Beowulf was the standard Tolkien aspired to. In that poem, the women characters make only brief appearances, and then as dignified or tragic queens. Loyalty between a chieftain and his followers is the emotion that most interests the Beowulf poet, far more so than erotic passion. A sentimental reader of The Lord of the Rings wrote to Tolkien in the 1960s, expressing dismay at how quickly the warrior maiden Éowyn abandons her unrequited love for Aragorn and pairs off with another man at the book’s conclusion. Tolkien wrote back, “This tale does not deal with a period of ‘Courtly Love’ and its pretenses; but with a culture more primitive (sc. less corrupt) and nobler.” Courtly love, after all, was an invention of the detested French, an adulteration of the heroic epic perpetrated by the middle and late medieval romancers who came after the Beowulf poet. It was yet another example of the deplorable tendency of cultures to intermingle, forsaking their immaculate roots.
No wonder, then, that Tolkien objected to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which mixed up classical and Northern mythologies, canonical fairy tales and slangy modern schoolchildren, myth and satire, all with such cheerful indiscrimination. He was not entirely alone in that sentiment. Even Green, who had liked the first draft of the book, tried to get Lewis to cut the scene where an incongruous Father Christmas appears to the Pevensies and the Beavers during their cross-country flight from the Witch, bearing magical gifts and a steaming pot of hot tea. Lewis ignored him. If Spenser could get away with it, why shouldn’t he?
What was Tolkien to think? Lewis had delighted in Middle-earth. He had eagerly read and extravagantly praised all of the literary manifestations of Tolkien’s private world. He referred often and admiringly to his friend’s essay on the value of fairy tales and imaginative fiction. And, even after the two men had grown apart, he happily fulfilled a promise to the publisher of The Lord of the Rings to “do all in my power to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recognition it deserves.” That included providing a back-cover blurb, two (unsigned) rave reviews in newspapers, and urgent recommendations to all of his correspondents and friends.
But when it came to creating his own imaginary land, Lewis disregarded Tolkien’s exacting formula for making a “secondary world.” Narnia was not self-enclosed and consistent. It lifted figures and motifs in whole cloth from a motley assortment of national traditions, making no effort to integrate them into any coherent mythos. Tolkien had carefully revised later editions of The Hobbit to remove a reference to tomatoes (if Middle-earth is meant to be an early version of Europe, then tomatoes, a New World import, would be anachronistic), while Lewis thought nothing of giving Mrs. Beaver a sewing machine!
Tolkien could also hardly fail to notice that, as highly as this friend — his best friend — thought of him, Lewis remained indifferent to other distinctions that lay very close to Tolkien’s heart. The religious conversion that Tolkien had worked so hard to bring about had led Lewis not to Roman Catholicism, as Tolkien had hoped. Instead, his friend turned back to the Church of England, an institution Tolkien regarded as degenerate. Tolkien’s Catholicism had always contained a strain of paranoia (although ordinarily quick to spot and condemn a tyrant, he supported the fascist general Francisco Franco in the Spanish civil war because some of Franco’s left-wing opponents had persecuted priests and nuns), and here Lewis had blithely gone and joined the ranks of the enemy.
Tolkien concluded that Lewis, try as he might to purge himself of old prejudices, had never really succeeded. At heart, his friend remained an Ulster Protestant and a member of the church whose only real foundation, in Tolkien’s opinion, lay in its hatred and persecution of “Papism.” Lewis preferred to believe that his apologetics spoke for traditionally minded Christians everywhere, that his theology transcended denomination. But this ecumenical stance amounted to asserting that the differences between Protestants and Catholics (as well as among Protestants themselves) didn’t really matter. And as far as Tolkien was concerned, they most certainly did.
The chief reason Tolkien offered publicly for the fading of his friendship with Lewis in the 1940s was the influence of a third man, the novelist Charles Williams. Lewis read Williams’s Place of the Lion in 1936 and promptly wrote a fan letter to the author, declaring the novel “one of the major literary events of my life.” Williams, who worked at the Oxford University Press in London, had in turn recently read the manuscript of The Allegory of Love and felt something similar. They quickly became fast friends.
During World War II, the offices of the OUP were moved to Oxford, and Williams came with them. Lewis enthusiastically incorporated his new friend into the Inklings. He adulated Williams, not just as a writer, but as a great soul. Lewis informed one acquaintance that should he happen to see Williams walking down the street he would instantly recognize him, “because he looks godlike; rather, like an angel.” Williams had this effect on people. In Williams’s company, W. H. Auden remarked, he felt himself to be “for the first time in my life … in the presence of personal sanctity.” And T. S. Eliot wrote, “He seemed to me to approximate, more nearly than any man I have known familiarly, to the saint.”
Tolkien always maintained that he liked Williams personally; his writing and thinking, however, were another matter. “Our minds remained poles apart,” he informed his American publisher when asked about the connection. The Place of the Lion, a very strange novel, describes the unfolding of a sort of Platonic apocalypse in modern-day Britain; the ideal manifestations of things (their “forms,” as Plato called them) begin to materialize, absorbing all their imperfect iterations in the real world. One character witnesses the appearance of the ideal butterfly, into which all of the ordinary butterflies are sucked, as if by a vacuum cleaner.
Tolkien had no use for intellectualized, quasi-allegorical stories of this ilk, but Lewis was a dyed-in-the-wool Platonist — this element of his thinking sometimes seems to eclipse the Christian — and he found The Place of the Lion inspiring. (The enormous lion that stalks the British countryside in Williams’s novel is surely one of Aslan’s inspirations.) Tolkien was convinced that Williams’s influence had spoiled the final novel in Lewis’s space trilogy, That Hideous Strength, and he lamented this as further evidence that his old friend was “a very impressionable, too impressionable, man.”
Near the end of his life, not long after Lewis’s death, Tolkien related to a journalist how Lewis had sparked the invention of a major chunk of Middle-earth’s legendarium by one day announcing, “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I’m afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.” Hence, their vow to write a “thriller” apiece. Tolkien never finished that particular book, but in the years that followed, “the most lasting pleasure and reward for both of us has been that we provided one another with stories to hear or read that we really liked — in large parts.” What Tolkien liked, however, were the first two books of the space trilogy; for Narnia, the imaginary land that many readers naturally associate with Middle-earth upon learning that the two men were friends, he felt only disdain.