Zachary A. Rhone - The Great Tower of Elfland: The Mythopoeic Worldview of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and George MacDonald

With any group of writers or artists, it is necessary to try to make sense of what holds together what almost inevitably is a disparate company of people, even if they are from the same social class or cultural background. This is true whether it is the Inklings, the Bloomsbury Group, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Lake Poets, the Clapham Sect, the Bluestockings Society of the mid-eighteenth century, or Dr. Johnsons Literary Club and The Scriblerus Club of the same century.

Zachary Rhone has masterfully responded to the untidy nature of groups in this study of the two most central members of the Inklings, and two significant writers who influenced them, with his reverse approach to the usual one, in moving from the particular to the general and abstract. This allows the capture of the creative and imaginative without abandoning a patterned and ordered intellectual structure to these four writers as seen in abstraction.

This study is an important addition to the as-yet modest number of books that have undertaken a study of writers notable for their connection with the Inklings or as important influences upon group members. I know of no previous book which so definitely explores the worldview of these four related writers as its main focus, rather than finding one or more characteristic and unifying themes, important as these may be. C. S. Lewis, in the early days of the circle, simply spoke of members of the Inklings (such as himself and his friend Tolkien) as sharing a tendency to write and Christianity. As Rhone makes clear, Lewis didnt see either his friendship with Tolkien or the Inklings group as an alliance of combatants consciously following a manifesto. I can imagine Lewis chuckling to himself as he might have conjured up mental pictures of his various friends in the club, as he called it. As a cheerful and combative debunker of overconfident errors of the modern age, it is easy, I think, to see how Lewis, at the center of the informal group, might be considered as such a combatant.

Dr. Rhones purpose is to convincingly set out a worldview in common between two of the Inklings, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who were at the core of the Oxford literary group of friends whose association lasted through the thirties, forties, and fifties. For cultural and historical context, G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald are explored in detail for their affinities with and strong influence upon the two writers particularly associated with the Inklings. Rhones conclusion is that there is a shared and unified worldview between all four. In the process, he explores the whole idea of their worldview as a rich coherence of intellectual and imaginative elements, encompassing art, belief, social thought, theology, philosophy, and culture. Rhone concludes that it is on the foundation of Christianity, that these authors perceive time, progress, science, and civilization and write with the hope of creating eucatastrophe and joy in the human spirit. He defines the worldview essentially as a mythopoeic (or myth-making) one, with all that this implies. The successful making of myth (in which all four participated) communicates deep truth through successful and convincing embodiment in literary art.

The book is marked by careful and attentive reading of the extensive works of the four authors and secondary works about them. As well as presenting new and little-known material, even familiar material (such as Tolkiens essay on Beowulf) contributes to a new understanding by treating it in an original and stimulating framework. For instance, as I mentioned, Rhone reverses the usual structure of introduction, exposition, and conclusion. Instead he proceeds in a creative, gestalt manner by exploring the main elements of the worldview the four writers have in common before gathering the pieces together into a full picture. This engages readers imaginations as well as reasoning, allowing them to anticipate what the conclusion might be. The conclusion is then made concrete and definite by the powerful unifying image of an elven tower, indicating the overview, which includes the reasoned and the imaginative. Rhone in fact appropriates and modifies for his purpose J. R. R. Tolkiens famous image of the tower he used in the 1930s in his groundbreaking essay upon Beowulf.

An all-important feature of Rhones book, in my view, is that it does what all proper learning should do: it opens doors and windows to further exploration, in this case, of the place of their worldview in the quality or essence that identifies individual members, two of whom are central to the Inklings. The implication, to my mind, is that the Inklings was larger in its significance than even the two most well-known members explored by Dr. RhoneLewis and Tolkien. Other members could be fruitfully studied for what I would hazard to call their Inklings-ness, in the light of Rhones work in this book. An example of an Inkling member who would be illuminated by Rhones insights is Owen Barfield. He could be looked at either in relation to Lewis or to Tolkien. In both instances Barfields worldview, which he formed very early (evidenced in what he wrote in his twenties, History in English Words and Poetic Diction), is what had such an impact on the whole nature of their thinking and writing. Barfield returned from Oxford to live in London, before the Inklings as such came into being, to work in his fathers law firm, forcing him to be an infrequent visitor to the circle. Yet there is an extraordinary impact of Barfields worldview on both Tolkien and Lewis. It can be seen, for instance, in his characteristic notion about language as having an ancient semantic unity, implying a profound participation in the natural world on the part of our ancestors, a notion which became an integral part of both Lewis and Tolkiens deepest thinking.

Something that Lewis wrote about our changing human perception of the original universe, which is deeply indebted to Barfield, could in fact speak for Tolkien, and also for Chesterton and MacDonald, represented so well in Rhones book: The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves personifications (C. S. Lewis, Preface in D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe [London: Faber and Faber, 1952]).