Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Love of mythology in general had been constant throughout the lives of the three men. Lewis and
Tolkien shared a great love of Norse mythology, discovering this „taste for Northernness‟ in childhood.
Tolkien had even started a club called the Kolbítar among the Oxford dons to read Icelandic myths and
sagas in Old Norse, and Lewis‟s attendance at this club was one of the their first interactions. Williams‟
fondness for mythology ran in a more ritualistic and magical direction: toward the quests of the knights of
Camelot. While Lewis and Tolkien found Arthurian legend delightful (though Tolkien distrusted it as the
„mythology for Britain‟, Williams was enraptured by the ideas of the Holy Grail and courtly love. All three
men believed that myth is essential and vital to mankind‟s understanding of their world. Michaela Baltasar
wrote that Tolkien intended The Lord of the Rings to demonstrate myth's true nature and proper function.
For Tolkien, this function is especially important as an act of „sub creation‟ as an intelligent creation of a
greater Creator. David Lyle Jeffrey cites St. Augustine‟s teachings as “„history [being] a kind of continuous
unfolding of God's Word in time‟ then literary works are contemporary glosses on that first divine text”
(Jeffrey, 65). Jeffrey concludes that writing, particularly writing myth, is then a kind of sub-creation,
repeating the patterns first established at Creation.
It was Tolkien who first introduced the idea of “true myth” to Lewis, originally as a means to
convince Lewis to convert to Christianity. Humphrey Carpenter, in The Inklings, relates much of their
conversation, the meat of it in Tolkien‟s teaching, “Pagan myths were, in fact, God expressing himself
through the minds of poets, and using the images of their „mythoepia‟ to express fragments of his eternal
truth… Christianity is exactly the same thing – with the enormous difference that the poet who invented it
was God Himself, and the images He used were real men and actual history” (Inklings, 44). Tolkien and
Lewis came to the conclusion that when it came to mythology, mankind had a collective unconscious that
accounts for Jungian archetypes and repeated symbols and messages, but this unconscious was supernatural
in the fact that the Christian God had created it, and told and retold the story of Jesus Christ as the dying
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