Why Did Tolkien Dislike The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?

(avg. read time: 3–7 mins.)

This will be a less extensive entry on Tolkien than others I have posted to this point, as well as others that have yet to appear here. It is actually something of a redirect, as I think that one scholar has answered a recurring question much better than I could. What I will be doing here is referring readers to the relevant article for more detail while epitomizing its major points here and adding some of my own commentary.

The article is: Josh B. Long, “Disparaging Narnia: Reconsidering Tolkien’s View of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” Mythlore 31.3/4 (Spring/Summer 2013): 31–46.

Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol31/iss3/4/

Tolkien himself stated in Letter #265 to David Kolb, S.J. in 11 November 1964, about a year after C. S. Lewis’s death, “It is sad that ‘Narnia’ and all that part of C.S.L.’s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his.” When such an opinion became more widely known, thanks in large part to Humphrey Carpenter’s biographical work, people were naturally curious why this should be. The two men were good friends—though not without some significant friction—and Lewis was one of the earliest and most vocal supporters of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. We even know that Tolkien thought well of Out of the Silent Planet and the rest of Lewis’s Space trilogy. Why, then, did Tolkien dislike the work that was more akin to his own and for which Lewis is more well known?

Long examines the accounts provided by Roger Lancelyn Green, Nan C. L. Scott, George Sayer, and the work of Humphrey Carpenter with their secondhand attempts to answer this question. But more importantly, he shares work from an unpublished letter of Tolkien’s where he states his reasoning in his own words. For the secondhand accounts, I refer the reader to Long’s admirable and careful analysis of each, but here I will simply provide a collective summary of reasons given:

1) Lewis was not taking the world-building of his secondary world seriously enough in a seemingly haphazard assembly of figures from unrelated (and even incompatible and incongruous) mythologies. As exemplified by the faun, Mr. Tumnus, the various mythical figures that Lewis draws into his work do not tend to fit with their mythical archetypes. In the original ancient myths, a faun meeting a little girl would not have been nearly so pleasant an occurrence as it is in Lewis’s work.

2) Tolkien disliked the allegorical nature of Lewis’s books. In fact, Tolkien often expressed his distaste for allegory and rebuffed attempts to read his works allegorically (that is, beyond applications of his work, as opposed to claims about his meaning).

3) Tolkien generally found Lewis’s work superficial and thought he was rushing it out. This certainly seems plausible, given their differences in writing habits, which caused most of Tolkien’s work to remain unpublished until after his death. Famously, when they agreed to venture together into science fiction, with Lewis writing a space-travel story and Tolkien writing a time-travel story, only Lewis succeeded in finishing his project (and even composing a trilogy out of it), whereas Tolkien’s work (known as The Lost Road) remained perpetually incomplete. Furthermore, in terms of depth of imaginative history, there is no question that Tolkien’s habits of thought and work led to a much deeper history than is available in Lewis’s work.

4) Tolkien thought that Lewis borrowed quite a bit from him. Combined with the previous criticisms, it is not difficult to understand why Tolkien would find this to be a problem.

As Long observes, there is reason to think that each of these in some fashion at some time resembled statements Tolkien actually made about Lewis’s work. But what interests me more is what Tolkien said in his own words. In an unpublished letter to Eileen Elgar (cf. Letters #246 and #255) in 24 December 1971, he writes: “I am glad that you have discovered Narnia. These stories are deservedly very popular; but since you ask if I like them I am afraid the answer is No. I do not like ‘allegory’, and least of all religious allegory of this kind. But that is a difference of taste which we both recognized and did not interfere with our friendship.”¹

However much—if at all—the other reasons actually affected Tolkien’s evaluation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or The Chronicles of Narnia in general, this reason had the most staying power, as Tolkien expressed this as his reasoning just less than two years before his death. What is interesting is that Tolkien has made an all-too-common error in framing Lewis’s work as allegory, an error that he often called out when others used this framing for his work. As an illustration of the common error:

Like Tolkien, Lewis denied that he was writing an allegory, but far fewer people have paid attention to this denial by Lewis than have paid attention to the denial by Tolkien. Lewis’s work certainly does resemble allegory in many ways, but it is not an allegory in the way that, say, Pilgrim’s Progress is (or Pearl for that matter, which Tolkien translated). Lewis insisted that his work was, in fact, a “supposal.” That is, suppose the gospel story played out in another world and its patterns had to be enacted in new ways with new types of creatures and characters involved; what do you “suppose” it might look like? Such was the seed of Lewis’s story.

(Of course, a couple other factors must be borne in mind for discussions about allegory and the works of Tolkien and/or Lewis. One, Tolkien has overstated his dislike of allegory to give the impression of a general distaste, but he uses it himself on multiple occasions. In the future, I will be covering cases where he used allegory in both “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and “Leaf by Niggle.” Two, since “allegory” has so many different uses in common parlance, it would be helpful if people who ask whether or not there is allegory in Tolkien or insist, despite his claims, that there is allegory would define what they mean by the term. That way, they can see if their understanding of the term matches Tolkien’s and thus if they are actually disagreeing with him or simply using the word in a different way. I have lost count of the number of times people have made connections with, say, biblical themes or historical events and thought that was sufficient to establish “allegory.” However, it is beyond my scope to get into that matter here. I hope to address it another time.)

Another interesting point here is that, despite his problems with the work, he recognized its value for others. While Tolkien is surely being polite to a dear fan in saying that this story that she enjoyed was justifiably quite popular, there is more to this statement than that. Tolkien actually owned the Narnia series. He would give these books, along with others, to his granddaughter Joanna to read before reading his The Lord of the Rings. This is, in its own way, an understated acknowledgment of Tolkien’s friend, despite his own tastes (which were indeed difficult for any modern author, including himself, to satisfy).

Tolkien’s distaste for Narnia was surely disappointing to Lewis, but this appears to be not so much a glitch in the system of their friendship, nor is it at all inexplicable in such a context. It is rather a feature of this friendship between two quite different individuals. As Long rightly observes, it was their differences that made them complement each other so well, “Tolkien needed someone hammering him to be productive, while Lewis needed someone to remind him to slow down and pay attention to the details. It is a well-known fact that Tolkien would have probably never completed The Lord of the Rings without Lewis's encouragement, but I think it is also fair to say that Out of the Silent Planet would have contained more loose ends and inconsistencies had Tolkien not provided Lewis with constructive criticism” (42–43).

1. On page 39 of the article: Unpublished letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Eileen Elgar, dated 24 December 1971 (private collection). © The JRR Tolkien Copyright Trust 2012