He wasn’t too keen on Narnia either...
Really? He was friends with Lewis.
Which is interesting, since he is credited with C.S. Lewis’ Christian awakening... to write his great book “Mere Christians”, and “The Screwtape Letters”.
Tolkein, from his trilogy was a believer in GOOD vs.Evil (the evil of the day being Hitler and before that the Kaiser... both aided as he saw it by the very real Satan).
I write this opinion as a premium consumer of literature.
99th percentile, FWIW. I read Mitchell's Gone With The Wind upwards of thirty times because of her superlative writing.
It’s been awhile since I studied the lives of both authors. While they were fast friends for many years, I believe there was an estrangement in the 50’s. Part of the trouble, I believe, is that Tolkien was a bit jealous of Lewis’ success not only as an academic but as a professional speaker and writer.
Lewis was familiar to a war-time audience that listened to his radio addresses to a beleaguered nation and also bought his works as they came out. Tolkien was more academic and Lord of the Rings came out rather late in his career—despite having written about the long history of middle earth and its peoples, heroes, and villains for decades. Tolkien’s works were far more ambitious and also took far, far longer to write. I can only imagine his frustration as his publisher kept wanting the sequel to the successful The Hobbit, but kept putting him off over The Silmarillion.
Lewis died in 1963 (the same day as Kennedy’s assassination, in fact) so his loss was completely overshadowed by the late President’s. This was after LOTR was published but just before it really started to take off. Heinlein was big during the late-50s/early-60’s. Then Tolkien and Herbert (who touched on some common themes between them albeit from completely different directions) had their heydays.
There was a movie within the last year, I think, about Tolkien as a young man (college, WWI) but I think it got past me. I haven’t seen it. Just k ew it was being made.
It wasn't that Tolkien wasn't keen on Narnia, per se, it was that he despised allegory. He thought it unartful and cheap.
Tolkein’s fellow “Inklings” at their meetings at the Eagle and Childe pub in Oxford were not uncritical of Lord of the Rings as Tolkein previewed his work in progress. Stephen Spender once interrupted a reading by Tolkein of a passage where the hobbits meet an elf along the way by moaning, “Oh no, not another f*cking elf!” Tolkein carried on, stoically.
He was definitely a snob about C. S. Lewis’ work even though they were friends.
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