Not another f***ing elf!*
This one is for you, Jon.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were great friends, for a time. Although I have read both authors repeatedly as a child and since, I have never read a biography of either and didn’t realize they were friends or that they influenced each other’s work until I read The Magician’s Book.
Tolkien had a term for the practice of inventing worlds: “sub-creation.” It was, he believed, in the construction of consistent, believable alternate realities that human beings paid the highest tribute to their creator—by imitating him (Miller 212).
… Lewis disregarded Tolkien’s exacting formula for making a “secondary world.” Narnia was not self-enclosed and consistent. It lifted figures and motifs in whole cloth from a motley assortment of national traditions, making no effort to integrate them into any coherent mythos (Miller 244).
This would be a better post, I guess, if I argued for one world over the other but the truth is simply that I like both Narnia and Middle-earth. We might marvel that the creation of these worlds played a part in destroying Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship but secondary worlds are well worth fighting about.
All authors ‘sub-create’—what is a book but an ‘alternate reality’ whether it is set on earth, or in the past, or merely in a different geographical location than our own. The power of creation is in the world or consciousness that we could never have got to on our own.
Arguing for Narnia over Middle-earth (or vice versa), is like wearing Vulcan ears instead of a Hogwart’s tie. It is a declaration that I am not only here, in this place; part of me belongs to another world which I have chosen for myself.
*“ ‘Not another fucking elf!’ Hugo Dyson famously moaned at the start of one of Tolkien’s readings.” Laura Miller
