“Work-Writing” to Create the Fictional Portrait: Tolkien’s Inclusion of Lewis in The Lord of the Rings

Abstract

“WORK-WRITING” TO CREATE THE FICTIONAL PORTRAIT: TOLKIEN’S INCLUSION OF LEWIS IN THE LORD OF THE RINGS S AR A H L A R R A T T K E E F E R Trent University I t is commonly said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Cognate with this aphorism must be another piece of wisdom along the lines of “One pays homage to a friend by writing him into one’s story.” We should qualify this second point immediately, for there are caricatures as well as compli­ mentary portraits to be created by an author’s pen. For every flattering sketch of a Raleigh as Timias or an Elizabeth Tudor as Belphebe by a poet of Spenser’s genius, there is a less attractive depiction of a Henry Sweet, as that dogmatic philologist Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, by a satirical master like Shaw (Bolton 266). Yet even in his less than benign portrayal Shaw may have been inadvertently complimenting Sweet, since he included in his caricature not merely an exaggeration of the man himself, but an ample and indeed comprehensive representation of the work to which Sweet dedicated his life. A career or life-work, therefore, defines the worker. If we look at the Spenser portraits, we notice Raleigh’s courtly (and practical) devotion to his Queen delineating the character of Timias in his relationship with Belphebe, while the public roles of Elizabeth herself as Monarch, Virgin, and Martial Prince (Erickson 373-74) serve to create the conditions by which Gloriana, Belphebe, and Britomart exist, and through which the narrative leads the latter two. Essentially, then, it is not enough to base a character on the persona of a real figure; the life and work of the model must be translated into the fiction as well, so that the portrait is more than a still life. A recognition of this phenomenon provides the means by which we can see how J.R.R. Tolkien included his friend C.S. Lewis in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but did so in such a subtle, perhaps deliberately coded fashion, that the portrait is neither apparent nor readily accessible. The academic world of Oxford in the mid-century years was insular, filled with self-absorbed and clique-like associations, of which the Inklings were perhaps a typical exam­ ple. A taste for in-jokes and idiom, acquired at the preparatory school level, seems to have been a hallmark of such friendships. In the following study we shall see how Tolkien made use of work that was distinctively Lewis’s own when creating one of his hobbit characters, in such a way as to cue those of the Oxford academic circle who would understand the associations, but E n g l i s h S t u d i e s i n C a n a d a , x v i i i , 2, June 1992 maintaining a seamless exterior to present to those outside his immediate group of friends. It was of course Lewis himself who began the compliment, by including Tolkien in his own writing. By looking first at Lewis’s portrait of Tolkien as the philologist Ransom in his fictional trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Voy­ age to Venus,1 and That Hideous Strength, and then at the “work-writing” from Tolkien’s own academic career, present as precedent in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, we shall gain insight into this process of creating fiction through life-work, and thence be able to both perceive the subtlety with which Tolkien obscures his clues, and penetrate that obscurity to the true portrait beneath: He was tall but a little round-shouldered, about thirty-five to forty years of age, and dressed with that particular kind of shabbiness which marks a member of the intelligentsia on a holiday. He might easily have been mistaken for a doctor or a schoolmaster at first sight, though he had not the man-of-the-world air of the one or the indefinable breeziness of the other. In fact, he was a philologist, and fellow of a Cambridge college. His name was Ransom. (Planet 2...