Letters
to Malcolm
and the Trouble with Narnia:
C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their 1949 crisis
Eric Seddon
I
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N the
early spring of 1949, C.S. Lewis read part of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, still in manuscript, to
J.R.R. Tolkien. Expecting enthusiasm from his longtime friend and colleague, he
received instead what would remain Tolkien’s permanent dismissal of the work.
The assessment was blunt and unequivocal: Tolkien deemed the book almost
worthless—a carelessly written jumble of unrelated mythologies. He simply
detested it (Sayer 312, 313). Although
shaken by this terse and unexpected verdict, Lewis later sought the opinion of
Roger Lancelyn Green, whose encouragement lead to the ultimate decision to
finish the book (Green & Hooper, 241). It went on to become one of Lewis’s
best sellers. The first of what eventually became The Chronicles of Narnia, it has been continuously in print ever
since. Now half a century from its first publication, the place of The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe seems increasingly remarkable. Like The Lord of the Rings it remains
embraced and even celebrated by a society steadily annexed by secular values.
Its success both in book sales and, more recently, at the box office have even
resulted in the somewhat bizarre spectacle of secular critics writing polemical
tracts attempting to marginalize, if not deny, the Christian elements of the
plot.[1] Thus Narnia’s success has remained somewhat
oddly stunning—the greatest testimony to its place in literature being this steady
endurance in the public imagination, despite the societal shifts since its
first publication.
