J. R. R. Tolkien blamed two events for the end of his intimate friendship with C. S. Lewis: “We were separated first by the sudden apparition of Charles Williams, and then by his marriage [to Joy Davidman],” he explained. While Tolkien was well aware of the debt that his The Lord of the Rings owed to Lewis’s constant encouragement, it’s unclear whether Tolkien ever realized the debt he owed to Williams, the very man who had displaced his friendship with Lewis.
And yet, Tolkien would be the last to be surprised by the good that could be wrought by such a loss. As much as he may have disliked Williams’ writings and literary influence on Lewis, Tolkien’s works consistently point to the possibility of “eucatastrophe,” the Christian conviction that deliverance can emerge from disaster.
For more than two decades, however, Tolkien and Lewis were close companions. Tolkien wrote that Lewis was his only audience for a long period of time: “[O]nly from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more, I should never have brought [The Lord of the Rings] to a conclusion.” But then Williams came to Oxford in 1939, joined up with their literary set of friends (The Inklings), and took Tolkien’s place.
Tolkien’s evaluation of Williams was always two-fold: he enjoyed the man personally but reviled his literary style and taste. There was nothing petty at play in Tolkien’s evaluations; his tastes were simply far more narrow and exacting than Lewis’s. Tolkien was so stringent as to even find fault with greats like Shakespeare and Spenser for their sometimes haphazard treatment of faerie (Tolkien had similar critiques of the mashed-up mythos of Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia).
Tolkien could simultaneously hold, without the slightest sense of contradiction, that Williams was a good man and that his novels were garbage.
Tolkien was clear that he “much enjoyed” Williams’s company. He referred to Williams’s transfer to Oxford during WWII as “good fortune amid disaster.” He even found it perfectly natural to commend Williams’s nonfiction, counseling that one should not “forget the wise words of Charles Williams” in The Descent of the Dove, “that it is our duty to attend the accredited and established altar, though the Holy Spirit may send the fire down somewhere else.” Tolkien was perfectly willing to acknowledge that he had no monopoly of claim on the Lord’s ability to work as He saw fit, even in someone like Williams.
But even if the Holy Spirit might send down fire elsewhere, Tolkien still preferred his own accredited and established ways over Williams’s, whose work he had trouble making sense of. Williams’s tastes and thinking were simply “poles apart” from his own. As “a man of limited sympathies,” Tolkien confessed, “Williams lies almost completely outside of them.”
Tolkien even went so far as to blame Williams’ influence for ruining Lewis’ Space Trilogy: “I actively disliked his Arthurian-Byzantine mythology; and still think that it spoiled the trilogy of C.S.L.”
And yet, for all of Tolkien’s displeasure with Williams’s work (he found it “wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous”), Tolkien may owe a hidden debt to Williams for the success of his The Lord of the Rings.
In 1937, a young, ascendant poet, W. H. Auden, met the middle-aged Charles Williams. At the time a lapsed Christian, Auden described this encounter as a critical step in his return to the faith (“for the first time in my life I felt myself in the presence of personal sanctity”). He went on to characterize his encounter with Williams as like nothing else he had ever experienced:
“I had met many good people before who had made me feel ashamed of my own shortcomings, but in the presence of this man — we never discussed anything but literary business — I did not feel ashamed. I felt transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base or unloving.”
Two years afterward, Williams moved to Oxford, forever changing Lewis and Tolkien’s relationship. But that same year, Williams published The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which also had “a major effect on Auden’s return to Christianity.”
Over the ensuing decades, Auden continued to establish himself as a literary force, earning accolades for his poetic works. In 1948, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Anxiety. In 1956, The Shield of Achilles won the National Book Award. He was at the height of his fame in the 1950s, readily acknowledged by established literary critics like Edmund Wilson as a genius.
So, when Auden took to the pages of the New York Times in 1954 (“The Hero Is A Hobbit”) and 1956 (“At the End of the Quest, Victory”), the literary world was forced to take Tolkien seriously. Auden made unflinching pronouncements: “The Hobbit … is one of the best children’s stories of this century”; “No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than The Fellowship of the Ring”; “Tolkien has succeeded more completely than any previous writer in this genre”; “he has succeeded where Milton failed.”
From letters traded back and forth between Tolkien and Auden, it’s clear that the poet’s fascination with Tolkien’s trilogy is due at least in part to the theology undergirding it, and so his glowing praise is difficult to separate from his conversion, occasioned by his time with Williams.
Decades after the original release of The Lord of the Rings series, not to mention the critically acclaimed Peter Jackson movies, it’s hard to appreciate how close the reception came to critical ruin. Edwin Muir blasted The Return of the King as a kind of Peter Pan fantasy: “All the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes… and will never come to puberty.” The same literary critic Edmund Wilson who called Auden a genius wrote a review bashing the books and disparaging Tolkien as having “little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form,” dismissing the high fantasy trilogy as “juvenile trash.” That The Lord of the Rings is taken seriously today is due in no small part to Auden’s interventions, something Tolkien was aware of. In acknowledgment, he even wrote a poem in Old English to commemorate Auden’s 60th birthday.
But Tolkien might not have ever realized the debt he carried to Charles Williams for helping restore Auden to the Christian faith. Williams accomplished this not through displays of grandiloquence, but simply by being a virtuous human being in whose presence others did not suffer shame.
We never understand how small things, like personal sanctity, can change the course of history. As Tolkien wrote, something so seemingly inconsequential as pity “may rule the fate of many.” It appears also that something so modest as Williams’ character ruled the fate of Tolkien’s trilogy.
Like all good fiction, The Lord of the Rings draws our attention to things that are true in our own world. “Even the very wise cannot see all ends.” The death of a friendship might end in the rescue of one’s life’s work. And sometimes crucifixion even turns to resurrection.