Well if he’s unmemorable, then how do you know you don’t prefer it? Huh? HUH? There! I’ve run rings around you logically.
So which percentile am I? I came to say, “No.”
I loved Lewis and Narnia as a child, but I really much prefer Middle Earth and Tolkien’s writing.
Lilacs, who likes JRRT’s poetry.
I like some, the Lay of Earendil, The Road goes ever on and Tom Bombadil’s songs. I even enjoy the dwarven cleaning up song (That what Bilbo Baggins hates).
But then I am a complete fanatic.
As an adult: Tolkien. There’s so much more to his stories.
As a kid: Lewis all the way. Tolkien’s prose was too hard to get through when I was a child, and Lewis’s stories were more on my level (those days) anyway.
Well, I never specified, because the variety of the responses you get when you leave a question open is invariably rich and unexpected.
Nothing I can disagree with there. As an author who’s thinking formed a significant part of the background for my own academic work, I grew in my appreciation for Lewis’s ability to move on from a fight, and to separate (how many talk about it but how few do it) the person from the product he was attacking. His responses and rejoinders over the years compare very favourably, for example, with another thinker upon whom I drew a lot, Popper, who never conquered the temptation to take all criticism personally.
Lissla Lissar, George MacDonald, Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton…I’m tempted to take a wheelbarrow load of cash down to the bookies and say you are one of the 300 people in the world still alive who has finished one of Charles Williams’s books!
I’m coming rather late in life (heck, I realised the other day that I’m older now than Orwell was when he died) to (just brush the surface of) mediaeval stuff. Reading Lewis (though not in fact A Preface to Paradise Lost) inspired me to buy a copy of Paradise Lost (incidentally, one way in which I resemble CSL more than JRRT is in the fact that I borrow from libraries more than I buy), which I’ve nearly finished. What an outstanding depiction of human weakness, the human condition! Lewis appears to draw on it for his Screwtape in particular, and as for Tollers the whole of his ME stuff is imbued with Miltonian themes.
Dorothy Sayers (quoted in a letter by CSL of around 1940 - his Collected Letters are highly recommended - I’ve always loved Lewis most as an essayist/correspondent; the same applies to Orwell - Homage to Catalonia taken as a war corresondent’s progressive disillusionment with the fragmentation of the Left is a masterpiece) once said that reading Williams had given her such an insight into the subject that she felt she had already read the originals of which he was writing. Or some such. Lewis has had the same effect on me. Reading *The Discarded Image * and Selected Literary Essays (still saving myself for Allegory of Love and then finally, perhaps in the old folks’ home, “Oh Hell!”), I’ve been able to enter the world of Chaucer, Mallory, Spenser et al, and enjoy it. Perhaps his greatest ability (which has, I suggest, much to do with his character) was to approach authors, and periods - as you will know, he didn’t even believe in “The Renaissance”! - fresh and unafraid of what others had written or what they would say. Like all the great iconoclasts, or eccentrics, he was because he didn’t try to be. He wrote not to shock, but because he believed. And like all good showmen, he enjoyed shocking!
I sometimes wonder if, for all his weaknesses, we will see his like again.
Since you said we’re allowed to say both… Both.
Part of me really loves the depth of Tolkien’s world and the grand story arch, and part of me (a more emotional part) Aslan invokes emotions in me that nothing else ever has. I’d like to replace some of the crappier books of the Bible with something from Lewis. Maybe replace Revelations with The Last Battle.
Wow, that came out wrong should read: “… and Aslan invokes emotions in part of me (a more emotional part) that nothing else ever has.”
It’s okay. We realised you were just overcome by emotion.
Either that, or I decided to restructure the sentence before I finished it and didn’t correct what I’d already written. Old Weller may also have been a contributing factor. One or more of those three possibilities was certainly in play.
Another vote for Tolkein here. I like what he says about allegory in the Foreword to LotR:
“…I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have always done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
I have taken the Journey There and Back Again many times.
Since I’ve only read Lewis’ Narnia books ( and not quite all of them ), I’d have to say Tolkien by a country mile. Much deeper, richer universe IMHO.
- Tamerlane
Without a doubt, Tolkien.
Can I get a cut of it if you bet? I also personally know three other people who have read a whole Charles Williams book and survived. My husband and I have read two each. They were the weirdest stuff ever. I tried to read Figures of Beatrice and gave up. I’ve sort of already read it because of the Sayers’ translation of the Divine Comedy. Incidentally, I had someone at work today ask me “Who wrote dante’s Inferno?”
I’d love to go out for a drink with Lewis or Tolkien (preferably Lewis), but preferably without Charles Williams. He squicks me the hell out. Cripes, the man had weird issues.
Enough hijacking.
I’ve read a couple of the novels contained in this volume, and one of these days I’ll get around to reading the third. I can easily understand why Williams isn’t as popular as Tolkien or Lewis. Williams’s works have neither as much, nor the same kind of, appeal as the other two (though I do see the resemblance to Lewis’s That Hideous Strength), nor has it aged as well, but I do think a decent supernatural-thriller-type Hollywood movie could be made from at least some of his novels.
Can I vote for Lewis Carroll? 
Seriously, Alice is only the tip of the iceberg!
If not, I’d say I prefer Jack to John, but only by a thin margin.
Wonder no longer. (Gosh, a completely gratuitous reference to me! Someone should have invoked Reepicheep and Not A Tame Lion too.)
Anyway, it’s like asking me whether I prefer port or Stilton. Tolkien invested a vast amount of creative energy in one particular setting, and the build quality just shines through: Middle-Earth is like a fantastic landscape painting where every time you look a little closer to see what’s hiding behind a particular bush, you see something else in the background that needs investigating.
Lewis’s Narnia isn’t anything like as detailed, but Narnia isn’t the sum total of all Lewis ever wrote and by no means the only part of his writing I like. The “space trilogy” books fall fearfully flat as science fiction - they’re less scientific than H. G. Wells, still reading much like an educated (*) but non-specialised Victorian gentleman’s view of popular science, although the whole “body of different movements” thing sounds interestingly like multi-dimensional physics - but they work extremely well as stories, and I love the depiction of Ransom’s household in “That Hideous Strength”. And I’ve whiled away many a happy hour over his more and less serious theological works, finding “The Great Divorce” almost indefinitely re-readable for some reason.
So “Both”, in short.
(*In thinking that the “albedo” of Venus is its highly reflective cloud layer, Lewis displays astounding ignorance.)
I came in here to see what **Mal **would say and he can’t even give a straight answer. grumble grumble
Sorry, I have this habit of going around giving carefully shaded, nuanced answers to questions that aren’t simply black and white. :rolleyes:
Lewis- I’ve adopted him as my patron saint and regard him as the main C’tian writer (English language) of the 20th century for the widest range of people.
Yes, Tollers’ LOTR is deeper & richer than Narnia or the Space Trilogy, but they don’t get down to where people live & how they relate to God/JC- which all of Jack’s popular fiction does.