Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship
The two most successful twentieth-century English fantasists were friends from shortly after their 1926 meeting until the younger's death. Both fought in World War I, in which all but one of Tolkien's dearest school friends died, and Lewis lost a buddy whose mother he thereafter cared for, as promised, until her 1951 death. As young Oxford dons, they discovered they shared a love of medieval northern European literature and, after Lewis (1898-1963), greatly aided by Tolkien (1892-1973), converted to Christianity, a common faith. Lewis' great aid to Tolkien was to encourage unflaggingly the development ofThe Lord of the Rings.Tolkien reciprocated Lewis' supportiveness for Lewis' fiction and scholarship but was too conservative a Catholic to approve of the low-church Anglican Lewis' popular Christian evangelical writings and especially his limited toleration of divorce, which apparently seemed adventitious even to Lewis when he married divorcee Joy Davidman and never told Tolkien. In a graceful, sympathetic, and appealing dual biography, Duriez stresses their influences on one another and the depths of their friendship.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved