of virtue and honor. For some traditionalists, these sorts of fears can provide rise to paranoia and insularity. The Inklings managed to avoid those pitfalls. They did this partly through their friendship, which gave them motivation and encouragement of their creative labors. Beyond that, their Christian faith gave them regular confidence that the forces of Hell would ultimately be vanquished. As Frodo might say, they can’t conquer ceaselessly.
This last point especially should be recovered, if today’s Christians hope to mimic the Inklings. The challenges of our own day may not seem quite so uniquely terrible after we set them next to the horror of the Blitz, or the bloody and muddy trenches of France in 1916. Even so, the world stays deeply troubled. For Christian believers, it often seems that our feeble efforts to evangelize are fruitless, and even ridiculous. Nobody is thinking about elves anymore. Nobody needs our funny, old-fashioned ideas. Pope Francis has urged the Catholic faithful to go forth and convert the world, but our numbers seem so few and our talents so slender. We feel radically unequal to this task.
Jesus’ apostles presumably felt the identical way. So did the Inklings. All through their books, we meet weak, flawed characters who’re forced to step up in an hour of need. English schoolchildren win battles and defeat witches; humble hobbits prevail against dragons and hordes of monsters. Everyone loves an underdog, in fact, but these tales feel more meaningful than an ordinary superhero film because their authors had their eyes on a deeper set of truths. Sin and corruption are real, but salvation continues to be available. They knew, as Tolkien explained to Lewis within the early years of their friendship, that the Christian story is the truest story, of which all others are echoes. When all appears to be lost, we all the time have recourse to the deep magic from the dawn of time.
Stories will be especially powerful for the work of evangelization because they’re told byone person toone other. The teller must work to translate his ideas into something his listener will find compelling. Christ taught in parables, and on the Thursday night meetings in Magdalen Hall, authors were expected to read their work aloud to a listening audience. This was their quest: translating old ideas into recent forms in order that recent audiences could hear them. Their efforts paid wealthy dividends. We could use more such laborers.
Even Americans might give it a try. Our modern media landscape places immense pressure on creative people to remain “relevant,” bending and twisting with the precise rhythms of their very own moment in time. Sometimes it’d pay to show down that ambient noise for some time, listening more intently to an older tune. Many individuals told Tolkien that his stories would never sell; several hundred million copies later, those people owe him an apology. The audience was there, hungry for myth and meaning. It continues to be there. So long as this world endures, there’ll all the time be more stories to inform.