Here’s something new I’m doing…a 90 second YouTube “show” to help people briefly learn about significant events in the life of C.S. Lewis. I plan to release something new each week. Hopefully, it will eventually be a book with 365 entries.

Note the text version of the show is below, WITH footnotes!

Met J. R. R. Tolkien (May 11, 1926)

Sometimes you meet a person and you become instant friends. Then there was the time when Jack met J.R.R. Tolkien and the opposite happen! Reflecting on his first encounter Lewis wrote, “No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.”[1] Of course, those initial impressions didn’t last and they later became close friends. Tolkien was a key influence in helping Jack accept the Christian faith[2] and Jack was the pivotal player encouraging Tolkien to finish The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings! Before Jack easily had his books published, Tolkien tried to get his publisher to consider releasing Jack’s Out of the Silent Planet novel (they declined).[3]

Jack and Tolkien went on to be the driving force behind a group known as the Inklings. Several books have focused on this group, the largest being The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, and the most unique is Bandersnatch. One of the activities of the Inklings was to read something they were in the process of writing. Among the drafts presented to their meetings was The Screwtape Letters. That work was later dedicated to Tolkien.

[1] All My Road Before Me; pg. 393. (1991)

[2] Jack states this in a letter to Don BeDe Griffiths on 12/21/1941: “Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my own conversion.” The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 2; pg. 501.

[3] Accessed 2/6/2019 – http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Out_of_the_Silent_Planet