When JRR Tolkien Bet CS Lewis - The Wager That Gave Birth To The Lord of The Rings

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When JRR Tolkien bet CS Lewis: the wager that gave birth to The Lord of the
Rings
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Elijah Wood (right) and Sean Astin as Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings
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CREDIT: ALLSTAR/CINETEXT/NEW LINE CINEMA
By John Garth
8 DECEMBER 2016 3:04PM
Eighty years ago JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis dared each other to write a sci- novel. It was a challenge that would lead to
the creation of The Lord of the Rings
nce upon a time two friends made a wager. "Tollers,"one said to the other, "there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am
afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves."At this time CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were "like two young bear cubs...
just happily quipping with one another", in the words of an Oxford contemporary.
Their historic wager to write about space- and time-travel was a vital step on the road to their most famous fantasy works yet it has
never been pinpointed more precisely than 193637. Now, however, we can reveal that the germ of the idea emerged during a few
days precisely eighty years ago.
The year 1936 had seen the two Oxford English dons hit their academic zenith with works that still shape medieval literary studies
today: Lewiss The Allegory of Love and Tolkiens Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Yet they were also wannabe authors Lewis,
38, was an unsuccessful poet, and Tolkien, almost 45, an unpublished mythmaker.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/whattoread/jrrtolkienbetcslewiswagergavebirthlordrings/
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Gollum in the lm of The Lord of the Rings
Both had grown up reading science ction classics such as Jules Vernes From the Earth to the Moon and HG Wellss The Time
Machine. In the Thirties the genre was exploding, ranging from the monster-bashing gee-whizzery of US pulp magazines to serious
speculation, especially in Britain.
To Tolkien and Lewis, Olaf Stapledons future histories of human evolution and the supernatural Christian thrillers of Charles
Williamsoffered both a challenge and enticement. They realised genre ction might offer a wider audience for their own ideas ideas
that centred on myth.
Tolkiens myth-cycle, The Silmarillion, begun in 1916 but still in progress, recounted how deathless Elves and their mortal human
allies overthrew the satanic Morgoth after agelong war. Lewis had become an avid fan rst the love story of Beren and Lthien (to be
published as a standalone book in May next year) and then The Hobbit, begun about 1930 as a bedtime story for the Tolkien children,
set in some vague era long after the overthrow of Morgoth.
Skandar Keynes as Edmund Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe CREDIT: ALAMY
Myth was no mere antiquarian interest. In 1931, Tolkien had persuaded the sceptical Lewis that ancient myths contained glimpses of
the "true myth", Christs incarnation. Lewis had since published The Pilgrims Regress, a heavily allegorical account of his conversion,
with characters such as Wisdom, Mother Kirk, and Mr Humanist.
The science-ction wager was a step onto common ground with Tolkien, who loathed allegory. They agreed to write adventure
stories in which the ction could be taken at face value, rather than as a code. But each adventure would lead to the discovery of the
literal truth behind a well-known myth the destruction of Atlantis and the fall of Satan.
Lewiss Out of the Silent Planet centres on a plan cooked up by a dastardly scientist, Weston,to invade and exploit a paradisal Mars. All
is witnessed by Elwin Ransom, a man kidnapped and brought along to be a sacrice to the Martians. But these turn out not to be
coldly cruel Wellsian aliens. Instead, three benign intelligent species live deep in the lush canyons of the planet, which they call
Malacandra.
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JRR Tolkien in his study at Merton College, Oxford CREDIT: HAYWOOD MAGEE/GETTY IMAGES
In his cosmic trilogy continuing with Venus-based Perelandra and earthbound That Hideous Strength Lewiss big idea was that the
solar system pulses with divine life. "The very name 'Space'seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance,"thinks
Ransom. "Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens."Spirits it freely between planets that are each
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ruled by a guardian angel. But the "silent planet"is Earth, a prison for a satanic fallen angel referred to only as "the Bent
One"because the interplanetary lingua franca, Old Solar, has no word for evil.
One symptom of the Bent Ones malign inuence is the materialist madness of the scientist Weston. He is a Lewisian parody of
geneticist JBS Haldane, who in the Twenties and Thirties popularised the notion that entire galaxies lay within the grasp of a human
race willing to adapt through eugenics and genetic engineering.
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CS Lewis at Oxford in 1950 CREDIT: JOHN CHILLINGWORTH/GETTY
Usefully, Ransom is a philologist a version of Tolkien, in fact so he quickly picks up Old Solar. Lewis, probably the only friend who
knew of Tolkiens voluminous works on his invented Elvish languages, must have chuckled when he described Ransoms rst close
encounter with an alien.
"In the fraction of a second which it took Ransom to decide that the creature was really talking, and while he still knew that he might
be facing instant death, his imagination had leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling
project of making a Malacandrian grammar."
Another ctionalised JRRT appears in Tolkiens The Lost Road: Alboin Errol, whose Germanic rst name (like Elwin) means "Elffriend". Alboin and his son time-travel via dream from the present day back to lost Atlantis called Nmenor in one of Tolkiens
invented languages.
The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where Tolkien and Lewis would meet to discuss their work CREDIT: JEREMY MOERAN/ALAMY
First, though Tolkien wrote a brief mythic account of The Fall of Nmenor. That story just a few pages long released what Tolkien
once called his "Atlantis complex", a "terrible recurrent dream of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the
trees and green elds". He had suffered from it all his life, and would wake up at the point of drowning.
The Fall of Nmenor opens straight after The Silmarillion and Morgoths defeat. Mortal men who fought him are awarded a utopian
home, Nmenor or "Westernesse". But they bitterly envy the immortality of their elvish allies. This is the cue for Th, former servant
of Morgoth, to corrupt the king and become an minence grise, imposing tyranny and human sacrice to Morgoth. The king leads an
armada to seize immortality in the westward paradise where the elves live alongside the godlike angelic powers who govern the earth.
An undersea rift appears in the ocean "and into this chasm the great seas plunged, and the noise of the falling waters lled all the earth
and the smoke of the cataracts rose above the tops of the everlasting mountains But Nmenor being nigh upon the East to the great
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rift was utterly thrown down and overwhelmed in the sea, and its glory perished". The elves paradise is removed to a plane apart, and
the at world of Tolkiens old mythology is changed into the sphere we know.
The only survivors of Nmenor are the uncorrupted "Elf-friends"who build new mainland kingdoms and Th. As Tolkien tinkered
with the story, he gave Th a new name, Sauron, and made him the Dark Lord of Mordor.
LOTR: The Return of the King - The Death of Sauron
Tolkiens Fall of Nmenor is the key to the date of the wager; asis a piece of publicity blub that Tokien wrote for the jacket of The
Hobbit, for which he signed a publication contract on December 2 1936. Many years later he told a correspondent: "In a 'blurb'I wrote
for The Hobbit, I spoke of the time between the Elder Days and the Dominion of Men. Out of that came the 'missing link', the Downfall
of Nmenor, releasing some hidden 'complex'."Though this appears in the now-venerable Letters of JRR Tolkien, no one seems to
have noticed its signicance. The Hobbit publishers requested the blurb in question on December 4. Tolkien posted it just four days
later.
The eureka moment was pure Tolkien the realisation that the Elvish word-root he had invented to mean "fall"("talat") would
generate a name nearly matching Atlantis. His language notes abruptly give way to frantic narrative scrawl: "Atalant legendary name
of Nmenr that fell into a rift made by the Gods / that fell back / that was drown". Drafting the Hobbit blurb had set Tolkien
thinking about the end of the "age of Farie"or myth. That epochal moment would be marked by the writing of The Fall of
Nmenor,his own version of Platos fable of the island civilisation destroyed by hubris.
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The writers wager surely came next, and quickly Lewis completed Out of the Silent Planet by the following September. Tolkien
began The Lost Road, but nevernished it (it was edited posthumously by Tolkiens son Christopher in his multi-volume History of
Middle-earth).
A timeslip thriller, The Lost Road sees Alboin and son dream themselves back to Nmenor at the height of Saurons tyranny. We may
now perform an imaginative timeslip of our own to December 1936. What rising fury inspired Tolkiens story of tyranny, schism and
cataclysm? What surging fear awoke his lifelong Great Wave complex?
On 30 November the Crystal Palace re struck an ominous blow. For a week from 3 December, the Abdication Crisis split the nation as
Edward VIII sought to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. The Catholic Tablet raged that the last king to try and alter the royal
marriage rules Henry VIII had made England apostatise from Rome. Can it be coincidence that at this very point the staunchly
Catholic Tolkien conceived his story of a king betraying both nation and divine order?
Tolkien later rightly refuted misreadings of his stories as a crude allegorical code. But he also said privately that his instinct was to
"cloak under mythical and legendary dress"his criticisms of life. Dramatising what he believed were universal and immutable
rights and wrongs, like any good artist he drew from life. And 1936 had wrongness in abundance to fuel his re.
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The year was described in the Telegraph as one "desperately charged with fate which seemed to bring catastrophe near". Fascist
Italy annexed Ethiopia, and Nazi Germany reoccupied the Rhineland death knells to the League of Nations and the Treaty of
Versailles. The Spanish Civil War erupted, a tragedy acutely felt by Tolkien, who had been raised from the age of 12 by an AngloSpanish priest.
Conservative Catholics smelt Stalin behind the Republican "Red Terror" which massacred clergy. Yet by December, it was clear that
Francos Nationalists were backed in force by Hitler, a dictator who (among other evils) sought to strangle German Catholicism.
Cruelty, moral compromise, and barbarism were on all sides.
Christopher Lee as Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring CREDIT: REX/MOVIESTORE
The Nmenreans of The Lost Road bear archaic witness to peculiarly modern horrors. Nmenors armaments, "multiplied as if for
an agelong war",include self-propelled metal ships with long-range repower. The kings displeasure "falleth on men and in the
morning they are not" dispatched to torture or the grave. Informers lurk "even by the heart of the house". As Christopher Tolkien
comments, in the Nmenrean era his father discovered "an image of what he most condemned and feared in his own".
When The Lost Road was being written, Christopher had just turned 12 and his brothers Michael and John were 16 and 19. When JRR
Tolkien was 19, the Great War that killed so many of his friends had been just three years away. The Lost Roads several father-and-son
pairings hint at a paternal anxiety absent from the bachelor Lewiss work.
The time-travel story was doomed by the success of The Hobbit. In late 1937Tolkien offered both the unnished The Lost Road and
his older mythology The Silmarillion to his publisher, who demanded more on hobbits instead. And so reluctantly, Tolkien embarked
on The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion, complete with Tolkiens fullest account of Nmenor, was only published posthumously,
through Christophers efforts.
Yet the Atlantis story, which owed so much to the crises of 1936, was in Tolkiens words the "missing link"to The Lord of the Rings. It
underpins the whole epic history of war between mortal men and Sauron. When at the climax the valiant, troubled Faramir recalls
Nmenor and his own dream of "the great dark wave climbing over the green lands darkness unescapable", it is an exorcism of
Tolkiens nightmare.
John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War, is writing a new book, Tolkiens Mirror: Creation in the Catastrophic 20th
Century
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Signed in as @Elias Pereira
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Graeme Cree
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13 Dec 2016 3:12PM
This is all very well, except that Tolkien's sci- novel WASN'T Lord of the Rings, it was The Lost Road (which was published posthumously in an incomplete
state).
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Thomas Goodey
8 Dec 2016 4:21PM
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The author of the article writes "Lewiss Out of the Silent Planet centres on a plan cooked up by a dastardly scientist, Weston,to invade and exploit a paradisal
Mars. All is witnessed by Elwin Ransom, a man kidnapped and brought along to be a sacrice to the Martians. But these turn out not to be coldly cruel Wellsian
aliens. Instead, three benign intelligent species live deep in the lush canyons of the planet, which they call Malacandra..."
This is not right. One of the races, the Sorns, lives higher up, and the third, the Ptriggi, is hardly described at all. It is the Hrossa who live in the canyons.
I have always suspected that Lewis's description of the Martians, especially of the race of Sorns, owes so much to 'A Martian Odyssey' by Stanley Weinbaum as
to amount to conceptual plagarism. In those days very few copies of American science ction pulps penetrated to England, but it is known that C.S. Lewis did
get hold of some of them. The resemblance is too close for comfort.
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Culture Books What to Read

CREDIT: ALLSTAR/CINETEXT/NEW LINE CINEMA

Gollum in the lm of The Lord of the Rings

CS Lewis at Oxford in 1950 CREDIT: JOHN CHILLINGWORTH/GETTY

LOTR: The Return of the King - The Death of Sauron

Christopher Lee as Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring CREDIT: REX/MOVIESTORE

Follow Telegraph Books

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Signed in as @Elias Pereira

8 Dec 2016 4:21PM

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