Tolkien. OF COURSE!
Have reread LOTR many, many times. couldn’t make through any of the Narnia books - no, wait I did finish and kinda like “Magician’s Nephew”.
Speaking from the standpoint of a “lore” geek, Tolkien. I can drown myself in Middle-Earth, thousands of years of history and legend, multiple nitpickety data points about who did what when and where and what happened because of it. Tolkien’s world is HUGELY more complex and detailed than any of Lewis’s. Narnia has charm, but it doesn’t have historical depth.
I couldn’t possibly choose between the two. They are of course in many ways very similar, and in the ways where they differ, both are much to my tastes.
Incidentally, to anyone who read the Narnia books as a child and has not re-read them for fear that they won’t hold up to your memories: Please do. They not only hold up extremely well, but you’ll find a great many nuanced layers that probably completely eluded you as a child.
And I don’t believe a word Tolkien said about disliking allegory, given that he wrote it himself. “Leaf by Niggle” is a more blatant allegory than anything that Lewis ever wrote.
It’s not clear that Lewis hated the name “Clive.” When he was four years old, his family had a dog named “Jack” (or sometimes “Jacks” or “Jacksie”). Lewis decided that he wanted to go by the name “Jacksie.” And that (which was soon shortened to “Jacks” and then “Jack”) was what he went by for the rest of his life. So the notion in the Indiana Jones films that someone could name themselves after their dog turns out to be true.
Okay, now I’m curious: do the things you dislike about Lewis really come through in his literary-critical writings?
By the way, if you haven’t given up entirely on Lewis and want to give him another chance, I recommend Till We Have Faces.
I was trying for succinctness – the only lit-crit one of his I’ve read, in fact, is An Experiment In Criticism. I got the impression very strongly, that CSL was, in his own eyes, very much The Man – he saw his take on what literature was about, as the only one which any sensible and worthwhile person could have.
Frankly, I think that barring extremely remote contingencies – I’m done with Mr. L., at least so far as this life is concerned.
One strongly gets the picture that Tolkien disliked, and regretted the existence of, all technology arisen with, and since, the Industrial Revolution (hobbits with nothing more complex than looms / bellows / watermills, vis-a-vis orcs with their pernicious and destructive machinery and explosives) – he strongly disliked railways and urban electric trams [streetcars]; it would seem in character for him to have next to no ado with, or knowledge about, the cinematograph.
That sounds more “inclusive” on Lewis’s part, than I would have imagined of him. Possibly my strong aversion to him leads me in some ways, to misjudge and wrong him.
Lewis. I find Tolkein too wordy and boring
As a nitpick, hobbits do also have mantle clocks, which are probably a fair bit more complicated than many things Tolkien considered “too complicated”. Of course, there’s nothing saying that the man had to be totally consistent in his views.
I’d agree with this. Like others have said, the bulk of C.S. Lewis’ apologetic writing (Mere Christianity, Screwtape, etc.) is filled with his overcertainty in the truth not just of Christianity, but in his particular way of seeing all things Christian. And this also comes through pretty intensely in the Perelandra trilogy as well.
(Less so in Narnia; my problem with Narnia is that, unlike with Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, I feel that I can see the edges of the 2x4’s propping up the scenery in the background, and that pressing too hard will find me in the Space Between the Sound Stages instead of the Wood Between The Worlds.)
But the C.S. Lewis who wrote Till We Have Faces and A Grief Observed is a man who still believes in God, but realizes that he personally doesn’t have all the answers for everyone anymore. To him, God is still quite real, but down here, we’re still mired in doubt, uncertainty, and the reality that bad shit can happen to you, no matter how deserving you are of better things.
I could have a worthwhile conversation with that C.S. Lewis. I would prefer not to meet his earlier self.
Based on your comments, I wonder what of Lewis’s you have read to give you such a strong distaste for him? His apologetics? I’ve certainly met people who didn’t care for him but seldom anyone with such a revulsion and I’m curious as to why.
Anyway, it’s a difficult choice for me - I’ve read and re-read them both for decades. I think I’d have to go with Lewis, mainly for sentimental reasons: I discovered Narnia as a boy without knowing anyone else who had ever read them, so they were my own discovery that I picked of the library shelf. As I grew a little older I read and loved the Space trilogy (and Perelandra remains one of my favorite books to this day) and The Screwtape Letters.
I also read The Hobbit and LOTR as a teenager; but I didn’t really appreciate the latter until I re-read it as an adult. I have not read much more of Tolkien - I tried Simarillion but didn’t get far into it. I should probably try again.
(FWIW, I’m also a big fan of Chesterton).
Maybe they got them from dwarves?
If someone would like to learn more about Lewis’s life, I have a recommendation. There’s a biography of him that came out last year called C. S Lewis: A Biography of Friendship, and it’s by Colin Duriez. I think it’s the best Lewis biography published so far. It’s not the multi-volume definitive work that somebody someday will write, but for 221 pages (not counting the 6-page chronology of Lewis’s life, the 13 pages of footnotes, and the 7-page bibliography), it’s very good. It’s better, I think, than Alister McGrath’s C. S. Lewis: A Life, the other pretty good biography that came out last year. There’s some misunderstandings of Lewis’s life in this thread, and I would rather not spend the amount of time it would take to unravel them, so let me just recommend this book.
Thanks for the rec, Wendell; I hadn’t heard about that one.
I’m definitely a Tolkien person. Lewis gives me hives (although I haven’t read Till We Have Faces, so maybe I’m misjudging him).
Love that story about JRRT and Ava Gardner.
For me, it’s Tolkien, hands down.
Friar Ted gotcha. Many Dimensions is great. I love the relationship between The Judge and Chloe, and the dry humor of the judge in general. (Dry humor seems to be one of those things the Brits are great at). I especially like the bit where the judge and Chloe decide that seeing the greed and amorality of the other characters has led them to believe in God as an alternative: it reminds me a lot of the ‘negative proof of God’ in THE MASTER AND MARGARITA.
Do you have any other recommendations for stuff I can read by Charles Williams?
Tolkien! I’ve read the trilogy at least 20 times. The silmarillion and others a few. The only place for me is Middlearth. Nothing else is real. CS Lewis, when you try and go there, you find out that you took a wrong turn and head back to the safety of Tolkien
I’ll admit to my Lewis-hatred being tied up with a certain amount of personal baggage of mine, which probably biases me unfairly against him. Not far off half a century ago, I had a girlfriend who was a very serious Christian and a “Lewis-groupie”. Attempting to bring agnostic and Christianity-unfriendly me, to the truth, she lent to me and asked me to read, Lewis’s The Four Loves. (I had previously encountered Screwtape, with negative sentiments toward it.) TFL struck me as the most awful steaming pile of self-referential, self-dogmatic bullcrap that I had ever encountered in my life to date – being cowardly or diplomatic, “whichever”, I fought shy of telling g/f that, in so many words. More generally, I did not appreciate her targeting me as a potential convert – no matter how benign her intentions in that. Unsurprisingly, the relationship did not last.
That aside – I’m a very “hard sell” for Christianity in the first place; and in much of what I’ve read of the overall little that I’ve read of Lewis’s works (if that makes sense), his line on Christianity strikes me as mostly a joyless one: he seems rather good at shooting down and refuting and denying to Christians, things that I like – or hope might be – in this life or the next. (Will get specific, if requested – absent that, don’t want to drone on at excruciating length.)
Further – Lewis from his writings (Christian-apologetics, and other – The Four Loves, Experiment In Criticism, Meditations On The Psalms, Mere Christianity [honestly don’t recall for sure if I’ve read that last, or not]) that I’ve read, strikes me as “so far up himself that he disappears”. Obviously, what people conclude that life and the world are all about, is derived from their personal experience; but there’s that, and there’s outright narcissism. IMO, from Lewis’s writings that I’ve read (and from what I gather second-hand, re those that I haven’t) – first, last, and all the time, it’s I-I-I, me-me-me; and the conclusions which he finally comes to (process of coming thereto, recounted in voluminous detail), are in his eyes what everyone ought to agree with, and anyone who did not, was to be despised – and said conclusions on the part of the mighty CSL, in his eyes the most interesting and most important person on the planet – sometimes changed with time and altering circumstances. One has the impression that as per the generally-agreed (even between mutually antagonistic variants of the faith) Christian scene over the centuries – Christians are supposed to minimise the self, narcissism is not cool. Mr. Lewis seems somehow to have failed to get that message.
I could go on, though I won’t – so as not to make this into a Pit thread, though heaven knows I’d like to Pit the person concerned (I probably shouldn’t, with personal stuff of mine being in the mix). As mentioned earlier – I get the impression that in person-to-person dealings, Lewis was a much better human than he comes across as – to me, anyway – in his writings.
Lewis. Tolkien, while doing quite an impressive job of creating his world, was a slog to read through. I almost gave up on the whole enterprise 100 pages into Fellowship of the Ring… I was pushed to keep reading until I finally found a place where I actually enjoying the books rather than ‘getting through’ them. Lewis, by contrast, I’ve found a pleasure to read and fairly witty - whether Narnia, Screwtape, Great Divorce, etc.