HAD CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien collaborated to make one work out of their best-known books, we could all be reading The Lion, the Witch, the Lord of the Rings and the Wardrobe.
Lewis and Tolkien and a group of friends calling themselves 'The Inklings’ met in a pub in Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s to discuss their writings. While Lewis published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – the first of his Chronicles of Narnia novels – in 1950, Tolkien’s book The Hobbit came out in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings followed in 1954.
Belfast man Roger Courtney has written a play about the two famed writers and their meetings in The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford – and the friction caused by the two fantasy worlds they created in their most loved books.
“I’d been reading lots of biographies of Lewis and I became fascinated by his relationship with Tolkien,” says Courtney. “They were very close for a long period and met every week in the pub – which was known as the 'Bird and Baby’. So they sat down and had a few pints and if they were writing something they’d read it to each other.
“Other friends came too and they called themselves `the Inklings’. I just thought, `I wonder what that would look like – this group of middle-aged men who wrote academically and also wrote fantasy books’. CS Lewis wrote science-fiction before he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and then Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings.
“And of course CS Lewis also wrote a lot of religious books too. I thought I’d try to write something about it.”
So was there a bit of competition when Tolkien found out about Lewis’s Narnia works?
“Well Tolkien was writing Lord of the Rings a long time before CS Lewis was writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I set the play in two different time periods – in 1941, at the beginning of the Second World War – and then in 1949, when the war is over and CS Lewis has started to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
“I thought it was interesting to wonder what Tolkien though about Lewis writing that book. Tolkien spent many years creating that whole idea of the Middle Earth and the whole Elvish language. So Tolkien wasn’t impressed with what Lewis was doing and his feedback wasn’t at all positive and the suggestion is that the relationship between them started to deteriorate at that point.”
Courtney’s play is premiering tomorrow at the Belvoir Players Theatre in Belfast, as part of the 2015 CS Lewis Festival. It will feature six actors from The Clarence Players.
“There’s Lewis and Tolkien and other Inklings and I created a female character – the bar manager – because the group was actually all men and no woman was ever invited into the inner circle in the Rabbit Room at the back of the pub.”
He says he’d like to look into writing a play based on the CS Lewis sci-fi book Out of the Silent Planet, which was apparently written following a conversation Lewis had with Tolkien.
So does Courtney think most people know about the Lewis/Tolkien connection?
“No, most of the people I have talked to hadn’t been aware of it. Everybody has heard of CS Lewis and everybody has heard of Tolkien, but I don’t think there’s an awareness of the relationship between the two. It’s definitely a story worth telling.”
:: The Inklings will be performed at the Belvoir Players Studio in Belfast tomorrow and Saturday at 8pm, as part of the CS Lewis Festival. Tickets £9.50 (www.eastsidearts.net / 028 9065 5830).
