How two mythmakers found belonging through friendship
Review of "The Mythmakers" by John Hendrix.
The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
by John Hendrix
Harry N. Abrams, 2024
It would not be extravagant to say that the C.S. Lewis–J.R.R. Tolkien friendship altered the course of literary history.
In the early twentieth century, many thought that the spirit of Romanticism had died – was slaughtered – in the trenches of the First World War. As late as 1954, Lewis wrote, “Poetry still has its militant, though tiny, audience: but the taste for romance seems in our age to be dead, and the very corpse mutilated and mocked.” Little did he know that he was writing upon the turning of the tide. That same year, Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring. Lewis compared the event to “lightning from a clear sky.”
In John Hendrix’s graphic novel The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien, the reader learns of the deep loss and the gladsome recovery of the joyful art of mythmaking through the lives of these two writers. The volume is beautifully made. Beneath the dust jacket, readers will find a burgundy cover embossed with gold-coloured foil. This foil – one recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins’s description of “the grandeur of God” flaming “out, like shining from shook foil” – assumes the picture of a door inscribed with the word “Joy” and, beneath it, the initials “C.S.L. – J.R.R.T.”
The reader, guided on this joyful journey by a lion and a wizard, passes through the stages of Lewis and Tolkien’s lives. As fans of their work may already know, both authors suffered poignant losses and relished in ecstatic delights. The reader travels to the bloodshed of the Somme and to the warmth of the Eagle and Child in Oxford.
Turning the charmingly illustrated pages of the graphic novel, the reader may drink deeply of the spiritual draught that refreshed both Tolkien and Lewis. Hendrix tells us, “deep in their bones, they ached to pass into a new land; to enter a holy portal and experience a world enchanted with life beyond the power of death.”
Not least among the book’s delights is its instruction. Every now and then, a portal opens that offers a brief, educational excursus away from the central plot, to explain the roots of myths and fairy tales and other such things. Hendrix also explains quite well the differences in writing speed and style between Lewis and Tolkien. Nonetheless, I wonder on occasion if a minor error might have slipped into the book. In one line, for example, I suspect that “eighteenth century” should have been “nineteenth century.” Similarly, I suspect that one instance of Hendrix writing “logos” and “mythos” was meant to be called Greek rather than “Latin.” Such errors are few and far between in this marvellous book, and don’t impact the striking narrative that it provides.
This is the kind of book that will instruct and delight readers young and old, novice and expert. To borrow a quote from Lewis, they “must be a dull reader who finds it dull,” for it is a lively book indeed.
Thank you for this review. I am also making a presentation about Tolkien in a Hobbit-ish town called Smithers, B.C., whose library has just purchased the book.
The friendship between the two cooled at various points, says Humphrey Carpenter in the authorized biography. I’ll have to get the graphic novel to see if this is noted.