The Chronicles are not elegiac — what could be more pointless than trying to arouse nostalgia in children? — but from the very beginning Narnia had at least a sketch of a past. The good old days that Mr. Tumnus reminisces about with Lucy are a woodland idyll that the Pevensies help to restore and then get to live in. Their reign as kings and queens becomes Narnia’s golden age, and by the time they find themselves grown up and back at the lamppost, they no longer speak as they once did. Even the narrator adopts the shift in diction: “‘Sir,’ said Queen Lucy. ‘By likelihood when this post and this lamp were set here there were smaller trees in the place, or fewer, or none. For this is a young wood and the iron post is old.’ And they stood looking upon it.”
This is how aristocrats in chivalric romances talk, and the hunt that brings the siblings to the Lantern Waste (for a white stag who gives wishes to whoever catches him) is just the sort of pastime Chrétien de Troyes’s characters would pursue on a summer afternoon. The Pevensies have graduated from fairy tale to romance. The transition is natural because the genres enjoy a familial relationship. When Lewis writes of one of his favorite books, The Faerie Queene, “what lies beneath the surface in Spenser’s poem is the world of popular imagination: almost, a popular mythology,” he refers to a common technique of the great romances: the combination of folk traditions with the sophisticated literary amusements of aristocrats. Why does the lady Una, when she first appears with the Redcrosse Knight in The Faerie Queene, lead a “milkwhite lambe” on a string (hardly a practical companion for a long trip by horseback)? Because in Spenser’s time, English village pageants celebrating Saint George always included a local woman who played the part of the lady rescued by the saint, and she would customarily lead a white lamb.
From its early days, the romance, like the novel, was promiscuous and adaptive, read for entertainment more than the elevation of the soul. It blended religious symbolism with love poetry, instructions on manners for elegant courtiers with folklore borrowed from old wives and nursemaids. The great Italian romances of the Renaissance — Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato — were, Lewis observed, written by educated men who approached traditional fairy tales with “a smile half of amusement and half of affection, like men returning to something that had charmed their childhood,” only to find that “their pleasure is not only the pleasure of mockery. Even while you laugh at it, the old incantation works.”
Tolkien did not agree, at least not when it came to the mockery. He took fairy tales very seriously. Mutual friends of the two men have offered various explanations for why Tolkien disliked the Narnia books so much, and this is one likely reason. Tolkien himself rarely elaborated on the subject. In a letter he wrote the year after Lewis died, he simply laments that “all that part of CSL’s work” had remained “outside the range of my sympathy.”
Roger Lancelyn Green recalls running into an indignant Tolkien in Oxford not long after both men had read the manuscript of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “It really won’t do!” Tolkien fumed. “I mean to say: Nymphs and Their Ways, The Love-Life of a Faun! Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?” The note of parody in the titles of Mr. Tumnus’s books seems to have particularly irked Tolkien, to have struck him, even, as improper. There is no book called The Love-Life of a Faun mentioned in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (that’s a joke no child could be expected to get), but Tolkien’s mistake is revealing. His memory nudges Lewis’s gentle teasing closer to raciness than his friend would ever have come himself. To Tolkien, Nymphs and Their Ways was just as bad as a mildly smutty joke, really, tantamount to desecration.
“I have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome),” Tolkien once wrote to a reader. There’s not much comedy in The Lord of the Rings, but what there is comes mostly from the hobbits, sticking to their comfort-loving, yokel ways in the midst of all the “high” adventures and noble speeches. Theirs is a rustic humor but not an earthy one, and in that The Lord of the Rings does feel very much a children’s book.
By contrast, the wit of the Chronicles is positively worldly. There are the excerpts from Eustace’s shipboard diary that appear in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, shrewdly drawn little cameos of deluded self-justification (“Heaven knows I’m the last person to try to get an unfair advantage but I never dreamed that this water-rationing would be meant to apply to a sick man”). Reading those passages was my first experience with that refined literary device, the unreliable narrator, and with irony. Irony was a specialty of Lewis’s. The most successful of his books during his own lifetime, The Screwtape Letters, is entirely ironic. Purporting to be the advice sent to a trainee devil by his supervisor, it is instruction by inversion, in which the reader comes to understand the lineaments of Christian virtue by flipping everything the demonic narrator says on its head.
Irony — especially the ironic social comedy Lewis relished (he was a great admirer of Jane Austen) — is a cultured humor. You can find amusement in the differences between what we would like to happen and what usually does happen only if you are already in possession of a variety of stories, official and otherwise. Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a particular favorite of Lewis’s, is about a young woman who has read too many gothic novels too credulously but who inhabits the world of a novel of manners; only an author familiar with both types of narratives could have written it. Irony, satire — Tolkien didn’t care much for this kind of thing; he had invented an alternative world in part to escape a society that struck him as repellently cosmopolitan and complex. The broad humor of the hobbits was a plain dish that suited him just fine. Still, hobbit humor is curiously lacking in what most people would regard as an indispensable ingredient of broad, rustic jokes around the world: sex.
Tolkien, it must be said, was a terrible prude. There is more eroticism — however peculiar and sublimated — in the Chronicles than in The Lord of the Rings, even though Lewis was purposely trying to avoid sex in deference to the youth of his readers. The White Witch and the Lady of the Green Kirtle are evil, but they are also unmistakably alluring; Susanna Clarke, in response to complaints about the “misogyny” in those depictions, says, “I see it as [the witches] being too attractive, as if he were saying, ‘If someone were to tempt me to do bad things, it would be a woman like this.’” The old romances often took the power and danger of sexual desire as one of their major themes; that’s one reason why the modern romance genre inherited the label. The Lord of the Rings may be intended for adults, but the rare occurrences of romantic love in the book are bloodless and melancholy affairs. If Lewis often gives the impression that he’s having a hard time keeping eroticism out of the Chronicles (it swirls below the surface), Tolkien never seems quite able to get it in.
This discomfort with sex was really only another facet of Tolkien’s fastidiousness, his preoccupation with purity and corruption. Languages, in particular, could be either virginal or defiled. Once, when fantasizing about some pocket of Anglo-Saxon culture that might have survived unsullied by the francophone Normans, Tolkien pictured a community speaking a language that “had never fallen back into ‘lewdness’, and has contrived in troubled times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman.” How a language can be “lewd” is a puzzle, but that image of a good country gentleman signifies a lot: he is a man free of both the decadence of urbanity and the coarseness of the peasant. This is a pretty narrow strip of territory to occupy. It also bespeaks a delicacy you would hardly expect to find in human societies like those of Middle-earth, which Tolkien himself described as existing in the “simple ‘Homeric’ state of patriarchal and tribal life.” He must have forgotten that The Iliad begins with two heroes squabbling over a concubine.