Books on Tolkien and Lewis

The same website that listed Patrick Deneen’s twelve books to read on Christianity and politics includes other lists as well. One gives fourteen books for understanding J. R. R. Tolkien’s writing and another gives six for understanding C. S. Lewis’s writings.

I’d mostly agree with the first, while commending only one of Michael Ward’s books and dropping Beatrice Gormley’s children’s biography, which really doesn’t belong on a list of this sort. I’d add the new three-volume collection of Lewis’s Letters, Justin Phillips’ C. S. Lewis In a Time of War, about the delivery of the radio lectures that became Mere Christianity, an dLaura Miller’s The Magician’s Book: A Skeptics Adventures in Narnia, and, if I may, the book I edited, The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness. There are lots of more scholarly works of value, among them C. S. Lewis and the Church, a collection edited by Judith and Brendan Wolfe, and (of interest to me more than most readers) Gary Tandy’s The Rhetoric of Certitude: C. S. Lewis’s Nonfiction Prose.

About the second, though, I’d disagree almost completely. Tolkien’s works, yes, and Ralph Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien, but after that Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, J. R. R. Tolkien; the four volume History of the Lord of the Rings, edited by Christopher Tolkien, though this is more of a book for the nerds; John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War; the late Stratford Caldecott’s The Power of the Ring; and one of any number of collections, for example Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo’s Tolkien and the Critics or their Understanding the Lord of the Rings.

The book I most recommend in Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle Earth, now in its third edition. A scholar in Tolkien’s own field, he well explains what Tolkien was doing in the books as a writer and philologist, very illuminatingly, though a little surprisingly he often does not understand Tolkien’s religion.

In both cases, there are many more good and very good books I haven’t mentioned, because most people aren’t that interested in reading about Lewis and Tolkien. In both cases, if asked to choose one book to read to understand the writers’ books better, I’d say read their Letters.