I just finished TheMythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, a — what would you call it? — graphic joint-biography written and illustrated by John Hendrix. It’s pretty good overall, very engaging, mostly accurate, and it goes a bit deeper than I expected. For example, rather than just The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia, Hendrix touches on Tolkien’s Silmarillion, the TCBS, “The Book of Lost Tales”, “The Lost Road”, the Ace pirate edition of The Lord of the Rings, and on Lewis’s “Boxen”, Shelley’s Pond at the Kilns, and other surprising details. He even mention the Apolausticks!
The book utilizes a sort of framing device with two guides —Wizard, modeled on Tolkien; and Mr. Lion, modeled on Lewis — through a fantastical landscape of underground caverns, great trees of tales, mountain passes, isolate lighthouses, and even the Western Europe of World War I. Along the way, they dissert and digress about the roots of fantasy, epic tales, folklore, legends, the Great War and its sequel, and other topics, at each point introducing and providing context for sections of biography on Tolkien and Lewis.
Periodically, a greater digression is offered — what Hendrix calls a “portal” — and interested readers may turn to the indicated page at the end of the book, after which they are redirected back to the page they had just left. Alongside Wizard and Mr. Lion, there are a few additional characters who deliver these digressions into the roots of myth, the origins of fairy tales, and so on. Diverting (literally), effective, and probably quite fun for younger readers.
After spending a number of pages and illustrations on “the breaking of the fellowship” between Tolkien and Lewis, Hendrix also indulges in a little bit of fan service/self-soothing to imagine a sort of final farewell scene between Lewis and Tolkien, taking place in some liminal, half-real, half-fantastical place. Their “proper goodbye”, so to speak. It’s a rather maudlin fiction, but I can understand the impulse.
Hendrix is also a Christian, and part of the appeal of Tolkien and Lewis, for him, lies in that affinity. To his credit, he does a good job of keeping this largely out of the book. He discusses Tolkien’s and Lewis’s religious views (and differences), but not in a way where you feel like he is endorsing this viewpoint or pushing his own agenda.
This book does contain some errors, though fewer than I expected, if I’m being honest. Here’s a short list (selective, not exhaustive).
- *Sarehold; for Sarehole
- Andrew Lang's Red *Faery Book; for Fairy
- Tolkien’s story about a *"great green dragon". It's a "green great dragon", of course; that was the whole point! [1]
- R.E. “Humphrey” *Harvard; for Havard
- Although it's valid to call Lewis more prolific than Tolkien (at least, as measured by publications), Hendrix is a little unfair contrasting Lewis's and Tolkien's major works 1940–1947, in which he gives Lewis credit for 8 but Tolkien only for 1 ("Leaf by Niggle"), apart from academic works. Hendrix omits "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" (1945) and "On Fairy-stories" (1947). And why not consider the entire decade, which would have allowed Farmer Giles of Ham (1949)? Why stop at 1947?
- “Two *Latin terms”, he says of logos and mythos; these are both Greek words.
- He says that in the 1960s, The Lord of the Rings had been "translated into every European language", when that isn’t even close to true. By 1970, the Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Italian, Danish, and German translations had appeared. Even the French didn’t appear until the early 1970s, Spanish not until 1977–1980, and plenty of other European languages much later (e.g., Czech c. 1990, Icelandic c. 1995, Romanian c. 2000).
- Discussing the Ace pirate edition, Hendrix talks about the "money Tolkien lost in the authorized printing", but Ace actually did pay Tolkien royalties in the end. [2]
- *Magdalen for the Cambridge College, but it's Magdalene, and Hendrix has only a single entry in the index for both the Oxford and Cambridge colleges of almost the same name.
[1] See Tolkien’s letters, #163.
[2] See Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, Revised and Expanded Edition: Reader’s Guide, Part I (2017), “Ace Books controversy”, pp. 4-6.
