Ships Passing in the Night: My Friendship with C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien

“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,

Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;

So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another,

Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Theologian’s Tale

This article marks my hundredth post on Iotas in Eternity. While one-hundred posts may not seem like very much when stood up against other writers whose output seems limitless, both quantitatively and qualitatively, it feels like a milestone for me all the same. Indeed, when taking my average word count per post into account, there’s anywhere between two or three entire books of material amassed across this site—more or less.

And whether by pure happenstance or some unexplainable itch in my own heart, it seems only fitting that the subject of my hundredth post be the two men who largely inspired my writing to begin with.

You needn’t be a longtime reader of my work to get the sense that I have a great admiration for C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien—the authors of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, respectively. In ways beyond count, these two literary titans cast their imaginations across the span of my childhood; ever enchanting ordinary schoolyards and woodlands with some mysterious beauty that I may have missed entirely had it not been for their gentle direction.

While they were alive, Lewis and Tolkien ran in the same literary circles and, more importantly, were good friends. The two men were such good friends, in fact, that Lewis credited his friendship with Tolkien as being instrumental in his eventual coming to know Christ—a friendship in itself that came to be yet far, far more influential for both Lewis and the reading world that followed after him. Like many of you, I too am a beneficiary of Lewis and Tolkien’s dear friendship—and their respective friendships with Christ Himself. In my own heart I have even come to consider these men as close friends of my own. Apart from their influence, I have little doubt that my childhood would have lacked some necessary enchantment, and my present work as a writer some much-needed childlike simplicity.

In a very real way, you are what you read. In his excellent article on this same subject, “You Become What You Read,” Clinton Manley considers how reading—whether the material be good, bad, or outright ugly—shapes you as an individual: “We’ve all heard, ‘You are what you eat,’ the principle being that your diet determines what you become. The same holds true for your reading intake. Like the plate, the page shapes us. If you imagine each book like a meal and each article a light snack, what you consume and digest day in and day out, over years and decades, molds your character.”

In his book, An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis himself considers how,

“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend [i.e., a person with poor reading habits]. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated.”

We are what we read. In like fashion, we become friends with those authors whose work we read regularly. True and honest writing is a terribly intimate business. In a writer’s endeavor to write those things which are sincerely good, true, and beautiful, they must first throw open the window to their soul so that their well-worn thoughts on a matter can pour out—and equally as vital, so that their readers can peer in.

Just recently I had the joy of sitting down over coffee with a man whose work I’ve been reading for many years. And at some point along the way, he began reading my work as well. Though up until this point we had never met, I felt as though I knew this man through his writing—and, I can only hope that the sentiment was shared on the other side of the screen. In many ways, both seen and unseen, I have found myself and my writing shaped by the godly thinking, living, and writing of this man. Because his written work always strives to be good, true, and beautiful, ever shaped by his friendship with Christ, I have not only learned from this man, but learned about this man—so much so that, when we finally met, there was a sense in which we, to some degree, already knew each other.

A shared union with Christ tends to have that effect. Indeed, a loving, omnipresent God who unites all things in Himself will often make the world feel a much smaller place than it might otherwise seem.

It should be no great surprise that I never met either C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien (I was born in 1998, mind you). And yet, in another way,—a very real way that is not at all silly or contrived—I have met them. Each and every time I crack open one of their books, there is a degree to which these men are right beside me, conversing with me. The integral part of an author’s life and inner-man lives on in their work.

In the same article, Manley thoughtfully considers how authors speak to their readers through the books they’ve written: “First, we must realize that though we often read by ourselves, we never read alone. When you open up a book, you sit down with an author. The book is fundamentally a technology of conversation; it fosters the meeting of minds across time and space. The written word captures something of the author and, when read, conjures him.”

Through their written works, I—alongside countless others—have not only had the privilege of knowing Lewis and Tolkien as individuals and as writers, but as friends also. As readers, we have stepped into their friendship. Because men are not individuals unto themselves,—as though they were mere islands—but are rather products of the many relationships they’ve been shaped by, we who have read and been shaped by Lewis and Tolkien have truly been shaped by Lewis and Tolkien. There’s no telling what one of them would have been—or not been—without the other’s friendship.

In his book The Four Loves, Lewis writes, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity.” I like to think that Lewis drew out the best in Tolkien, and Tolkien the best in Lewis, even as they both continue to draw out through their writing the very best in each of us. Their friendship, like their work, has outlived their mortal span and become threaded into our own lives, homes, conversations, and friendships.

Like ships passing in the night, separated by an ocean of stars and time, any friendship I (or anyone) might have enjoyed with Lewis and Tolkien here below and in person has slipped through the cracks of time and space and circumstance, missing one another by only a few short decades. Lewis, Tolkien, and I never had the opportunity to meet at a pub somewhere just the three of us; but, one day, meet we shall. For though our ships may have passed in the night, we are sailing towards a common harbor and will meet there face to face in due time.

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Photo by Johannes Plenio, Unsplash

Author’s Note: Much of my work as a writer, whether implicitly or explicitly, owes a debt to Lewis and Tolkien. Here are, in no particular order, some of the pieces that have been most inspired by these two men (simply click the title and it will open to the appropriate article):

1. “The Healing of That Old Ache: An Ode to Sunsets & Childhood”

2. “News From the Frontlines: Aslan is on the Move”

3. “Letters From Home”

4. “Sad, But Not Unhappy: Fighting for Joy Alongside John MacArthur & Treebeard”

5. “Things Which No Tongue Has Yet Spoken”

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