Friends and rivals

When Tolkien's memorial is placed in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey next year, it will be near that of C.S. Lewis. "[H]e and Lewis will be, in death, within pipe-lighting distance of each other – at least in spirit." Philip Womack in The Telegraph:

.... Lewis and Tolkien bore many similarities: Lewis was also conservative and deeply Christian.

.... Both fought, and were scarred by, the First World War. They also both enjoyed smoking a good pipe.

Their rivalry took many forms, as they sized each other up from opposing sides of a bitterly fought war in the Oxford English department. Tolkien sprang from the unfashionable school of philology, and thought anything after Chaucer was too miminy-piminy to be the proper subject of a degree. This rankled with Lewis, whose works of literary criticism on Renaissance writings still stand strong today.

Tolkien saw his work as an act of “sub-creation”, inspired directly by God. His Middle Earth was built up from language itself, extrapolated into a unified whole. Its purpose was to resonate as mythic history for the English, filled with Anglo-Saxon echoes. Surprisingly, Middle Earth’s spiritual aspect is pre-Christian: no Christ figure walks alongside the hobbits, breathing strength into their steps.

Lewis, on the other hand, adopted a hodge-podge approach which, on the whole, Tolkien disliked. How, for example, can Father Christmas exist in Lewis’ Narnia, a mythical world of talking animals, when Christ did not visit it? Aslan the lion is the Narnian version of the Son of God, with different functions to Jesus (he appears, for example, at the Creation of the World.)

There’s also the mixed bag of fauns, hags, dryads and so forth, drawn from numerous sources. Even Bacchus pops up. ....

Their most powerful link, though, was their shared faith, manifested in particular in the idea of joy. In his writings, Tolkien was interested in what he termed “eucatastrophe”, or a “sudden joyous turn”, demonstrating the existence of God’s Providence. Lewis explored a similar idea of “joy” in his memoir, Surprised by Joy. Whenever Aslan appears in Narnia, characters become overwhelmed with the emotion. .... (more)

Philip Womack, "Tolkien and CS Lewis were the best of frenemies," The Telegraph, Sept. 24, 2026.