Warren Lewis at the Kilns
Collaboration can be difficult to define. How much involvement is necessary for someone to be considered a collaborator? We’ve seen that the Inklings worked together in many different ways—providing support, offering correction, giving suggestions—and the word “collaboration” could be used to describe any of these various ways of working together. In this chapter, we take a closer look at examples of collaboration in its most specific sense: as two or more individuals who think up a project and then work on it together from start to finish.
There are a number of important works worth mentioning. Some involve lesser known members of the group: J. A. W. Bennett, for example, edited a collection of essays about the King Arthur legends, and it features a major essay written by C. S. Lewis. Others are strictly academic: Christopher Tolkien and Nevill Coghill worked together to produce three carefully annotated editions of Chaucer’s tales. Some books were really just assembled rather than coproduced, including a collection of essays entitled English and Medieval Studies, Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday.
For many of the Inklings, this habit of collaboration began when they were very young. This is especially true of the Lewises.
The earliest Inklings collaboration is Boxen, an imaginary world created by C. S. Lewis and Warren Lewis when they were boys. It began in April of 1905, when the Lewis family moved from Belfast to a brand-new house on the outskirts of the city. Lewis describes the change this way: “My father, growing, I suppose, in prosperity, decided to leave the semidetached villa in which I had been born and build himself a much larger house, further out into what was then the country. The ‘New House,’ as we continued for years to call it, was a large one even by my present standards; to a child it seemed less like a house than a city.” Lewis was six years old; Warren was nine.
The Lewis brothers took over a section of the attic, calling it “the little end room.” This is where Lewis’s first books were written and illustrated. He invented a world he called Animal-Land. It was set in medieval times and featured dressed animals, including a frog named Lord Big, a rabbit king named Benjamin VII, and a bear named James Bar. At the same time, Warren Lewis was also writing stories, but they were very different from his brother’s. Warren Lewis didn’t care about the Middle Ages; he was interested in modern times. He was captivated by trains and steamships rather than dressed animals. He did not invent a new country. Instead, he created an ideal world based on what he thought India was like.
Over time, the boys decided to merge their two worlds into one. Animal-Land came to represent an early period in its history, while India became the modern period of that same world. Once they had worked out a rough historic timeline, the boys revised the geography. Lewis recalls, “Animal-Land had to be geographically related to my brother’s India, and India consequently lifted out of its place in the real world. We made it an island, with its north coast running along the back of the Himalayas; between it and Animal-Land my brother rapidly invented the principal steamship routes. Soon there was a whole world and a map of that world which used every color in my paintbox.” Having worked out these details, the boys named this world Boxen.
Much of this collaboration took place over the Christmas holiday of 1908. They expressed their creative vision in many different forms: stories, maps, illustrations, and essays. There is a short play called “The King’s Ring (A Comedy)” that deals with the theft of the crown jewels of Animal-Land. There is also a fairly long biography called “The Life of Lord John Big of Bigham (In Three Volumes).” Warren Lewis even published a Boxonian newspaper.
Boxen is a beautifully detailed imaginary world, but the quality varies a great deal. Readers who are looking for early hints of Narnia are generally disappointed. There is nothing particularly magical here. Most readers find the whole thing rather dry and prosaic. There are long, drawn-out speeches and elaborate political details. Still, the invention is complex, and the work is clever. It shows that Lewis was devoted to writing from a very early age. Not only that: it offers important evidence of the boys’ joint process. Joe R. Christopher notes, “Perhaps Lewis’s childhood period of imaginative play (Animal-Land) that was shared by his brother (India) prepared him to be an author who was ready to borrow from his friends.” C. S. Lewis began his creative work in daily collaboration with his older brother and continued to work with others throughout his life.
Lewis outgrew the tales of Boxen, but when he went away to university, he continued to create in collaboration.
Rhyming Lines
When C. S. Lewis started his undergraduate studies at Oxford, he gained a reputation as a mysterious figure, “a strange fellow who seemed to live an almost secret life and took no part in the social life of the college.” Despite this shadowy reputation, a student named R. M. S. Pasley heard that Lewis was a writer and sought him out. Pasley introduced Lewis to Leo Baker; they were soon joined by Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood, and W. O. Field. A shared passion for poetry forged the connection, and from the beginning, they read each other’s original work.
During their first term at Oxford, they planned several long afternoon walks together, and as they walked, they recited and critiqued the poems they were writing. These casual walks evolved into large-scale walking tours—they would commit a week or so to walking across the English countryside, across moors, through woods and meadows, pausing along the way at inns and pubs. They adopted the name “The Cretaceous Perambulators.” But neither hiking nor sightseeing served as the focus of these excursions. Poetry did. Baker notes, “What did we talk about on those walks? Naturally, of first importance were the poems we had most recently written.” The group continued on for several decades.
In addition to talking about their poetry, Baker, Barfield, Lewis, and the others made up spontaneous verse along the way. Lewis tells of one walking tour: “We had a splendid evening ‘telling a story’—an old diversion on these walks in which each player invents a chunk in turn: the natural tendency of each to introduce new characters and complications and then to ‘hand the baby’ to the next man, produces the fun.” On this particular occasion, Hugo Dyson met them for a part of the time, and Lewis notes he was particularly good at this game of spontaneous round-robin storytelling.
On another occasion, Lewis, Barfield, Harwood, and Field planned a long tour together. They had a very pleasant start, but then they encountered some nasty setbacks: strong wind, steep hills, scrubby camp, and bad food, including oranges of the “tough, acrid, unjuicy type, which is useless for thirst and revolting to taste.” Lewis and Barfield responded to these challenges by converting their frustration into collaborative poetry. Lewis writes, “Barfield and I dropped behind and began composing in Pope-ian couplets a satire on the people who arrange walking tours. Nothing cd have been happier. At a stroke every source of irritation was magically changed into a precious fragment of ‘copy.’”
As Barfield recalls, part of the joy of creating poetry was making jokes at the expense of their walking companions. Field, who was tall and thin, they renamed “Longus.” And they referred to Harwood as “Philocasius,” combining the Greek “philos” and the Latin “caseus,” i.e., a person who loves cheese. Lewis notes that composing poetry helped them turn a trial into an adventure, and it had done them both some good: “By the time we had walked three miles we were once more in a position to enjoy the glorious country all round us.”
On a different occasion, they created another long collaborative project: “That night we slept at Challacombe and composed ex-tempore poetry: telling the story of the Fall between us in the metre of Hiawatha.” Barfield also remembers this serial poem and explains that one of the lines contained a reference to “the mystical caboodle.”
And again, on 30 June 1922, Lewis records a poem he and Barfield composed together: “On the way back we started a burlesque poem in terza rima composing a line each in turn: we continued it later, with paper, by candle light. It was very good nonsense. We entitled it ‘The Button Moulder’s story’ and went to bed.”
The satire about people who arrange walking tours has vanished. “The Fall of Hiawatha” was never written down. “The Button Moulder’s story” was never published, and I could find no trace of the paper copied by candlelight. Like the other poems mentioned here, it was apparently a light-hearted narrative poem with a strong pattern of rhyme and meter.
There is another casual collaboration that has survived, however, and it may give us an idea of what these Barfield/Lewis collaborations were like. Lewis often composed poems with his wife, Joy Davidman, engaging in “rhyming competitions” as they wrote alternating lines of poetry together. One such occasion occurred in 1960 as the two of them toured Greece with Roger Lancelyn Green and his wife, June. While in Crete, they stopped at a “terrible tourist resort” called The Glass House. “We were kept waiting hours for a very indifferent meal,” records Green, “and the band blared away deafeningly. Joy finally began flicking bread-pellets at the nearest musician.” As time dragged on, they amused themselves by throwing out lines of an impromptu poem:
[Jack] A pub-crawl through the glittering isles of Greece,
[Joy] I wish it left my ears a moment’s peace!
[June] If once the crashing Cretans ceased to bore,
[Roger] The drums of England would resist no more.
[Jack] No more they can resist. For mine are broken!
[Roger] To this Curetes’ shields were but a token,
[June] Our cries in silence still above the noise —
[Joy] He has been hit by a good shot of Joy’s!
[Jack] What aim! What strength! What purpose and what poise!
Composing poems and stories to pass the time, to mythologize their experiences, to give expression to gripes and complaints, to provide mental exercise, or to poke fun at one another was a natural part of walking tours and a common feature of Lewis’s friendships. He and Barfield, in particular, enjoyed it. This habit extended across the years. But despite this long history, only one Barfield/Lewis collaboration has ever been published. It is entitled “Abecedarium Philosophicum,” and it appeared in The Oxford Magazine on 30 November 1933. It is cheerful nonsense, discussing (and dismissing) thirty philosophers or philosophical ideas, following one another in alphabetical order. The poem begins,
A is the Absolute: none can express it.
The Absolute, Gentlemen! Fill up! God bless it!
B is for Bergson who said: “It’s a crime!
They’ve been and forgotten that Time is Time!”
C is for Croce who said: “Art’s a stuff
That means what it says (and that’s little enough!)”
And so it continues through the alphabet, listing Descartes, Elis, Fichte, the Good, Hume, and so on, all with the same light and irreverent touch. If this published work is characteristic of the larger body of unpublished material, it indicates that silly topics and serious ones were addressed with gusto in the poetry Barfield and Lewis wrote together.
These energizing tours were a creative crucible: writing projects and other creative breakthroughs emerged spontaneously, and poetry was made from the raw material of daily life. There is one other manuscript that came about as a result of these playful and highly interactive outings.
Perambulators
One of the most unusual publications to grow out of these walking tours was a booklet entitled A Cretaceous Perambulator. It was published in 1983 in a limited edition by the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society. This little book had its start in April 1936, when Barfield, Harwood, and Lewis scheduled a walking tour. At the last minute, Lewis was unable to join them. So, as a joke, Barfield and Harwood conspired to have Lewis make it up to them by taking a mock exam. They modeled their test after the School Certificate Examination taken by British students at age 16, and they sternly informed Lewis that he would not be permitted to walk with them ever again unless he passed the test and gained readmittance into the “College of Cretaceous Perambulators.”
The test consists of three parts. Sixty minutes are allowed for Part I, which consists of ten short essay questions, including, “Why are you the best map reader?” and “Distinguish carefully between a walking-tour and a walking-race.”
One of the most complex questions in this first section asks Lewis to write an essay describing “an imaginary walking-tour lasting not less than 4 days with no more than 4 of the following.” The list of potential walkers includes Father Ronald Knox, Mahatma Gandhi, G. K. Chesterton, Mary Pickford, Sigmund Freud, Sir William Morris, Lord Olivier and “Tha Dhali Llama of Thibet” [sic].
The first draft of the test also includes this question: “Who were: Owen Glendower, Owen Nares, Robert Owen, Owen More, Owen Barfield, Vale Owen, Owain, Ywain, Rowena, Bowen, Rovin’, Sowin’, Growin’, Knowin’ and Gloin?” Although this question did not make it into the final version of Part I, the questions that did are equally facetious.
Part II of the test allowed only forty minutes. Six topics are given for an “English Essay,” including “My Favourite Soaking-machine, and why.” Lewis himself coined the expression “Soaking-Machine.” He writes, “The word ‘soak’ means to sit idly or sleepily doing nothing;” therefore, a Soaking-Machine is just a comfortable place to sit and daydream. George Sayer offers another perspective on the origins of the Soaking-Machine in relation to the walking tours: “The routine of the walk was always the same. One of us would shoulder ‘the pack.’ We would walk for half an hour. If it was warm enough, and somehow it usually was, we would then have a ‘soak.’ This meant lying or sitting down while Jack smoked a cigarette.”
Part III is the practical section, requiring first, that Lewis “show reasonable proficiency in the game of Darts,” and second, he “read a Chapter to the satisfaction of a recognised Bishop of the Established Church.” The notes explain that none of the Perambulators were the least bit proficient at darts. And the request to read a chapter comes from their habit of stopping at any church they came upon. They would rest in a pew while one of the walkers would read a chapter from the Bible at the lectern.
Lewis responded to all three parts of the test, with answers as amusing as the questions themselves, full of ironic schoolboy lapses in taste, spelling, punctuation, and grammar. At one point, he deliberately taunts Barfield by indulging in the most blatant form of chronological snobbery. Lewis writes, “It is true that [Aristotle] was not such a good philosopher as Lord Bacon but ought we to laugh at him for that, no We ought to remember that he lived a lot earlier when people were much less civilized.”
Lewis invokes Aristotle again in answering the question, “Why are you the best map reader?” He explains:
Aristotles [sic] astonishing learning enabled him to discover that there were four Causes—formal, efficient, material and final e.g.–
| i | The formal reason why I am the best map reader is because I have the best map reading faculty. |
| ii | The efficient is because I read it best |
| iii | The material is my brains. |
| iv | The final is that we can find the way |
A Cretaceous Perambulator overflows with the clever and playful spirit that characterized the creative life of the Inklings. Like other Lewis/Barfield collaborations, it has “a peculiarly Oxonian character, a mixture of high seriousness, good humor, and genial fellowship.”
Fragments and Failures
Even successful groups have their share of missteps, mishaps, and failures. Creative work and new ideas for joint projects emerged in conversation at work and play, but for one reason or another, some were never completed. In 1944, Lewis and Tolkien considered writing a book together on language (nature, origins, functions). By 1948, the book got as far as the title Language and Human Nature. Chad Walsh reported optimistically, “The Student Christian Movement Press, in its recent announcement of forthcoming books, listed a text on semantics, Language and Human Nature, to be written jointly by Lewis and his friend, Prof. F. R. R. [sic] Tolkien, but I gather that it is still in the blueprint stage.”
This book project was serious and substantial enough to be listed and promoted by the publisher, and many people knew of it. But the book did not get very far. Lewis began the first chapter, writing about seven pages of it longhand in a small notebook he had labeled “SCRAPS.” The pages are tentative, with long definitions of what language is and a preliminary exploration of how it relates to meaning.
Lewis’s draft of Language and Human Nature shows that the book was clearly intended as a collaboration. He uses the plural “we” and “our” rather than the singular “I” and “my.” He refers to “the authors” and their ideas. If this small beginning is any indication, the book was not to be written in alternating chapters by Lewis and Tolkien but offered from a single unified perspective.
Lewis made a good start, but there is no evidence that Tolkien worked on it at all. Lewis was frustrated. He writes, “My book with Professor Tolkien—any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man—is dated, I fear, to appear on the Greek Kalends.” He expected it would never be written, and he was right.
Lewis and Williams attempted two collaborative projects, and these, too, were never completed. A reference to one of them is found in a 1946 letter. Lewis had been talking with Charles Williams, and they planned “to collaborate on a short Xtian Dictionary (about 40 Headings)” as their contribution to “a sort of library of Christian knowledge for young people in the top forms at school.” They are called The Thorn Books, “being elementary as Horn-Books, dealing with thorny questions, from an Anglican point of view.” As it turned out, the idea of The Thorn Books did not generate enough interest, and none of the books in the series were produced.
Another failed Lewis/Williams collaboration is mentioned in Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Lewis explains that Williams “toyed with the idea that he and I should collaborate in a book of animal stories from the Bible, told by the animals concerned.” Lewis describes some of the possible story lines. They could tell the story of Jonah from the point of view of the whale. And they could tell the story of Elisha from the point of view of the two she-bears. “The bears were to be convinced that God exists and is good by their sudden meal of children.” This project, too, got no further than the realm of ideas.
Joint Projects
Amid these failed collaborations, many did succeed. One such book is The Problem of Pain. C. S. Lewis took up the task of writing this book with great reluctance. Ashley Sampson, an editor at Geoffrey Bles, had been impressed with The Pilgrim’s Regress, and so he approached Lewis asking him to write a book on the Christian view of pain and suffering. At first, Lewis said no; when pressured, he asked if he might possibly be allowed to write it anonymously. Lewis admits, “If I were to say what I really thought about pain, I should be forced to make statements of such apparent fortitude that they would become ridiculous if anyone knew who made them. Anonymity was rejected as inconsistent with the series; but Mr. Sampson pointed out that I could write a preface explaining that I did not live up to my own principles!”
And so Lewis began. As he worked, he read it aloud chapter by chapter at meetings of the Inklings, and they offered many suggestions.
Dr. R. E. Havard had a great deal to contribute to the unfolding draft. Lewis appreciated his input so much that he invited Havard to write an appendix to the book, asking him to draw from his medical experience and describe what he had observed of the effects of pain. Havard was glad to do it. And apparently he worked very hard. Havard reports with some pride that when Lewis saw the appendix, he seemed quite pleased. He also notes that Lewis revised his contribution extensively, shortening it and also editing it for clarity. Havard enjoyed the process and observed, “I was impressed by the trouble he took to get it right.” Lewis is the one who read the revised chapter aloud at an Inklings meeting, and it was received with enthusiasm.
The Problem of Pain is Lewis’s first important work of Christian apologetics, and it is still one of his most popular. In addition to the insights it provides into the nature of suffering, it also offers a window into how the Inklings worked together, the highly interactive process of initiating, drafting, commenting, editing, changing, shortening, revising, and clarifying. The Problem of Pain is, appropriately, dedicated “To The Inklings.”
While the Inklings took an active part in many of each other’s projects, there is only one book they worked on as a group from start to finish: a collection entitled Essays Presented to Charles Williams. As was noted in chapter 2, Williams first came to Oxford when Oxford University Press moved out of London during World War II. As the war drew to a close, Williams prepared to return to his home and family. The Inklings began working on a book of essays to be published in his honor. Lewis explains that he and Tolkien came up with the idea together and took the initiative in proposing this project.
But on the 14th of May 1945, Williams experienced severe abdominal pain and was taken to the hospital. He endured an operation, but it was not enough to save him. He died the next day.
The Inklings completed the collection of essays, but with a significant change in purpose. In the preface, Lewis grimly observes, “We now offer as a memorial what had been devised as a greeting.” The proceeds of the sale of the book were given to Williams’s widow.
There is little information about how the Inklings went about choosing, editing, and ordering the essays, but it is clear that Lewis played the role of editor. He wrote the preface, edited each contribution, and personally invited two additional contributors: T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Essays Presented to Charles Williams displays the skill and intellectual vitality of five of the Inklings: C. S. Lewis, Warren Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Mathew. And its publication helped to establish the Inklings as a “corporate identity in the public eye.” Whether or not it truly represents the group, it does stand alone as the only book the Inklings produced together from start to finish.
One more joint project is worth mentioning here: Arthurian Torso. “C. Williams & C. S. Lewis” are listed on the cover as coauthors, and the sections written by Williams and by Lewis are equal in length. In the introduction, Lewis describes the rather unusual origin of this book. When Williams died in 1945, he left two major works unfinished. One was a long series of poems on the King Arthur legend. The other was a long history of the King Arthur legend entitled “The Figure of Arthur.”
Lewis was well acquainted with Williams’s Arthurian work. He writes, “Since I had heard nearly all of it read aloud and expounded by the author and had questioned him closely on his meaning I felt that I might be able to comment on it, though imperfectly, yet usefully.” Lewis wrote a long commentary, based on a number of sources: the typescript of Williams’s unfinished essay, his conversations with Williams, and his experience in hearing Williams read these works aloud. Lewis wrote at length about the work Williams left behind. This extended commentary was entitled “Williams and the Arthuriad.” It was delivered as a series of lectures, revised and then published along with Williams’s unfinished essay.
Gervase Mathew notes, “It is almost a symbol of the nature of their friendship that the draft and the lectures should weld so perfectly into a single book, although superficially the technique is very different.” In this one volume, we have literary history and literary criticism and another example of a joint project by two of the Inklings.
Tolkien and Tolkien
Of all the examples of Inkling collaboration, none is more extensive or important than the common labor of J. R. R. Tolkien and his son. Christopher has occupied many roles, including audience, commentator, proofreader, and tutorial pupil. He is also an Inkling, the last surviving member of the group. His father made his status clear in a letter dated 9 October 1945, telling him that the Inklings proposed “to consider you a permanent member, with right of entry and what not quite independent of my presence or otherwise.” At the time this invitation was extended, he was twenty years old.
Christopher Tolkien’s name can be found on nearly every one of his father’s works, including the foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Hobbit, the maps in The Lord of the Rings, and the editing of The Silmarillion. Tolkien calls his son his “chief critic and collaborator.”
Chief critic perhaps; chief collaborator without question. Christopher’s earliest contribution to his father’s work was as a primary audience for The Hobbit. He was about five years old when he first heard the words, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” As we have seen, the presence of interested and eager readers is a crucial part of the creative act. This is true of authors in general and very true of J. R. R. Tolkien in particular.
Christopher Tolkien critiqued both the text and the drawings of The Hobbit as the book took shape. He was always very concerned with the consistency of the story, and he offers this example. One night, as his father was reading the story to him, he interrupted, saying, “Last time, you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a golden tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver.” Much annoyed, his father “strode across the room to his desk to make a note.”
Though J. R. R. Tolkien sometimes found this attention to detail annoying, he quickly learned it could be used to his advantage. In 1938, he received a letter from a fan in Boston, listing a number of errors in the published text of The Hobbit. Worried, Tolkien asked fourteen-year old Christopher to read the whole book through looking for mistakes, and he paid him twopence for every one he found.
Their interaction continued as Tolkien worked on The Lord of the Rings. Two of his other children, John and Priscilla, explain that their father “kept in very close imaginative contact with Christopher during 1944 and 1945 when Christopher was stationed in South Africa. In these letters (many of which appear in the volume of letters published after J. R. R. T.’s death) he sent Christopher regular installments of the book as he wrote them, as well as discussing the ideas and problems he was encountering.” Tolkien looked forward to sending new chapters to his son. In one letter, he expressed his appreciation to Christopher saying, “This book has come to be more and more addressed to you, so that your opinion matters more than any one else’s.”
When Christopher returned to Oxford and to Inklings meetings, he took up another task: reading aloud new chapters of The Lord of the Rings. Carpenter points out that “it was generally agreed that he made a better job of it than did Tolkien himself.” J. R. R. Tolkien spoke in a rapid, indistinct voice, a quality that hampered his reputation with his students and exhausted the patience of some of the Inklings. On 6 February 1947, Warren Lewis noted in his diary, “Chris then gave us an admirable chapter of the ‘[new] Hobbit’, beautifully read.” Some months later, Warren Lewis noted that Tolkien was back to reading his own story to the group, and he quietly confesses, “I think we all missed Christopher’s reading.”
One of the most underappreciated contributions Christopher Tolkien made to The Lord of the Rings is designing the detailed maps of Middle-earth. His work was based on a large number of rough sketches his father had prepared. Christopher’s maps are far more than decorative; the process of mapmaking and storytelling was highly collaborative, and each one shaped the other. J. R. R. Tolkien writes, “I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit.” And again, in an interview on the BBC, he observes, “If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map, otherwise you can never make a map of it afterwards.” The sense that The Lord of the Rings tells a real story unfolding in a real place owes a great deal to the skill and clarity of Christopher Tolkien’s maps. They allowed Tolkien to maintain a “meticulous care for distances,” as well as planning the travel routes, accounting for terrain, and determining the pace of events.
Christopher Tolkien served as an important collaborator during Tolkien’s life; his participation in his father’s work is even more evident in the posthumously published work. The Silmarillion is one example. As Tolkien labored on The Lord of the Rings, he often protested that the stories that have been gathered in The Silmarillion represented his real work. In 1938, he emphasized that his mind was “preoccupied with the ‘pure’ fairy stories or mythologies of the Silmarillion.” Nearly twenty years later, he was still adamant: “My heart and mind is in the Silmarillion.” One of the best descriptions of this important book comes from William Cater, a British journalist who became friends with Tolkien. Cater calls The Silmarillion “the heart of Tolkien’s invented mythology, the scarcely visible roots from which grew the great tree of The Lord of the Rings, the source of his invented languages, the origin of his invented peoples, elves, hobbits, ents, dwarves, orcs.”
Over the years, Tolkien drafted a vast amount of material for The Silmarillion. With the completion of The Lord of the Rings, he returned to this project, and after his retirement in 1959, he vowed to give it his full attention. But he quickly became overwhelmed by the task. He found himself easily distracted, and he spent his days writing letters or playing solitaire. By this time, Tolkien had become increasingly isolated, and as a result, he found himself increasingly unable to write.
When he died in 1973, he left an enormous amount of material unfinished, unconnected, and completely disorganized. Christopher Tolkien observes, “By the time of my father’s death the amount of writing in existence on the subject of the Three Ages was huge in quantity (since it extended over a lifetime), disordered, more full of beginnings than of ends, and varying in content from heroic verse in the ancient English alliterative meter to severe historical analysis of his own extremely difficult languages: a vast repository and labyrinth of story, of poetry, of philosophy, and of philology.”
How to handle this vast amount of disconnected material? Christopher Tolkien decided that rather than present all of the assorted fragments of the poems and stories of his father’s mythology, he would select the most important ones and arrange them in the most “internally self-consistent” way. He explains, “I had to make many choices between competing versions and to make many changes of detail; and in the last few chapters (which had been left almost untouched for many years) I had in places to modify the narrative to make it coherent.” And once he had made these changes, he wrote new sections of the story to fill in the gaps. He notes, “Here and there I had to develop the narrative out of notes and rough drafts.” As a result, as Christopher Tolkien acknowledges, “There’s a great deal of my own personal literary judgment in the book.”
Ultimately, the task was so demanding that he called in the assistance of novelist Guy Gavriel Kay, who worked with him on the project during 1974 and 1975. The Silmarillion was completed and finally published in 1977.
The Silmarillion was followed by Unfinished Tales. Whereas the goal of The Silmarillion was to produce a cohesive unity, Christopher Tolkien’s purpose in Unfinished Tales was to present the loose collection of incomplete narratives untouched, adding lengthy introductions and explanatory notes.
After Unfinished Tales, he continued steadfast in his commitment to his father’s work. He sorted through the manuscript pages, and eventually he completed a twelve-volume set called The History of Middle-earth. It includes rough drafts and alternate versions of Tolkien’s published works, along with scattered stories, poems, sketches, and outlines that were never finished.
In completing this monumental task, Christopher Tolkien used the insight and expertise he alone possessed as one intimately involved in the creation of the work. Among other things, he deserves considerable credit for simply being able to decipher his father’s handwriting. He typed and sequenced the scattered sections and provided detailed notes and essays on the various documents. As profitable as it is to have J. R. R. Tolkien’s working drafts and background materials, much of the value of these twelve books is found in Christopher Tolkien’s notes and commentary.
In addition to these important contributions to his father’s imaginative world of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien also contributed to Tolkien’s scholarly work in Middle English. In 1975, two years after Tolkien’s death, Allen and Unwin decided to publish his translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo in one volume. Christopher Tolkien explains that his father “wished to provide both a general introduction and a commentary; and it was largely because he could not decide on the form that these should take that the translations remained unpublished.” Christopher Tolkien was called upon to sort through the translations. He writes, “In choosing between competing versions I have tried throughout to determine his latest intention, and that has in most cases been discoverable with fair certainty.” He used his father’s notes to compile an introduction. He also prepared a short glossary, printed in the back of the book.
There is more, much more. Christopher Tolkien has written a number of important articles discussing his father’s work. He worked closely with Humphrey Carpenter as coeditor of The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. He continues to prepare introductions and critical notes to enhance his father’s publications, including The Children of Húrin (2007), The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009), The Fall of Arthur (2013), and Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014).
J. R. R. Tolkien left a great deal of his work unfinished when he died. What we have of his writing and what we know of his sub-created world is due in large part to the insight and effort of Christopher Tolkien. As Rayner Unwin eloquently observes, “In effect one man’s imaginative genius has had the benefit of two lifetimes’ work.” Without Christopher Tolkien, not only would The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings look very different, but so would the face of Tolkien scholarship.
“Well, We Will.”
When we think about the Inklings, we usually focus inward, on the ways they met to discuss their books with one another. This is fitting: collaborative circles generally focus on their own creative process. But if a group is successful, and especially if it persists for an extended period of time, its attention will shift, and at least some of its energy will be directed outward. This has been called the “collective action” stage. It begins “when the members decide to carry out a group project aimed at winning support for their vision outside their own network. The project could be a journal, an art exhibition, a grant proposal, or some other task that requires interdependent work.”
The Inklings did not invest much energy in collective action, aside from devoting significant energy to publicizing one another’s writing projects: promoting book ideas to publishers, writing blurbs for book covers and advertising, and publishing reviews. Still, there are occasions in which they attempted to bring about some kind of political change.
As we saw in chapter 2, one of the first projects that Lewis and Tolkien collaborated on was the complete revision of the curriculum for students at the English School. Several years later, the Inklings rallied again, this time to put forth one of their members, Adam Fox, as the Oxford Professor of Poetry. This is a five-year position, and, unlike other university positions, the Professor of Poetry is elected by popular vote of the faculty. Throughout its history, this position has provoked bitter debate, not only about the holder’s point of view, but also about the position’s purpose: Should it provide a platform for a practicing poet? Or should it be reserved for a scholar of poetry?
In 1938, E. K. Chambers was nominated for the coveted position. Even though Chambers had impressive academic credentials, Adam Fox was surprised to hear that he had been nominated. Fox reports, “When at breakfast one morning I read that Chambers was proposed, I said without any thought of being taken literally, ‘This is simply shocking; they might as well make me Professor of Poetry.’” Lewis, who was seated next to him at the time, said in reply, “Well, we will.”
So the Inklings joined forces to oppose Chambers, arguing that a practising poet should fill the position and nominating Adam Fox instead. They lobbied enthusiastically for votes, and Fox won. Tolkien responded with enthusiasm and pride: “[Fox] was nominated by Lewis and myself, and miraculously elected: our first public victory over established privilege. For Fox is a member of our literary club of practising poets.”
Some have argued that the Inklings had little motive for this political action—it did not pay off for the group in any tangible way. So why do it? Carpenter suggests that the Inklings wanted to demonstrate their power as a group. It seems to me, however, that the motive was less to flex their collective muscles than to promote their convictions about what sort of person should or should not hold this position.
The syllabus-reform measure and the election of Fox were triumphs of their collective action. But another political attempt ended less successfully. In 1951, the position of Professor of Poetry was again vacant, and this time the Inklings nominated C. S. Lewis for the position. Lewis ran against Cecil Day-Lewis, and he was defeated, with a final vote of 173 to 194. Many believe that Lewis’s outspoken Christian faith was responsible for his defeat. Warren Lewis recorded in his diary, “I’m astonished at the virulence of the anti-Xtian feeling shown here.” Hugo Dyson reported that he talked to one elector, urging him to vote for Lewis but was told he could not possibly support the election of the man who had written The Screwtape Letters.
The Inklings met for dinner after the results were published, and, as Warren Lewis notes, their conversation was “merry” despite the defeat. Tolkien says much the same thing. Although some have suggested Lewis was “cut to the quick” by this turn of events, that is not the case. As Tolkien explains, “I remember that we had assembled soon after in our accustomed tavern and found C. S. L. sitting there, looking (and since he was no actor at all probably feeling) much at ease. ‘Fill up!’ he said, ‘and stop looking so glum. The only distressing thing about this affair is that my friends seem to be upset.’”
One other election deserves mention here. For many years, Lewis had hoped he might be offered a professorship at Oxford. Then, early in 1954, an offer came from an unexpected direction. Cambridge University announced the creation of a brand-new position, a chair for a Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English. Lewis was chosen unanimously as the first holder of this coveted position; Tolkien was one of the committee members responsible. The Electors wrote to Lewis on 11 May 1954 to tell him so.
Lewis was flattered, but he graciously declined the appointment, citing “domestic necessities.” Puzzled, they extended the invitation again, and again, Lewis said no.
Then Tolkien took action. He had a long talk with Lewis. He discovered the reason for Lewis’s reluctance was his concern about his living arrangements: he did not want to sell his home in Oxford and uproot his brother, Warren, and Fred Paxford, their gardener. Tolkien wrote to several of the other Electors, urging them to provide rooms for Lewis so he could live comfortably in Cambridge during the week and still return to his home in Oxford on the weekends.
They agreed, and Lewis accepted the position. He was quite clear about the reason: “I have had a conversation with Tolkien which has considerably changed my view.” Lewis held the position of Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge for eight years, until declining health led to his retirement. It proved a happy move, and Tolkien deserves credit for it. Through the years they knew one another, from their early meetings as junior faculty members at Oxford to these later years of final assignment and retirement, Tolkien and Lewis worked together within the academic environment and took small steps to make a difference.
In his book The Four Loves, Lewis describes the pleasure of working with one’s colleagues side by side. In fact, he builds his whole theory of friendship upon this very idea: “You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.” In addition to these examples of warriors who fight, poets who read, philosophers who argue, and Christians who pray, one might add the important and influential interaction of collaborators who write. Together.
DOING WHAT THEY DID: Collaboration has a place in formal meetings, with everyone assembled for a specific purpose, following an agenda, and working out the details of an urgent task. But it also has a less structured side: two children drawing pictures in the attic, a handful of college students composing rhyming couplets as they walk along, father and son drawing maps and telling stories, colleagues exercising their voice in local politics. When you look at the lives of innovators, there is often little distinction between work and play. And when creative people make it a point to spend time together, new ideas and joint projects emerge with little effort, a natural part of the rhythm of each day.
