Justified True Belief

(●) The Oxford philologist who built the most fully worked out imagined world of the twentieth century, and argued that the gospel is a story of exactly that kind which also happened. + Most people meet him as the man who wrote about hobbits. He would not have minded, but he would have wanted one correction made first. A philologist is someone who studies the history of words, how they shift and wear down and pass between languages, and that was Tolkien’s actual trade: he worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, edited medieval texts, and held two Oxford chairs in succession, a chair being a full professorship with a name and an endowment attached to it. The stories grew out of the trade rather than beside it. He invented languages first, for pleasure, the way other men do crosswords, and then discovered that a language needs a people to speak it and a history for the people to remember, and the history turned into Middle-earth. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons, and neither of them is that his books contain hidden Christian symbols. The first is a conversation. On a windy night in September 1931 he walked the grounds of Magdalen College with a colleague who could not get past the objection that myths are beautiful lies, and by morning that colleague was most of the way back to Christianity. His name was C. S. Lewis. The second is an essay. In "On Fairy-Stories" Tolkien set out why the old stories move us, why their happy endings are not a cheat, and why the Christian claim is that one such story stepped out of the books and into history. The signature fact about him is how slowly he worked and how little he finished. He began his legends in hospital and on sick leave in 1916 and 1917, was still revising them when he died more than half a century later, and the great book of them, The Silmarillion, was published only after his death, assembled by his son from drafts that filled a room.

(●) 1892 AD: Born at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, and fatherless before he was four. + John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 at Bloemfontein, in what was then the Orange Free State in southern Africa, where his father Arthur Reuel Tolkien managed a branch of the Bank of Africa. His brother Hilary arrived two years later, on 17 February 1894. The place never suited his mother Mabel, and in April 1895 she took both boys to England to visit her family in Birmingham, expecting Arthur to follow when he could get leave. He never did. Arthur died at Bloemfontein on 15 February 1896 of a haemorrhage brought on by rheumatic fever, aged thirty-eight, and was buried there. A visit had quietly become an emigration. Mabel, a widow with two small sons and almost no money, rented a cottage at Sarehole, then a hamlet outside Birmingham with a working water mill, a river, and a miller’s son the boys were frightened of. Tolkien spent four years there, from four to eight, and said afterwards that those years counted for more in his imagination than anything else that ever happened to him. The Shire is Sarehole with the fear taken out and the mill left in. Humphrey Carpenter, his authorized biographer, reports the one famous story from Africa: a tarantula bit the toddling Tolkien in the garden, and his nurse snatched him up and sucked out the poison. Tolkien himself would only say that he could remember a hot day and running in fear through long, dead grass, that the spider itself had faded out of the memory, and that the whole business had left him with no especial dislike of spiders.

(●) 1900 AD: His mother became a Catholic, her relatives cut off their help, and four years later she was dead. + In June 1900 Mabel Tolkien was received into the Catholic Church, along with her sister May. Her own family were chapel-going Protestants and her late husband’s were Anglicans, and both sides took the conversion as a betrayal. The financial help she had been receiving stopped. She moved the boys into Birmingham, near King Edward’s School, and went on teaching them herself: Latin, botany, and her own beautiful handwriting. She had diabetes, and this was nearly twenty years before insulin, which is to say that there was nothing a doctor could do for her but watch. On 14 November 1904 she collapsed and died at Fern Cottage in Rednal, where the family was lodging near the Birmingham Oratory. She was thirty-four. Ronald was twelve, Hilary ten, and the priest she had named as their guardian, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Oratory, took the two orphans on and paid for a good deal of their upbringing out of his own pocket. Tolkien never separated his faith from that grave. Writing about his own books half a century later, he said he was grateful for having been brought up since he was eight in a faith "that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know; and that I owe to my mother, who clung to her conversion and died young, largely through the hardships of poverty resulting from it." He regarded her, in plain terms, as someone who had died for what she believed.

(●) 1908 AD: He met Edith Bratt at sixteen, was ordered to stop writing to her, and obeyed for three years. + In 1908 the brothers were lodged in a boarding house on Duchess Road, Edgbaston, and on the floor below lived a nineteen-year-old orphan named Edith Bratt, who played the piano well and had nobody much to play it for. She and Ronald invented the sort of small conspiracies that sixteen-year-olds invent: sugar lumps dropped from an upstairs window onto the hats of passers-by, bicycle rides into the country, tea in a shop with a balcony. Father Francis found out, judged that the boy was throwing away the scholarship his mother had died to make possible, and forbade him to see or write to Edith until he turned twenty-one. It was a hard ruling and Tolkien felt it as one. He kept it. He went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1911 to read Classics, and as midnight struck at the start of 3 January 1913, the day he came of age, he began a letter to Edith. She wrote back that she was engaged to another man, George Field, because she had assumed he had forgotten her. He took a train to Cheltenham, walked with her, and by the end of the day the other engagement was over. That February he sat Honour Moderations, the first of the two great Oxford examinations in Classics, and came out with a second class rather than a first. What redeemed the result was a single mark: an alpha, the top grade, in comparative philology, which is the study of how related languages descend from a common ancestor, so that Latin, Greek, Welsh and Sanskrit turn out to be cousins. That one mark moved him out of Classics and into English Language and Literature, which was where the work he was built for had been waiting all along. Edith was received into the Catholic Church on 8 January 1914, a year to the day after the journey to Cheltenham, at some cost to her own circumstances. He took his First in English, the top class of degree, in June 1915, and they were married on 22 March 1916 at St Mary Immaculate in Warwick. They had four children: John in 1917, Michael in 1920, Christopher in 1924, and Priscilla in 1929.

(●) 1916 AD: The Somme killed all but one of his closest friends, and in a hospital bed he began the legends. + At King Edward’s School four boys had formed a half-serious society they called the T.C.B.S., the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, after the school library where they brewed tea illicitly and the department store where they drank it in comfort: Tolkien, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman. They believed, in the way clever nineteen-year-olds do, that the four of them together were going to do something that mattered. Tolkien was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers on 15 July 1915 and reached France in June 1916 as battalion signalling officer with the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, the officer responsible for getting messages between his battalion and everyone around it, by field telephone and flag and runner, which meant he knew before most men did when something had gone wrong. He arrived on the Somme, a river in northern France, just as the great British offensive of 1 July began there; it would grind on until November. Rob Gilson was killed that first day. Geoffrey Smith died of wounds on 3 December. Wiseman, in the Navy, survived. Earlier that year Smith had written to Tolkien: "May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot." What saved Tolkien was lice. Trench fever, a louse-borne illness that ran through the armies of both sides, left a man feverish, aching and fit for nothing for weeks at a time; he caught it on 27 October 1916 and was invalided back to England on 8 November, which almost certainly saved his life, since his battalion was cut to pieces later. Writing a foreword nearly fifty years afterwards, he answered readers who assumed his book was about the Second World War with a flat sentence about the first one: "By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead." In hospital and convalescent camps through 1917 he began writing the stories that became The Book of Lost Tales, starting with the fall of a hidden city called Gondolin. That same year, in a wood full of hemlock near Roos in Yorkshire, Edith danced for him, and the tale of a mortal man who loves an immortal woman, Beren and Lúthien, took the shape it kept for the rest of his life.

(●) 1925 AD: Oxford elected him Professor of Anglo-Saxon, and the next year he met C. S. Lewis. + His first job after the war was on the Oxford English Dictionary, working through the words beginning with W, which is about as deep inside the machinery of English as a man can get. From there he went north to Leeds, where he was made Reader in 1920, a rank a step below professor, and Professor of English Language in 1924. Leeds also gave him a working partner: with his colleague E. V. Gordon he produced an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that students were still using sixty years later. Then, in 1925, Oxford elected him Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College. Anglo-Saxon is the older name for Old English, the language spoken in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the language of Beowulf, and holding its chair meant he now taught, for a living, the thing he had loved since he was a schoolboy. He was thirty-three. On 11 May 1926, at an English Faculty meeting at Merton College, he met a young fellow of Magdalen named Clive Staples Lewis. Lewis wrote in his diary that evening that Tolkien was "a smooth, pale, fluent little chap" and added, with the confidence of a man who has misjudged someone entirely, "No harm in him: only needs a smack or so." Within two years they were reading Old Norse together in a club Tolkien had founded called the Coalbiters, named for men who sit so close to the fire they might as well be chewing the coals. Then came the night of 19 September 1931. Lewis had dinner in his rooms with Tolkien and with Hugo Dyson, an English lecturer at Reading who was often in Oxford, and afterwards the three of them walked the path beside the river at Magdalen called Addison’s Walk, arguing about myth. Lewis had said that myths are lies, even if they are lies breathed through silver. Tolkien said they are not lies at all. Talk went on past three in the morning. Nine days later, on 28 September, Lewis rode in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle to Whipsnade Zoo, and recorded afterwards in Surprised by Joy: "When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did."

(●) 1937 AD: A sentence scrawled on a blank exam paper became The Hobbit, and its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, took seventeen years. + Oxford dons with four children took in outside examining for the money, and marking School Certificate papers, the examinations English schoolchildren sat at about sixteen, is the dullest work in the world. Tolkien turned a page and found it blank, and wrote on it, for no reason he could ever explain: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He said of it later, "I did not and do not know why." The story he built around that sentence circulated among friends in typescript for years before a former student who worked at the publisher George Allen & Unwin heard of it. Stanley Unwin gave it to his ten-year-old son Rayner to report on, at the going rate of one shilling, and Rayner’s verdict got it published on 21 September 1937. The publishers wanted more about hobbits at once. Tolkien offered them The Silmarillion, the vast body of legend he had been building since 1917, and they declined it. In December 1937 he started the sequel instead. It took seventeen years, because he would not let the sequel be smaller than the legends behind it, and because he rewrote constantly. Through all of it he read chapters aloud on Thursday evenings to the Inklings, the informal circle that met in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen and on Tuesday mornings in a pub called the Eagle and Child. Lewis, he said afterwards, was the reason the book got finished at all. The Fellowship of the Ring appeared on 29 July 1954, The Two Towers on 11 November of the same year, and The Return of the King, delayed by the appendices, on 20 October 1955. Meanwhile, in 1936, he had given the British Academy a lecture on Beowulf that changed how the poem was read for the rest of the century, and in 1939 the Andrew Lang Lecture at St Andrews that became "On Fairy-Stories".

(●) 1959 AD: He retired, watched his books become a phenomenon he had not wanted, and died in 1973 with the legends unfinished. + He had moved to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature in 1945, and gave his valedictory address on 5 June 1959. Retirement was supposed to mean finishing The Silmarillion. It did not. In 1965 an American paperback house, Ace Books, brought out The Lord of the Rings without authorization, exploiting a gap in the copyright, and the row that followed put the book on every American campus at once. Students wore badges reading "Frodo Lives". Strangers telephoned from California at three in the morning, not having worked out the time difference, to ask whether Balrogs had wings. In 1968 he and Edith left Oxford for a bungalow in Poole, near Bournemouth, largely to get away from it. Edith died there on 29 November 1971, aged eighty-two, after fifty-five years of marriage and three years in the bungalow they had moved to together. Merton gave him rooms, so he came back to Oxford alone, an old widower living in college among young men. The honours arrived in that last stretch: he was appointed CBE, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, in 1972, and Oxford gave him an honorary Doctorate of Letters the same year, for the philology rather than the hobbits, which pleased him. He did not have long. He died at Bournemouth on 2 September 1973, aged eighty-one, and was buried with her at Wolvercote Cemetery. The stone carries the two names he had given them both out of his own legends: Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren. Christopher Tolkien spent the next forty-five years editing his father’s drafts, publishing The Silmarillion in 1977 and then, volume by volume, nearly everything else.

What He Taught

(T1) Making things up is what creatures made in the image of a Maker do. + A child draws a dragon on the back of an envelope. Nobody taught her to want a dragon, and there are no dragons, and yet the impulse is as ordinary as hunger. Tolkien thought that impulse was evidence about what human beings are. His word for it was sub-creation. A sub-creator is a maker who is himself made: he cannot bring anything out of nothing, but he can take what is already there and build a world inside it with its own laws and its own weather. Tolkien called the world we live in the Primary World, and the world a story-maker builds the Secondary World. The test of a Secondary World is not whether you believe in it while your feet are on the carpet, but whether, once you are inside it, everything holds together. Say "the green sun" and you have said something easy. Make a world in which a green sun is credible, and you have done something very hard and very rare. The claim underneath is theological. God made, and part of what he made was creatures who make (Genesis 1:27). Tolkien was clear that the ability can be misused, and said so bluntly: men have invented gods and worshipped them, and have also made idols out of their politics and their economics. His answer was a Latin tag from the schoolmen, the theologians of the medieval universities who argued in tight formulas like this one: abusus non tollit usum, the abuse does not abolish the right use. Counterfeit money is an argument against counterfeiters, not against money. The version of all this that he liked best he put in verse. Answering Lewis’s charge that myths are "lies breathed through silver", he wrote a poem called Mythopoeia, a word that simply means myth-making, in which the heart of Man "is not compound of lies, / but draws some wisdom from the only Wise", and named Man "Sub-creator, the refracted light / through whom is splintered from a single White / to many hues".

(Q) "Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker." + Source: J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories", the section on Fantasy. Delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews on 8 March 1939 and published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford University Press, 1947). "In our derivative mode" is the whole argument in four words: everything a maker makes is second-hand, borrowed from a world he did not make, and that is not a complaint but a description of what a creature is. The sentence comes at the end of a passage conceding, at length, that fantasy can be done badly and used badly (T1).

(T2) The sudden turn to joy at the end of a story is not a lie told to children. + In November 1944 Tolkien sat in church at Oxford and heard a sermon about a small boy with tubercular peritonitis who had been taken to Lourdes, not healed, and put back on the train home to die with two nurses attending him. As the train pulled out within sight of the shrine, the boy sat up, said he wanted to go and talk to a little girl further down the carriage, walked there, played, came back, and announced that he was hungry. Tolkien, in the pew, found himself in tears, and recognized the feeling as the exact thing he had spent an essay trying to describe. He had coined a word for it: eucatastrophe, from the Greek eu, good, and katastrophe, the turn or overthrow at the end of a drama. A catastrophe is the turn that ruins everything. A eucatastrophe is the turn that saves it, arriving suddenly, after real loss, without cancelling the loss. It is not the same as a story in which nothing bad happens. Tolkien insisted that the joy depends on the sorrow having been genuine, and that "it does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure". Dyscatastrophe is the third word in his little family of them, the bad turn, the one that ends in loss, and his point is that a story which never risks one has nothing to rescue. Critics called this escapism, and he thought they had chosen the wrong word on purpose. "They are confusing," he wrote, "not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter." A man in a cell who talks about the sea is not pretending the cell is not there. He is remembering, accurately, that the world is bigger than his cell. Tolkien’s claim was that the happy turn works on us as it does because it is a brief glimpse of how things actually run, and not because we are soft.

(Q) "For it I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce)." + Source: Letter 89, to Christopher Tolkien, 7-8 November 1944, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1981). Christopher was in South Africa training as a pilot, and his father wrote to him constantly, half diary and half theology. A few lines further on Tolkien says what he thinks the joy is evidence of: that the story has let you see, for a moment, "how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made" (T2).

(T3) The gospel is a story of exactly that kind, and it also happened. + This was the argument he made walking beside the river at midnight, and heard quickly it sounds like a trick. Taken slowly it is not one. Lewis’s difficulty was this. Dying-and-rising gods are everywhere in pagan mythology, and he loved those stories; he found them moving in a way he could not justify. The same pattern in the Gospels left him cold, and the obvious conclusion was that Christianity is one more of those stories, only duller because someone insists it is factual. Tolkien answered that he had the relation backwards. The pagan stories move you because they are dim, broken, sometimes badly distorted reports of something true, told by men who were made to tell stories by a God who works in stories. They are not competitors of the gospel. They are, in his phrase, splintered light. And then, once, the pattern the stories kept reaching for was enacted by God himself in a particular province of the Roman Empire, under a named governor, in a body that ate fish afterwards. So the Christian claim, on this view, is not "here is a myth" and not "here is a bare fact". It is "here is the thing the myths were about, and it is also a fact, and the two do not cancel". A myth that happened is still a myth: it still carries everything myth carries, the resonance and the terror and the joy. It is simply also true, the Word become flesh and dwelling among us on a particular street (John 1:14), and therefore it can save you rather than merely move you. Tolkien was not offering this as a proof of the Resurrection, and never confused the two jobs. About the historical question he was blunt in a late letter to his son Michael: "It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened’, and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded of him."

(Q) "The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy." + Source: J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories", Epilogue. The Epilogue is three pages long and Tolkien apologized for writing it at all, calling the subject "a serious and dangerous matter" and himself presumptuous for touching it. The sentence just before it says what he thinks is unique about the Christian story: "But this story has entered History and the primary world." Two sentences after it he adds a line that concedes how odd the claim sounds and presses it anyway: "There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits." A page further on he puts the whole case in one short line: "Legend and History have met and fused" (T3).

(T4) Nothing that rebellion invents escapes the theme it was trying to spoil. + His legends open with music. Ilúvatar, the one God of Tolkien’s invented world, makes the Ainur, spirits something like angels, and gives them a theme to sing. One of them, Melkor, the mightiest, begins weaving in music of his own devising, loud and repetitive, to make himself the author rather than a singer. Twice Ilúvatar raises a new theme against the discord, and the second time he stops the music and tells Melkor what has actually been happening. The scene is worth a Christian reader’s attention precisely because it claims so little. Tolkien does not say the discord is secretly pleasant, or that Melkor meant well, or that the harm will turn out not to have been harm. He says the rebel is not writing a rival score. He is supplying material to a composer better than himself, who will use it for effects the rebel never imagined and would hate. That is close to what Joseph says to the brothers who sold him: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today" (Genesis 50:20). Joseph does not say that the pit and the slave market were fine. He says God was working while they were happening. Paul puts the same thing in one sentence, that all things work together for good to those who love God (Romans 8:28). The idea runs all through The Lord of the Rings, usually in the mouth of Gandalf, and always in a form careful enough to leave room for real freedom: Bilbo, he says, was meant to find the Ring, and not by the Ring’s maker, and therefore Frodo was meant to have it too. A great deal is left unsettled by all this, and deliberately so. Tolkien nowhere offers a solution to the problem of evil, the old question of how a good and almighty God can permit the suffering there plainly is, and he would have been embarrassed to be told he had. His claim is narrower and older: that evil invents nothing, that it can only spoil what was already made, and that it is therefore always second and never first.

(Q) "And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined." + Source: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, "Ainulindalë", edited by Christopher Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1977). "In my despite" is an old phrase meaning in defiance of me, or in spite of me. Ilúvatar is speaking to Melkor in front of all the other Ainur, immediately after silencing the music, and the sentence is both a judgment and a mercy: the rebellion is real, it has done real damage, and it has not become an independent power (T4).

(T5) Mercy shown to someone who has not earned it is what saves the world. + Here is the plot of The Lord of the Rings in one sentence, stated the way Tolkien stated it and not the way a film trailer would. A hobbit walks a ruinous object, a ring that corrupts whoever keeps it and cannot simply be thrown away, across half a continent to the one fire that can destroy it, and at the last possible moment he fails. Frodo stands at the Cracks of Doom and claims the Ring for himself. The quest succeeds anyway, because a creature he had spared out of pity, and who fully intended to murder him, takes the Ring off his hand and falls. Readers wrote to Tolkien in some distress about this, and his answers are among the most theological things he ever wrote. He refused to call it a moral failure: Frodo had been carrying the thing for months, starved and tormented, and had reached the limit of what a creature can bear. There exists, he wrote, "the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one’s power", and he pointed to the petition in the Lord’s Prayer that asks not to be led into temptation, remarking that a prayer against something that cannot happen would be meaningless (Matthew 6:13). We would not be told to ask for that if no one could ever be pressed past bearing. What saved Frodo was not his strength. It was that he had, over and over, refused to kill Gollum when killing him would have been easy and defensible. In Tolkien’s summary: "his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed." That sentence is the beatitude on the merciful, who are promised mercy in return (Matthew 5:7), with a plot attached to it. And it comes with the matching claim about who does the saving: not the kings and not the wizards, but two small people from a country nobody in the story takes seriously, which is the pattern Paul names when he says God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27).

(Q) "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends." + Source: J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, chapter 2, "The Shadow of the Past" (George Allen & Unwin, 1954). Frodo has just said that it is a pity Bilbo did not kill Gollum when he had the chance, and Gandalf answers that it was Pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. A few lines later he adds the line the rest of the book pays off: "My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many" (T5).

(Q) "The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism." + Source: Letter 142, to Father Robert Murray, 2 December 1953, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Murray, a Jesuit and a family friend, had read the book in proof and written that it left him with a strong sense of a positive compatibility with the order of grace. Tolkien’s reply is the single most quoted sentence he ever wrote about his own work, and the sentence immediately after it is the one people forget: "However that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little."

What Christian Readers Made of Him

(†) One night’s argument gave the century its most widely read Christian apologist. + A month after the walk at Magdalen, on 18 October 1931, Lewis wrote to his oldest friend Arthur Greeves and set out what had happened to him. He had never minded the idea of sacrifice, or of a god dying and rising, when he met it in a pagan story; it moved him deeply and he could not say why. What Dyson and Tolkien showed him was that "the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened." Much of what Lewis wrote afterwards stands on that sentence. Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, the Narnia books, and a 1944 essay called "Myth Became Fact" that is essentially Tolkien’s argument in Lewis’s prose, all come after Whipsnade. The debt ran the other way too, and Tolkien said so plainly in a letter of 1965: "The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion." Neither man’s bookshelf would exist without the other.

(†) Sub-creation gave Christian artists a doctrine of their own trade. + In the ordinary run of church talk, a Christian who wrote novels or painted pictures had two familiar defences ready to hand, and both were thin. Either the art was useful, meaning it smuggled in a moral, or it was harmless recreation, which is another way of saying it did not matter. "On Fairy-Stories" offered a third answer: making is what image-bearers do, the impulse itself is part of the equipment, and a made world is worth making even when it teaches nothing in particular. Dorothy L. Sayers reached similar ground from another direction in The Mind of the Maker (1941), reading the creative act as a trinitarian analogy. Since then the vocabulary has become common property well outside Tolkien’s own communion, among Protestants and Orthodox as readily as Catholics, and the two words that travel furthest are his: sub-creation and eucatastrophe. Both now turn up in ordinary sermons on Easter morning, usually without the preacher knowing where they came from. He set one condition on all this that his admirers regularly break. In the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings he wrote, "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations," and drew the distinction his readers ought to keep: "many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author." Gandalf is not Christ, the Ring is not sin, and hunting for a decoder ring is exactly the way to lose what the book has (T3).

(†) The scholarship outlasted the fashion it broke. + In November 1936 Tolkien read a lecture to the British Academy called "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", and it is still the first thing a student of the poem is told to read. The scholarship of the day treated Beowulf as a quarry: valuable for the historical scraps and the linguistic forms embedded in it, and artistically childish because the hero fights monsters instead of doing something serious. Tolkien answered with a parable. A man inherited a field of old stone and built a tower from it, and from the top of the tower he could see the sea. His friends pushed the tower over to examine the carvings on the stones, and remarked that the man had no sense of proportion. The monsters, Tolkien argued, are the point: the poem is about mortality and courage in a losing fight, and a Christian poet looking back at the heroic age of his own pagan ancestors is exactly who would write it that way. That is the other half of what he has to offer a Christian reader, and it is easy to miss under the hobbits. He spent his working life on texts like Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century rule of life written for anchoresses, women who had themselves shut into a cell beside a church in order to pray there for the rest of their lives, and on the Middle English of the West Midlands, the English of the centuries after the Norman Conquest, Chaucer’s language rather than ours. A man who lives in those documents knows from the inside how a Christian civilization actually thought, prayed, and told stories, rather than knowing it from a summary. Tom Shippey, who succeeded to Tolkien’s old chair at Leeds, has argued at length that the fiction is the philology continued by other means: the invented languages are real languages, the names obey sound laws, meaning the regular patterns by which the sounds of a language shift over centuries, and the depth readers feel is the depth of somebody who was not making it up as he went.

(†) Where he fell short: the friendship that made Lewis a Christian cooled, and his own sharpness helped cool it. + Tolkien had hoped that the man he walked home to God in 1931 would come the whole way into his own church. Lewis instead returned to the Anglicanism he had been raised in, and Tolkien found it hard to be glad. He disliked Lewis’s popular theology, thought the subject better left to those trained in it, and said what he thought of the Narnia books with a coldness that has become famous: "It is sad that ‘Narnia’ and all that part of C.S.L.’s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his." He began a commentary on Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm that he said would not be publishable if he finished it. Other things did the damage too, and he named them himself: Charles Williams’s arrival in the circle, and Lewis’s marriage, which Tolkien learned of long after the event and felt as a wound. He knew what it had cost. Writing just after Lewis’s death in November 1963, he told his son Michael that many people still regarded him as one of Lewis’s intimates and that this had "ceased to be so some ten years ago", and then set down the sentence that settles the account: "But we owed each a great debt to the other, and that tie with the deep affection that it begot, remains." Four days after Lewis died he wrote to his daughter Priscilla that at his age losses came like leaves falling one by one, but that "this feels like an axe-blow near the roots". None of this makes his convictions a fault; a man is allowed to think his church is right, and the differences between them were real and were not manufactured by bad temper. What the record shows is narrower and more ordinary. Where two Christians differ, the difference can be held in a way that keeps the friendship working or in a way that slowly stops it, and Tolkien, by his own account, found himself on the wrong side of that line with the one friend he could least afford to lose. He grieved it honestly, which is the best thing anyone can say about it, and he said the unpayable debt was still owed.