Refracted Light

The heart of Man is not compound of lies,

but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,

and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,

Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.

Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,

and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,

his world-dominion by creative act:

not his to worship the great Artefact,

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right

(used or misused). The right has not decayed.

We make still by the law in which we’re made.

 —from Mythopoeia, by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1931, and dedicated to C.S. Lewis

The Hobbit has until quite recently been regarded as inferior to—or at least less “important” than—J.R.R. Tolkien’s other works. And, looked at simply as an early attempt or “prequel” of the genre he later perfected in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it is perhaps so. Paul Kocher recognises it as being “fundamentally … different in kind” from The Lord of the Rings and it is indeed so. It should be looked at separately, and luckily I came across it before I knew much about The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps because I had just finished reading a biography of C.S. Lewis, what struck me most forcefully about it was the startling resemblance of Bilbo Baggins to Lewis. It jumped out of the page with a shock of recognition I will never forget. The Hobbit reads to me as a mythopoeic account of the conversion of Lewis, first to theism and then to Christianity. Tolkien watched it happen to his increasingly dear friend, followed the workings of Lewis’s mind as he grappled intellectually first with God and then with Christ, and was influential in his final yielding to religious faith.

The influence of Lewis on Tolkien’s creative life is usually understood as one of encouragement and affirmation, urging Tolkien to complete his work and giving him confidence in its quality and wider appeal to the reading public. However, I believe that what Tolkien lacked was not confidence as much as a focus for his wide-ranging but rather undisciplined imagination, and I think Lewis gave him that focus. Here at last was a highly intelligent, articulate and attractive man who shared many of Tolkien’s literary and cultural tastes, who was willing not only to listen to Tolkien expound his theories about mythology, but also to argue about them, ponder them deeply and finally be convinced of their truth. To a fundamentally lonely and eccentric—in its good sense of being other-centred—man like Tolkien this was heady stuff indeed, and it is little wonder that Lewis may have captivated Tolkien’s imagination, intellect and heart, and through the eyes of that consummate mythmaker metamorphosed into Bilbo Baggins.

The fluency and speed with which The Hobbit was written, so uncharacteristic of Tolkien’s later painstaking technique, point to quite definite and well-formed purpose, story and character, and a complete engagement of the writer with his subject. The fact that the manuscript he had typed by 1932 finished at the slaying of the dragon—which incidentally, was one of the few parts Tolkien’s drafts show him having some uncertainty dealing with—could be explained by the fact that in 1931 that is as far as the story of Lewis had come. The dragon of his intellectual and emotional reservations about Christianity had been drawn out into the open and slain and he had finally become a Christian. But where he would go from there was anybody’s guess.

Tracing the Lewis story through The Hobbit may not add a great deal to our biographical knowledge of him, a territory that others have covered exhaustively. What it does do, however, is give a uniquely contemporary and personal insight into Tolkien’s analysis of, reactions to and feelings about Lewis’s conversion, which show him to have been remarkably prescient, sharply perceptive and deeply yet humorously sympathetic towards Lewis. It is a quite intimate picture of his attitude to Lewis at this time, uncoloured by the later cooling and souring of their friendship.

The years of the writing of The Hobbit correlate extremely closely with the time of Lewis’s Christian conversion (about 1929 to 1931). But the genesis of the story is earlier, as bedtime stories told to Tolkien’s sons well before 1930, even as early as 1926, the time when Lewis first joined the Coalbiters (Kolbitar), an informal group of Oxford scholars who used to meet with Tolkien to read in the original Icelandic the ancient sagas and Older and Younger Edda. It was here that Lewis and Tolkien discovered their similar literary tastes and their real friendship began. They had much in common in their previous life experiences, as well as some important divergences.

This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

Thus the whole story of Lewis! One has only to open the book and here is a personal Lewis so clearly presented in the description of Bilbo Baggins, devoid of the public persona of bluster and bully with which he sometimes carried on (what Tolkien ironically called the “Ulsterior motive”). Hobbits are “inclined to be fat in the stomach … [have] good natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it)”. This is the revelation of the private Lewis of Monday meetings in his Magdalen rooms or at the local pubs, the Lewis who later joked as he quickly downed three pints in succession that he was being abstemious for Lent (he should have been a Catholic).

The habits of Bilbo Baggins are those of Lewis, appealingly gregarious with those he felt to be of like mind, the spontaneously warm-hearted, kind and generous friend who yet guarded his innermost private life jealously. Tolkien himself maintained that Bilbo’s smallness referred to “reach of imagination rather than actual size”, just as he maintained that Lewis’s failure to understand the significance of Christianity was a failure in imagination rather than faith. Interestingly, Bilbo is “exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father”, just as Lewis uncannily resembled his own father. Bilbo is a “little” person, but one whom we like at sight and who reveals himself to be one worth liking. He proves to be brave, loyal, resourceful, practical, clever and shrewd as the tale progresses—in short, one whom we like and admire more and more as we get to know him better and really see the stuff of which he is made. It is an exact reflection upon the progression of the friendship between the two men.

The first meeting of Lewis and Tolkien was not propitious, each writing the other off with faint praise. One can perhaps see this rather unpromising beginning in the smug brush-off that Bilbo tries to give to Gandalf at the very mention of “adventure”, a thing supposedly inimical to hobbits. It was the Coalbiters that really sparked their intimacy—just as the dwarves (with their names lifted straight from the Edda) feast, talk, play music and sing in a very mead-hall, Coalbiterish kind of way in Bilbo’s house. It is the dwarves’ exciting stories of long ago that work their mythical magic upon Bilbo, and his Tookish desire for adventure stirs within him—his spirit is awakened, the elusive “joy”, that inexplicable appeal of the “other” that first led Lewis on his quest for the transcendent, is felt. Gandalf, as the experienced one who initiates this whole adventure, shares with the narrator the voice of Tolkien—the Icelandic language expert, founder and leader of the Coalbiters, somewhat older in years than Lewis and certainly senior in the university faculty, as well as a professed Christian and practising Catholic.

It would seem that from very early in their acquaintance, if not from their first meeting, Tolkien discerned that like Bilbo, Lewis was “not so prosy as he liked to believe”, though he had developed the persona of a plain man with no nonsense about him. The amusing reluctance of Baggins to become involved in the treasure hunt, but the irresistible curiosity and the well hidden, but nevertheless strong, adventurous spirit that breaks out in him (in between bouts of wanting it all to just go away) reads very similarly to Lewis’s frank descriptions of his own highly reluctant conversion to belief in God, and finally to belief in Christ, in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy—“the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”.

This dichotomy is apparent throughout the journey of the hobbit, and shows its power initially by causing Bilbo to faint at the thought of what is being proposed. He arrives back to consciousness just in time to hear himself being scorned as completely unsuitable for the job. This irks him to the extent that he agrees to take part in the adventure before he even knows what his role in it is to be. Bilbo’s answer to the dwarves has a classic Lewisian ring: “I am quite sure you have come to the wrong house … But treat it as the right one. Tell me what you want done and I will try it.” This notion is expressed in Lewis’s own writings: “A given act or attitude, be it never so inadequate, will do for the moment, the idea being that this is a step in the right direction and more will follow in time.” Lewis remarks in Surprised by Joy that eventually he had to admit that talk must stop at some point and action take over.

Bilbo’s request a little later—“All the same, I should like it all plain and clear … by which he meant: ‘what am I going to get out of it? And am I going to come back alive?’”—gives rise to an all-night confabulation, with Baggins at times confused, resentful, cross, outraged, but compelled also, and highly attracted despite his better judgment. This needs no great stretch of the imagination to be seen as a direct reference to the pivotal and oft-quoted all-night discussion with Tolkien and Henry Victor (Hugo) Dyson at Magdalen in September 1931 that Lewis himself maintained was hugely influential in his Christian conversion not long thereafter.

The very short-lived relief that Bilbo feels when his guests appear to have gone the morning after this “unexpected party” makes it clear that Bilbo is not going to get away with hiding behind the familiar; just as Lewis could no longer get away with denying the pull of the truth and still remaining intellectually honest.

Having set out on the journey, naturally they run into trouble very early: the rather amusingly stupid, though nasty and dangerous, trolls. Outwitted and kept fighting among themselves about completely useless trivialities (rather like some atheistic academics of Tolkien’s acquaintance perhaps, or the aggressive Ulster Protestant ancestors of Lewis!) by Gandalf, the captured dwarves and Bilbo are freed from the trolls’ sacks. Again urged on by Gandalf, they seek out the treasure trove of the trolls, where the apparently useless key that the tyro thief Bilbo stole from the trolls is discovered to open the door and two mysterious and beautiful swords are found.

As they continue after their narrow escape Bilbo shows his ignorance by asking solemnly if the first mountain they come to is “The Mountain”, it looks so enormous to him. Balin’s dismissive negative makes Bilbo feel “more tired than he ever remembered feeling before” as the Herculean nature of the task before them slowly becomes apparent to him. This to me betokens a very deep understanding on Tolkien’s part, even while he has a gentle joke at Baggins’s ignorance, of what the price of Christian conversion can be.

Tolkien always believed that her conversion to Catholicism ultimately cost his mother her life, as it alienated her from many of her relatives and the possible financial help they may have otherwise given the widowed and ill mother of two young sons. However, this had not embittered him against the Catholic Church (but possibly somewhat against his inflexible relatives), as he had been endowed with the same gift of deep faith that he regarded as precious beyond price and worth fighting and dying for.

Tolkien also knew the isolation that was felt by any practising Catholic in England at that time. An English university campus has frequently been an uncomfortable place to be a publicly professing Christian of any denomination; and he knew intimately of the difficulties that differing attitudes to faith can cause in domestic life also. So Tolkien was well aware of the courage needed for Lewis to pursue his quest.

And yet the humour of the incongruity of the little hobbit engaged in a dangerous and dramatic quest cannot be escaped and indeed gives the tale its piquancy and its heart; the unexpected triumph of the apparently beaten underdog is one of our favourite themes—always the pale reflection of Christ’s victory against the worst odds in history gives us our most compelling and best-loved stories.

Shortly after their narrow escape, they meet the elves of Rivendell and have at least two weeks of respite—“Bilbo would gladly have stopped there forever”—rather like the beloved fairy tales of old that both Lewis and Tolkien found such a rich source of comfort and imaginative delight. Yet one cannot stop there forever, one must move on, as they are not ends in themselves but lead to another end altogether, according to Tolkien’s theory of myth. They are indeed only a beginning of a journey. The wisdom contained in the halls of Rivendell helps them discern the “right road to the right pass” amongst the many evil and dangerous ones to the mountains, and reveals to them the origin and the power of the two swords earlier discovered as well as some handy information about understanding the map they have.

This is but a beginning; it is possible to draw close parallels between all Bilbo’s various adventures and Lewis’s conversion journey. Among other things, his emotional and spiritual struggles during and after the final illness and death of his father, several specific well-documented moments of grace—even his horror of insects—can be found.

And after all his vicissitudes, Bilbo having come full circle and arrived where he started but as a very different hobbit, is reminded in the closing words of the book of what started it all. Tolkien reiterates the argument made to Lewis in the long poem Mythopoeia:

“Of course!” said Gandalf. “And why should not [the ancient prophecies] prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”

Bilbo’s response as he reaches for the tobacco jar—a laughing “Thank goodness!”—honest, humble and with a complete understanding of his “littleness”—is to my mind the greatest encomium Tolkien could pay to his newly minted Christian friend.

The very heart of mythopoeia is Tolkien’s under-standing of the urge to mythologise and create fairy tales that is apparent in all cultures, as fragments of God’s own creative power still reflecting aspects of the truth of God, however distorted they might be by our fallen human understanding. I believe Lewis is very possibly the prism through which this “refracted light … [that moves] from mind to mind” forms into the wonderful mythical creation of Bilbo Baggins and Middle Earth.

Catherine Parish lives in Perth.