The Myth Makers Essays on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was my favourite book as a child; then I discovered The Lord of the Rings and fell in love with its luminescence. It was a couple of years before I found out that the authors of both books were close friends and that Tolkien was a mentor of Lewis’s. This set me off on a lifelong quest to explore their works. In this volume I investigate the underlying purposes of each author: what makes Lewis’s and Tolkien’s work similar? What makes them different? What key effect was each trying to create upon readers? How did they accomplish those effects? Examining such topics as the influence of Dante upon Lewis, the differing genres of his Space Trilogy, how Narnia developed, the role of allegory and symbolism, why some of their books succeed more than others, the principles of parallel universes, the influences on Tolkien including the Finnish national epic ‘The Kalevala’, the part played by metaphysics and language in Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth, recurring images, the role of Owen Barfield’s work, and much, much more, this book was written for those who love Lewis and Tolkien and want to appreciate the real power and importance of what it was that they were accomplishing in the middle of the Twentieth Century and for generations since.