An Imaginative Inheritance: Chesterton’s Influence on Lewis and Tolkien
by Frank Thornsbury
What brings an author to create what he creates? What, beyond sheer skill, brings him to the dimensions of his worlds or to the complex personalities of his characters? Imagination is the answer. Without a cultivated store of traditions, principles, ideas, and other influences the artist is an animal, a being with five senses and some rote faculties by which to categorize sense data. Indeed, our ability to be educated and to act on our knowledge and intuition makes us human. The degree to which we put this imagination to use is what makes some of us extraordinary.
Authors such G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien shared a vast imagination, one that precludes the possibility of an exhaustive description, especially in this setting. Thus names such as George MacDonald, who was influential on each of these men in different ways, are conspicuously missing. With the challenge of brevity before us, then, we will limit our focus to the imaginative common ground that Chesterton first expressed and that Lewis and Tolkien continued and renewed.
Mythos
All three of our subjects were Englishmen, meaning at the very least they shared a national identity. What does this have to do with their literature? The English national identity has as its foundation a collection of myths, legends, and histories of kings and battles, of heroes and wizards––all set on the small group of islands inhabited by the Britons and then the Angles and Saxons so long ago.
Chesterton’s epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse tells the story of England’s first monarch, King Alfred, that great protector of English law and Christian faith. In it, we see Chesterton’s own Christianity intersecting with the English mythos. This meeting of tradition and truth is part and parcel of his literary imagination. This is what’s passed on to Lewis and Tolkien. Tolkien particularly channeled Chesterton’s imagination when developing a mythology for England, The Lord of the Rings. Christopher Clausen argues the following in his note-length article entitled “Lord of the Rings and The Ballad of the White Horse”:
In its fundamental conception, as well as in many of the significant details of its working out, Lord of the Rings is heavily indebted to G.K. Chesterton’s now little read poem of 1911, The Ballad of the White Horse. . . . The major theme of both works is the war and eventual victory, despite all odds, of an alliance of good folk against vastly more powerful forces of evil, and the return of a king to his rightful state.[1]
In both stories this ever advancing force––advancing in battle at times, but always advancing toward a final defeat of the good––seems immovable, terrifying, and sure-to-win, only to be conquered by a bright white light.
Chesterton’s influence is about more than just literary structures or themes or even the use of national myths; it’s about the collision of those stories with truth; it’s about that perennial struggle of good versus evil set in Anglo-Saxon terms; it’s about bringing truth to a people, to a tradition, to a common identity and reflecting the truth that is already there. This is what’s continued in the writings of Lewis and Tolkien.
Language
All three men wrote and spoke in English. To say that Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien shared a language is not merely to say that they used the same diction and grammar. What’s important to our discussion of their imaginative common ground is the fact that they shared a body of literature. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man that “art is the signature of man.”[2] The same is true for a nation. Literature is the signature of a people; it reflects their worldview, their history, their law, their most fundamental habits and customs. It is a vehicle of cultural preservation.
Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien would have been familiar with the great practitioners of the English language such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens. This literary corpus would have comprised their educations and, no doubt, their personal reading times. Additionally, all three men wrote on such topics professionally; this is more the case with Tolkien and Lewis, but Chesterton too produced literary criticism, specifically on the topic of Charles Dickens.
Chesterton loved Dickens. Why? Because Dickens was, as Chesterton put it, a mythologist. In fact, Chesterton wrote a biography of Dickens wherein he asserts:
Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed to make them gods. They are creatures like Punch or Father Christmas. They live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves.[3]
Dickens affected Chesterton in much the same way that Chesterton affected Lewis and Tolkien. Dickens didn’t just write compelling stories (although he did); he diagnosed the spiritual ailments of the society to which he wrote. He, through his immortal characters, spoke the truth of eternity and abundant life to a nation. He was a sort of literary apologist, not explicitly like Chesterton and Lewis; but Dickens, as a mythologist, dealt with the same cross-currents of tradition and truth.
Shakespeare did it; Dickens did it; Chesterton did it, and it changed Lewis’s life and set Lewis and Tolkien on their literary trajectories. Chesterton told stories and wrote about stories, not for the sake of stories, but for the sake of people. He, like those before him, understood that good literature is a cure for identity crisis, that it helps us understand who we are as English-speaking peoples, as humans, as image-bearers of God. Yes, Chesterton understood myths and fairy stories and all tall tales to be shadows of one true story, the gospel.
Faith
In Orthodoxy, Chesterton insists that we give the dead a vote, that we attempt to reconcile the past to the present for the sake of future generations. This is best expressed in the original communion, that of Christ and His Church throughout all places and ages. Chesterton calls this tradition; therefore, faith, the ultimate nexus of tradition and truth, is the only global element of Chesterton’s literary imagination.
The gospel is a tradition for all peoples. A need for heritage is in everyone. Furthermore, the need for a turning around is in everyone. These innate human longings are well recorded in the larger Western literary tradition. Here one thinks of Odysseus’s pilgrimage home in Homer’s Odyssey or of Achilles’s metanoia in the Iliad. But, again, Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien emphasized the original, which fundamentally transformed the purpose and meaning of their stories.
Redemption in Narnia, for instance, doesn’t find its highest expression in the change of a great hero, but in the quiet surrender of a young girl. And Lucy’s enduring belief functions as more than just a plot device. Jonathan Rogers, in his book The World According to Narnia, summarizes Lewis’s understanding of how stories influence our greater quest for truth:
The story of Christ, according to C.S. Lewis, “demands from us, and repays, not only a religious and historical but also an imaginative response. It is directed to the child, the poet, and the savage in us, as well as to the conscience and the intellect.” Belief is wholeness. It bridges the imaginative feeling self to the rational self. . . . [However] when myth becomes fact, you are no longer the audience of the story, but an actor in it. [4]
Stories are not enough to save us, but stories, especially those written as imaginative responses to the gospel, are very powerful. They inspire belief which is confirmed in faith. They also help us picture the moral physics of life, the causes and effects of certain actions and dispositions. In short, stories enlarge our imaginations and help us understand the fullness of God’s creation and our place in it.
Conclusion
Chesterton’s greatest literary legacy is his imagination, one which is imbued the white light of Christ. This imagination is the inheritance of Lewis and Tolkien. It is our inheritance. So, I encourage you to give Chesterton a vote; give Lewis and Tolkien a vote in forming your imagination. Most importantly, I encourage you to take up your role as actor in the story and allow Christ to redeem your imagination by renewing your mind and surrendering every thought to His captivity.
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[1] Christopher Clausen, “The Lord of the Rings and The Ballad of the White Horse,” South Atlantic Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1974). www.jstor.org.
[2] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Rough Draft Printing, 2013), 13.
[3] G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, quoted in Kevin Belmonte, Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesterton (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2011), 101.
[4] Jonathan Rogers, The World According to Narnia: Christian Meaning in C.S. Lewis’s Beloved Chronicles (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2015), 49.
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