C.S. Lewis society hosts lecture on Lewis and Tolkien’s ecumenical friendship – Hillsdale Collegian

When it comes to the friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, people tend either to take their relationship for granted or believe the urban legend that the two men had a “falling out” later in life, said Holly Ordway, Cardinal Francis George professor of faith and culture at the Word on Fire Institute.
Ordway gave a lecture Nov. 7 on Lewis and Tolkien’s ecumenical friendship, hosted by the C.S. Lewis Society.
“Ecumenism is the promotion of the restoration of unity among all Christians,” Ordway said. “In Tolkien and Lewis’ friendship, it meant that although they disagreed on key points, each man recognized that the other was a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ.”
Ordway spent the first part of her lecture explaining the improbability of the two men’s friendship.
“Because they have so much in common as fellow Inklings, as academics at Oxford, as Christians, as writers of fantasy, it’s easy to take their friendship for granted,” Ordway said. “But if we look at the cultural and social conditions in which these two men met for the first time in 1926, we can see barriers that could easily have prevented their friendship from even getting started.”
Although Lewis was an atheist when he met Tolkien, he grew up in Northern Ireland, where anti-Catholic sentiment was quite strong, according to Ordway. Meanwhile, Tolkien was part of an extremely marginalized group as a Catholic living in England after the Reformation.
“Legalized discrimination against Catholics persisted well into Tolkien’s adult life,” Ordway said. “It’s not surprising that many Catholics were inward-looking. They were wary of Anglicans, or they were even hostile to them.”
But seemingly against all odds, Ordway said, the two men grew closer instead of further apart as the 1930s unfolded.
“Lewis was at this time gradually moving towards belief in God, partly through his philosophic engagement with the idea of objective value, and partly through his steadily advancing friendship with Tolkien,” Ordway said about when the two men met in 1926.
The two spent many hours conversing late into the night. At one point, Ordway said, Lewis recalled Tolkien and he had stayed up until 2:30 in the morning discussing Norse mythology.
“The most significant of these night time conversations occurred in September 1931,” Ordway said. “Tolkien joined Lewis and this visiting friend Hugo Dyson for an evening at Magdalen College. Dyson was an Anglican, and Lewis was a newly-minted theist. After dinner, the three men took a stroll. They began with discussions about myth and metaphor, and then they turned to the topic of Christianity. A week after this conversation, Lewis wrote in a letter that he passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ.”
Later, Ordway said, when a group known as the Inklings formed around Tolkien, Lewis, and their shared love of literature, their strong friendship was essential to establishing the group’s ecumenical tone, which consisted mostly of Anglicans but also included several Catholics.
“There was never a sense that Catholics were merely tolerated,” Ordway said. “Sparks could fly — sparks did fly between the Anglicans and the Catholics — but Lewis would not allow disputes to destroy their collective understanding of themselves as being united in their shared Christian faith.”
As to the commonly held belief that Lewis and Tolkien ceased to be friends toward the end of Lewis’ life, that was nothing more than an urban legend, Ordway said.
In addition to quoting several close friends and family who maintained that Lewis and Tolkien’s supposed “falling out” was only a natural drifting apart as both men became increasingly busy, Ordway quoted Walter Hooper,  Lewis’ friend and literary executor, where Hooper described visiting Tolkien soon after Lewis’ death.
“One of the points Tolkien made was that Lewis ‘had not made enough time for me,’ and I explained that Lewis’s view was that Tolkien had not made enough time for him. I think he felt then that it was a pity that they had both claimed to be very busy, which they doubtless were, but you just don’t really believe your friends will die,” Ordway said Hooper had recalled.
Senior Nathan Reynolds noted the relevancy of Ordway’s lecture for Hillsdale students.
“I think that Dr. Ordway beautifully showed us what a relationship can look like between people with opposing religious orientations that are still gathered around the good and the beautiful,” Reynolds said. 
Hillsdale admissions counselor Juliana Undseth ’24 said Ordway’s explanation of how the two men influenced each other in addition to their spiritual walk was inspiring to her.
“Not only their faith, but their whole work and everything that they were doing was clearly energized by their friendship with the other person. And that’s, frankly, just kind of beautiful,” Undseth said.
According to Ordway, Lewis’ conversion occurring earlier rather than later in Lewis’ prolific career is probably why such works as “Mere Christianity” and “The Chronicles of Narnia” exist. In return, both men acknowledged that Tolkien’s magnum opus, “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, would never have been completed without Lewis’ encouragement.
“The friendship between Lewis and Tolkien is surely one of the most significant in literary history,” Ordway said. “If they had never met, it’s quite likely that we would not know either of them today.”

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