Robin Hardy Online
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After dinner [on Sept. 19, 1931] Lewis, Tolkien, and Dyson went out for air. It was a blustery night, but they strolled along Addison's Walk discussing the purpose of myth. Lewis, though now a believer in God, could not yet understand the function of Christ in Christianity, could not perceive the meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. He declared that he had to understand the purpose of these events--as he later expressed it in a letter to a friend, "how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now--except in so far as his example could help us."
As the night wore on, Tolkien and Dyson showed him that he was here making a totally unnecessary demand. When he encountered the idea of sacrifice in the mythology of a pagan religion he admired it and was moved by it; indeed the idea of the dying and reviving deity had always touched his imagination since he had read the story of the Norse god Balder. But from the Gospels (they said) he was requiring something more, a clear meaning beyond the myth. Could he not transfer his comparatively unquestioning appreciation of sacrifice from the myth to the true story?
But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.
No, said Tolkien, they are not.
And, indicating the great trees of Magdalen Grove as their branches bent in the wind, [Tolkien] struck out a different line of argument.
You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a "tree" until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic "progress" leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.
Humphrey Carpenter
Tolkien: The Authorized Biography (1977)
pp. 146-47
J.R.R. Tolkien (left) and C.S. Lewis from about this time.
Photos are from Carpenter's The Inklings.
