J. R. R. Tolkien at Tea
We’ve considered praise for good work on the one hand, harsh criticism on the other. In addition to these large categories of response, writers who read each other’s work may also roll up their sleeves and offer very, very specific recommendations. This kind of feedback may take many different forms. It may emerge in conversation or be written in a letter. It can brief or quite extensive, direct or indirect, serious or playful. But whatever the mood or the method, when the members of a writing group serve as editors, they offer advice that results in specific changes.
The Inklings were involved with one another’s work at the smallest level of detail. C. S. Lewis read and corrected the proofs of Dyson’s Augustans and Romantics. Warren Lewis read and corrected his brother’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. Charles Williams edited Lewis’s The Allegory of Love when it landed on his desk at the Oxford University Press. In fact, Williams is the one who gave that book its title.
Owen Barfield (a solicitor by profession) read Lewis’s autobiography Surprised by Joy with extreme care, looking for potential lawsuits before he cleared it for publication.
When Tolkien translated Beowulf, Lewis read through the draft more than once, marking up the manuscript, suggesting changes to word choice and phrasing. Lewis was no expert in Anglo-Saxon; his careful editing was not designed to make it a more accurate translation, but to improve it as poetry. And it may be that Lewis inspired Tolkien to prioritize this project in the first place. At this time, Lewis was meeting twice a week to read Old English with undergraduates. He was frustrated with the translations available to him. In a long letter written in 1927, Lewis writes, “I wish there was a good translation of Beowulf.” That’s when Tolkien started working on this project in earnest.
Whether or not this outpouring of advice makes a difference depends on one thing: how fluid writers consider their drafts to be. When Anne Gere did research on writing groups, she found that one of the most important keys to their success is “textual indeterminacy,” that is, the writer’s ability to stay open to the possibility of substantial change. This helps explain the effectiveness of the Inklings. As they met and talked about their work, they viewed each manuscript as a work in progress.
Even their name—the Inklings—hints at fleeting notions, half-formed ideas, and rough impressions. Tolkien explains that they did not read polished, publishable drafts to one another but rather “largely unintelligible fragments of one another’s works.” They shared very rough drafts, fully expecting to revise them: sometimes adding, sometimes deleting, and sometimes rewriting the material. They might take all the advice they were given or take only one small part. Sometimes, advice simply served as a springboard to a brand-new idea; at other times, it sparked a reaction in direct opposition. In all of these situations, the Inklings were open to the possibility of new directions.
The result was constant and significant change. And Tolkien is the one who benefitted the most from this process.
Laborious Changes
Tolkien is notorious for the amount of revision that characterized his writing process. It is often claimed that Tolkien was not influenced by the comments he received; when it comes to listening to criticism, he has been accused of being more ornery than a bandersnatch. But his work constantly evolved, and the Inklings participated every step of the way. Tolkien’s first drafts were dashed off at great speed, and these are the versions he read to the Inklings. At times, they are nearly illegible, breaking off into fragmented notes when ideas flowed faster than his hand could write. Having dashed off a draft, he would rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again. He would continue to produce page after page in order to discover what he wanted to say. As a result, as many as 18 different drafts exist for some of his chapters. The complete manuscript of The Lord of the Rings has so many versions that it consists of nearly 10,000 pages; the pages make a stack over seven feet high.
Christopher Tolkien explains that his father built his manuscripts in “phases.” Tolkien worked like a painter who first pencils in a rough sketch, erases, then draws again, then fills in a more detailed drawing, then adds layers of color, working from background to foreground to final details.
Tolkien revised much of his text; he also revised many aspects of it. Christopher Tolkien says the biggest changes were made to his characters’ names and family relationships, particularly the hobbit families of the Shire. He writes, “In no respect did my father chop and change more copiously.”
But hobbit names and genealogies are not all Tolkien chopped, changed, and revised. Concerning The Lord of the Rings, he declares, “Every part has been written many times. Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. And the placing, size, style, and contribution to the whole of all the features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered.” Tolkien revised relentlessly, weighing and considering every single word.
Even after the entire book had been written, Tolkien pressed on and continued rewriting. He explains, “When the ‘end’ had at last been reached the whole story had to be revised, and indeed largely re-written backwards.”
It is hard to overstate the case. Referring to chapter IX of Book One, Christopher Tolkien writes, “The manuscript of this chapter is an exceedingly complicated document: pencil overlaid with ink (sometimes remaining partly legible, sometimes not at all), pencil not overlaid but struck through, pencil allowed to stand, and fresh composition in ink, together with riders on slips [of paper] and complex directions for insertions.” The layers of this chapter are so complicated that he provides a chart to help scholars track the progress of all the various threads.
The story of the One Ring kept changing, and so did the larger context of Tolkien’s sub-created world. In a description of his father’s background mythologies, Christopher Tolkien says, “It was far indeed from being a fixed text, and did not remain unchanged even in certain fundamental ideas concerning the world it portrays.” He continues, “As the years passed the changes and variants, both in detail and in larger perspectives, became so complex, so pervasive, and so many-layered that a final and definitive version seemed unattainable.” Tolkien was constantly working on the world he had invented. Some of the most foundational aspects of plot and characters kept changing. Even the nature of Middle-earth remained in flux throughout his life.
To what extent did the Inklings contribute to these evolving drafts? Their comments fueled Tolkien’s natural impulse to keep polishing and perfecting his work. Lewis writes that Tolkien is “one of those people who is never satisfied with a MS. The mere suggestion of publication provokes the reply ‘Yes, I’ll just look through it and give it a few finishing touches’—wh. means that he really begins the whole thing over again.”
This tendency to rework his text was part of Tolkien’s personality, a reflection of his preferred writing habits. And the Inklings reinforced rather than restrained this natural tendency.
New Directions
As Tolkien read his texts aloud at meetings, group members not only encouraged him to work a little harder, they also made specific suggestions. Evidence of these comments remains, and one specific comment, made by C. S. Lewis, proved to be the turning point in the history of Middle-earth.
We know that Tolkien gratefully acknowledged Lewis for his role as encourager, for convincing him that his “private hobby” was worth sharing with others, and also for urging him to continue writing when he wanted to abandon the whole thing. We’ve also seen that Lewis gave feedback on the earliest chapters of The Lord of the Rings, and as a result, Tolkien improved the work considerably by crossing out lines of dialogue, tightening up conversations, and banishing long explanations to the appendices. Even though he preferred to write page after page of “Hobbit-talk,” Tolkien shifted the proportions and refocused his efforts on telling the story.
Once he had completed these revisions to his earliest chapters, Tolkien found that he was completely lost. He could not figure out what to do next. According to Christopher Tolkien, the story was “a beginning without a destination.” On 17 February 1938, Tolkien writes, “I could write unlimited ‘first chapters’. I have indeed written many. The Hobbit sequel is still where it was, and I have only the vaguest notions of how to proceed.” The next day, Tolkien wrote again, “I squandered so much on the original ‘Hobbit’ (which was not meant to have a sequel) that it is difficult to find anything new in that world.”
Five months later, Tolkien was at exactly the same spot: still stuck and still utterly discouraged. He confesses, “It has lost my favour, and I have no idea what to do with it.” Although Tolkien offers a number of explanations, one thing stands out: he is fundamentally uncertain about the nature of this book. At this point in the process, Tolkien imagined The Lord of the Rings as a book very much like The Hobbit: aimed at a young audience, built around humor and pranks, and modeled on the structure of a folktale or fairy story. He even called it “the Hobbit sequel” or “the new Hobbit.”
He writes, “I am personally immensely amused by hobbits as such, and can contemplate them eating and making their rather fatuous jokes indefinitely; but I find that is not the case with even my most devoted ‘fans.’” He simply didn’t know where to take the story next.
Then on 24 July 1938, he met with C. S. Lewis. Lewis listened carefully to Tolkien’s frustrations with his story. He gave Tolkien a short, clear, transforming piece of advice. Tolkien records, “Mr Lewis says hobbits are only amusing when in unhobbitlike situations.”
It was an important insight, and Tolkien took it to heart. As a direct result of that conversation with Lewis, he immediately began to consider a more ambitious purpose. He tried to bring some sort of “unhobbitlike” seriousness and weight to this new story.
The new direction can be seen in the changes Tolkien made to a key scene in chapter III. In the first draft, three hobbits named Bingo, Odo, and Frodo have left Hobbiton and are walking through the Shire. They hear the sound of hoofbeats drawing near. Frightened, they hide amidst a cluster of tree roots, in a little hollow beside the road.
Suddenly, “Round a turn came a white horse, and on it sat a bundle— or that is what it looked like: a small man wrapped entirely in a great cloak and hood so that only his eyes peered out, and his boots in the stirrups below.”
The horse and rider stop near Bingo. “The figure uncovered its nose and sniffed; and then sat silent as if listening. Suddenly a laugh came from inside the hood.” It is Gandalf, arriving at last after a long and anxious delay. He calls out, “Bingo my boy!” as he throws aside his wrappings.
In the manuscript, the story breaks off at the bottom of this page. After Tolkien’s conversation with Lewis, he went back and revisited this scene. Here is the same passage again, as it appears in The Fellowship of the Ring:
Round the corner came a black horse, no hobbit-pony but a full-sized horse; and on it sat a large man, who seemed to crouch in the saddle, wrapped in a great black cloak and hood, so that only his boots in the high stirrups showed below; his face was shadowed and invisible.
When it reached the tree and was level with Frodo the horse stopped. The riding figure sat quite still with its head bowed, as if listening. From inside the hood came a noise as of someone sniffing to catch an elusive scent; the head turned from side to side of the road.
The mysterious figure pauses a while, then shakes the reins, and moves on.
It is clear that this new description draws its details from the original description of Gandalf, including the cloak and hood and sniffing sound. But things have shifted radically. Gandalf is gone; a Black Rider appears instead. The facts have changed, and the mood is quite altered. Once personal and playful, the whole thing feels much darker. Frodo fingers the Ring in his pocket and shudders with “unreasoning fear.”
With this new apparition, the tale has turned. The sudden appearance of this Black Rider raises two questions. First, what in the world is this terrifying thing? And second, since this isn’t Gandalf, what has become of their trusted friend? Finding answers to these questions will determine the necessary direction of the events that follow.
But not only has the hobbit adventure changed, Tolkien’s experience as a writer has changed as well. At last, Tolkien seems to catch his stride. Soon afterward, he reports that the story “is now flowing along, and getting quite out of hand. It has reached about Chapter VII and progresses towards quite unforeseen goals.” There is a clear break from the tentative and uncertain tone of the past. Now the manuscript flows along and has taken on a life of its own—it progresses, it has reached chapter VII, it is getting out of hand.
Even the title has changed. From this point on, Tolkien doesn’t call it “the new Hobbit.” He refers to his story as “The Lord of the Ring” [sic]. It is clearly something new, distinct from its predecessor and moving toward a different purpose. All of these changes occur within a month of Lewis’s comment about hobbits.
Lewis himself recognized the importance of this conversation with Tolkien. In a letter to a reader, Lewis says he was the one who redirected Tolkien’s story away from the frivolous and toward a more serious purpose. Lewis writes, “My continued encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him very much to write at all with that gravity and at that length.”
More weight, more scope, more length. Less hobbit talk and far more danger. Lewis’s comment completely transformed the type of narrative Tolkien was writing. But there is an even larger issue: to some extent, Lewis and the Inklings are responsible for the fact that Tolkien produced narrative at all. During the years he worked on the project, Tolkien worked in fits and starts. From time to time, he would abandon the novel and, instead, turned his attention to his invented languages or the histories and extended genealogies of his invented world. He admits, “The most absorbing interest is the Elvish tongues, and the nomenclature based on them; and the alphabets.” And again, “The construction of elaborate and consistent mythology (and two languages) rather occupies the mind.”
Clyde S. Kilby noted this with some irritation when he worked with Tolkien in the summer of 1966. Kilby remembers, “It would be satisfying to record that I always found him busy at his writing, but that is not true. I did find him sometimes working at his Elvish languages, an activity which seemed endlessly interesting to him.” Tolkien was a philologist through and through.
Tolkien observes, “If I had considered my own pleasure more than the stomachs of a possible audience, there would have been a great deal more Elvish in the book.” Nonetheless, he once again deferred to his readers. If he had not, the work would have been entirely different. Some writers are adamant that since Tolkien worked “from great depths within himself,” he would have written everything he wrote even if he had never heard of the Inklings. On the contrary. Without the group, we would have more details of Shire genealogies, more words in the Elvish vocabulary, and fewer stories of the Third Age of Middle-earth.
Tolkien caught his stride at last, and he continued to read his story aloud to the Inklings. And their comments continued to shape the direction it took.
Fine-Tuning
The Inklings were not shy about offering advice and direction. Some comments were global, but others were very precise. While it is easy to recognize and appreciate the major changes, these little details also tell us much about how writers can work together and help each other. Each comment may be considered a small leaf, but each one is a powerful indicator of the shape and nature of the tree to which it belongs.
One example of a precise change is found in The Lord of the Rings in the scene where Merry and Pippin first meet Treebeard. The shaggy Ent looks down at the little hobbits and remarks, “Very odd you are, indeed. Crack my timbers, very odd.” In the manuscript, this line is crossed out, and underneath Tolkien has written, “queried by Charles Williams—root and twig.” The phrase “crack my timbers” is crossed out and replaced by “root and twig” here, and again in two more places in the story.
Several things are significant about this tiny change. It’s true: some of the Inklings found Tolkien’s story tiresome and hard to follow (Dyson disliked it; Havard couldn’t follow it; Barfield found the whole thing difficult). But Williams paid such close attention that he noticed that “crack my timbers” seemed out of character. It just wasn’t the sort of thing Treebeard would say. Perhaps it was too pirate-like, suggesting Long John Silver or “Shiver me timbers.” Or perhaps the hint of noise and violence—a crack or break—seemed somehow out of place given the nature of the slow and thoughtful Ents.
In addition, very little pressure was needed in order to prompt this change. Apparently, Williams questioned its appropriateness; Tolkien listened, took note, and made the switch. And he gave Williams credit for it, too.
There are other places in the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien writes down a bit of advice from one of the Inklings. In an early draft of the chapter entitled “A Short Cut to Mushrooms,” the hobbits draw near to Farmer Maggot’s farm. Startled by three “baying and barking” dogs and the loud voice of the farmer, Bingo Baggins puts on the Ring and turns invisible.
They all continue into Farmer Maggot’s kitchen, Bingo shadowing close behind. But then the farmer begins to recount an old grudge: “That Mr Bingo Baggins he killed one of my dogs once, he did. It’s more than 30 years ago, but I haven’t forgotten it, and I’ll remind him of it sharp too if ever he dare to come round here.”
Bingo can’t stand it any longer. He sees this as an opportunity to scare the farmer, so he grabs his beer mug, drinks the contents, and returns it empty to the table. Then he snatches up the farmer’s hat and runs out the door. “The hat went off at a great speed towards the gate; but as the farmer ran after it, it came sailing back through the air and fell at his feet.”
It is a merry scene, in keeping with Tolkien’s original concept for this new Hobbit book. But Christopher Tolkien noted that there was an inconsistency in this part of the story. He pointed it out. His father wrote in the margin: “Christopher queries—why was not hat invisible if Bingo’s clothes were?”
Tolkien tried to solve the problem. He reworked the passage several times, first by substituting a jug for the hat, then by adding a rather clunky explanation. In the end, he dropped the troublesome scene altogether. Christopher Tolkien was disappointed. He notes, “I was greatly delighted by the story of Bingo’s turning the tables on Farmer Maggot.” Then he adds, “I was much opposed to its loss.”
Christopher was also opposed to the loss of Odo, one of the hobbits who travelled with Gandalf in the early drafts of Fellowship. Tolkien apparently decided there were too many hobbits in this section of the story, so he changed their names and reduced their number. “Christopher wants Odo kept,” wrote Tolkien on the manuscript. But Odo was dropped, though much of his grumpy, impatient personality was incorporated into Fatty Bolger and much of his role was assigned to Peregrin Took.
These examples from Tolkien are not the only times that an Inkling has written the name of another Inkling in the margin of a manuscript. We find it again in a draft of “The Figure of Arthur,” a scholarly essay written by Charles Williams. In one of the more memorable descriptions of a reading by an Inkling, Lewis explains how he and Tolkien (“The Professor”) met in his rooms at Magdalen to hear the first two chapters read aloud.
Picture to yourself, then, an upstairs sitting-room with windows looking north into the “grove” of Magdalen College on a sunshiny Monday Morning in vacation at about ten o’clock. The Professor and I, both on the chesterfield, lit our pipes and stretched out our legs. Williams in the arm-chair opposite to us threw his cigarette into the grate, took up a pile of the extremely small, loose sheets on which he habitually wrote—they came, I think, from a twopenny pad for memoranda, and began. …
In his essay, Williams discusses the phrase “Give us this day our daily bread” from the Lord’s Prayer. Here, in the margin of the manuscript, the name “Tolkien” has been written in pencil. Lewis provides a footnote to explain that Tolkien interrupted the reading at this point in the chapter and “raised some philological questions about the meaning of έπιούσιον [daily].” Lewis speculates that Williams “intended to discuss the matter with him more fully on some later occasion.” Williams died before he finished the book, so there is no further record of philological conversations or editorial changes. But the reading, and the interruption, question, and attribution are all documented.
Williams penciled another comment in the margins of this manuscript that can be traced to another interruption by an Inkling. In a section discussing the sources used by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Williams dismisses the possibility of “some intermediary tale which is now wholly lost.” Lewis writes, “At this point I interrupted the reading to suggest that the view taken by A. Griscom (The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, London, 1929) was different. The single word ‘Griscom’ pencilled on the MS. doubtless means that Williams intended to give the matter further consideration.”
Everything about this exchange is typical of the way the Inklings edited one another’s work. The author reads aloud from a rough draft, handwritten on loose sheets of paper. The reader is interrupted; here, Lewis jumps in and offers a specific suggestion. The author listens, then jots a quick note on the manuscript. The note is brief and somewhat cryptic. It is also completely unattributed. This example helps paint a picture of how the Inklings interacted when they gathered, whether in groups of two, or three, or in the larger Thursday meetings. It suggests that other marginalia may have come from similar comments and advice.
In considering these editing changes, we also see a hint of the wide range of feedback these men offered one another. An awkward phrase is corrected, a philological question is raised, a biblical passage is explicated, and an additional source that offers a contrasting point of view is recommended. As the following illustrations will show, this is only a small sample of the kinds of feedback they shared.
The Lay of Leithian
Tolkien began his work on “the new Hobbit” in 1937, and by then, the Inklings were meeting frequently. Feedback was extensive as the members talked together late into the night. But earlier, before regular meetings were established, Tolkien shared The Lay of Leithian with Lewis, and this is one of the few cases where we have an extended written commentary from one Inkling to another. In fact, in this instance we have an unusually complete record of the poem’s development. We can study Tolkien’s original rough drafts, we can read the full text of Lewis’s suggestions, and then we can compare both to Tolkien’s revisions. A close look at this exchange reveals much about how carefully the Inklings edited one another’s work.
The Lay of Leithian is a long narrative poem, more than four thousand lines, written in octosyllabic couplets. It holds a significant place in Inklings history, for this is the poem Tolkien showed to Lewis in December of 1929, the one that led to the deepening of their friendship, and before long, the founding of the Inklings.
After Tolkien and Lewis first discussed the poem, Lewis took it home and read it with great care. The next day, he wrote a brief and enthusiastic letter, insisting that the work deserves a wide audience. This was the kind of encouragement that, as we have seen, meant a great deal to Tolkien.
Sometime later, Lewis responded to The Lay of Leithian again. This time, rather than giving a short note or a brief word of encouragement, Lewis wrote fourteen pages of detailed, line-by-line criticism. The form of Lewis’s commentary is ingenious, for it is written as if a series of scholarly experts have published an article in a journal called Gestudien, critiquing variant manuscripts of an ancient poem. He names his imaginary experts Peabody, Pumpernickel, Schuffer, Bentley, and Schick. Lewis offers line-by-line commentary on Tolkien’s poem (and also makes fun of typical academic discourse) by writing dialogue for these characters using exaggerated academic jargon.
For example, at one point Peabody observes, “The combination of extreme simplicity, with convincing truth of psychology, and the pathos which, without comment, makes us aware that Gorlim is at once pardonable and unpardonable, render this part of the story extremely affecting.” In a different section, Shuffer decides, “My own conclusion is that if the assonance in the textus receptus is correct, the same phenomenon must originally have occurred often, and have been suppressed elsewhere by the scribes.”
By using this form of criticism, Lewis mocks the obscure vocabulary one can find in academic journals. He also creates multiple voices, much like the conversation you find when writers gather in a writing group.
It also allows Lewis to claim that the weak passages of the poem are not poorly written poetry; instead, they are merely unfortunate corruptions of the original manuscript. For example, twenty lines of the poem are marked with this note: “The passage, as it stands, is seriously corrupt, though the beauty of the original can still be discerned.” As Christopher Tolkien notes, this pretense “entertainingly took the sting from some sharply expressed judgements,” and that made the criticism easier for Tolkien to take.
At one point, the commentary reads, “Many scholars have rejected lines 1–8 altogether as unworthy of the poet.” This is one of two places where Lewis labels lines as “unworthy.” And, in both cases, Tolkien completely rewrote these sections. Lewis also complains that there are too many monosyllabic lines, and the revised versions show that Tolkien attempted to eliminate them, too.
Other criticisms of the poem are more precise. For example, he comments that Tolkien’s use of “did” to fill out a line is clumsy. Tolkien eliminates this three times in the poem (“did fall,” “did flutter,” and “did waver”).
Overall, many, many specific lines are changed. Here are a few examples:
Lewis called this weak: “who had this king once held in scorn”
Tolkien changed it to this: “who once a prince of Men was born”
Lewis called this Latinised: “or ask how she escaping came”
Tolkien changed it to this: “or ask how she escaped and came”
Lewis called this harsh: “bewildered, enchanted and forlorn”
Tolkien changed it to this: “enchanted, wildered, and forlorn”
Lewis criticized Tolkien’s poem line by line, making suggestions that improved the rhythms of the poem and provided better imagery. But he did even more. He completely rewrote a number of passages, claiming that these alternatives were the “true” or “authentic” work of the poet. This shows remarkable boldness. It is one thing to suggest that an author change a weak line or avoid monosyllabic constructions; it is quite another to personally rewrite the verse. Yet Lewis did just that. And the extent to which Tolkien incorporated Lewis’s ideas is striking.
The following examples show some of these changes step by step. First is the line as Tolkien originally wrote it, then the line as Lewis suggested it ought to be written. Finally, in each case, is the line as it appeared in Tolkien’s revision:
Original Tolkien: “of mortal feaster ever heard”
Lewis suggestion: “Of mortal men at feast has heard”
Revised Tolkien: “of mortal Men at feast hath heard”
Original Tolkien: “his evil legions’ marshalled hate”
Lewis suggestion: “The legions of his marching hate”
Revised Tolkien: “the legions of his marshalled hate”
Tolkien incorporated specific suggestions made by Lewis, sometimes using them exactly, sometimes using them as a springboard to invent something new. It is a remarkable exchange of intelligent critique and careful revision.
Christopher Tolkien writes, “Almost all the verses which Lewis found wanting for one reason or another are marked for revision in the typescript B if not actually rewritten, and in many cases his proposed emendations, or modifications of them, are incorporated into the text.”
Nonetheless, Tolkien did dispute some of the suggestions. Lewis remarks that internal rhyme is always “an infallible mark of corruption,” but Tolkien continues to use it anyway. Also, Lewis claims that lines 631–32 (“the dizzy moon was twisted grey / in tears, for she had fled away”) made use of “half-hearted personification.” Next to this criticism, Tolkien writes, “Not so!!” adding this explanation: “The moon was dizzy and twisted because of the tears in his eyes.” Despite Tolkien’s emphatic protest, he still eliminated these lines from the poem.
In another case, Tolkien used chiasmus, a literary device that makes use of inverted word order. Tolkien’s lines read,
“Where art thou gone? The day is bare,
the sunlight dark, and cold the air!”
Lewis is critical of this figure of speech, writing “The chiasmus is suspiciously classical.” He recommends a straight parallel structure instead: “Dark is the sun, cold is the air.” In the margin, Tolkien writes in protest: “But classics did not invent chiasmus!—it is perfectly natural.” In this case, no changes were made to the text.
Nor did Tolkien accept Lewis’s rather peculiar suggestion that the spelling of labyrinth in line 1075 be changed to “laborynth.”
But these are exceptions. All in all, the extent to which Tolkien rewrote his poem in response to Lewis’s suggestions is remarkable. Remarkable, too, is the time span involved. Tolkien began the poem in September of 1925; he was still working on it and incorporating changes more than thirty years later.
Rival Wizards
Tolkien does not mention Lewis’s ongoing participation in The Lay of Leithian. But he does give credit to Lewis for the significant editing of what he calls the “Saruman passage” in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien says that he revised this section extensively in response to Lewis’s “detailed criticisms.” He also says that the revised version is “much better” as a result.
Tolkien identifies this section as “the confrontation between Gandalf and his rival wizard, Saruman, in the ravaged city of Isengard.” There are many, many changes to this portion of the manuscript.
1.A long discourse on tobacco is marked “Put into Foreword.”
2.In the draft, Théoden laughs loudly. In the revision, the laughter is removed and “his gravity (at least of bearing) was restored.”
3.In the draft, Gandalf makes an unkind remark to Théoden about his age: “It is long since you listened to tales by the fireside, … and in that rather than in white hairs you show your age, without increase in wisdom.” This remark is “very firmly struck through on the manuscript.”
4.In the first draft, Théoden delivers a lengthy discussion about hobbits, explaining that he has heard of holbytlan, “half-high folk” who dwell in holes. Then he speculates at some length about the origin of their name. This philological excursus was dropped.
5.In the margin, a question is written, “Shall there be more real Ents?”
6.A description of Saruman’s voice is substantially altered. In an early draft, it is “unpleasant” and “scornful.” In the revised version, “Its tone was that of a kindly heart aggrieved by injuries undeserved.”
7.In the original sketch of the scene, Gandalf takes Saruman’s staff away from him and breaks it in his hands. In the published version, the scene is far more dramatic. Gandalf “raised his hand, and spoke slowly in a clear cold voice. ‘Saruman, your staff is broken.’ There was a crack, and the staff split asunder in Saruman’s hand, and the head of it fell down at Gandalf’s feet.”
8.In the initial version of the scene, the palantír shatters on impact. In the second version it “splintered on the rock beside the stair.” In the final version “the ball was unharmed: it rolled on down the steps, a globe of crystal, dark, but glowing with a heart of fire. As it bounded away towards a pool Pippin ran after it and picked it up.”
9.A cliché “Set a thief to hinder a thief!” is removed.
I cannot link any of these changes directly to specific comments made by Lewis. But we know Tolkien was “dead stuck” at this exact point in the story, and he plainly credits Lewis for providing “detailed criticisms” that led to significant improvement. The changes listed above— shortening dialogue, adding gravity to Théoden’s bearing, softening a caustic remark, removing long expository sections, eliminating philological commentary, envisioning broader possibilities for the palantír, dropping a cliché—all are consistent with the suggestions Lewis makes in other critiques of Tolkien’s stories.
Furthermore, the physical evidence of these changes to the manuscript is exactly what one would expect when an author is responding to the comments and criticisms of a careful reader—a phrase is emphatically struck out, a penciled note is attached on a small slip of paper, a question is written in the margin.
Having said that, it is also important to note that although Tolkien’s acknowledgment of his debt to Lewis is direct, it is also somewhat grudging. His comments appear in a letter he sent to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, responding to their draft of an article about him prepared for the Daily Telegraph Magazine. They sent him the draft, and he responded quickly and with grave concern, working hard to correct a host of inaccuracies and misunderstandings. “I am a pedant devoted to accuracy,” he tells them. Then he copies troublesome passages from their article and provides a sharp correction and explanation for each one.
The Plimmers had drafted a paragraph saying that Lewis would make suggestions, and Tolkien would work hard to revise. But then they say that Tolkien reworked the Saruman passage in just this way, and he now claims that it is the “best in the book.”
Having read this account, Tolkien offers this rather stern correction: “I do not think the Saruman passage ‘the best in the book’. It is much better than the first draft, that is all. I mentioned the passage because it is in fact one of the very few places where in the event I found L’s detailed criticisms useful and just.”
In his response, Tolkien does affirm that Lewis often urged him to rewrite and offered detailed and helpful suggestions. This process has had an impact on this specific passage, which is “much better” as a result.
However, the curious thing is that Tolkien says this is one of “very few places” where he found Lewis’s feedback “useful and just.” Elsewhere, Tolkien expresses unqualified enthusiasm for Lewis’s help and support. A look at the context may shed some light on the apparent discrepancy. Tolkien is responding to an article that has misquoted and misrepresented him. He finds it necessary to write pages and pages of corrections on subjects as diverse as his height, his ancestry, his views on Dante, and his reading habits. The grumpy and somewhat defensive tone is certainly understandable given the nature of the document.
But it is more likely that the date rather than the circumstances provides the key to understanding Tolkien’s comment. This was written in 1967, nearly forty years after Lewis and Tolkien began to meet and share their manuscripts. As Tolkien got older, he increasingly denied the participation of others in the creation of his work. Tolkien says this is one of the few places where Lewis’s detailed criticisms were useful and just. It may be more accurate to say this is one of the few places where Tolkien specifically acknowledges the careful editing of his friend.
Changes Here and There
Lewis’s writing process was quite different from Tolkien’s. While Tolkien wrote things out in order to discover what he wanted to say, Lewis tended to mull things over before committing anything to paper. While Tolkien produced draft after draft, Lewis completed his work rapidly once he had settled on a clear idea and the right form to express it. And while Tolkien reconsidered every word on every page, when Lewis finished a story, he was restless to move on.
Given his tendencies, some people picture Lewis as a man who sat down, wrote a book, and sent it off to the publisher. Walter Hooper, for example, says that if you look at Lewis’s manuscripts, “There is next to no evidence of rewriting or of copious changes.” He adds, as if with pride, “You don’t have a man revising or anything like that.” There is some truth to this, and scholars rightly point to the rapid composition of The Pilgrim’s Regress (written in two weeks) and certain gaps and inconsistencies in The Chronicles of Narnia (seven books in seven years) as evidence. But even though this view is commonly held, it is still incomplete. Lewis was open to changing his work.
For one thing, Lewis liked to try out his story ideas in more than one form, creating several variations of the same work. This is a radical form of revision, one that allowed him to explore various concepts, images, motifs, and phrasing, and paved the way for rapid composition once he discovered the best genre for the work. Dymer, for example, was first written in prose form, a second time in verse form, next as a ballad he called “The Red Maid,” and then a fourth and final time as a long epic poem. Till We Have Faces underwent a similar transformation: in November of 1922, Lewis recorded that he hoped to write a masque or play based on the Cupid and Psyche myth. But rather than writing it as a play, he spent the next year trying to write it as a poem. Then, more than 30 years later, he started all over again and wrote it as a novel. Perelandra also went through drastic changes. It started out as a short poem that included references to floating islands and a green lady. Lewis abandoned the poem, and sometime later, he wrote it as a novel.
In each of these examples, the final version was written very rapidly, with Lewis pausing only to dip his pen into the inkwell. But Lewis had been pondering these images and ideas for years. He had also attempted very different versions before he discovered their final form.
In addition, there are a number of instances where Lewis did substantially revise his finished work. The most extensive example is The Magician’s Nephew. Lewis began it in 1949, right after he finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He abandoned it, returned to it, and then drafted nearly the whole thing. He showed it to his friend Roger Lancelyn Green, and on the basis of his feedback, he dropped half of the story and rewrote the rest.
Following their initial publication, Lewis rewrote Chapter 3 of Miracles, and he produced abridged versions of both Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. When he wrote the text of his broadcast talks for the BBC, he worked closely with several of their editors and revised the talks to suit his radio audiences. The scripts of these talks were edited and published as a series of short books, and then he edited them again; they were published together as Mere Christianity.
There are other examples. He wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress quickly, and when he had finished it, he sent it to Arthur Greeves along with an extended request for comments, asking particularly for help on any passages “where one word less wd. make all the difference.” He sent Sister Penelope the draft of Perelandra, saying, “It’s uncorrected, so you can exercise your textual criticism on it.” He wanted feedback, and feedback made a difference.
There is also evidence of revising on his sermons and essays. The manuscript of “Learning in Wartime” is typical. It shows words crossed out and ideas refined. In between the time when he wrote it and the time he delivered it, more than 10% of the text was changed.
Lewis did niggle over tiny details and factual inconsistencies in his work. One particularly apt example comes from The Screwtape Letters. In the first edition, published in 1942, Screwtape advises Wormwood that his “patient” can be coaxed out of the British Museum and, once he is on the street, can be distracted by the sight of a newsboy, then the No. 73 bus, and so on. Apparently, numerous readers sent letters to tell Lewis such a thing was impossible—one simply couldn’t see the No. 73 bus from the street in front of the British Museum. “Drat that Omnibus!” wrote Lewis, and he tried hard to find a solution.
In 1959, Lewis began working on a new edition of The Screwtape Letters. He planned to write a new preface and add a chapter called “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” He also wanted to take advantage of the opportunity and change the troublesome first letter, so the problem of the No. 73 bus would no longer attract complaints. Lewis listed the possibilities in a letter to his publisher, Jocelyn Gibb: “If you can provide the number of any bus that might be seen in some such neighbouring street, and then emend street to streets in the last line of p. 24, we shall have saved our bacon. If this is impossible then take your choice of green coach, jeep, fire engine, Rolls, police car, or ambulance.”
Gibb considered the options and made the most modest change possible: he added the single letter “s” to the word “street.” The line now reads: “Once he was in the streets the battle was won.” Lewis was greatly relieved at this elegant solution. “I believe we’ve got it right,” he said. One small change, and as Hooper notes, “This problem which had nagged at Lewis for over twenty years was solved.”
In addition, Lewis constantly revised his poetry. Cecil Harwood provides one example: when Lewis was told a canto from his narrative epic Dymer was “not up to standard, he went away and produced another in the space of a few days.” He mailed most of his poems to Owen Barfield asking for detailed critique. He talked regularly with poet Ruth Pitter about the craft of poetry and put high value on her comments about his work. Hooper writes “Even after he thought one was completed he might suggest a change here. Then a change there.” As a result, “It was not always easy to determine his final version of a poem, especially if there were slightly different versions or if the poem had already appeared in print.”
In general, though, Lewis tended to spend a long time mulling over his ideas, then delivered them quickly. Havard writes that for Lewis, “major works such as books grew from a painful period of gestation. He described this state as being ‘in book,’ and the process of actual writing as akin to parturition—painful but enlivening.”
Some of the time Lewis spent “in book” was reserved for private reflection. But it is a striking feature of Lewis’s writing process that he typically involved others as he worked out his ideas. One illustration is found in Lewis’s interaction with Clifford Morris. Lewis didn’t drive a car; Morris served as his driver, traveling with him “some hundreds of miles” and enjoying “some hundreds of conversations on all sorts of subjects.” Morris describes Lewis’s writing process this way:
There were occasions when Jack used me as a kind of sounding board when he was trying out some new ideas or some new way of putting an old idea or some fresh outline or even, now and again, some striking phrase. As we might be sitting over a glass of beer, or as we were quietly driving along, he would suddenly say, “Friend Morris, listen to this, and tell me if it means anything to you,” or, “How does this strike you?” And if I didn’t “catch on” at once, I have known him to scrap the whole idea, phrase, sentence, or whatever it was and then begin all over again from another angle or in another way.
Morris’s comments illustrate that Lewis talked over small elements, like phrases, as well as large elements, like fundamental concepts. Depending on the editorial feedback he got, he readily adjusted or adapted or dropped material. He had a remarkable memory. All the evidence suggests that, in fact, Lewis did a great deal of revising. He was able to revise long passages in his head, before he wrote them down.
The way Lewis came up with title ideas offers another glimpse of his interactive writing process. A letter to Roger Lancelyn Green shows Lewis suggesting numerous possibilities and discussing them with a broad range of his readers. He asks specifically for advice on his “immediate problem,” which is to find a title for his new Narnia story. Then he explains that there has been considerable disagreement on the issue: “[Geoffrey] Bles, like you, thinks The Wild Waste Lands bad, but he says Night Under Narnia is ‘gloomy.’ George Sayer & my brother say Gnomes Under N wd be equally gloomy, but News under Narnia wd do. On the other hand my brother & the American writer Joy Davidman (who has been staying with us & is a great reader of fantasy & children’s books) both say that The Wild Waste Lands is a splendid title. What’s a chap to do?” Eventually, every one of these possibilities was rejected. The new book was titled The Silver Chair.
In short, Lewis eagerly sought advice at every stage of the writing process, but since his composing style was largely internal rather than external, there are few written records to examine. This does not mean he did not solicit feedback or change his work substantially in response to the comments he received. There is every indication that he enjoyed input from others and took their advice seriously. Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham remembers that when he offered suggestions on Lewis’s drafts, he found that his stepfather was “the kind of man who would listen to what I said.”
Lewis’s habit of asking for feedback resulted in an interesting change to the text of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Owen Barfield wrote Lewis a letter to convey several concerns his wife Maud had mentioned after she read the rough draft. Lewis responded, writing to Maud: “Owen has told me about the two main snags, from your angle, in the story. The fur can easily be removed. I am afraid I was not thinking of the fur trade at all, but only of the fact that you wd. almost certainly find fur coats in an old wardrobe. Much more serious is the undesirability of shutting oneself into a cupboard. I might add a caution—or wd. this only make things worse?”
Even though Lewis says the fur is expendable, the reference to fur remains in the published version of the story: “Looking into the inside, [Lucy] saw several coats hanging up—mostly long fur coats.” But Lewis did accept the “more serious” suggestion to include something about the danger of wardrobes. He adds a word of warning. When Lucy steps into the wardrobe for the first time, we are told that she leaves the door open “because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe.” Not only is the warning spelled out, but the verb shifts from past tense to present tense, making the point even more emphatic.
The caution is repeated when Lucy enters the wardrobe a second time: “But as soon as she reached it she heard steps in the passage outside, and then there was nothing for it but to jump into the wardrobe and hold the door closed behind her. She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.”
Again, there is the shift to present tense—it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe. And Lewis adds an important point of clarification: be careful not to shut that door, whether the wardrobe is magical or not. Altogether, there are five of these warnings in the first five chapters of the book, all in response to a letter from the Barfields.
We have seen a number of changes Lewis made as he listened to comments from friends, colleagues, fans, and readers. Sometimes he edited, and sometimes he revised. There are also instances where he took quite a different approach, directly answering a question or addressing an objection right in his text.
Lewis does this several times in Mere Christianity. After the very first chapter was broadcast on the radio, letters began to pour in, and from that point on, Lewis makes adjustments right in the text to include their immediate questions, comments, perspectives, and objections. He says, “One listener complained,” and “I find a good many people have been bothered by what I said in the last chapter.” Even more: at the beginning of Book IV, Lewis writes, “Everyone has warned me not to tell you what I am going to tell you in this last book.” In describing the basics of the Christian faith to his listeners, Lewis weaves comments from his audience into the talks themselves.
Another example of this responsive approach appears in Essays Presented to Charles Williams. This collaborative book includes six essays, five of them written by Inklings (Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield, Gervase Mathew, and Warren Lewis).
Lewis wrote the preface, and six pages into it, he offers this description of Charles Williams: “Mr. Williams’s manners implied a complete offer of intimacy without the slightest imposition of intimacy. He threw down all his own barriers without even implying that you should lower yours.” This was certainly Lewis’s experience with Williams, but apparently not everyone agreed with him. At this point in the preface, Lewis writes: “But here one of my collaborators breaks in upon me to say that this is not, after all, the true picture; that he, for his part, always found Williams a reserved man, one in whom, after years of friendship, there remained something elusive and incalculable.”
What were the circumstances of this interruption? And who is the “collaborator” Lewis mentions here? Had Lewis been reading a rough draft of this preface aloud at an Inklings meeting when someone interrupted and contradicted him? Was he at home at the Kilns with Warren Lewis, talking with him about this description, only to have his brother offer a modified picture? Did he meet with Tolkien on a Monday morning, or enjoy a visit from Barfield, or run into Mathew? We just don’t know.
But someone had objected. And Lewis doesn’t respond by quietly revising the essay; he describes the entire vignette, question and answer, right in the text, mentioning both the collaborator and the interruption. He then adds a qualifying statement to balance his own point of view.
Out of the Silent Planet offers the most extensive example of Lewis reworking a story in this way. Tolkien closely edited the first draft of this work. The details are mentioned in Tolkien’s letter to Stanley Unwin dated 4 March 1938, a letter David Downing calls “one of the most perceptive brief treatments of Lewis’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer.” Tolkien’s letter is brief and indirect—nothing at all on the level of Lewis’s lengthy critique of The Lay of Leithian. But it shows that Tolkien recognized the book’s quality and understood Lewis’s writing skills. It also provides a clear example of Lewis making changes in direct response to a friend’s critique.
As was typical of the Inklings, Tolkien’s comments in this letter are rich in encouragement. He says the book is enthralling, adding he could hardly put it down. He commends the language and poetry of Malacandra, saying it is “very well done” and “extremely interesting.” Also, in a statement that must be considered high praise coming from Tolkien, he says “the linguistic inventions and the philology on the whole are more than good enough.”
Still, Tolkien does find fault with the story. He says the book should be longer and the story line better developed. Practically speaking, he says, the book is “rather short for a narrative of this type.” As a result, “the central episode of the visit to Eldilorn [sic] is reached too soon.” Tolkien also took issue with the style, observing “Lewis is always apt to have rather creaking stiff-jointed passages.” In addition, Tolkien found a number of details in the plot that struck him as “inconsistent,” a problem virtually every fan of Lewis must admit at one point or another.
Tolkien’s criticisms occur at three levels: the whole text (plot), the sentence (“creaking” passages), and the word (philology). Nearly every aspect of Lewis’s writing is addressed. And Lewis responded with very great changes at each level. Tolkien assures Unwin that these problems “have since been corrected to my satisfaction.” Lewis was by nature far more casual about the details of his fiction than Tolkien. If Lewis corrected the text to Tolkien’s satisfaction, there must have been significant interaction and substantial change.
But in addition to all of this editing, Lewis changed Out of the Silent Planet in another way: he added a postscript. In it, we are told that although the book is presented in fictional form, the events really happened, and Lewis simply wrote down what Ransom, the main character, told him. The postscript is written as if Ransom has just finished reading Lewis’s novelization of his experiences and has written to tell Lewis he is quite disappointed with it.
It is enlightening to compare Lewis’s comments in the postscript with Tolkien’s criticisms about the book. The voice of Ransom and the nature of his concerns sound suspiciously like those of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ransom is irritated, for example, that Lewis has cut the philological parts so ruthlessly. It is not hard to imagine that just as Lewis demanded more narrative in Tolkien’s text, Tolkien may have wanted more philological detail and information about the invented languages in Lewis’s text. Ransom is also annoyed that so little attention has been given to the culture of Malacandra, to calmer circumstances when the texture of daily life is clearly seen. He scolds Lewis for these omissions, then adds his own remembrances of the geography, and answers questions about pets, funerals, and the night sky. There is the quick filling in of homely details—of the average body temperature of a hross and the nature of their droppings and the fact they don’t shed tears but do drink alcohol.
Ransom also describes other subspecies, such as the silver hross and the red sorn, and then apologizes for giving so little information about the pfifltriggi. He says in jest, “I agree, it is a pity I never saw the pfifltriggi at home. I know nearly enough about them to ‘fake’ a visit to them as an episode in the story, but I don’t think we ought to introduce any mere fiction.” All of these additions serve to fill in obvious gaps in Lewis’s sub-created world, and all of them likely address questions raised by Tolkien, who was fascinated with language and enjoyed the details of common life.
Tolkien believed Out of the Silent Planet was too short; it may be that the postscript provides more of the kind of information he hoped for. But the form is certainly unconventional—rather than going back and revising the story itself, rewriting and adding to it as Tolkien would have done, Lewis creates an imaginary situation that gives him an excuse to list the complaints and invent explanations and then tack it on as an addendum to the story.
In the postscript, Lewis also addresses a logical inconsistency. The spaceship becomes unbearably hot as they pass near the sun on their way home. Ransom asks scornfully, “Why must you leave out my account of how the shutter jammed just before our landing on Malacandra? Without this, your description of our sufferings from excessive light on the return journey raises the very obvious question, ‘Why didn’t they close their shutters?’” Is Lewis poking fun at himself for making such a conspicuous mistake? Or are the Inklings the ones who asked this “very obvious” question? If I had to speculate, I would guess that Warren Lewis, who loved vehicles and transportation of various kinds, might be the one who caught the error. This may be one of the reasons Out of the Silent Planet is dedicated to Warren Lewis, “a life-long critic of the space-and-time story.”
Most personal and provocative of all, I think, is the final line of the postscript. The original wager specified that Lewis would write a space-travel book, and Tolkien a time-travel book. Lewis has finished his task, so, as he ends his book, he seizes the chance to pave the way for Tolkien. Lewis writes, “Now that ‘Weston’ has shut the door, the way to the planets lies through the past; if there is to be any more space-travelling, it will have to be time-travelling as well … !” Lewis ends his story with a challenge directed at Tolkien and designed to encourage him to fulfill the terms of the wager and write the book he promised.
Dedication
Every time a writer revises a draft, fresh opportunities arise for comments and questions to inspire significant change. In a highly interactive group, especially one with a long history of regular meetings, only a small percentage of these will be written down at the time. But as this chapter has shown, there are some cases where we can directly trace a specific change in a text to a specific comment from one Inkling to another. The longer I look at source materials, the more examples I find. But one must stop somewhere. Perhaps some sense of the overall impact can be seen most clearly through the words of the Inklings themselves.
In Saving the Appearances, Barfield thanks Lewis, among others, for “thoughtful comments and practical suggestions, which I have used freely.”
In The Sunset of the Splendid Century, Warren Lewis thanks Gervase Mathew and C. S. Lewis “for their patience in listening to several chapters of it in manuscript.” Warren Lewis also thanks Mathew for reading the manuscript of Assault on Olympus and making “useful suggestions.”
In The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation, J. A. W. Bennett thanks C. S. Lewis and Colin Hardie for “corrections and suggestions.”
In The Allegory of Love, Lewis thanks Barfield, Dyson, and Tolkien, noting in particular that Tolkien read and commented on the first chapter. In English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, Lewis thanks Bennett and Dyson “for advice and criticism.”
In The Court of Richard II, Mathew acknowledges “pervasive influences” from friends including Nevill Coghill and C. S. Lewis, and he names Tolkien among those with whom “minor problems” have been discussed. In his article “Justice and Charity in The Vision of Piers Plowman,” Mathew thanks Coghill for his input.
In A Study of Old English Literature, C. L. Wrenn thanks four of his professional colleagues, including Tolkien, who have “given me not only the benefit of their writings but frequent personal guidance.” In Beowulf, with the Finnesburg Fragment, he thanks Tolkien, along with R. W. Chambers, crediting the two of them for “what is valuable in my approach to Beowulf.”
In The Poet Chaucer, Coghill acknowledges Mathew and Dyson, among others, for “their patient reading of this book before it was printed, and for many wise and learned suggestions they have made and I have adopted.”
As we will see in the next chapters, collaborative works, references in their books and articles, poems and fictional characters, and other textual evidence round out the picture of creative participation and significant influence. But here, in this quick sampling of dedications, we see credit and gratitude expressed by seven different Inklings concerning eleven different titles. They acknowledge a whole range of thoughtful comments, practical suggestions, advice, criticism, input, guidance, corrections, and influence.
In summary, Lewis has this to say about the influence of the group: “All Hallows’ Eve and my own Perelandra (as well as Professor Tolkien’s unfinished sequel to the Hobbit) had all been read aloud, each chapter as it was written.” And he adds with certainty, “They owe a good deal to the hard-hitting criticism of the circle.” It is a sweeping statement, and I, for one, believe him.
DOING WHAT THEY DID: There is an art to giving feedback. It is common for critics to offer diagnoses: This is boring. This is choppy. This character isn’t working. The storyline is predictable. The scansion is off. It is often more helpful to offer specific suggestions: Shorten the dialogue. Pick up the pace. Combine these three paragraphs. Invert these two lines. Envision a possibility they may not have considered. Or suggest an alternative they may not have thought of.
There is also an art to receiving advice. Suggestions may be most helpful while the paint is still wet and the ink hasn’t dried. Inviting feedback early can make a big difference.
And, ultimately, it is important to remember that the word “author” is related to the word “authority.” The choice to accept, or reject, or modify the advice that is offered always remains under the author’s control.
