John Whitehead's Commentary

Disgraced [man] may be, yet he is not dethroned, And keeps the rags of Lordship once he owned. -- from the poem "Mythopoeia," by J.R.R. Tolkien

It was Saturday, Sept. 19, 1931. Oxford University English professors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had just finished dinner and decided to take a now-widely reported stroll with their friend Henry Dyson.

Fame had not yet touched their lives. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was still some 20 years away from being written. And Lewis' The Screwtape Letters had not yet seen the light of day.

As the story goes, on that warm, still night, as they wandered over Oxford's green pastures, their talk turned to the subject of myths, which Lewis insisted were enjoyable but only to be believed by children. Adults knew better: myths were lies.

Tolkien was quick to disagree. He argued that however untrue myths might seem, they contained elements of truth. Unlike Lewis at the time, Tolkien was a Christian. Indeed, Tolkien asserted, the mythmaker was himself a creator, created as he was by God. Thus, when the mythmaker undertook to spin a tale, elements of truth inevitably found themselves interwoven with myth.

At a crucial point in the discussion, they found themselves distracted by a sudden gust of wind. Standing in the dark, they listened to the ensuing rain-like patter of falling leaves. By the time they resumed their walk, their conversation had turned to Christianity and its doctrines.

Lewis was having difficulty believing Tolkien's argument for Christianity, particularly the doctrine of Christ's redemption of mankind. He couldn't understand "how the life and death of someone else (whoever he was) 2,000 years ago" could help them there and then -- except insofar as his example helped them. Lewis had read the gospels, but nowhere did he find this example business. Instead, he found "propitiation" and "sacrifice" and "blood of the lamb" -- all expressions that Lewis could interpret only in the sense that seemed to him "either silly or shocking."

"What is wrong with sacrifice?" asked Tolkien, a Roman Catholic. There was nothing wrong with sacrifice, Lewis had to concede. He had always liked "the idea of sacrifice in a pagan story," he said, "the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself" and "the idea of dying and reviving God." But the idea of such notions of sacrifice was entirely out of place when it came to interpreting the gospels.

If pagan stories were "God expressing himself through minds of poets, using such images as he found there," Tolkien argued with vigor, then Christianity might well be construed as God expressing himself through what men call "real things." And why couldn't the story of Christ be construed as a myth that was true but with a tremendous difference -- it really happened?

As the evening wore on, Lewis grew more certain that the Christian story had to be approached in the same way that he approached other so-called myths and that it was "the most important and full of meaning." By three o'clock that morning, Lewis was almost certain that it had really happened.

In the days following, Lewis returned time and again to his talk with Tolkien. Twelve days after that memorable September night, Lewis wrote to a friend, "I have passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ -- in Christianity. My talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it."

Lewis would go on to become a staunch Christian apologist. He would also write the beloved children's books The Narnia Chronicles, as well as The Screwtape Letters, a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior demon.

Tolkien in a few short years would write The Hobbit and, at the urging of Lewis, later complete The Lord of the Rings, becoming one of the most read authors in history.

There is little doubt that the urgency of the Ring-bearers' mission against the force of darkness was quickened by Tolkien's sense, as he wrote, that "there will be a 'millennium,' the prophesied thousand year rule of the Saints, i.e. those who have for all their imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world or evil spirit."

Such were the lives and works of Tolkien and Lewis -- thanks to a September stroll.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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