Illustrating a Fellowship: Depicting Lewis and Tolkien’s Contrasting Visions, with John Hendrix

Hi everyone! A very warm welcome to today’s conversation. We are so encouraged to have about 1600 people registered to join this conversation today. We all know how stiff the competition is for our attention these days, and we are grateful to have you here with us. I think the appeal of the writers we’re going to be talking about today is really universal, as evidenced by the fact that nearly 300 of you are with us for the first time. You are very welcome. Many of you are part of this work as members of our Trinity Forum community. And so we want to say thank you. And if you’re not yet, we hope you’ll consider joining as a member. If you do today, you’ll receive a signed copy of the book we’re going to be talking about, and we will have a link in the chat where you can learn more about that. For those of you who are new to the Trinity For in a nutshell, our invitation is to join us in exploring timeless Christian wisdom together so we gain clarity and courage for our own lives and help cultivate a renewed culture of hope. In these conversations, what we try to do is to provide a hospitable place to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers.

With that, we’ll turn to today’s theme and our guest. Many of us are deeply familiar with the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. If you’re not so familiar, it’s okay. It’s a safe space. Their works of fantasy are central to what is sort of a modern canon of the Christian imagination for many people. Many have read them and even more have seen the worlds they created on screen. What is perhaps a bit less familiar are the forces that shaped those imaginations. These two men shared much in common in their backgrounds. they shared a terrible experience of war. They shared a unique university setting at Oxford, a unique historical moment in the inter-war period. And they frankly had rather offbeat intellectual passions in common. No offense to those of you who are really into Norse sagas in their fellowship. Iron sharpens iron, you might say, but a story less told is that of their differences. This friendship that propelled them also cooled just as they were achieving their greatest successes, and there were very deep differences in their ideas and their approaches.

So it’s really a complex story, not a simple one. Our guest today was inspired to tell this story in a new way through a graphic novel biography John Hendricks’s book is called The Myth Makers The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And John has agreed to share some of the images from the book as we talk about it, so we’ll have more of a visual element than we usually do in our conversations and the plan is to have fun with it. We hope you will, to introduce John. He is a New York Times best selling author and illustrator, and he’s chair of the MFA Illustration and Visual Culture program in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in Saint Louis. His other books include The Faithful Spy Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler, which was called the best book of 2018 by NPR. Drawing is magic discovering yourself in a sketchbook, The Holy Ghost, a Spirited Comic, Miracle Man, The Story of Jesus, and many others, and his award winning illustrations have also appeared on book jackets, newspapers and magazines all over the world. John, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. So glad to be here.

Well, for starters, I am just going to ask a question from my English wife. What is it about Americans and Lewis and Tolkien?

You know this. I wish I had the best answer possible. I think a dissertation could be written on this now. Maybe there’s scholarship I don’t know about, but it is absolutely undeniable that Americans in general are way more obsessed with the Inklings and Lewis and Tolkien specifically than their fellow countrymen. And maybe it is a prophet is not respected in his own hometown. Maybe that’s part of it. I think there is some part of it about the expression of the American church and the evangelical edge to what the church was interested in the 50s and the 60s. But I mean, Tolkien, you can’t you can’t pin it on the church. I mean, it was college students who were buying Lord of the rings in this Ballantine edition of the books that were all bootlegged, basically. So yes, it is truly an American phenomenon. Now, that’s not to say it is not a global, product as well. I mean, 250 million copies in print of Narnia and Lord of the rings throughout the world. So, yeah, it’s a it’s a phenomenon, but we Americans seem to love it more than the Brits.

Well, we’re certainly glad to have lots of guests from other countries, but we have quite a few Americans, too. But wherever you’re from, you’re very welcome.and yes, the story of Tolkien being discovered by sort of the counterculture in the 60s and being becoming a counterculture hero is one that maybe a lot of people wouldn’t know, but is is a fascinating subtext to this whole thing. I believe Lord of the rings is still considered to have been the highest selling book of the 20th century. Am I right about that?

That sounds right. Yeah, I’m not sure, but yeah, that tracks for me.

So what led you to the story? To the idea that this story of these two writers would benefit from your particular kind of visual approach to storytelling?

It’s funny, people will ask me, why did you decide to make this story a graphic novel? And of course, I’m an artist, so all my stories are visual in some form. But you are right in that this book is primarily a work of art. It is not a work of scholarship. I mean, I took a lot of care to make it as accurate and truthful and to rely on real scholarship, but it ultimately is a love letter to Tolkien and Lewis and how much they influenced my own world. But one thing I realized early on, of course, there have been a zillion illustrated editions of Lord of the rings, and I own all of them. I am the sucker that buys the new edition every time it comes out. And of course, Narnia the same way.but the thing that had not been made was this third world that they created together, actually, which was the inklings. Their own friendship actually is a kind of fantasy world. I mean, we all want to enter the Eagle and child on a snowy day with our friends and talk of poetry and the big things of life. And, you know, I’m a university professor, and I only do that 8 or 9 times a week.no, actually, I never do that right. There is a kind of fantasy to the inklings, and they created that on some level in our minds. And so I wanted to illustrate that story and tell their story as a myth that would in some ways resonate with their, their real lives, in this sort of back and forth way.

Well, your previous book, as I mentioned, was on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and I think people would be interested in hearing how this story connects with that very different one, although from the same era and with the story you plan to tackle next.

Yeah. So, my 2018 book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer really came of my own interest in reading, you know, cost of discipleship and life together. And of course, I knew of his story, but it was very difficult to tackle in a picture book, which was what I was making at the time. So I made this sort of blended book that was half graphic novel, half prose, middle grade story, and it became what I realized was about the concept of Christian fellowship and what it does in the world. And actually, that I didn’t realize that was a resonant theme that I have begun exploring in multiple books. And the Myth Makers, in many ways, is exploring Christian fellowship. That was generative.the Inklings and Lewis and Tolkien themselves. And then the next book I’m working on is a retelling of the Salem witch trials, through the lens of people inside the story, which is really about a Christian fellowship that became destructive. So across these three books, I am really interested in kind of the interaction that the edge of the church has with the rest of the larger world. And so my recent graphic novels have been exploring that.

When you when you think about the audiences for these and for this book in particular, perhaps I think you have to have something that’s going to work for people who are very, very steeped in this world of Lewis and Tolkien and then people who really know hardly anything about it. I mean, how did how does that, you know, how did you approach the project with, with these this wide world in mind?

Yeah. On my tour, one of the first places I went was at the Wade center, which holds a lot of the contemporary, collections in America of the inklings, their papers, many of their artifacts. Anyway, this was my worst nightmare on some level, to have actual, real scholars in the room as I am presenting what sometimes I feel like is my own little, science fair project or something. But yes, I, I really did work hard to try to honor the work of the scholars, that I used to, to create this story.and a way I like to explain it is with the contemporary musical Hamilton. And if you have not read the Ron Chernow biography, that is a work of scholarship, whereas Hamilton is a work of art, and in fact there is not one that is really better than the other. They do two very different things. And in fact, they do them so differently that the other one can’t really be replaced with the other form. And so in some ways, that’s what I think of this kind of work. And this book is for young people, even though adults have enjoyed it. It’s meant for middle grade and Ya audiences. And part of that is to be able to translate complex ideas and make them legible to young minds with words, images, maps, illustrations, prose and that sort of blended language. to me, it kind of creates this third space in our mind. And it frankly, is the way I loved reading books as a kid. So in some ways I am making books for my own 14 year old mind.

Well in the book you use two narrators and they are sort of avatars, it would appear for Lewis and Tolkien. So maybe you can explain what you did there, why you did it, why they were useful to you.

Yeah here, let me show a few images here while we’re chatting. Here, you can read the entire book in 30s. So this was a five year project. And as you might imagine, when you are setting out to tell the story of Lewis and Tolkien, it’s really exciting. But they really don’t do anything. I mean, they sit around and talk. That is what the inklings did. And when they were not talking, they were writing all alone. So I created these two characters, a lion and a wizard. Those were chosen totally at random. And these two characters helped to embody something of Lewis and Tolkien, to act as sort of avatars for the story and these characters. One, they give us something to do, like the lion and wizard go on a dragon ride. They go on a dungeon crawl. They visit these sites throughout Tolkien and Lewis’s life, and they sort of enable us to have a little fun. And frankly, I’m thinking of the 1314 year old mind, like my ideal reader has just been assigned Beowulf, and they hate everything about it. And what I want to do is say, you will love Beowulf if you love Harry Potter or Star Wars or the Avengers. And so in some ways, Lion and Wizard are sort of tricking young minds into reading some of Lewis and Tolkien’s most seminal works. And outside of their stories, I mean, Tolkien wrote this amazing essay called On Fairy Stories, which basically lays the groundwork for why fantasy writing is the highest form of human art, and I just want young people to really understand what he was talking about, and they’re not going to read that essay. I wish they would, and maybe they will someday. Maybe this book will help them get there. But in many ways, this tale is designed to trick people into learning about these deeper ideas inside of the Tolkien and Lewis story.

Well, to focus on, on one defining event or course setting event for them, they share these horrific experiences of World War one and the death of the belief in human progress. Really. you have a striking illustration there about, you know, it was by 1914, kind of a widespread belief that things were just going to get better and better and better. We basically figured it all out, and then, 20 years later, they did a lot of their great work in the shadow of World War Two, either in the run up or during the war itself. So some people will describe works of fantasy like theirs as escapist, which really seems exactly wrong because and in fact, their works do depict evil very directly, very frankly. But you point out, and I’m quoting you here, the optimism and wonder that marked both of their works later in life is the very opposite of what you might expect from men who witnessed such human suffering. So what do you think is beneath this paradox? And then how did you go about tackling it?

You’re right. They came out of a generation that was basically vaporized by World War One. And you can see it in the literature that came out of the survivors of that time. And it’s very interesting to note that they do not share in a lot of the legacy of that literature. And so an interesting question is why? Of course, right now you would say, well, of course it’s their Christian faith. Well, hold on a second. Lewis was an atheist, when he came out of the war and in fact wrote some of his worst poetry of all time,under a pseudonym, that that Spirits in Bondage is the title of that. And he was really grappling with some of those feelings. Now, you can imagine that would have gone further on and developed more the longer he wrote. Except he met Tolkien, and Tolkien loved Norse mythology. Now, Lewis had, of course, loved Norse mythology as a child as well, and they both had this shared kind of orphanage. Tolkien lost both of his parents very young. Lewis lost his mother young, and his father shipped him from, Northern Ireland to England to go to boarding school. And so he was basically orphaned at a young age. So they had this shared loss as boys, where they found their refuge in the great stories.

And the stories brought Lewis optimism, hope and even joy, and it was a joy that he felt suspicious of. And he was suspicious of it because he thought all those stories are ultimately lies. Right? And what Tolkien did was ever so slightly help him to see why the deepest stories were not true, not untrue. They were actually truer than true, because in some ways, we need myths in order to express truths that are beyond the realm of the everyday. And so that was the thing that began to lock them together. And like you said, they were not just colleagues. They were they were bros. I mean, they dressed up as polar bears together to go to this. They were always forming these little clubs, you know, like the inklings. And they start Tolkien, of course, started a club called the Coal Biters, where they read, Norse mythology together in Icelandic. And I believe this was where they dressed up as polar bears. But anyway, so Lewis slowly began to find a different version of himself coming alive when he was with Tolkien and when he was with these stories. And that was the process that began, ultimately, him figuring out the right story that he wanted to tell with his life.

Well, one of the one of the creations you have in your book to try to capture some of what they were into is something you call the Hall of myth and epic. So what is it? Why did you create it? And then how did you how did you execute it to draw us in?

Yeah. So one of the problems with this story, like you said, is how do you lay the groundwork for the context of what came before? If we’re going to talk about myths, I’m talking to 13 year old minds. How do we get them to understand the broad scope of the world that they are entering? And so Lion and Wizard walk into a dungeon and basically figure out that this dungeon has a history of every story that’s ever been told, and the lion and wizard begin to explore these stories and what they meant and how they are all connected, sort of in the roots of the human experience. And so this is meant to give the reader a sense of the water that Lewis and Tolkien are wading through as they begin to write their own stories. But it also provides an opportunity to, for the young reader to explore. Like, where did these myths come from? What are some of the archetypes of storytelling, like Joseph Campbell Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey? And so I came up with this device in the book, which is kind of fun. it actually came from my editor who thought I had way too much content in the book. But I do these illustrated footnotes, like if you have ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book, it’s like a little doorway you can take and go to the back of the book and get a little more information if you want, and then you can come back and join the story after you’re done. But I usually tell young people to like the first time you read it, skip all the doors, come back on those on the second time.

And in there you take some pains to distinguish or explain the connections among folk tales, legends, epics, these different genres, but then to distinguish them all from myths. So maybe just why is that distinction so important? Why should we be thinking in terms of myth with these writers?

Yeah, I think well, okay. So scholars will argue about what these things mean. And this is the problem. Anytime you start to have a conversation where you are definitively saying one thing is a certain thing, okay, myth, folktales, epics, legends, these are sort of fuzzy boundaries. But the way I started to describe this to young people was to unpack these differences. And let’s say a folktale happens because an event occurred like a giant spider attacked someone in the woods. Maybe it wasn’t that big, but maybe the folktale version of it. It gets a little bigger, and maybe the legend of that story is now a hundred years down the road, that that sort of makes sense now. The myth. The myth is a thing that operates outside of time. Sometimes it’s like described by scholars as a place beyond place and a time beyond time. And the myth was not seen historically as a fictional story that was untrue. Like when we when someone says like, that’s a myth, or using that as a synonym for lie. And this is actually one of the things that I think Christians often get caught up with when someone says, Genesis is a myth, people get really outraged and say, you can’t call the Bible a lie because the Genesis is a myth in the sense that the myth is the story told to tell you a larger thing about the world that is absolutely true to that audience. Like, that’s the thing you have to understand about the myth.

It was told to unpack truth. It was not told as a as an entertaining yarn around the campfire, like the way we would watch The Avengers or something. The myth told us something that was beyond telling in a way, and that’s why it’s much closer to poetry than science, right? Poems are not documentaries, right? They are not facts. They are myths. They are metaphors. And metaphors in the space of art exist in this place that is like it’s not a factual, but it’s like in a place beyond facts, in a way. Okay, that was a long preamble to say that myths are really important to understand, because this is a fundamental way that human beings communicate stuff that is true about the world to one another. We write stories. We write myths because, as Tolkien said, our hearts were made by a myth maker, and the title of this book comes to illustrate not just Lewis and Tolkien as the myth maker, but God himself. He writes his myths and man writes his. And you see this, this sort of longing in their stories to come to this agreement on the human person wants a good story because we are a story. And really, that’s what Tolkien and Lewis were doing all their life. They were writing stories, not for the New York Times best seller list, but for each other. They wanted to tell each other a really good story.

Tolkien used this word subcreation to describe what he saw himself being involved in. Maybe you could, connect that idea to what you were just saying about about myth making and also maybe to to your own work as someone who is yourself, a maker, and maybe even as a stretch for those of us who maybe don’t think of ourselves that way. How would you apply this concept of myth making and subcreation?

Yeah, so I love this as a concept. So of course, the very first thing we learned about God in the Bible is what? It’s the fifth word, right? We can all say it in our heads. In the beginning God created. He is a maker. It’s a very it’s like top line, you gotta know God makes things. And so Tolkien believed that when we make things we are making under that umbrella of God’s creation, only God can create things ex nihilo, like from nothing, something that is God’s role. We cannot do that except in one place, and that is in our imagination. And so Tolkien believed that when we make stories, we are like little see creating. We are creating underneath God. And so in the in the book I use this dragon ride.that the lion and the wizard take to talk about Subcreation. And this is all from Tolkien’s on fairy stories, as I was talking about earlier. And in this sense, he’s the wizard is really explaining to the lion about Subcreation. And here we have they’re riding a dragon, and, the wizard hits a little button that says sub create.

And all these little dragon kites come out from behind the dragon to indicate that, you know, this is an act that is under the shadow of the bigger act. And I’ll just read it from the book. Writing stories to Tolkien was a holy act. In fact, he felt humanity’s desire to take the created order and rearrange it into new worlds was ordained by God, and he called it Subcreation. We make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a maker. And this, this is a really pivotal idea to understand not only Tolkien’s motivation, but why Lewis was brought into this world and and basically became the team that they were together in trying to do this activity, this sub creating activity and how initially, when they started out, they were not writing for children at all. They really wanted to write fairy tales and fantasy stories for adults that were serious, taken seriously, and that mattered and that made each other want to continue writing.

Well, if I can ask you, John, about another of the images in your book, you create something or present something called The Ancient Tree of Tales. and so where did that image come to you from? Of a tree of these stories. And what were you trying to capture through it?

Yeah. For those of you who don’t know, Tolkien was a Beowulf expert, basically.and he had a very if you’ve ever heard, there are recordings of him that exist. none of there’s no video of Lewis, but there’s some video of Tolkien speaking. He’s very like Mumbly, sort of, by the way, you can almost hardly understand him. But the legend was when he would read Beowulf, something else would come over him and he would just command the room. And so he had this immense love of Beowulf, which was a story made of all these individual parts and pieces. And he used this metaphor of creating this tower, and this tower that they walk into in Beowulf allows the reader to see far beyond the realms of their land, into the sea, into the oceans, into the mountains. And Tolkien loved this concept of like, what do all the human stories add up to? And so Tolkien talked about this great pot of soup, this great tower of stories, or a tree of tales, and that how many of the stories that we human beings have written have all watered this tree of tales, and it grows up from human experience, from human desires, from the human longing for meaning and purpose and, heroism and bravery and quest. And that was what he was trying to do. He wanted to write a tale for England that could be mythical, that could be part of that tree of tales. Because he didn’t he dismissed the King Arthur stories, as being really part of,England’s lineage because they were, you know, they were romance tales from the French. They were they were French in origin. And he did not feel like that was a tale for England, which is where he started out with in Lord of the rings. It’s all about the Shire, of course, which is his love letter for the countryside of England.

Well to this concept of escapism. How did Tolkien in particular, focusing on him for a moment distinguish between the progression in fairy tales of what he identified as escape, recovery and consolation with. How do you distinguish between that and mere escapism, which of course, escapism is familiar to all of us, maybe now more than ever, in our current, current world. So where can the fairy tale lead us that mere escapism can’t? In his view.

It’s almost impossible for our modern mind to throw ourselves back to a moment before fantastical world building was normalized and was part of adult culture, right? Like really fan culture, you could argue, was created by Star Trek and Lord of the rings in the 60s. So. But before that, when Lewis and Tolkien are young, they are in a world that sees adventure, storytelling, even the concept of the novel as sort of pop culture work that is less than desirable, for a scholar to be spending their time on. So in many ways, their work was rehabilitating the idea of stories as popular media for adults that could be literary and significant and important. And so the criticism was that these fantasy stories or fairy tales,that all the popular fairy tales of that era were for children. When you think of Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz or, Beatrix Potter or whatever. They were for children and that it’s escapism and it’s not healthy as an adult to continue to go down these paths of escapism. And Tolkien said, I actually called this out in the book specifically because it’s just this is a whole passage just about sort of refuting this and moving towards Tolkien’s sort of ultimate rebuttal on this, which I love.so he’s talking about, the fairy tale and, he’s responding to lion here, and he says, ironically, no, Mr.

Lion, talking animals are not the hinge on which all fairy tales turn. Instead, it is a single unification of the three values that he sees as why fantasy exists. Escape. Because, Tolkien said, when you’re in prison, who doesn’t dream of escape? That is different than escapism, right? Escape. Consolation and recovery. And then Tolkien created this amazing word for the unification of those three things that happen in a fairy tale. He called it the Eucatastrophe. And if you, you know, want to study your words a little bit, you probably know that that has the similarity to catastrophe and maybe Eucharist. Right? So it’s like a turning over catastrophe means a bad turning over. This means like a good turning over. And it’s the feeling that you get at the end of a story. Well, here, I’ll let him explain it. The anti catastrophe is what the eucatastrophe is. All real fairy tales have it. You’ve probably felt it in your heart when you’ve read a story. That moment when all hope is lost and then without warning, there is a sudden and miraculous grace never to be counted on to recur, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy that should be capitalized. Joy. Joy beyond the walls of our world. As poignant as grief. And Lyon says, the happily ever after. And Wizard says, even better, a longing to live forever in joy. It is the universal desire for the greatest of all escapes and escape from death.

And this was his note that escapism is something that any rational person should feel. We long to escape from death, and is there any answer out there that will finally solve the problem of the escape from death? And Tolkien is arguing that fantasy, in and of itself, gives us the ability to gaze beyond the walls of our world and see into the new creation. Basically, this is a little window to see the waves of the new creation lapping up onto the shores of Earth. And he said, there’s no other place that you can experience that in human creation. And in fact, if you want to criticize Lord of the rings, it’s that there’s too many of these things. They’re they’re all over the place, like, you know, Gandalf comes back from the dead, kills the witch king suddenly, of course, the Eagles, save Sam and Frodo like it’s over and over again. It’s of course, because he was he was obsessed with it. A Gandalf coming on the third day at Helm’s Deep. But it’s, you know, it’s I think, why we love to read these stories. And it’s why I don’t listen to people who say there’s too much, deus ex machina in, Lord of the rings. It’s because deep down, we all we all kind of want that, I think.

And this and this concept, even though Tolkien was the one to articulate it, this, this would describe Lewis Lewis’s work. I mean, he would be in full agreement on this point, wouldn’t you say?

Oh, yeah I mean to them, the urtext of the eucatastrophe is the resurrection to Tolkien. Maximum defeat followed by maximum victory is the Son of God coming to earth and being slain by the Romans on a cross and lying in the tomb dead. And then an unexpected, totally glimpse of joy from beyond the world of death. He rises again. And so that was the goal in writing all stories to him. And it’s why he said, the gospel is the greatest myth ever written. It’s the myth that entered history. It’s the myth that actually came true. And this was the thing that pushed, pushed Lewis just over the edge. He was walking along. We saw you had an image of the cliffs of Dover. He was walking along the cliffs of Dover. That was the key point that pushed him over into, surrendering to, the Galilean.

Well, turning to their relationship, by the way, we do invite audience questions. We’ll turn to those in a in a minute.but think of there of the relationship, the friendship between the two of them. Lewis observed that Tolkien was gifted at leaves, but needed help with the trees. And so, as we note, Tolkien’s, basically one great work, I mean, expressed in a couple of different books, but really one big corpus versus Lewis’s varied outputs, which were not just in this fantasy realm, but, you know, of course, apologetics and literary criticism, many other things. What was what was kind of the unique role Lewis played in helping Tolkien get this, get this thing done?

Oh, they were such different people. I mean, they had so many similarities. But Lewis would basically compose on the first draft and do very little editing, and he was a very prolific writer and just had no problem with having imperfect things in the world, for lack of a better phrase. And Tolkien was the ultimate perfectionist. I mean, you’re right that he published multiple works, but really, his whole life’s work was really this vast legendarium. Right. That that I don’t think personally, Lord of the rings would ever have been published without Lewis because Lewis Tolkien was just simply a fan. He was just simply an encouragement.Lewis famously said that you could not influence Tolkien. You’d sooner influence a Jabberwocky from Lewis Carroll than you could Tolkien, because he was just kind of persnickety and had very particular tastes. But what he was, was a fan, and we have so many letters of Lewis encouraging Tolkien, just loving the writing.we have a wonderful letter that Lewis wrote to Tolkien, even as their friendship began to cool and dim. He wrote this loving letter to Toddlers just praising the work of Lord of the rings. And in fact, he ended the letter with I miss you very much. And so he was always sort of Tolkien’s first fan and encouraged him all along the way. And I think it’s something that Tolkien didn’t fully appreciate until after Lewis’s death, even.

Nor did he really reciprocate it exactly, did he?

He did not. Yeah. Oh, everyone gets very upset about this when they realize that Tolkien did not like Narnia and said it was rubbish, basically. now I have to put that in context and give Tolkien a little bit of a pass because he hated everything. Like he did not, like, very. I mean, he read,2001. He read Dune. What do you think? Did he love these? No, he hated them. He would hate the movie adaptations of his work. He had very particular tastes. Now, that said, I think that was a real wound to Lewis to not get at least some kind of encouragement. Part of it was that Tolkien felt, I think, a little proprietary about his world building. And Lewis, in his estimation, was creating kind of a hash of a bunch of different mythologies and maybe even borrowing some of Tolkien’s world building in ways that sort of irked him. But now, looking back, it’s clear to me that Tolkien did not read Narnia correctly.but, you know, we we, I do give I’m not going to spoil the ending, but I do give Lewis and Tolkien a little chance to work out what happened with them at the end of this book.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. So I it is ironic, really, just as a matter of timing that there,a lot of their great works were created after their fellowship had really been kind of broken, you know, kind of compromised. And it didn’t ever really, wasn’t ever really recaptured. So, yeah. Say whatever you want to say about Eucatastrophe with respect to the relationship, without going farther than you want to go.

I know I think it naturally we as people are like, oh, it makes me sad to think that they had this 30 year friendship that was really deep. And then at the end, just as they are truly as Lewis is finishing Narnia and as Lord of the rings comes out, they’re at a place where they’re not estranged, but they’re not as close as they once were. And I think they may even feel a little hurt about what the other has done.in their life and career. And so there is a kind of deep sadness about that. But in some ways, just as a pure story, it makes so much more sense as human beings who live in a world that are waiting for the wrongs to be righted, ultimately.there is a lot, actually, we can take away as creative people, as people who work in community. There are lessons in Lewis and Tolkien to learn outside of world building and fantasy stories. There are lessons of friendship and honesty and forgiveness.and it’s really a rich story. Even with the dimming of their friendship that occurred at the end. Mhm.

Well, on that note, let me, take, take one of our audience questions. This is from Anna Dufek. What advice would you give to those seeking to build creative community? Things we can learn from the way that their fellowship rose and fell.

Yeah. Oh, man, there’s so many. There’s a great book, speaking of Bandersnatch called Bandersnatch by Katherine Glyer. Great book that explores some of this practical implications of the inklings together. But a couple things. The inklings were very disciplined and intentional. This was not just like, hey, do you want to go to the pub? It was Tuesday at 11 a.m. at the pub again, so try doing that in your life more often. Get a pint at 11 a.m. with your friends. And that was for, like, catching up on university business. Giving each other a hard time chatting. And then the reading group was on Thursday evening in Lewis’s quarters at Magdalen College. And so for this big chunk of their life, 20 years, 25 years, there was this every week they had fellowship and then they had study together. And Warnie Lewis, Lewis’s brother, said, reading your essay in front of the inklings was like facing a howitzer with a peashooter, because they were not there for the mutual admiration society. they gave very honest feedback. Maybe too honest, actually, because we have some letters where Tolkien and Lewis have had to ask for forgiveness for things that happened in inklings meetings. So there is a there is a danger to being honest. But I actually think if you want to grow and learn, it is better to have a safe space with friends you trust to be honest about the stuff you are making.

And by the way, I think you mentioned Diana Gliders book on the inklings. I think it’s Diana, We did an online conversation with her a few years ago. And if you, for our viewers, scroll up in the chat. You’ll see a link to it there in case you want to go deeper.the, let’s see, here’s another interesting question from Abigail Wahluke. She notes, liking that it’s a myth makers is a friendly book to people who are not Christian believers as a conversation starter. And she’s recommended to folks in both camps who are equally excited to read it. Was it your intention to make this book something that would be friendly to all sorts of people, people with different faith perspectives? Really? Was that was that intentional?

Yeah, it’s funny, I am a Christian. I am motivated by my faith to explore the world through that lens. But I do not think of my books as missional in that sense. Now, that doesn’t mean they can’t be like that way in some places and in some hands. But really, I’m always thinking of the audience member and what they need from the book. And in this case, I wanted to really honor the story of these two men. And I really wanted to inspire young people who also like telling stories. Now, it just so happens that these two men’s worldview were shaped by some of the deepest Christian truths that I think also end up telling really good stories. But yes, I can see why that this would work in that way. But frankly, because their properties work in that way, right? Like Lord of the Rings and Narnia, despite having Christian roots. Maybe some people don’t even know that Tolkien was a Catholic.they work because they are phenomenal stories, and all of my books I am always concerned with, like, is this an excellent story? And so that’s where I start and that’s where I try to end.

We got an interesting question from Joel Scandrett, who I, from His question, I think, has read the book, and it’s about this question of logos and ethos and the way you identify Tolkien is driven by logos and, Lewis by ethos. Well, his question is, given Tolkien’s remarkably descriptive prose, more descriptive than Lewis’s, his images are much more vivid. Why, then, do you describe Lewis’s approach in terms of images or, ethos and Tolkien’s in terms of language or logos? I would suggest the reverse. So maybe you can explain the concept a little bit and then respond to Joel’s question.

Oh no, I think that’s a great criticism. I think you could almost make the argument, as you do in reverse that way. Now, what I’m arguing is that the thing that most motivated them at their core, not necessarily the way their stories look and felt, and the reason why I say that is Tolkien aligned himself with logos in my mind, because before there was a story, There was a language like he created an entire world to make an excuse for a piece of language to exist. there is this story that a star shined on the hour of our greeting, right? That Tolkien wanted a world where that could be said to another person in this Elvish language that he made, that made sense and built the world around it, and also logos, values, logic and order and sensibility. And Tolkien was an immaculate perfectionist. He made weather charts, moonphase charts. He made calendars for the story so that the characters, you know, they leave on Christmas and they arrive on Easter, right? That was not an accident. there are all these things that that kind of attention to logic would never enter to the world of the way that Lewis was motivated to write a story.

Lewis was shaped by the grand story. Right. And so to him, the details of like, can a fawn hang out with Father Christmas? Like that actually doesn’t interest him. What interests him in is the supposal. That’s what he always said. Narnia was the supposal and not an allegory. And so again, it is probably an imperfect,an imperfect metaphor. But again, it’s it’s more about as a person who teaches artists, I see these kind of artistic,motivations all the time, one that is motivated by the motivated by the grand story, the big picture, and others who are into the weeds and the details. And if you ever read Tolkien’s story Leaf by Niggle, it’s basically a confession of Tolkien telling his audience that he is way too obsessed with the leaves on these trees. It’s an amazing story. That’s a confession that is just an artist who can never finish his ultimate masterpiece, because he can he can zero in further and further and further on the details of this amazing tree he’s painting.

John we have a couple of questions that kind of focus on your work as an artist or your approach as an artist. So I’m going to try to combine two of them. Mark. Mark Brendel asks, do you identify more with Lewis’s first run and done way of creating or Tolkien’s stewing, refining, drafting to perfection with your own work? And then the related question is from Wilma Vander Leek, can you talk about your drawing style, what you draw on, how it evolved? And she says it’s fantastic, simple and profound. Love to hear some backstory to your visual history.

Oh thank you. Well, first of all, anytime you see someone who is supposedly talented at drawing, you have to remember that they’ve spent thousands of hours practicing. And most of drawing is a craft that you learn. And I think I could teach anyone to draw. Right. So I prefer to think of drawing as a way of thinking, as a toolset that we use to express ideas as, as opposed to just draftsmanship. But yes, I am more like Lewis than I am Tolkien. I am not a chronic reviser. I am very intuitive in the way that I make things almost like, um. Lewis was much more like an improv artist, right? Much more like, get it on the page, say yes and respond to it, do some light editing and then move on to the next prompt. Whereas Tolkien was much more of a drafter that would revise rework, he wanted to rewrite all of The Hobbit to make it more like adult, to match the tone of Lord of the rings. Thankfully, he was talked out of that. But you know, you can see the temptation to sort of make something perfect. And it’s why The Silmarillion never existed in his lifetime. And it was. It fell onto his son Christopher, to basically spin it up out of dozens of drafts of passages of Galadriel’s history and the the fall of mandolin, and all of the stories that ended up in The Silmarillion were really there because another person was able to edit them down. Tolkien, I think, realized at the end of his life that The Silmarillion, which to him was the major project like the Lord of the rings, was just the thing that pointed to this deeper Old Testament mythology underneath it, but it never came to be in his lifetime. Hmm.

We have interesting question here from Natasha Dukette, and she refers to your comment about the the term Eucharist coming in the term eucatastrophe. And her question is, I am wondering why Tolkien incorporated the tragic Aristotelian idea of catastrophe into his term eucatastrophe. Is it because we cannot have the resurrection without the crucifixion?

Yeah, I love that idea. Yeah. I mean, without the with the in my understanding of that word, the strophe part is the turning over. So the yucca tastrophe is the good turning over, right? As opposed to the good bad. Right. So he’s not saying like it’s a yin yang thing. He’s saying, you know what? This is the moment when there is instead of ultimate disaster, it is ultimate victory. But with that same suddenness of disaster, with the same unexpectedness of a catastrophe. This is the good catastrophe. Mhm.

Here’s another question on your,artistic approach from Jennifer Smythe Church. She mentions that in your book, The Faithful Spy, you intentionally use blue and red to represent the Nazis on one hand and Bonhoeffer on the other. Was there a similar intentionality behind the color palette in Myth Makers?

Yes, Thank you for noticing the colors. you know, this is kind of shop talk. I love talking about, you know, pens and tools and techniques. And, in this book, it almost looks like it’s printed in these four colors of yellow, orange, purple, and teal. But it’s printed Cmyk and it and it’s because I wanted to do a little trick where as the book continues, the, the ink colors slowly fade across the book as their friendship is dimming. And by the time you get to the end of the book, the color has sort of like leaked out of the book until you get to, a eucatastrophe. You cannot tell a myth about Lewis and Tolkien without giving them their own eucatastrophe, by the way. But yes, the colors took a long time to figure out in this book, and I was really stuck on it until I started using some Easter colors. I started using purple and yellow in contrast, and that aligned thematically with a lot of the elements in the book. And it just happened to work visually too. So what you don’t see when you see a book like this, it looks like I just sat down and composed it and printed it, but there is so much stuff that is never seen to the reader that are tests and drafts and discarded attempts and frustrating afternoons and frustrating mornings. And this was a five year process and it was a mess. Start to finish. An absolute mess. I mean, anytime you read a book, you have to remember that the author, when they are physically writing those words that you are reading, they don’t know if the book is going to work or not. And every book is like that. And it’s a miracle that any book has ever finished and produced. And so I just don’t want anyone to think out there that this is an act of talent. Almost all books are an act of patience, persistence and discipline, more than more than talented.

But you feel you dragged it across the line from catastrophe to.

I keep thinking I’m going to figure out how to make books where it’s not a struggle the entire time, but I think this is part of the human experience. So, yeah.

Well, here’s another question on your sort of your lessons I’ve learned from Abigail. What did you learn as an illustrator and storyteller from your work in Faithful Spy that you apply to myth makers, and then bringing the question forward to Salem witch trials. What you know, she’s asking about your process, art style, storytelling methods. Yeah. What’s been some of the progression?

So I read the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, who was since turned into a movie. But the original book version is incredible in the sense that it has long passages of prose and then long silent passages of comics, essentially. And this is now probably 20 years old. This book, and I love this book and the blended language of that was so exciting to me. So in Faithful Spy, I really wanted to play with this hybrid prose comics illustration maps back and forth.and in many ways, I think I just scratched the surface in Faithful Spy. I figured out how to do it after four years of, you know, struggle with that book. And so when I came to Mythmakers, I wanted to do it again, but this time I wanted to add way more comics, long paneled sections of dialog. You know, all those things that you just want to be a fly on the wall when they’re at the Eagle and child and talking about their day and their work. I wanted to drop readers into that. But of course, an entire panel graphic novel about their lives would have to be like 800 pages long. So this hybrid format allows me to jump around in their storyline while also keeping the reading experience pretty varied.

Here’s a question from Chuck Olsen. he’s a long time Winslow Homer fan, so we’re going to. Oh, yeah. Combining the visual and the and the verbal here.and he was present during the Civil War, illustrating it for the popular press. But the work I love most comes later. After witnessing real horror, he turned toward depicting endurance, beauty, and what makes life worth living. Do you see a similar trajectory in Lewis and Tolkien that their myth making is, in part, a response to having seen the worst, and a way of pointing toward what remains good and true afterward.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it’s easy to forget, in many ways, the horrors that they saw in the war. I mean, you can see it in Tolkien’s writing.the Dead Marshes, for instance, come directly from an experienced Tolkien had of seeing, you know, corpses underneath the water and bunker and shell holes. And so the, the, the language and the horror that came from those stories is absolutely underneath in even though Narnia and Lord of the rings are ultimately optimistic tales, I think they only work because there is real evil beneath them. And yeah, they had a real literal touchstone to that in their lives. I mean, both of them should have been killed. it’s a it’s a miracle both of them got out.you know, Tolkien had trench fever. Lewis was, injured in a artillery burst that, you know, he carried shrapnel with him, his whole life. And, you know, if you if you read his autobiography looking for details, he doesn’t tell you, like, he spends half the book talking about boarding school and, like, three pages on World War one, which, you know, this is extremely frustrating as a reader. But yeah, he did not spend a lot of time writing about it after the war.

Here’s a question by Christian Alcantar. I’ve heard a poet say that his imagination was baptized before he was baptized and came to faith. So would you say that that captures the story with Lewis as well?

Yeah. So that that is a Lewis story. Yeah. He was,on a train platform and at a bookshop. He bought the George MacDonald book Phantastes, which is one of the you may not have read it may not know that George MacDonald’s story, but it’s one of the earliest fantasy works specifically written for adults, and it’s a classic portal fantasy. it’ll probably feel very derivative to a modern mind to read it today. But to Louis it was transporting, and it allowed him to see a world where the imagination was a portal to meaning. The imagination was not a portal to lies. Or, as Louis tried to counter to Tolkien, lies breathed through silver. But that book fantasies. Louis later said it in a way, baptized his imagination and gave him a window into this larger world, where stories and myths were pointing to the ultimate myth that came true in Jesus.

And let me,ask a question by Rebecca Chamberlain. Which of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s works is carrying you through this moment in time? I think that phrase, this moment in time will mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I probably you included. So, yeah, what what’s particularly meaningful to you in 2026?

Oh, man. So the one of the first, I read the Narnia books out of order and did not connect them to the Christian story at all when I first read them. So that should tell you something about my intellectual capacity. Later I read the first book that was Not Narnia of Lewis, as I read was Screwtape Letters, and I actually discovered at the end of that book that it was the same guy who wrote Narnia. Couldn’t believe it. And again, it’s been a long time, but I had the chance to see the early draft of the first page of Of Screwtape, the actual manuscript at the Wade center. and it’s amazing how much it actually tracks on to the way the book really is. I mean, he did it composed just almost intuitively.but Screwtape, to me is a very prescient reminder because of how many imitations it gets so poorly done online. I think in some ways it underscores what a seminal work it was. to be able to tell that story, to have it be convicting, to have it be incisive, but also just funny. Like it’s a funny book. And in many ways, I wrote my Holy Ghost comics in that vein, longing for the sort of wisdom and hilarity found in Screwtape.

Well, thanks, John. In a moment we will give you the last word, but first for our viewers. Immediately after we finish on your screen, you’ll see an online feedback form. We’d be grateful for your thoughts on how we can make these conversations even more valuable to you. And if you take the survey, we’ll gift you a free digital copy of one of the Trinity Forum readings of your choice. We have published over 100 that you can choose from, and then tomorrow we’ll send all of you who registered an email with the link to the video, and we hope you’ll share that with friends. We also hope you’ll join us in our community, the Trinity Forum society, and the link to do that is in the chat as a special incentive, if you become a member today with a gift of $150, you’ll receive not only all four of our readings in the mail during the coming year, but we’ll also send you a signed copy of John’s book, The Myth Makers, so you can go deeper. your membership helps keep these conversations free, and we’re grateful to you. You can also register now for our online conversation next Friday with Ryan Berg on his new book, The Vanishing Church. He is a colleague of John at Washington University in Saint Louis, which incredibly makes for Washu Folks that we’ve featured in fairly recent times. Is Saint Louis the Oxford of today?

That’s what I’ve always said. Absolutely.

All right. in March, we have a couple of live events to look forward to that connect to this discussion in Washington, DC here on March 23rd. We’ll have a special book launch evening conversation with the English poet Malcolm Guyot on the first volume of his epic poem on the Arthurian legends, which is entitled Galahad and the Grail. So if you can find your way to Washington, it’ll be great. And then if you can find your way to Nashville on March 31st, Joseph LeConte will join us to discuss his new book, The War for Middle Earth, which focuses on the effect of the gathering Storm of the 1930s and World War two on the work of Tolkien and Lewis. So if today’s conversation was your cup of tea, both of these events surely will be too. Please also take a moment to subscribe to our podcasts. Some of our recent guests include the writer Marilynne Robinson, historian Tom Holland, theologian Miroslav Volf. And this Tuesday, our next episode will feature the historian Molly Worthen. With that, John, over to you for the last word.

Great. I’m going to try to encourage everyone who makes stuff just as we close here, I’m going to remind you that great art, great writing is made on a Tuesday afternoon. This is from letters that Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher. Friday, April 14th, 1944. I managed to get an hour or two writing, and I brought Frodo nearly to the gates of Mordor. Door. Afternoon. Lawn mowing. Tuesday, April 18th, 1944. I hope to see C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams tomorrow morning, and read my next chapter on the passage of the Dead Marshes and the approach on the gates to Mordor. The afternoon was squandered on plumbing, stopping overflow and cleaning out chicken fowls. Now, the reason I share this is because in some ways it is easy to mythologize the inklings and think that they were these Titans, and in fact, they were extremely normal people who made art because they cared about it and they cared about one another. So maybe, maybe you can make some good art on a Friday afternoon today. So thanks for letting me join you.

Thank you, John, and thanks to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.