The Eric Metaxas Show - On Myth as a Vehicle for Truth A Dialogues Conversation with Holly Ordway & Louis Markos (Continued)

Episode Date: September 20, 2025

How often do you use your imagination? In our newest program, Socrates Dialogues, authors and professors Louis Markos and Holly Ordway discuss the enduring friendship between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and their most famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of The Rings.  They discuss how the two balanced their disagreements while maintaining respect and a close bond, the mythical worlds they created, the fight between good and evil, and ultimately, the importance of imagination through reason.

Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling threat of The Blob. Well, way back when, Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because The Blob was supposed to eat him. But he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest.

Eric the Texas! Today on this program, we're playing a Socrates dialogue, a conversation under Socrates in the city between C.S. Lewis, I'm sorry, between Holly Ordway and Louis Marcos about C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien. It's terrific. Here it is. But it's very interesting. In an interview, Tolkien once said, I believe in absolute good, but I do not believe in absolute evil. and that's really significant. And he goes on elsewhere to talk about the way that Sauron, he says, Sauron is a toad. Sown is nothing. Evil is ultimately hollow. It's empty.

It's insubstantial. And I think it's no coincidence that when Baradur is destroyed, when the ring is destroyed, we see the sort of shadow of smoke rise up and then plow away. All of Sauron's power turns. turns out to have been an illusion. When Saramund dies, same thing happens. Sharkey, when Saramund dies, it just disintegrates. It just disintegrates.

Yeah, and I think Tolkien is really giving us some images, some meaningful images of what evil really is. Evil is not power. Evil is not a thing. It might be glamorous in some way, in the old understanding of glamour as in like a false show, but it can never be. be grand. It can ever be real and substantial. Only goodness can be that. And Tolkien's examples of goodness, you know, he talks about how evil can be, seem to be winning. But goodness

will always be working quietly, maybe, you know, seemingly insignificantly, but it will be working. And that, I think, takes us to a theme that I find really significant in Tolkien. And that's the theme of humility. And again, because we have kings and we have Sauron and we have wars and all that, sometimes people look at that, and I think the grandeur of the film adaptations can maybe shift people's attention. I do really like Jackson's films of The Lord of the Rings, but sometimes they can obscure the way that in the novel, the Tolkien's really emphasizing hobbits, because those

are the real protagonists. They're the hobbits. And the hobbits are the weakest people in Middle Earth. They're not powerful warriors like Boromir or Faramir. They're not wise like Elrond or Gandalf. They're really genuinely weak, less knowledgeable childlike. They've got nothing to contribute to a kind of worldly level. And it's important to recognize that.

It's not that they have actually, you know, secretly. they have these great abilities that will come to the four. No, no. They're going to throw rocks, but that's about it. Yeah, no, they're really, they've got, on the grand scheme of things, they've got nothing. And that's really important. And this ties in to Tolkien's fundamental understanding of the faith, because he even explicitly connects the humility of the hobbits to the humility of Mary, the mother of God,

who, you know, in her, she's just a woman. and yet, you know, God asks her to be the mother of his son, and she says, yes. And she's the mighty have done great things for me. You know, he has done great things for me, and I am the humble one. And that's what he sees in the hobbits, that they are the humble ones of the world for whom the Lord is doing great things and through whom the Lord is doing great things. And this humility is apparent from the beginning. We have the Council of Arwand where Frodo steps up and says,

I will take the ring, though I do not know the way. And he doesn't know the way. And he can't get there without help. And I think again and again, this comes back to Tolkien's understanding, you know, that the Christian faith is one of reversals. You know, in Mary's Magnificat, the mighty have been put down from their throne. and he has raised up the humble and the meek. That's what we see in the hobbits.

They are the humble. They are the meek. And they're the ones through whom Middle Earth is saved. But not by power of arms, not by wisdom, even not by their own strength of will. And this is a really important point at the end. A point that's often missed. Even Tolkien noted how many people missed it.

Frodo fails. He just fail, yeah. He loses. He fails. At the end, he's broken by the person. power of the ring that he's born for so long. And he takes the ring and he seizes it. His eye, you know, I will not do this thing. And he's saved and Middle Earth is saved because Gollum comes up and bites off his finger and falls in. And this is really the workings of providence because why is

Golm, why is Golm there? Because earlier on, Frodo and Sam had the opportunity to kill him, and it would have been prudence. Yes. And they say, and Bilpo, even before. And yes. You have three hobbits. who all give way to a good kind. Pity can be manipulative. This is a good kind of pity that doesn't. They showed mercy. Sam finds that pity because briefly he was a ring bearer and he realizes it. And you remember Bilbo when he's, and he would have had every right to kill Gallum in The Hobbit. But, you know, he suddenly has this image of, you know, endless days without hope of betterment, cold, you know, hard stone, cold fish. And he doesn't kill him. And perhaps the pity of Bilbo will rule the fate of many. Exactly. And the thing is, is that on a worldly level, this is a stupid move. Because Gollum is trying to kill them. But they're not motivated by worldly wisdom. They're motivated by a sense of mercy, which is so important to Tolkien. And their ability to forgive Ghalem after he dies. Let us just let him go. Exactly. And that's, and that ultimately is how Middle Earth is saved through the exercise of mercy and pity and the workings of Providence. So here we have

such a countercultural message, as it were. Like, no, it's not about power. Aragorn and all of his armies only serve as a distraction. That's true. It's true. It's true at the end, yeah. They're waiting. Will this happen? And yeah, I'm amazed every time that he fails, Frodo. And you've got the U catastrophe. It's all building up to this sudden twist that you would never expect.

And it works because every time you read the book, every time you see the movie, you're surprised again. And you're uplifted again, just like every time you, read the gospel, and you get to Easter Sunday, and it's like, what's going on? Oh, my gosh. It's a complete reversal. So even Satan is taken by surprise. And it's important.

A lot of people don't get this clearly. The reason that their ploy works of taking the ring into Middle Earth to destroy it is because they know that Sauron cannot conceive that someone having the ring would not use it. So he doesn't have the in. He doesn't have the humility. Cannot understand it. And that's why they're able to go right under his nose. because evil is ultimately blind. Yeah, evil can never understand goodness.

Right, and Lewis says that too, literally. You know, evil, goodness understands good and evil. Evil understands nothing. And I love it. There's a really important word in the Gospel of John, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not, well, the Greek word means to grasp, but it can be grasp with your hands, sees,

or grasp with your mind. So you can say, but the light, but the darkness has not overcome it, or the darkness has not comprehended it. And I think with John that the obvious surface meaning is it can't overcome it. But I think the deeper meaning is darkness cannot even understand light. Again, the movie did a great job of getting almost all the good lines in. But one of the ones they miss, and I'm sure you like this line too, is when Gandalf goes to Saruman.

He says, Hail Saruman the White. I am no longer Saddaman the White. I am Saddaman of many colors. I preferred white. White will do as a beginning. The white page can be written on. The white cloth can be dyed. The white light can be broken.

In which case it is no longer white. Remember what he says? And he who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. Yes. He's not against science. There are sometimes you need to do dissection. But we sometimes think that the only path to wisdom

is cutting and cutting. and tearing apart. And it's not. And I think it's important that Tolkien uses the word break. Yeah. Because a good scientist is not break. A good scientist explores,

maybe take something apart, but always with respect. And this is something that Lewis gets at in Ablisht of Man, which includes discussion of regenerate science. And of course, the Ablisdivin Man is such a complex book.

We could go into great depth. I will actually give a little bit a plug for Michael Ward's book after humanity, because that's such a fantastic guide to Ablishdoman. A major retail chain just canceled a massive order, leaving My Pillow with an overstock of the classic My Pillows, and this is your gain, because for a limited time, my Pillows offering their entire classic collection at true wholesale prices. Get a standard my pillow for just 1798. Want more upgrade to Queen's size for only 2298 or King's size for 2498? Snag body pillows for 2998 and versatile multi-use pillows for just 998.

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or call 800-978-3057. Now, don't forget to use promo code Eric to grab your standard, my pillow for only 1798, only while supplies last. You've been listening to a conversation, a Socrates dialogue, part of Socrates in the city, between Holly Ordway and Lewis Marcos. The title is Myth as a Vehicle for Truth. Here is more of that. So Lewis is talking about regenerate science, and what would it be like to have science that didn't destroy as it, you know, as explored, because a good scientist doesn't break. A good scientist might take things apart to look at how they work, understand how they work.

But that's very different from, like, smashing stuff up to get your way. It's similar to the way that Tolkien talks about roads. Now, Tolkien, and this is one of the misconceptions about Tolkien that has gained a lot of traction, this idea that he was some sort of Luddite and hated all technology. That's not the case. He got a typewriter. He actually... Well, he had multiple typewriters.

We had three typewriters. He was, if I may coin a phrase, a typewriter nerd. Remember, because in his day, typewriters were advanced technology. That's true, yeah. And he had one with a special keyboard for philological symbols. There's a letter in which he writes to his grandson extolling the virtues of this model and that model. He was really into voice recorders, again, a new technology. He was experimenting with them.

He used one to practice. He wanted actually to be... They were doing a version of Sir Gound and the Green Knight, which he translated. They were doing a version of that for the BBC. And Tolkien really wanted to be the one to read it. And so he practiced on a voice recorder before he went to London to audition. They didn't pick him. But the point is that he wasn't objecting to this technology.

He was using it sort of cautiously. the first time he used it, he did record the Lord's Prayer in Gothic, as one does. And it's partly playful, but partly, I think, a kind of humility. Like, if I'm going to use this new technology, let's have it be the, you know, the Lord's Prayer be the first thing that's on it. But he used this technology. He used ballpoint pens, which, Lewis wouldn't even use a ballpoint pen. I know. Lewis wouldn't even use a type frame. Yeah, dip pen. Yeah, dip pen. Yeah. And ballpill pens were, you know, a new invention, American invention. and Tolkien even used them for his art.

There's a marvelous tree he does with various ballpoint pen, different colors. So Tolkien was willing to use technology when it was useful for good aims. What he was really against was the abuse of technology. And so he actually enjoyed cars. In a late interview that he did with the BBC, the interviewer was really trying to get him to play up this cranky, blood-a-krimand. And Tolkien wasn't having it. It's great to read the transcript of it. They cut all this footage from the final one because it didn't fit their image. But the

recovered transcripts show that the interview is sort of like, well, basically, don't you hate cars? And Tolkien said, no, I like driving them. I love riding in them. And I can just imagine the interview. I'm like, wait, what? And Tolkien explains that the problem is with roadmakers that have blasted their roads to the countryside without any heed for the beauty of it. And that thereby destroying the very things that you would want to go see. And this is really central to Tolkien's thought. He's not simplistically rejecting technology. He's advising us to be mindful about the uses and abuses.

The hobbits have things like Mills. That's technology. Yeah, sure, yeah. You know, he wants to be thinking about how are we using this versus misusing it. And that's the conversation that we need to be having. And I think sometimes that we too easily accept this false view of Tolkien as a Luddite because it allows us to just sort of reject, like not pay attention to his mornings. Right, that's true.

He's old-fashioned. Exactly. So we can just ignore him. But no, no. He was willing to use the most up-to-date technology of his day when it was appropriate. it, and he rejected technology when it was exploitative or when it was abused. And that's challenging, right? It's much easier to just say, oh, yeah, yeah, he was a fuddy-duddy.

No, no, he wasn't. He wasn't. So he gives us a real challenge to say, okay, these new technologies, you know, everyone's using AI now. Well, should we really be using AI? I would say this is a different conversation. No. Use it for things like cancer research, but not for anything.

And certainly not to write books. Yes, right. But that's another conversation. But I think Tolkien challenges us to not simply say, ooh, new and shiny technology must be good. Therefore, no, no, no. Let's step back and say, is this good? Is it being done morally? And it doesn't matter if everybody else is doing it.

So what? Be the one who doesn't, right? That's, I think, Tolkien's challenged to us, and I think it's a good one. It is. I mean, you've got a character like Eustace Clarence scrub. I think if you wrote that today, Eustis would probably be playing video games on his phone all day. I think you could just easily update his character. He reads books, but only if they're books full of information about little children

and working on tractors and things like that. He's dissecting bugs everywhere. But he doesn't have any, he hasn't read the right books. You know, isn't it wonderful that you could be Lewis and Tolkien, or at least Tolkien, that you can appreciate cars, but you still take walks. You don't let the new technology prevent you from getting out in nature, walking, going slowly. And I always imagine Lewis wanting to trudge on and Tolkien wants to stop and look at every tree and flower, and how much they drove each other crazy, but they still went out and walked together.

They thought there was something beautiful and human about that. And that's actually, that is something I think really worth talking about, which is their friendship. Yeah. You know, we've been talking about a lot of big themes. you know, implications of it. But let's turn to the sort of more human level for a bit. Because they were great friends for a long time.

But they were very different. I mean, that example of them walking is a great one. Because, you know, Lewis was the great, was Tolkien called him a ruthless walker. Oh, there we go, yep. And, of course, Tolkien drove Lewis nuts because Tolkien would be walking along,

oh, a tree. And he would stop to give us little mini lecture about the origins of the name or something, and of course, was to march on. But they still went on these walking tours together. And, of course, they were both part of the inklings, of which Lewis was really the central point. And Tolkien, I think, a really key figure after Lewis, the mean the key figure. But they were very diverse, very lots of differences in perspectives, you know, and a lot of variation theology. And I think looking at the cultural context, this is something I explored a great deal

in Tolkien's faith, realizing just how anti-Catholic the culture was in Tolkien's day, we live in happier times in that respect. It's much more ecumenical, you know, that there isn't this sort of baseline anti-Catholicism that was the case through most of Tolkien's lifetime. And, and, you know, And in the inklings, very sort of unusually, there was a mix of Catholics and various kinds of Protestants. Mostly Anglicans, but they had at least one Presbyterian. And that was not typical of the day. But what was even more surprising is the fact that they had conversations about religious matters. It wasn't that they just declared this off limits so that they could not have conflict.

They did talk about these things. Sparks flew. Right, yep. And I think that gives us something to think about in terms of what can we learn from that, you know? So what would you? It is. I mean, you know, they get together. And I like it, first of all, because it was not a Bible study.

It was a writing group to read out loud. They were much better at listening than we are. But the Bible came in because that was who they were. But it wasn't just this. And what's wonderful is that they're, okay, they're very critical of each other. But they're giving each other. other support, not just because they're writing something with Christian content, but because they're writing fairy tales, children's literature, sci-fi that is looked down upon. So they're having the

courage to explore genres that have been put in the shelf. You know, you know, Tolkien or they played who said it, but when old genres go out of style, they get put in the nursery, right? This sort of thing. And I remember, we all need to do this. So the story was Lewis and Tolkien and we're walking together, as they always were, and there must not have been any trees around, because they kept walking, and they were talking about, why does nobody write the kinds of books? Things like Gulliver's Travels or the Fairy Queen,

you know, things that have the fantastical and the realistic altogether. And then one of them stopped, they never even remembered who said it. They turned and said, it looks like we're going to have to write the kinds of books we want to read. And even though the inklings were very critical of each other, they still supported the fact

that they would write in genres like this, even genres outside their specialization. And I think, I mean, critical is an interesting word because critical, we tend to think of it in negative terms, but really to critique means to bring an informed judgment upon. And so they did that. And it was, as Lewis put it, you know, no butterbath. They weren't just lavishing praise in each other.

But neither were they tearing each other down most of the time. And which Hugo Dyson turned out to be a bad egg. Another bloody elf. Yeah, it's terrible. So he was very negative about Lord of the Rings and really hurt Tolkien badly. So that was the negative kind of critical. But in the positive sense, they just were taking each other's work seriously. And it wasn't all directly Christian.

I mean, Warren Lewis, who, you know, Lewis's brother, he wrote all these books on 14th century France. He became like, I mean, he was an amateur historian, but he published all these books about French history. and Harvard, the physician, he wrote some medical things, if I'm not mistaken. So people are writing all sorts of different things. Some of them we forget about because they weren't as famous and successful. But that critical faculty was the faculty of judgment. You've been listening to a conversation, a Socrates dialogue, part of Socrates in the city, between Holly Ordway and Lewis Marcos.

The title is Myth as a Vehicle for Truth. Here is more of that. Apparently, at some point, Tolkien was too harsh in Lewis because he wrote a very apologizing letter. We don't know the exact, we don't know the context for it, but somehow he was too hard in Lewis and then felt afterwards, okay, I over did it. And he writes this really sweet letter to Lewis, just apologizing. And what humility that takes to say, sorry, you know.

And I think that is something we need to recover, this sense of, fellowship where they really could tackle different questions, difficult questions, where they didn't agree and didn't expect to convince the other person necessarily. One of the things that brought Lewis to Tolkien together is Tolkien showed Lewis an early version of the story of Barron and Lutheran in poetry. It's in the, what is it, the lays of ballerian is where you can read it. And Lewis sent it back with unbelievable marks everywhere. And then this is one of the best thing I've ever read. I mean, it's amazing. Maybe this is too harsh.

My understanding is that when Tolkien had criticism, he would either just ignore it or start all over again. Maybe that's an exaggeration. It is. I mean, that's what Lewis said about him, that he tended to do that. And it is true that Tolkien had this terrible habit of just starting over again. So so many of his unpublished manuscripts are about half to two-thirds finished. He never gets the end.

Ah! But it's not sure that he didn't take constructive. feedback. So, over the lay of lathean, which is this poem, it's interesting. Lewis showed

insights into Tolkien's personality because Tolkien was much more sensitive than Lewis. He was, Tolkien's very extroverted, but very sensitive

and very easily hurt. I would even say a little too sensitive. He could be prickly sometimes. But Lewis, what he did is he wrote his comments in the voice of four different scholars.

like Sheffer's Shick and Pumpers, Nicol, I think, are three of them. And these are comments saying, arguing over the correct reading of the manuscript, that can't possibly be the accurate reading. It's unworthy of the poet. So Lewis had this genius for friendship, and he was able to see this is how I can provide feedback to Tolkien in a way that will convey, okay, these are the areas that aren't so great, here are some suggestions, but allow him to receive it.

And it worked. Because this was early in their friendship. And it really was a make-or-break moment in their friendship. Because if Lewis had come in blasting, oh, that's rubbish, you changed this. We would not be having this conversation today. But then there are other times when, you know, Tolkien might have been a little bit resistant, but he took Lewis's feedback.

So, for instance, originally the Lord of the Rings had much more of the hobbits in it. And Lewis, including an entire epilogue of more hobbit stuff. and Lewis made the very important observation that the hobbits are only interesting when they're doing in non-hobbit-like situations. And Tolkien mold this over and he said, you know what, I enjoy writing scenes of hobbits just being hobbits. I personally just enjoy that. He is a hobbit. Exactly. He likes his waistcoat.

But then he recognized that Lewis was right and he cut that from the manuscript of the Lord of the Rings to what we have today. that's a pretty significant change. And it was a response to Lewis's feedback. And he said, I myself like this bit, but Lewis is right. This works better for the manuscript. And I think that's a fruit of a real relationship where they're able to recognize differences in perspective and share these thoughts. And it's fruitful.

Yeah. One thing I love about Lewis, I wrote an essay about it, a long time ago called the British Barnabas. Barnabas being the one, of course, who brought Saul, you know, later Paul, together with the church leaders. And he had this wonderful way of taking his friends, not Tolkien, but his friends who were a little bit heterodox and lifting them up into orthodoxy. An example I would use as Charles Williams.

Again, he gets a little into spiritualism. But you've got that hideous strength, which is a Charles Williams book, but it's brought up a little more into what we recognize as orthodoxy. See, I'm going to disagree with you. You don't think he's even. No, because I... Well, Charles Williams is definitely unorthodox, a wacky, wacky guy. But I'm going to say that his strength is not as much of a Charles Williams book as it seems.

And I think it... There's a bit in the biography of Lewis by Roger Lenselin Green and Walter Hooper, where there's that famous line of, you know, that hideous strength is often said to be a Charles Williams novel. But then they go on to say, this is the bit that's not quoted, but that's just an exaggeration. And so there are certain Williams-ish elements to it,

but it really, it's all Lewis. And I've actually written... It's abolition of man. Yeah, and he's working with Arthurian elements in a way that's very different from Williams. People often think that because Williams was really into Arthuriana and that Heddy strength has Arthurian elements in it, that Lewis got that from Williams, but no.

Lewis's interest, as you well know, in Arthur dates back to, you know, decades before, and he even observes of Williams that, like, yeah, his knowledge of Arthur and stuff is kind of amateur. Well, he does. I mean, I do think that, what's it go, war in heaven is not as insightful into the Holy Grail as I expected it to be. I enjoy the novel. But, I mean, to me, it's like Williams. First of all, Ransom, I find, is becoming a little bit like a Williams character himself. And some think that got Tolkien upset because he begins as a philologist.

But one of the things that Williams does that's amazing is he writes what we would call a spiritual warfare novel with regular people, not nuns and priests and monks. He's right up to this present darkness that brought all of that back. And that's where I see that that sort of link to it. And, you know, George McDonnell, you know, he's kind of moving into universal salvation. And we get the great divorce where it is George McDonnell. Donald but brought close. And then also Owen Barfield, who was messing around with Anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner.

But Lewis still likes those ideas, but he takes... Yeah, I think it's important. I agree. He manages to glean the gold. But I mixed out of it. He gleaned the wheat from the chaff. He refines the gold. And I think that's... I would absolutely agree with that.

Just straightforwardly said that if it hadn't been for Lewis's encouragement, his constant encouragement, have finished, let alone published Lord of the Rings. Maybe Christopher Tolkien a little bit, helping him to being the first fan. A little bit, but I really, I think he's being absolutely straightforward that he just would never have, he would never have finished it. And he certainly would never have taken all the effort to bring it to publication without Lewis's encouragement.

And Lewis even wrote one of the first good reviews, which was a little risky for him. Yeah. Because, you know, people were still not taking this stuff seriously. And, you know, a lot of people don't realize. We just take for granted that one of the reasons that one of the reasons that, you know, since Oxford was upset at Lewis and didn't give him a professorship was because he wrote about Christianity. Well, that's a little bit true, but it was more that he was writing popular things outside of his specialty. And I will tell you, I don't know if you feel this way, but Lewis particularly, Tolkien as

well, but Lewis especially, as an English professor, gave me permission to be a generalist. Because, you know, academia is so overly specialized, especially in the humanities. I don't mind too much having an eye doctor who's a specialist. But I don't want the humanities to be overly specialized. And Lewis shows us. And even Lewis's specialty. Medieval and Renaissance literature. That's a special thing.

That's pretty capacious. And Tolkien, in a little different way, but Tolkien is still willing to take what he's learning and put it in this new format, this accessible format. And I think we just need that today. Yeah, it's interesting. I would definitely agree that, Lewis is a great model for a

generalist, but I also think that Tolkien is a great model as a specialist. And he was. Yeah, and I think it's important to see these two men are very different, and sometimes they can get kind of melded together, as if they were, you know, this sort of composite figure, the tall Lewis,

like the tester belt of tall Lewis. But Tolkien was a specialist in medieval philology. He was super specialized, and he really was the best in the world at what he did. What do they call that?

The language that Sir Gowan was written in. Middle English. Yeah, that, what, Midlands? Middle English. Middle English. I was a dialect of Middle English. That dialect particular, right? What's it called? Midlands?

What's it called? I don't remember. But he specifically was an expert. And he does a fair bit of really specialist writing about, you know, little cruxes of like what does this particular word mean? Right. And how do we understand which word it was? he had this amazing ability to think himself into the mindset of the medieval scribe and figure

out, okay, he wrote this letter, but because of the way the language was, he must have really meant that, and this is what it really was. And he was just extremely specialized. And this is, somebody's not noticed because it's so specialized that, you know, he did, like, review essays of the years' work in philology. People don't read that stuff because it's so specialized. Whereas Lewis, you can read his academic work because it's not. Tolkien just is doing a different thing. So people were upset with him writing The Hobbit, not necessarily just because he's doing popular stuff.

Because, well, Lewis Carroll did that as allowed. It was that they wanted him to write the definitive work on... Like, why aren't you doing the definitive work on Chaucer, which he never finished? But it's really inching, because Tolkien is able to illustrate kind of a different aspect of this journalist, because he has his specialty, but he's also writing these fictional works. which in some mysterious way are rooted in his language. That's an area that I'm, it's beyond my capacity.

I'm not a linguist. We need Tom Shippey. Yeah, Tom Shippey's works are really, really helpful in that. But Tolkien was also extremely generous in his help to his colleagues. And this is something when I was... And you show too, especially his female students. He was very supportive of you showed that your book. He was, yeah.

And this is, I think, something that's something. really needs to be well known because he was living and working at a time when sexism against female students was almost taken for granted. Some of the stories they came across in, you know, anecdotal books from students of the day, contemporary books, there were some professors who made the women sit in the back so they would have to look at them. I kid you not. But Tolkien always took pains to respect his female students and help them. He was sometimes a little mystified that they didn't seem to progress as far as his men. male students in their profession. But far from that being, him being sexist, he was, I think,

observing a real thing. He was observing a kind of glass ceiling effect. And like, he wasn't really sure what's going on, but he was trying to help them go as far as they could. And then noticing, he was observant enough to notice that they weren't getting the chances that his male students were getting. But he wrote recommendations for his female students. He supported them. Simon Darden, actually ended up becoming a full professor. He was very supportive of her. work. But even, you know, as a professor, he would do things like sit down with a junior colleague and help them work out their plan of lectures. He freely gave of his time. He asked nothing in return. He had this generosity of giving his time to build up his colleagues. That's amazing.

And then think about, you know, just as Lewis is encouraging him and finished Lord of the Rings, Tolkien all but pushed him to take that full professorship in Cambridge. Oh, he did. He turned it down at one point. And Toler was like, You've got to take this so that you will have the time to write and do these things. It's interesting. We talked about this is the uniqueness of Tolkien, right? He is this specialist, right? And he writes Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics.

And what makes that basically the first essay of modern is not his incredible understanding of the language, though it's there. He just says something simple like, why are we ignoring the poetry? Why are we treating this as an artifact as if it were a bowl or something? It has a great story with heroes and dragons. So isn't that wonderful that this, again, great philologist is really allowing us to, and maybe you could say reason and imagination, right and left brain, bring it together and remind people. And then it was almost like they didn't even know that.

I mean, I went to University of Michigan, and one of my friends was this girl who was getting PhD in classics, and she spent the entire semester reading the Agamemnon by Esclos, one of the most powerful. I mean, you know, Aeschyus is the only person you go put next to Shakespeare. And I asked her at the end, well, what did you learn? What insight did you get into one of the greatest plays ever written? And she had nothing whatsoever to say. I mean, I understand that you and I have done proofreading. Don't ask me if this is a good book.

I'm proofreading, you know? So I understand that. But still, an entire semester and nothing to say about the play as a play. Yeah. That's why we need Tolkien to remind us. Exactly. I mean, because he was able to get into the weeds to the infantic degree, but also step back and see that big view. So let's, I think our last, maybe our last question

to wrap up, let's kind of pull the threads together a little bit. You know, there are a lot of people today, a lot of Christians who want to write things for, you know, for our culture, for our times. They want to be the next Lewis and the next Tolkien. And unfortunately, too often in my view, being the next Lewis and next Tolkien means they write, you know, some fantasy that has halflings and something instead of hobbits or, you know, where they go through a different kind of magic portal rather than a wardrobe. Like, no.

I think we need to think a bit more broadly about what does it mean to be the next Lewis or Tolkien, not imitating them, but emulating them. So what would you say are the ways that people could emulate them? I mean, we start with, you know, what Lewis said about Lion the Witch and the Wardrop, right? He said, I did not, you know,

we'll tell about allegory, maybe later, but he says, I didn't sit down and say, how can I take the gospel story and illustrate it for children, which too many Christians do. He says, according to Lewis, it started with pictures in his head. He had pictures of the fawn holding the packages, right, and, you know, the sleigh and all, and then images of lines, and it all bounded together.

And then Lewis says that he said, I want to do something with these pictures. So Lewis, the author steps in and says, what is the best genre to make these images into something you might read. And he decided that it wanted to be a children's story. It didn't want all of the interiorization of a modern, realistic novel. They didn't want any of that.

It wanted that. And then he said, then once I did that, Lewis, the author, got to say, Lewis the man, who is a Christian, said, you know, I might also be able to use, I don't even like the word use, but to use these stories to overcome something that I struggled with as a boy, because he did grow up in an England at home, and then he left and came back.

And that was, everything about Christianity was just so medical and whatnot. Maybe I can restore a sense of wonder. So let's, you know, trust those images. And also just to throw this in, Lewis said, stop trying to be original. Try to be true to the vision and the originality will come with it. So I don't know what you think. Yeah, I agree. And it's such a beautiful thing that Lewis did.

and it's interesting to see how, in a way, Tolkien does it very differently. There's not one set way to do this, right? I think that's so beautiful. Lewis had this approach that was the balance of the conscious and the unconscious, the artistic and the deliberate. And I think, for instance, the Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien said of that book that he said, The Lord of Rings is a fundamentally religious and Catholic book,

unconsciously in the writing, but consciously in the revision. He says that's why I have taken out all the religious elements, and he says the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. So Tolkien, the Christian elements are present unconsciously because they're coming out of his own rootedness in the faith, as we says later in this letter. His own rootedness in the Christian faith have come up

and become manifest in the story, and then afterwards, and this would go along with, the author and the man, he then shapes them. He actually reduces the overt presence so the implicit presence can be more effective. So there's different modes of doing that. But I think in both cases, they're rooted in their own lives of faith. That's the kind of the heart of it. And then they're seeing how this develops.

You know, I can't say 100% of Lewis and Tolkien would agree, but when people ask me how I view inspiration, I say the way I view inspiration is my job is to read as much as I can to make connections, to get my mind full of these things. And then the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit doesn't, okay, God created ex nihilo, but only in the beginning. That's not the normal way God creates, right? It's just in the beginning, right? After let there be light, then everything is a shaping and a discerning, right?

The rest of Genesis and all that. So the Holy Spirit doesn't put something into an empty head, but he makes a connection I never would have made and now I go with it. And I think, I don't know if they'd use that same language, but I think you see that. Lewis and Tolkien were so filled with all the stuff they loved. And then, you know, Tolkien said, don't you, do you believe Tolkien when he says,

I am really an editor? Not a writer. You think he's exaggerating? What do you think? I think he's, he's, well, he's being a little playful, but he's also expressing an aspect of his writing experience. And when he makes that comment about it, he feels that he feels that he's more of an editor

of his work. He's making that comment decades after the writing, looking back on it. And honestly, I feel that way looking back on, you know, my books, especially Tolkien's faith, which was a massive undertaking. I think, wow, how did I write that? Wow. But I know how I did it. And I think Tolkien also, if you look at his manuscripts, he was a reviser. He's laboring over it. He's really working on it. Right. Well, we'll leave that as our closing note. So it's been a real pleasure to have this fellowship with you, Lou, on the Socrates Dialogues, and I hope all of you watching this have enjoyed it as well.